Addendum, with actual photos
After a lot of compiling, digikam is working again. Here are the photos from Conclave at Charybdis. And here are some Egyptian geese, if you like that sort of thing.
What I Did On My Holidays
This update will be communicated mostly in photographs. I apologise for the totally wrong upload order.
- We made some presents for people
- Just after Christmas I went to the Vogelgat Nature Reserve with Simon and his mom. I have a new zoom lens, and it is harder for small animals to escape me.
- We spent New Year’s Eve at the SAAO Star Party, huddling for warmth inside the telescopes on the plateau near Sutherland. It was pretty cool; we met some interesting people, and the mad crowds ran away after midnight. We slept in Matjesfontein, which is a tiny historical town with an old-school hotel and at least three distinct cats. Unfortunately we missed the historical bus tour, because the historical bus broke down and the mechanic broke down on his way to fix it.
- Stephen and Kia visited Cape Town from the UK. We went to the Rhodes Memorial and Monkey Town.
- I had a birthday party. It was fun, and lots of people dressed up. Here are Neil’s photos of the event.
- I have a lot of new books.
- I have constructed approximately a third of Cthulhu’s ass. I wish I had a paper shredder.
- We have had our balcony enclosed, and I have an indoor garden with exciting wildlife.
Wildlife photos
My photographs, let me show you them:
Lemurs! Monkeys! Tortoises! Surprise cat! Poultry! Indistinct floaty things with flippers!
It’s alive!
After some misadventures with dynamic DNS, we’re moving our stuff to the lovely CLAWs server in the UK. Yay, countries with less crappy internet.
Notable recent events in no particular order:
Dragonfire happened, and it was cool. Then Hodgestar and I went to Jo’burg (or rather its outskirts) to visit the HartRAO observatory, where work keeps its test radiotelescope, and where we climbed into the 26m dish. Jo’burg and flying made me a bit ill, but the telescopes were awesome.
More recently, we belatedly celebrated Hodgestar’s birthday with a trip to Monkey Town with a bunch of people (longer review and photos forthcoming; you must go there and see the mongoose lemurs, which are like kitties with opposable thumbs).
We went to the awesome second-hand bookshop in Gordon’s Bay, which is huge and impossible to explore thoroughly in less than a week. I got some random scifi, and an old book on lacemaking for R3.
Afterwards we went for a walk on the beach, and I found some exciting flotsam: a not-quite-dead hermit crab with no shell (I think) which I threw back into the sea, mostly unbroken wrap-around sunglasses, filed to a matt finish by the sand, and a barbie leg (not an authentic barbie leg; a cheap imitation plastic doll leg) which I left there for some unfortunate small child with a one-legged barbie to find. I intend to make the sunglasses into a steampunky set of Goggles of Uselessness. They are useless, because the matt surface makes them impossible to see through. They could theoretically be helpful for sleeping in the car. I might write a whole LARP around this prop (which doesn’t exist yet).
Then we went to Hermanus with Akika and drnlm, and saw lots of whales really close up (photos forthcoming). We went to a nursery with Hodgestar’s mom, because they had bonsai there. Hodgestar selected what is allegedly a chinese hackberry, which looks tree-like and has cute little leaves. We have been reading about bonsai on teh interwebs. Apparently the hackberry is easy to care for, and since we have neither aircon nor central heating, and a place outdoors to keep it if it’s miserable inside, we are unlikely to kill it.
I ordered a lot of graphic novels from Outer Limits and they rather surprisingly arrived all at the same time, including the Hellboy stuff from Dark Horse, which has traditionally been held up for months by mysterious forces of import and export. (Adeeb says that Diamond has improved its internet presence, which has made it easier to complain when they’ve stuffed something up.) I’m all caught up on B.P.R.D., I’m still waiting for Hellboy 8 (7 arrived), I got a lot of random lovecraftian stuff from Boom! studios, and I have all the A Distant Soil that’s been written so far.
And now for some actual photos:
- The samurai LARP that ate a month of our lives. It worked out rather well.
- Dragonfire during the day
- The Fountain of Youth, Beth’s LARP, which we helped DM.
Atropos Photos and Afterthoughts
The third running of Appoinment at Atropos, our sci-fi LARP, happened on the 19th. Here are some photos.
I am always pleasantly surprised by the alien costumes. The physical descriptions of the aliens are deliberately left vague, because getting four people to dress up as matching aliens is difficult enough without more specific requirements. So we just throw some facepaint and make-up at the relevant players at the beginning of the briefing, and let them make something up. This year the Kar-Shan had bright blue skin and hair which faded to white with age. In the playtest they had gills, and in the second running they had two pairs of eyes.
A full PDF copy of this LARP will be going up on its page in the CLAWs library, but I have to fix up the special ability cards first.
Because we suddenly have a huge pool of female roleplayers again, it looked like we weren’t going to find enough men for this running — so we made four of the male characters gender-swappable. This is where writing the LARP in pmwiki really came in handy: I set up some variables in the config and replaced all the pronouns and other gendered words referring to those characters with placeholders, and we can now swap the gender of the characters by setting some variables on a wiki page. I think I will make this into a more generic recipe and submit it to the pmwiki cookbook.
This does make it more difficult to provide a PDF, since there are 256 possible gender combinations. I guess we’ll put up a maximally male and maximally female version, and take custom orders.
Having all the gender-swappable and gender-neutral characters makes the LARP much less of a casting nightmare than completely fixed-gender LARPs. Especially when looking for emergency last-minute replacements.
I am slowly working on a sequel/prequel, set in a seedy bar in a mining colony and populated by dubious semi-criminal characters. It would be the antithesis of Atropos’s epic politics. I like the universe, and I want to do more stuff with it — and it will be easier to write a second LARP in it because I won’t have to do all the background information from scratch.
Now I just need to think of another SF book title to parody. 
Alive!
Photography
Here are some photos from the trip to Vogelgat. I don’t have a telescopic lens; all those close-ups of small animals are the result of a lot of determined sneaking.
Here’s a photo of new! improved! paper mache Cthulhu. I revamped him for orientation week, and boy, was I sick of paper mache by the end.
Moving Pictures
Farscape is awesome, and you should watch it. The first season, while kind of cool, is not really representative of what the series later becomes. It really comes into its own when the longer story arcs start. The first and second seasons have a couple of really awful filler episodes; I think the third and fourth seasons are the best. John Crichton becomes remarkably less annoying — I remember spending the whole of the first season wanting to stab him — although his epic wormhole subplot drags on a bit and ends up dominating the entire series. Had the series not been cancelled, it would perhaps have moved onto the Nebari after the conclusion of the Peacekeeper-Scarran war. This will probably never happen (apparently some short webisodes are due to be released this year, but they’re likely to be far-future sequels). It makes me sad in my pants.
The Peacekeeper Wars, the two-part miniseries made to wrap up the final season’s loose ends, is rather depressing to watch. It’s clear that a season’s worth of plot has been compressed into a much smaller space, and this is not a good thing. The plot is very rushed, some parts of it are not convincing because so little time is spent developing them, and some characters just walk on screen, wave and disappear (or hang around in the background with no dialogue). I believe that there was a two year gap before PKW was filmed, and this also shows — some of the acting is a bit off. It’s worth watching for completeness, and there are little moments of coolness — but don’t expect much, and be aware that it might drive you to drink if you recently watched season four and loved it.
Something entirely different, which is also awesome and should be watched by you, is Samurai Fiction, Nakano Hiroyuki’s samurai comedy.
Interactive Entertainments
If you’re a member of CLAWs, and you wrote a module or LARP that one time (or multiple times), please contribute to the latest attempt at an online catalogue/library, which I describe here. I have added By The Rivers Dark, my and Hodgestar’s most recent Dragonfire module, which you are welcome to download and play. I hope to add our two LARPs and several older modules soon (or later, in the case of modules which have to be extracted from the jaws of an obscure proprietary file format).
Pre-flight Photosplosion
Tomorrow I am going to Poland. I hope I haven’t forgotten anything important.
I am uploading as many outstanding photos to Flickr as I can before I go, now that I’ve found kflickr, which is a lot more stable than f-spot. I still need something better than f-spot to organise photos, but making uploading less painful than stabbing myself in the head is a good start, I suppose.
ETA: I should stop reading about airport security now; I am becoming increasingly enraged.
ETA2: All uploaded now: the third Chrysalids LARP, a mixed batch of weird things, Grove of Fallen Leaves LARP, Dragonfire, Simon’s birthday.
Buy someone a cow
Recent Tweets
- @firstfallen I like option 4 too. Option two is also nice, but kind of busy.
- Twitter, you are making me sad in my pants. Fix your damn RSS feeds or stop linking to them. http://tinyurl.com/2apmyjv
- @AnnaMalczyk It wasn't hard -- wasn't actually using it for anything. Stupid LJ crossposting feature was final straw. Do not want! D:
- Or not so much. Now exploring these possibilities: http://tinyurl.com/382w9kg
- http://topsy.com FTW; actually seems to have access to full Twitter history.
- @TheRiver I'm following these instructions; don't know how "complete" this is: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account
- I just nuked my Facebook account. When the boat anchor starts biting your ankles, it's time to let go.
- @firstfallen I don't think you're being oversensitive. Waiting would have cost little and been worth a lot. They chose to be dicks about it.
- @firstfallen They all deserve to be summoned to a compulsory team-building workshop on Christmas Eve. :P
- I think encasing the whole block in this tree would make the street look much better. Cut window and door holes. http://tinyurl.com/2vjhg3m
