Normal service should resume somewhere over that weekend. Until then, I'm kinda out of contact. Email should still work, but that's about it.

Don't do anything I wouldn't do. On second thoughts, do things I wouldn't do. There's some things I wouldn't do that look quite interesting...

The Glass: half-empty

I'm still here, as you've probably surmised from the fact that I'm talking, and it's been a busy few months. Doesn't look like it's going to get any better any time soon either, so while this is an update, it's not a return to the old frequency of posting, at least not yet. Sorry about that, if it bothers you.

Hell, some of you may be enjoying the break.

Anyway, yes. I'm currently writing my thesis, and it's draining pretty much any reserves I have of cope, happy and other useful things, so I'm ... well, not so much fun to be around at the moment. For that I'm sorry. I hope people will put up with me leeching sanity from them for a little while.

In my Copious Free Time, I am still gaming. Maelstrom event 1 was a few weeks back, and was a fair bit of fun - the wind and rain and mud weren't great, but the rest of the event made up for it, and next event promises to be better for a variety of reasons. Here's hoping.

Also, a group of friends (Firecat Masquerade) have started running a fest-larp system based loosely on Kenneth Graham's Wind in the Willows. Because I am mad, but also because they needed the help and it's a great way to burn off stress, I've volunteered to crew it. Event 1 was an astounding success by all accounts, and hopefully event 2 will be at least as good. Since E2 is set a little over a month after my thesis handin deadline, I may be slightly crazed at that point. But it'll be fiiiiiine.

Fencing ... is not going so well. Despite being on the committee, due to noone else standing for armourer and the club needing one, I've not made it to the great majority of training sessions this year. Feel quite crap about this, as they do rely on me to some extent, but there are people there who can repair most things, and two full evenings a week is simply more than I can spare at the moment. I managed to get along tonight, and they were only slightly pissed off, which is comforting. So it goes. Will persevere there, and might even fence again at some point.

To sum up, life is hard, real damn hard right now, but I'm still cracking on with it. I'm doing some slightly crazy stuff in an effort to stay sane, and trying not to neglect my obligations, tricky though that is in turn. I aim to write some more here soon, so stay tuned. Distinct risk of pseudophilosophical bullshit, but I guess we'll see what happens.

It's got to be better than total radio silence, right?

The Glass: empty

It seems to me that the title (when considered along with the content) is intended almost as a list of things a person needs to be happy in life, a list of life goals. This feels pretty overdone to me. Faith, Power and Glory? So much noise, pain and risk.

Then I got to thinking. Faith needn't be an unshakable belief in a deity, a sure certainty that what you are doing is right and just. Faith can just as easily be a small, quiet voice telling you that you can do this, everything will be alright, almost as if the roles were reversed. Perhaps someone has faith in you. Faith's little brother is Trust.

Power. Well, power's a problem. It is said that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and ... to be honest, I don't see how it can not. Think about it. The power to do anything at all, to wish it and have it occur. How long would it be before you started hurting people, because they're in your way or don't share your views? How small, how limited we would all soon seem to you. Of course, the reverse is no better. We all need a modicum of control over ourselves, our actions and out surroundings, for sanity reasons if nothing else. This middle ground is called Agency, the ability to act within the limits of one's environment.

Finally, Glory. To be celebrated, revered, adored. I suspect that gets old pretty quickly: the number of celebrities who seem to be overwhelmed by their fame and end up fleeing the public eye... I half wonder if Glory is something that people deal best with once they are dead and only remembered. Scale it back a bit, though, step it down so we're not blinded by it, and glory becomes something much simpler and more important. Respect, or Recognition (I'm not quite certain which). To be known as someone who is good at a particular thing, or who knows where something can be found, or who has good, well-considered opinions on things... that's far more important than being followed around by cameras, and having your every act catalogued for posterity, surely?

So, FAITH, POWER AND GLORY, not so much. The simpler, scaled-down version is something I think we all look for in our lives. Trust, Agency and Respect.

Maybe it's not such a jingoistic title after all.

The Glass: half-empty

Oddly, I think it started to go wrong on the way home, rather than while I was still at work (although I got no words written today on account of having to fight a series of administrative fires). I was happily cycling home in the dark, lights and high-vis on, everything more or less OK, when my rear wheel started to vibrate interestingly. I've been here before. I pulled over. Rear tyre, completely flat. Arse.

So I pushed my ironically-named pushbike home, and locked it to the mooring loop, as usual, and took the rear wheel off and brought it in with me, to fix the puncture. Since I'd just cycled/walked home, I took five minutes to spod on the 'net, and my music collection disappeared. The player stopped in the middle of a song, and when I went to check it there were no songs. No songs, no directory, nothing.

Troubling. I could swear they were here only a minute ago.

So, it seems the highly reliable RAID I built a couple of years back to store my stuff ... isn't so highly reliable any more. It's a 3 disk array, which means it can lose any one disk without losing any data. It's dropped one particular disk a couple of times recently, both times pretty soon after street-wide power cuts, so I figured it was a little tired, and planned to make backups etc. Real Soon. Unfortunately, now it's dropped that disk, and its brother... Array Failure.

RAID arrays spread the contents of a file across multiple disks to increase redundancy, so I don't even have a few of my many files intact on the remaining disk: I just have bits of the vast majority of my files. Those bits don't add up to a whole, in most cases. None of my skills with Linux seemed to be working, and I couldn't get it to rebuild.

Then, dwm turned up on IRC, and guided me through a six-hour rebuild that hasn't quite finished yet, but looks like it's going to work. Once it's done, I need to pull important things off that drive, then see what happens, I guess. I'm not quite sure what's wrong with the machine, but signs point to one of the SATA controllers going bad, which would be very annoying.

So, bit of a wakeup call there. A lot of my data is pretty insignificant, but I'd miss it if it were gone. So I must implement a Proper Backup Strategy in the soon-after...

I eventually solved the bicycle problem too. Patched the tube, went round the tyre to find the cause, found a 10mm shard of road-grit that had gone right through the tyre wall and slashed the tube. Yet another reason to hate snowy weather...

Oh well. The world turns, things happen, or don't, according to their own inscrutable timetable, and we all get slowly older. This is the way of things.

The Glass: empty

To Nagasaki, just in time to be bombed again.

He was the only recognised survivor of both bombings, and he died on Monday from stomach cancer at age 93. He has, apparently, written several books and songs about his experiences. Another piece of history crystallises, hopefully not to be forgotten.

In other news, it's snowing out again. I think we've got about an inch settled now, and it's starting to compact into ice on the footpaths. The roads are mostly clear, thanks to gritters and snowploughs, but I've already seen one Council truck jack-knifed in its parking area, so that may not continue. Conditions treacherous. I decided the footpath outside ours needed some attention this time (it's on a ~20 degree slope, so ice is a bad thing), so went to B&Q to buy a shovel. They very tolerantly didn't laugh at me, and ended up selling me a dutch hoe (with a sharp stainless steel blade) and a stiff broom instead, which are making a decent account of themselves, much though the job is taking ages. I'll just burn off a lot of energy doing it, I guess, which is probably good for me.

The glass: half-empty

What was I going to say?

I ended up playing Boriz, the chef, and having three responsibilities. I was to help run the Now Infamous Saratov Wodka Game, to manufacture a prop to detect the drunkenness of a guest about to play said game, and I was to build an alcove-shrine to hold and backlight some rather lovely tarot cards, along with miscellaneous other shrinefluff as tends to accumulate on such things: candles, flowers, votive offerings and the like. Not particularly onerous responsibilities: I've done prop builds and scenery stuff before, and I'm a LARPer, so improv and "being ambient" in character is pretty simple.

The problems kinda started with the breath-tester build, to be honest. It was built to call to mind a small pressure vessel, with brass and aluminium panels and little slot-head screws everywhere. A little breathalyser keyring drove the whole show, with the LEDs rewired to drive a nice moving-coil gauge, with a jointed pipe for the user to breathe into. It was to be mounted on a leather vambrace, it looked lovely and as I was putting the final touches on it and getting ready to fix it to the vambrace I did something (still don't know what) and the sensor stopped responding. I either shorted something or opened a fatigue crack in one of the solder joints, and the whole thing stopped responding, at all. Given that there was prep work to be done for the alcove and my lift was due to arrive in a couple of hours, there wasn't much I could do but give up - debugging would likely take more time than I had, and the project was already massively over time-budget. I'd only slept about four hours the previous night because of all the effort I'd put into it, and it wasn't coming with us. Not the best way to start a party.

Still, cut the parts for the alcove, packed all the tools, character kit, duct tape, para cord and the usual rigging accessories, got in the car and travelled to London. Cable is a bizarre and interesting space under the Bermondsey railway arches, near London Bridge station: Victorian brickwork, huge industrial air-conditioning and a slight damp problem. We were led through to our "space" (the chill-out room at the club was to be transformed into the Servants' Quarters, which was our domain, while the rest of the club ran a fairly normal service), and started installation. Now, due to the trouble I had with the Wodkameter, I only had a fairly loose plan of how the alcove was to go together: I knew where all the parts went, but not their exact measurements or how they would be attached. Myself and a man I still only know as "Triumph" (his IRC nick - we were introduced, but I forget) got straight into it, and the next few hours were filled with the measuring of gaps and the driving of screws. The original design used a string of anchor bolts to run wires across the front of the alcove, from which the cards would hang, and to screw some shelves to the wall at the back to mount lights and offerings, etc. This plan went out the window when we learned something interesting about Victorian brickwork: our drill bits could barely scratch it. The 8mm bit was blunt within 5mm of penetration, which took the best part of two minutes (and while I'm inexperienced with masonry drilling, I'm not THAT bad). With four 60mm-deep 8mm holes to drill, and seven 14mm holes for the anchor bolts, and two hours till the club as due to open, we needed a new plan and I was running on vapours and prayers, having not eaten or rested since we got there.

We were absolutely saved by the Production Manager, Santi, who suggested we run wire along the front of each shelf and hang the cards from that, supporting the shelves by fixing them to the back of one of the modular staging units sitting idle nearby. We had just enough spare screws to be able to make it work, and half an hour later the shrine was finished. It looked pretty creditable, as seen in this photo (part of a set of photos from the night taken by Ara, a professional photographer who was also crewing the NYE event). The shelving Triumph and I near-sweated blood over almost completely disappears in that shot, eclipsed by the lights and cards, which is of course exactly how we wanted it :)

So, Nightmare Build over, and everyone else was in costume, briefed, fed etc. This is something else I'm entirely used to from my backstage days during high-school and college, and I don't begrudge them it. Five minutes to decompress, ten to jump into costume and eat some of the chips someone had thoughtfully acquired for us, and I can put Dan down to wibble and twitch in the corner, while Boriz runs the show for the rest of the night.

The rest of the night. The rest of the night was good. Boriz was written as a miserable old wretch who has been dragged to the party by order of his lord and lady, and I mostly managed to play him as such (though it was difficult when Doktor von Science was prestidigitating in the corner and the Sullivan Singers were singing showtunes on stage). Tricky to maintain the facade when the room started filling up with people I know from other places, trickier yet when I had to do some running between rooms to handle a complex situation I don't mean to go into here, and had to interact with some Normal revellers as well as the Steampunks, but I think I mostly pulled it off. The fact that the club polarised pretty rapidly into Steampunks in the Servants' Quarters and Normals in the Techno Room once all rooms were open was kinda amusing, but also useful, as it meant we didn't have to deal with drunks and scallies, for the most part. The fact that our dressing room and out-of-character area was outside, accessed via the smoking area was less useful, but livable. The Wodka Game, incidentally, went without a hitch (except a few irritating bits of tangled string, but that's a story for another time, perhaps).

I get the feeling I'm complaining a lot, and it was a really draining, tiring night what with one thing and another. The other thing it was, I'll say again to reinforce, was a Lot Of Fun.

Now, I just have to try and fix my sleep schedule...

The Glass: full

As far as I recall it, my reading fell out as coming from close friendships, being currently in confusion, and leading to the risk of stagnation and obsession (if I recall correctly). Despite the obvious romantic interpretation, I rather suspect that could be relevant to work. I don't intend to unpack that any further in a public forum, but I might in conversation. Upon being told by the friend reading the cards that he suspected I might be best represented by a particular card in the deck (in its guise as a personality type) I was interested, but suspect that I'd apply shadings of two other cards to get an actual representation of my personality, as opposed to the persona I project.

I should point out that I don't "believe" in the divinatory power of the tarot per se - I suspect that given hands drawn are an excellent focus and aid to meditation and introspection, but I ascribe no particular power to the deck or significance to the order of the draw. That particular hand, while by no means the worst hand drawn for people during out little diversion, will lead to some careful thought and re-evaluation in the near future, I think (having drawn certain issues I was trying to avoid into the clear foreground).

Despite said lack of belief, I would be much happier had the cards drawn in the opposite order.

The Glass: empty

So it goes. Not everything is metalwork at the moment, I'm also looking at refurring my character mask for maelstrom over the holiday. To that end, I wandered to FabricLand on Western Road today, who have the most amazing selection of esoteric fabrics ever. After dithering over which of about five white fur fabrics I was going to use, I ended up taking a roll of a nice deep-pile fake fur to the counter, where the woman running the store cut me a suitable length of it. If you've ever worked with fur fabric before, you'll know what's coming next: it immediately shed an immense amount of fur where the scissors had cut through the strands. In her words, it looked like we'd whacked a muppet. :)

Oh well. Christmas shopping is done, presents are wrapped, and now I'm heading home, to Worthing, to be with my family for a few days. As the wise man said, we are in the heart of midwinter, and festivals abound. Whatever you celebrate, have a good one.

The Glass: half-full

So, I went over to Dom Flannelcat's house to do some planning for the New Year's Eve Thing. We did some costume design, laid out some backstory, figured out how to build some props and so on with a bunch of other people from Firecat Masquerade. It was fun, and a great break from the dry, technical writing that is most of what I'm doing at the moment.

We were in the sitting room, planning everything out, with the curtains drawn. When we eventually got done, and some of us decided to head for home, it turned out that it had snowed while we weren't watching. Two or more inches of snow on the ground, light and fluffy: cars were in trouble, trains were barely moving (we watched one inch across the nearby rail bridge over about ten minutes), and the world as a whole was coming to a halt. So I'm stuck here tonight, where there is tea and sofa and cat. Woe, woe, etc :)

This weather wasn't due until tomorrow, hence lack of preparedness. Oh well. Snow Day!

The Glass: half-full

Lewes Hospital is to be commended, by the way, for running an excellent Minor Injuries Clinic, which is kinda the baby brother of an A&E department (I have a Thing about bothering Accident and Emergency departments when I'm not actively bleeding, spasming or dying, so this turns out to be exactly what I need). In, examined, X-rayed and out in a little over an hour (in other news, twisty-hand is even twistier inside than out, it seems - I'm missing a joint on my index finger, which turns out to be because the entire piece of finger that should be between two of the joints is telescoped into a tiny triangle between the other two). I'd love a copy of the X-ray, but didn't think quickly enough to ask for it.

Anyway, enough of that. From bed to University Health Centre to Lewes and back by 1215, busy start to the day. From there, I proceeded to the house/workshop of a friend and fellow larper, Will Segerman (who is cool and makes many interesting things). He lives up an ENORMOUS hill behind Brighton Hospital (which houses the A&E I would likely have ended up in had it not been for not wanting to bother anyone). The walk up said hill gave me more exercise than I really wanted or needed, but the end result is lovely, a part-built prop for a New Year's Eve Thing that I should hopefully be able to finish at home, assuming certain parts arrive before then and the postal service don't mess up. More details later, probably.

From there to Portslade via the number 1 bus for games night, and that's the day. It's been interesting - I've visited a lot of bits of the surrounding area that I've not seen before, all for the cost of a little shoe-leather and a well-worn bus ticket. I recommend it, especially at this time of year, when the centre of town is so crowded.

Most importantly, I still haven't broken any bones in my life, ever. This will, of course, be my cue to fall off a kerb and break my hip or something STUPID over the Christmas period, or something. This is the way life works.

The Glass: half-empty