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I'm back in Cambridge again. Try not to look shocked :)
I've just come out of an informal interview at ARM Holdings, which went extremely well: I aced pretty much every test they put in front of me. Comforting to know I've learned a thing or two in the last ten years... So I guess we'll see how that goes.
Tomorrow, we're off up to Derby to celebrate a friend's wedding by camping in a field and having a ceilidh. And there's no metaphysical discussion for me to hide in this time, so I have to dance. Such hardship.
In other news, Maelstrom went well. The Undead were attacking all weekend, and not only did we manage to hold down the camp and keep them out almost all the time, the times they did break through they did minimal damage. No characters my character cares about died, despite their best efforts, so a good weekend. Next up is Odyssey, then a couple of weekends off (well deserved).
It's that time of year again: I'm off to go be someone else in a field in Oxfordshire Buckinghamshire over the weekend. Since I pick up the van tomorrow morning, I suppose I should say goodbye now.
Will be off comms, to all intents and purposes, from tomorrow morning until Monday night, except to people trying to find me in said field tomorrow night. Have a good Easter, if you celebrate, otherwise enjoy the holiday.
Me? I plan to. I NEED a holiday right now, corrections are wearing me down and I've too many things people need me to do. I'll be putting them all on hold for four days, then coming back to them refreshed, I hope.
Well, that was interesting. A couple of months back, my mate Dom approached me about New Year's Eve. What am I doing? Nothing much. How would I like to come along as part of the crew for a Steampunk night at a London nightclub?
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...
Not much clank yet. The mail shirt doesn't so much clank as jingle, but one thing at a time. Anyway. I'm back from Maelstrom Event 1, more or less unpacked and still kinda tired.
It was an awesome event. Over the course of a four-day event I sang, ate, fought, charged, fled, gambled and slept, at least a little. The next one can't come soon enough (about fifty-five days, for those as are counting). I don't actually want to say too much about it here, because there's the risk that other players might run across it, which could be bad for my character and his friends in future sessions. I'll talk about it happily enough (indeed, I've found you'll be hard pressed to stop me once I get onto the subject).
As is usual in my posts, I've tried to use an amusing but relevant title. This one was a little harder than usual, but I think I've managed. Today's title revolves around an ... accusation that was made mostly in jest on Monday afternoon by my in-game employer after the final time-out had been called. Like many society ladies, she had a lot of appointments to keep, and I happened to have a timepiece that looked appropriate for use in character. Thus, she referred to me a lot for the time and, most of the time when I had her back and things looked bad, she was busy trying to do something else. Thus, apparently it seemed to her that I was less of a bodyguard and more of, in her words, a "chainmail pocketwatch". I suppose it's all about perceptions really: if it appeared I was doing nothing at all, I guess I was doing my job right.
That said, of course, I'm slightly worried now that she might have, secreted somewhere in that outfit, a pocket large enough to hold me...
Still. When we're all in character, that sort of thing fades away, much like most other things. Sleeping and eating, for one. It's surprising how much the character overrides you when you're immersed in the setting for three days straight, leading to things like one and a half square meals a day, drinking bottles of mead without blinking and running up and down the field in heavy armour. My shoulders hurt for days, AFTER the event was over.
Finally, I suppose I should mention the other puzzling side-effect of setting-immersion. I very consciously entered the festival in character, and met the group of which I'm now a part in character. Consequently, I hardly know the people behind those characters. It's a strange sensation, walking up to someone you've stayed with for pretty much the entirety of the last four days, conversed with, laughed and sung with, and finding you have nothing at all to say to them. Quite disconcerting. I have the choice of either getting used to it or getting to know the players, as well as the characters. I suspect we all know I'll choose the latter.
How did it get to be 2AM? These weekends, they are bad for you...
Yesterday, I had a morning! I actually woke up before midday on a Saturday, at 0830 no less, so I could get to the tool shop and still be in Fishersgate for 11AM. Of course, I missed my connection at Brighton station (my train was late, and the connecting train pulled out of the platform just as our doors opened), thus balancing out my good fortune until that point.
Still, eventually I got there, to flannelcat's house, to help with the building of a [CENSORED] to be used by the [CENSORED] in an upcoming live roleplay game. It took flannelcat, Will and me a couple of hours to thrash out the exact design we were going for (it's got to hold a person, amongst other things, so it needs to be built right), but we finally had a set of plans and a bill of materials sorted out: over 70ft of 2x2 timber, 40+ coach-bolts and other assorted hardware. So, we set out to the builders' merchant, to get said supplies. Unhelpfully, they were closed.
Irritating, really. Turns out they were only open till midday on Saturdays, and we got there around two. Still, we got the design sorted out, which means flannelcat can shop around for decent prices in the week, and we did get sausage and bacon sandwiches for lunch (oh yeah...). So I didn't haul a rucksack full of tools to Fishersgate by train for no reason, even if we didn't use them.
Still, Will is an interesting person, and that's the first time I've met him as himself, rather than a character. He has an irritatingly forgettable face, in that I can't describe him, but recognise him whenever I see him (sometimes as somebody else). He's a Maker of Things, builds props for a living, and some of his work is just beautiful. The pump-action blunderbus/crossbow/spring-gun (ultra-low power, of course: it's a larp prop, firing foam projectiles a maximum of about twenty feet) is a case in point - full size with a carved wooden stock, etched brass sideplates, custom-turned components, the works. I'm looking forward to working on a few particularly tricky bits of costume work with him in the near future.
So, we failed at the whole construction thing, but it was a good day out. Next up, we have to do it again, but with the appropriate resources to hand so we can actually build the darned thing!