Cape Town is having Winter, TM, slightly late but with immense seriousness and inordinate quantities of water. Traffic has been horrible, particularly this morning, when it took me 20 minutes to inch up the hill to campus. It turned out that this was not because large chunks of road on the N2 had been washed away, as is the way of my people in ( Read more... )

We ran Attack of the Vapours, our insane 24-person parody LARP, for the latest generation of university roleplaying types last night. As a result I'm pretty much dead, but it was fun, and the players did very well. Some really good roleplayers beautifully in character, and a lot of attention paid to costume and prop. Memo to self: always put a ( Read more... )

I don't usually have much interest in the Nobel Prize, but this year's are a bit of an exception. Al Gore receiving the Peace prize makes me very happy, if only because it's an indicator of the status of environmental issues in the public consciousness. Not the right public consciousness (the Scandinavians seem to be pretty much in the forefront of ( Read more... )

I thoroughly enjoyed Casablanca. It's one of those movies one should really watch before experiencing, oh, I dunno, modern culture. It's like watching Shakespeare: all sorts of references, quotes and idioms suddenly fall into place. It's aged very well, without any of that clunkiness one sometimes associates with old movies. And, as Mal points out ( Read more... )

I'm getting too old for LARPing. Or, at least, getting too old, opinionated and set in my ways to really enjoy LARPs written by all but an extremely high-quality few (d_hofryn, this means you and your partner in crime, so get writing, people!). As I am not generally in, as they say, a Good Space at the moment, I seem to have very little tolerance for the ( Read more... )

Lovely moment at about 1am this morning, driving back in a haze of exhaustion from a LARP that did the usual time-distortion post-midnight surreality... at the campus exit, a small herd of about a dozen deer, calmly cropping the grass by the side of the road. They didn't like me stopping to watch them and, with that curiously feline "you're in my ( Read more... )

I did this day slay that damned animation entry, she says with satisfaction, dancing on its recumbent corpse with becoming cartoon glee. Tomorrow, Disney, which entails tackling all the notes I've made and rendering into reasonably sensible English such cryptic comments as "cnsmrist pdigm", "nstalgic manip" and "bltant fklc pervsion", interspersed ( Read more... )

Favourite moment from the LARP on Saturday night:

ME: Sorry, you can't come past.
PLAYER (confused): Um, why?
ME: Because I'm four six-foot Nubians with scimitars.
PLAYER: Oh. OK, then.

Damn, I miss LARPing.

Our nice cleaning lady has just wandered in and informed me that there's a strange grey cat sleeping on the Evil Landlord's bed. This is, in fact, Ounce, who has developed neurosis and rapid stealth response to the point that, although said cleaning lady has worked for us for eight years and Ounce has lived with us for about five of them, this is ( Read more... )

Strange Narrative Decisions, #1. David* recently procured me (cheapcheap!) an evil bootleg copy** of Howl's Moving Castle. It's a lovely movie, but actually not as all-embracingly wonderful as I'd hoped, given its genesis as the bastard offspring of my favourite anime director and one of my favourite fantasy authors. It's currently sitting a bit ( Read more... )