who only by moving can balance

Okay. SO.

Via THE GATE APPRECIATION SOCIETY on Facebook, earlier today I became aware of the Ginkgo Gates at the Adelaide Botanical Gardens. I took one look at the short sections and went I WANT TO KNIT IT.

Ergo lireavue went and poked Ravelry with sticks, and... this shawl fell out.

There Was Shrieking.

And then the shrieking Intensified because all of a sudden the outline of a possible character for the game that Admin: the LRP supports Arrived All At Once. Namely, one of the nations of the Empire is Navarr (summary of influences: "wood elves"). From the look and feel page for Navarr:

The Navarr look draws heavily on the forests for its inspiration. The colours are primarily greens and browns with occasional splashes of dark autumnal red or yellow. Materials are practical, primarily those that come from hunting - leather and fur. [...] Rather than rich materials or unusual colours the Navarr personalise their appearance by adorning their costume with embroidery, beads, feathers, fetishes, and other accessories. It is also common to weave such items into the hair. [...] Layers of well-worn, practical wool and leather in natural shades often serve as the foundation of Navarr costume.

Also relevant context: the existence of magical items that grant you Additional Tricks. Like, for example, mage robes, where I am raising particular eyebrows at the part where the information for Volhov's Robe notes that even the Navarr "see great value in a skilled individual being able to help an established coven".

Additional and further relevant context: there are four events a year. In-game, these events take place during the Winter Solstice, Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, and Autumn Equinox.

It Is Also The Case That: a particularly distinctive piece of kit can get very strongly associated with The Specific Character Who Wears It in the general cultural wossname.

... I abruptly very badly want to make myself a set of three shawls identical except in colour: spring green, summer green, autumn blazing yellow. Obviously the conceit is that it is not three shawls, It Is One Single Magic Shawl. It Changes With The Seasons. Do I know anything about this potential character other than "Navarri, magician, magic shawl"? NOPE. Have I ever actually LRPed? NOPE. Am I nonetheless actually kind of tempted? ...

I spent ... some ... time on Thursday night very concerned that I had Broken My Fancy Pen. (The pen I am using most in the field is a Pilot Vanishing Point/Capless, which I got very cheap second hand because it was a little bit dinged up already, where by "very cheap" if you are not a pen person I mean "add at least one more zero", and if you are a Pen Person I mean "remove one zero".) The actuation -- it's a clicky pen -- wasn't properly actuating, in that it was feeling spongy and squishy and generally sluggish and Did Not Want To Work Properly.

I was relieved the following morning to discover that actually it was entirely fine.

... and it was not until dusk when the air temperature dropped precipitously again, and it started happening again, that I realised that Possibly and Perhaps what was going on was It Doesn't Like Cold Weather.

(I have not yet gathered further data i.e. asked pen people on the internet if they've had similar experiences.)

Meanwhile today a player correctly identified the pen I was using from a brief glimpse, with nontrivial awe about Being So Close To One Of Those, and while under most circumstances players don't get to use anything but the lending biro I keep in my pocket at all most times for this precise purpose, on this occasion I moved to offer to let them try it, and was vindicated in this decision when they, wide-eyed, asked If I Was Sure.

(It went fine! They enjoyed themself! I'm a little sad it was the EF nib on suboptimal paper, but hey, they had fun and the pen came back to me in one piece.)

... include "angular momentum" (yes, despite having sat on a spinny chair and done the thing; yes, despite having worked through all the maths multiple times; yes, this is awkward for several of my flavours of science) and "ratchet straps".

The latter is increasingly inconvenient given the existence of my terrible tent-based hobbies.

So! A has been threatening me with the concept of a Tiny Ratchet to add Enrichment to my Environment for a while, and a few days ago (courtesy of the car getting a spa treatment) a tiny ratchet did indeed wind up on the sofa, where my feet normally go.

It has spent the entirety of those days Not Biting Me even though I squinted at it suspiciously, so this evening we moved on to the next step of "staring intently at all the moving parts while fiddling", with Supervision from a Responsible Adult.

So far I think it is going better than angular momentum? I am potentially willing to grudgingly concede the existence of ratchet straps. The tiny baby (0.28 tonne) ratchet will continue to live on the sofa so I can intermittently pick it up and continue fiddling suspiciously. Maybe I will manage to internalise enough of the workings to feel slightly more confident being handed the ten-tonne ratchets in a few weeks' time...

So. Admin: the LRP. I tripped and fell and now I'm kinda sorta corunning lost property.

Our Least Favourite Things To Store are weaponry, because weaponry is generally (i) large, and (ii) not given to stacking well. On the upside, it being large (and expensive) means that mostly it doesn't get lost!

... and then. then. there are the people who acquire weaponry the entire point of which is to fling it away from one's person with gay abandon, preferably in the woods, where it will get lost in the undergrowth.

Throwing daggers are kind of okay? Throwing daggers are small and I am absolutely getting to recognise the usual suspects. Oh, so-and-so was out on a skirmish this afternoon, were they.

But then. there are the arrows.

LRP-safe arrows have a large foam head, in order that they donk only gently against their targets. Commonly one makes some kind of identifying mark on the head, on the basis that lost arrows get deposited into containment bins like great bouquets with their heads upwards. This is not without its risks, though, in that one of the ways arrows commonly break is to have their foam head delaminate, so many people also make marks of some kind on the fletching or the shaft.

My favourite people are the ones who just write their damn PID in multiple places on their arrows, so that regardless of which combination of parts we are handed we are able to send up the Oi, Come Get Your Shit signal.

However. Many people who arch. Do so in multiple systems. And, not actually unreasonably (I concede grudgingly), are reluctant to mark their property with a unique identifier that means them for Admin purposes but might very well mean someone completely different in other systems.

So they draw A Sigil. (Or, in one case we are all very fond of, they carve a beautiful detailed potato stamp.)

This in turn means that it would be, as one of my bosses pointed out about a year ago, Extremely Helpful to have a catalogue of which sigils match to which unique identifiers, again for the purposes of Giving People Back Their Shit.

Attempt the first relied on grainy photos of sigils on textured foam against a busy background printed in black and white.

A few weeks ago I realised that it might actually be better to, uh, record the symbol for use in catalogue, and spent some time thoughtlessly reverting to my default of "trace shit in inkscape, optionally with a stylus on A's tablet", which stalled on "but I don't have digital copies of all the photos".

Today it finally dawned on me that! in fact! almost all of these symbols (potato-stamp maple leaves and foxes aside) are deliberately designed to be amenable to churning out at speed using a permanent marker onto foam, and that even my rudimentary art skills were! in fact! probably! just about up to.......... copying them onto my phone screen using my finger. without needing to trace onto a separate layer at all.

SO THAT IS WHAT I HAVE SPENT MY AFTERNOON DOING, followed by spending my evening compiling the images into a DOCUMENT, and now? a catalogue? exists??? so I just have to gently badger the boss whose idea this was in the first place for any other photos she might have lost down the back of the sofa, and then we can PRINT IT OUT and HAVE A REFERENCE when we are IN A FIELD next week.

And, hey. I made some questionable art. I am pretty proud of myself.

In the run-up to my viva I decided that the nicest way to make my totally spurious personal-use-only hard copy of my thesis would be using a £90 hole punch, so I stacked up some discount codes and bought into the Atoma disc-binding system. Obviously, when you have a £90 hole punch you bought for a single specific purpose, you fairly rapidly discover that you are in possession of a solution looking for problems.

Happily, Admin: the LRP presents no shortage of problems.

... or, more helpfully: after the first event of 2022, we decided that we could do a little bit better in terms of issue-tracking than my horrible scribbled bits of torn paper, and designed and set up a whole entire analogue ticket system based on query slips!

( Background. So much background. )

For convenience, I have taken to collating like query slips we'll probably want to refer back to during the event (the background above; lost property; found property; ...) into disc-bound booklets. Alas, "white paper someone's scribbled all over" doesn't really stand out much from The Chaos; happily, this gives me an excuse to make FLUORESCENT NOTEBOOK COVERS with the contents written on the front in BIG FRIENDLY LETTERS.

Because reasons, I had a stack of fluorescent cardstock -- pink and orange and yellow and green. The thing is, though, that Admin: the LRP has A Colour Scheme. That colour scheme is Royal Blue. Obviously, therefore, I wanted some obnoxiously loud fluorescent blue cardboard.

... I was a frankly embarrassing way into tediously unedifying search results before it occurred to me to double-check how fluorescence actually works.

To first approximation, things are colours because they absorb all the visible wavelengths of light except the one they appear to be, which they reflect back to you more-or-less unaltered. Per wikipedia:

Fluorescence is the emission of light by a substance that has absorbed light or other electromagnetic radiation. It is a form of luminescence. In most cases, the emitted light has a longer wavelength, and therefore a lower photon energy, than the absorbed radiation ... Strongly fluorescent pigments often have an unusual appearance which is often described colloquially as a "neon color" (originally "day-glo" in the late 1960s, early 1970s). This phenomenon was termed "Farbenglut" by Hermann von Helmholtz and "fluorence" by Ralph M. Evans. It is generally thought to be related to the high brightness of the color relative to what it would be as a component of white. Fluorescence shifts energy in the incident illumination from shorter wavelengths to longer (such as blue to yellow) and thus can make the fluorescent color appear brighter (more saturated) than it could possibly be by reflection alone.

... oh, I realise, belatedly. Oh. Er. Fluorescent blue is not really a thing in most contexts... because blue light is the shortest wavelength in the visible spectrum... so since fluorescence works by converting shorter-wavelength light to longer-wavelength light... fluorescent blue only really works if you've got lots of UV bouncing around the place... whiiich isn't something that happens very much in domestic indoor settings so it er isn't surprising that (i) there isn't much demand for it, and (ii) fluorescent green is the shortest-wavelength colour that's trivially available on cardstock.

And so! I have resigned myself to making do with the colours I already have available (I've been doing some clearing out of Stuff from my parents', and a giant stash of 90s kids' stationery has mostly gone on Freecycle, but a few bits of it I kept), and as consolation have a bit more of an understanding of How Colours and How Lights, and on the whole I think this is a fair trade.