Monday and Friday meme

The weekend went well overall (spod to come). Lists of things which need to be done this month are less overwhelming me, but ones that don't *need* to be done are being postponed several times, and at some point I need to work out if at the current rate of doing and finding new things to do I'm catching up on them or not.

I really need to go to the bathroom and debug my program before I forget where I got to, so I'll leave this comment here.

LARP

On Friday I went to LARP. In the spooky coincidence stakes #1, my character had been troubled by prophetic dreams that the end of the world was nigh and his/all gods were returning to judge us. He was pleasently surprised to find that when he turned up in the bar, everyone else also had omens telling them a god was coming and the end of the world was nigh, and had plans well in hand that would hopefully control the situation. This meant he was catapulted into interfering with main plot sooner than possible, but fit in well.

In #2. I was reading about Tarot (looking for CUSFS seating riddles, and thinking "Whoah, Mao with 56 cards and 23 nines of diamonds!" and found they were used in the plot here too.

It would have been nice to go to the linear, but I had a friend staying, and didn't quite feel up to an away/night bash.

CTS Croquet

On saturday afternoon was Cambridge vs Oxford, Tolkien Society Croquet. Sorry to anyone who experienced faff of doom with me (which is probably too boring to try to explain). In the end we had a great lawn and a great picnic, and I think an enjoyable day.

The sides seemed fairly evenly matched, and everyone seemed to play quite well, including those who never played before, and those including me who'd played the winkers last year with no great distinction. I invoked Reevely powers to make two several-metre cross-bumpy-ground stick-in-hoop shots, and if I recall temporarily loaned them back to Mark to do a "put both of our balls through our hoop and send theirs to opposite ends of the pitch" shot special :)

The real problem was the evil hoop of doom. I think next time we house rule that we start there, or go through the other way, or ignore it, because half the game was spent fighting each other on a bumpy corner with a hoop fixed in. Because of the slope it's nearly impossible to stop the ball in front of the hoop, so to get through you need to find a flat edge and take a longish shot.

The first two balls (iirc) were finally got through when ours was lodged in the hoop, and their ball came back to try to touch it, and we all disagreed about if it had or not, so we compromised on that it had, but that they would knock both balls through the hoop rather than trying to knock ours out and start the whole thing again.

CUSFS Croquet

And slightly out of order, but while I'm on the subject, on sunday was cusfs croquet, to elect vice presidents[1]. It wasn't entirely clear how this was going to work, but it transpired quite well: we attatched coloured nomination slips to the hoops and peg and dandelion, deleted those passed through by balls, and elected the last six remaining.

It was pleasingly elegant, but annoying in that a ball going through a hoop out of order, or backwards, removes the paper without counting for croquet, so it misleads you.

Croquet is a great sport. No great strength but some dexterity is needed, and it's veyr vicious and manipulative :) I hope to play more often: upcoming games hopefully include cts vs cusfs[2] and cts vs winkers[3].

The mutual agreeing of house rules immediately suggested a more mao-like variant of croquet, but we managed to restrain ourselves, and played penultima afterwards to make up for it :)

[1] These are perhaps the elections least related to reality I've been involved with. People nominate various candidates, which have no requirement to be in cambridge, members of cusfs, people, existant, non-squiggy, or non-lizard-men. In fact, most tend to be abstract nouns or spanish railways. And then they are elected by some mostly-random system.

[2] Cambridge Tolkien Society and Cambridge University Science Fiction Society. Strangely the more specific society seems to have more active involvement, but cusfs probably has more intertia. And there is fair overlap between them. Several people would have to play on both teams or choose :)

[3] The Tiddlywinks society seem to exist mainly to drink a lot and play every other society anywhere at any sport, including tiddlywinks and croquet, which are very good aims. But we always loose because they have lots of players who play croquet and we don't :)