the dread sigil odegra

[freckles_and_doubt]

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 winter. Far more amusingly, it was because a divvil of some sort had possessed the traffic light just before the freeway exit, so that it was cheerfully showing to our road, at any one time, either three green lights and one red, or three red lights and one green. You have no idea how dislocating this is. And, for some reason, how amusing. I'm still giggling. It seems to undermine some fundamental truth in your average driver, producing a sort of bewildered contemplation which plays out as follows (and I could see exactly this thought process in the cars ahead of me even before it happened to me):

TRAFFIC LIGHT: *cheerfully shows three red lights and one green*
CAR: is confused. Treats this carefully like a malfunctioning robot: stops, checks, is about to go when:
TRAFFIC LIGHT: *changes cheerfully and without warning to three green lights and one red*
CAR: responds like Pavlov's dogs to the green light for a microsecond by starting to take off before having brain exploded by the lone red. Is confused. Treats this carefully like a malfunctioning robot, stops, checks, drives on with head spinning. Or, if me, in a fit of the giggles.

We are creatures of order, and traffic lights are unquestioned beacons of coherent guidance in our orderly worldview. Except when they aren't. Then our heads explode.

I have not been blogging of late because of... thing. I'm not sure what, actually. I have, however, spent an entire weekend with the Jo inventing a new, exciting and minimalist LARP system which encourages players, Fiasco-like, to invent the plot themselves from minimal cues. Currently it's labouring under the working title of "Space Amnesia", which is really a literal description of its workings. We shall be hunting down playtesters shortly.

I have also, by no actual effort of my own other than desultory blogging, found a Macavity Solution, in that CarloandKaren have volunteered to adopt him on the grounds of being short a ginger tom. This means we have started feeding him and encouraging him into the house, with the fell and deceptive intent of getting him relaxed and friendly so that we can swoop down, incarcerate him in a box and haul him off to a life of vet check-ups and sybaritic luxury. While he still won't let me come closer than a Jackie-length or so to him, he has progressed from pitiful yowling to actual conversational yowling if I talk to him for a while. I'm hopeful.

Subject line, as any fule kno, references Good Omens and demonic traffic possession.

Comments

Green green green red

[first-fallen.livejournal.com]

http://www.fringebloggers.com/mysteries-of-fringe-green-green-green-red/

Re: Green green green red

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Good lord, I really must catch up on Fringe, I'm horribly behind. I vaguely lost interest at the point where they started dimension-hopping, which is several seasons back. *forms hollow square to strip self of own fangirl buttons*

[stringgeek.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of Macavity just this morning. I'm glad a solution to his situation has been found!

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

He's actually quite sweet, in a sort of battered, rakish tomcat way. I can almost touch him if I feed him ham first. I'm a bit worried about his medical status, though, he looks as though he has damage to his teeth; I think I may have to institute a vet check-up before unleashing him on his kind adopters, it seems a bit low to land them with an unknown quantity which may be unviable.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

> cheerfully shows three red lights and one green ... changes cheerfully and without warning to three green lights and one red

As a software engineer, I have to say that's a poor failure mode.

Also, congratulations on the cat-placement.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I actually darkly suspect some sort of student prank, the malfunctioning light with the inverted green/red phase was looking a bit the worse for wear, I think someone may have simply physically swapped them. It's certainly an error I've never seen before. Mercifully.

[d-hofryn.livejournal.com]

I know what a Jackie-length is :) Who coined that term?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Goes back to early role-playing days, possibly Andrew H-S's game? Jackie used to play in the campaign but traditionally fell asleep, making her a convenient unit of measure.