Freckles & 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.

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 ecological stuff and don't really need their consciousnesses raised) but their stamp of approval has to mean something.

I'm rather saddened, though, by the way the award seems to have brought anti-eco feeling out of the woodwork - a lot of sites mentioning the award seem to have a comment trail to the effect that he doesn't deserve it, it's not a legitimate issue, his activism hasn't achieved anything, and climate change has nothing to do with peace, this last causing me to grind my teeth somewhat. (Even some of the usually liberal and intelligent folk at the Whatever are kvetching no end). I honestly cannot see how anyone can deny either the climate change situation in the face of the current evidence, or the effectiveness of Gore's long-term efforts to wave the the issue around like a flag. I'd be a lot happier if humanity were orang-utans rather than ostriches.

The other pleasing award was Doris Lessing's literature prize. I am afraid to say that I have never yet finished a Lessing novel, being somewhat put off by (a) her creds as a Serious African Issue-Driven Novelist, which sparks my auto-bloody-mindedness response, (b) her writing style, with which I for some reason do not resonate, and (c) a very vivid memory of my late maternal grandmother, who knew Lessing in her early days in then-Rhodesia. At any mention of Lessing, Gran would tighten her lips ominously, say tartly, "Tigger Wisdom? She was a naughty girl," and refuse to be drawn further. In retrospect, it is somewhat ironic that I should have allowed myself to be influenced by this, as it refers to Lessing's unhappy first marriage from which she departed at speed, leaving a husband and two children - I think my gran was horrified by the children-leaving bit. I, on the other hand, am fully behind the rights of the individual to escape an unhappy relationship, and given the social mores of the time, could easily see how Lessing might have been pressured into both marriage and children.

It thus clearly behooves me to dig out the Canopus in Argus series I madly bought about a year ago and have never read, and to darned well read them in the interests of both feminist and sf solidarity. I am happy about Lessing's win because she is a highly-regarded "serious" mainstream novelist who both writes deliberately within sf genre traditions, and, unlike rotten weasel-worders like Margaret Atwood, routinely acknowledges her debt to the genre. The world needs more writers capable of exploding the myth that "if it's good it can't be science fiction." A Nobel rather does that. Heh.

Slightly spacey today, after a hectic and highly enjoyable weekend helping the dreaded jo run her Opera InCognito LARP. Good bunch of players, lovely costumes, perfect setting, much hilarity had by all. Stv took some stunning photos, will link to them when he's released them to Teh Internets. Also saw Stardust. It made me happy. Review tomorrow, when I've killed 20 essays and annotated an Honours dissertation. Sigh.

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 kinds of problems and inconsistencies an inexperienced bunch of designers are likely to perpetrate. I become very frustrated, and end up spending three hours gnashing and gnarling at all beholders in a thoroughly obnoxious fashion.

This wasn't too much of a problem in last night's Discworld LARP since I was supposed to be taking upon me the mantle of Granny Weatherwax, probably the character most designed by a benevolent providence to be my role-playing soulmate, and herself constructed with a fair amount of gnashing and gnarling intrinsic to her personality. But I always had misgivings about the idea of a Discworld LARP that used actual canon characters, and in the event, despite the evident care and detail that went into writing this LARP, I don't think the final result was ultimately successful. There are too few surprises, too many ponderables attached to each character, and too great a discrepancy in the extent to which the players are familiar with the history and personalities of the canon.

The risk is also simply too great that the designers, in a desperate search for novelty, will take the characters too far away from the canon as it is perceived by die-hard, read-everything fans such as I unashamedly am. The dual layers of interpretation - designers and players - mean that the LARP comes to read like slightly slap-dash fanfic. This is fatal in the context of Pratchett: I don't personally enjoy fanfic written for any setting which has, in canon, a reasonable degree of complexity and subtlety. (I love Harry Potter fanfic because Rowling's world is basically flat and full of holes, and any embroidery has a high chance of actually improving on the original. I won't read fanfic in any Joss Whedonverse, because they're complex enough that an insensitive reading really stuffs with the canon. Call me picky. I'm picky).

The fact that I was, last night, in Day 3 of a particularly obnoxious four-day headache (possibly more than 4-day, depending on whether or not I wake up with the blasted thing tomorrow) really didn't help. Nor did a major communication breakdown among the DMs about character abilities, leading to a somewhat doomed attempt to play Granny Weatherwax with no actual effective power at all for three quarters of the evening. In fact, bleah.

On the upside, she says, trying desperately not to turn into Schopenhauer, I have fiendishly addicted the Evil Landlord to Season 1 of the new Doctor Who, which is entertaining to watch; he seems somewhat tickled by Christopher Eccleston's Doctor. Heh. I'll make a drooling Germanic fanboy out of him yet.

Also, outside in my courtyard a small flock of white-eyes has found the hanging baskets, the fibrous padding for which apparently makes excellent nesting material. I'm so enjoying watching the little buggers flipping about uttering muffled witterings through a mouthful of fibre, I don't particularly care that the baskets are starting to have that shocked Afro look.

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 with the occasional "aargh!" and "bugger!" (Actually, in retrospect "bltant fklc pervsion" looks rude, and probably is). Writing on Disney is a process the upshot of which is a strange mixture of loathing, frustration and vindictive satisfaction: I abominate what they stand for, but there's a perverse pleasure in identifying and labelling their manifold iniquities with sadistic (or possibly masochistic), surgical precision.

Somewhat predictably, I have entirely failed to summon the necessary willpower not to write LARPs, and have been gently exhorting myself through the actual academic work by allowing myself brief excursions into the Wild West. *fires off six-shooter contentedly*. This would be the LARP we started writing, lo, these many years ago, before jo actually buggered off overseas - in fact, the current character sheet I'm writing (in a laconic Western drawl) was started in the year 2000. I figure that's quite enough self-denial to be going on with.

Tomorrow I plan to toddle off and watch the recent SciFi Channel version of Earthsea, courtesy of Mike. By all accounts it's a shockingly bad adaptation denounced roundly by Le Guin herself, but I shall fortify myself with Mike's excellent wine, and stave off the actual ritual suicide by planning the vindictive blog entry with which I shall subsequently edify the faithful, always supposing that my own lower intestine hasn't leapt up and throttled me in a praiseworthy attempt to save my sanity. Reviewing as an extreme sport, the new craze.

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 the first time she's seen him. She was worried that perhaps a neighbourhood cat had snuck in. Ounce's default position is to assume that any member of the human race, aside from the Evil Landlord, is about to kill and eat him. Despite the fact that I'm the one who feeds him approximately 50% of the time, he still suspects I might do this anyway. He has "cower and run" down to a fine art. It's very depressing, and tends to make me insecurely worry that I've been accidentally killing and eating him in my sleep on a regular basis.

The LARP on Saturday went surprisingly well, given that we had two last-minute player pull-outs, and one absolute all-time horror of a casting error. A player who I usually blacklist on the grounds of his total incompetence signed up under his e-mail pseudonym, and no-one realised it was him. It was a nasty shock when he turned up, and he played appallingly, but we were able to brief his allies to take up the slack.

I am forced to conclude, however, that the Younger Generation of roleplayers are tragically missing a very essential trait for LARPing, viz. basic nastiness. That has to be the most cute and cuddly version of that LARP I have ever run. People were handing over concessions and making agreements left, right and centre without much thought for their own goals and desires. There was none of the horse-trading, back-stabbing and sneaky manipulation for which the LARP was designed. I am forced to the horrifying conclusion that this damned New South African liberal democracy thing is gradually rotting the brains of the young, to the point where each year is more wishy-washy, non-confrontational and conciliatory than the last*. I forsee a horrible time, ten years down the line, where they're all too feeble to LARP at all, and Old LARP Designers can only sit around, gnashing their evil reactionary teeth and writing scenarios full of labyrinthine villanies which no-one will ever play.**

Also, the Younger Roleplaying Crowd has, somewhere along the line, missed out on the vital piece of brainwashing which says it's important to turn up to a LARP in costume. About a third of them did. Honestly, I despair of the younger generation, she says, rocking away ferociously in her rocking chair.

* Either that, or consumer culture is slowly leaching from them the last vestiges of individuality. I'm sure roleplayers had more personality in my day. *waves walking stick around toothlessly*
** We'll probably have to export them all to America, which seems to be settling nicely into polarised value judgement. Although their rampant consumerism is even worse, so it'll be pale, characterless ghosts savagely espousing bigoted views. Fear.

I acquired another Honours student today, after she had apparently spent several weeks broadcasting her desire for me to supervise her thesis to approximately 64% of my immediate social circle, not including me. (She's a CLAWtype, which helps with this kind of indirect assault). Over the weekend I was informed by three separate sources that this young lady was keen for my academic oversight, but was, in fact, too scared to actually approach me about it. I find this distressing, since I honestly don't think of myself as being that terrifying*. For heaven's sake, I lecture fantasy, science fiction, Gothic, and gosh-darned Victorian nonsense. Intimidating academic rarefication, that ain't. Also, surely the days when I cowed the massed hordes of CLAW with fascism, boots and demonic organisational skills are long gone? I don't think any of the undergrad CLAWites would recognise me if I bludgeoned them over the head with my complete Clawmarks collection. Much as I would fondly like to think that my Great Old One status is accompanied by whispered lore about my achievements, vices and accompanying tentacular appendages, I really don't think so. Role-players have short attention spans, especially across generations. Barring the unearthing of the occasional musty tome with these strange, unknown names transcribed therein, I doubt I cross their consciousness in any way.

Then again, I have apparently reached a point in my role-playing life when a semi-younger CLAW-type plotting a Discworld LARP automatically assumes I'll be playing Granny Weatherwax. I suppose I can be thankful it wasn't Nanny Ogg.

If anyone wants me, I'll be out back in the rocking chair. Cackling. And eating students alive.

* Of course, her state of fear would not have been mitigated by helpful suggestions from the ilk of jo&stv (apparently I require propitiation with appropriate sacrifices of chocolate cake) that were, in fact, not. Especially since, while I enjoy chocolate cake, it's not high on the list of Things For Which I Will Commit Suspect Acts Of Favouritism.