October 27, 2006
Marae, Fence, AotFKRI
My attempts at posting more regularly aren't quite living up to what I was hoping for. Let's see if I can remember some interesting stuff...
I was unable to get to Scarlet's birthday last weekend, because my family was presenting my grandmother's picture on our marae, as well as giving them some outside seats and a table as a koha. It was interesting; while I'm the oldest of the grandchildren on my father's side, I'm about the middle on my mother's side, and going up to Foxton meant that I was seeing a whole lot of cousins, second cousins and other miscellaneous relatives who I'd otherwise probably never see. (Much genealogy research was perpetrated while we were there.) And I was slightly nervous about the waiata that all of us were meant to sing, to back up my brother's speech. (I mean, you're not meant to repeat a song, so what would we do if they sang it to us first? The only hymn I know in Maori is "Mo Maria", and I'm certainly not going to sing by myself!)
Anyway, I'm not super-confident of myself on the marae, but it didn't go too badly; sitting on the floor meant that my legs went completely to sleep, but I learned some interesting stuff about the history of our hapu. And I got on really well with two little second cousins (sisters, about three and six), the older of which managed to tell me (most of) Aesop's fable of the lion and the mouse, and for whom I made up (at her request) a story about a pink cat, a puppy and a slide. :)
Anyway, it was nice to go up to Foxton again, and see a bunch of relatives I don't often see, and I'm glad that I heard some of the stories about life on the marae early last century that were floating around.
* * *
The big storm on Monday managed to knock down some of my front fence; now I'm going to have to find out what I need to do to put a new fence up, in terms of getting agreement from my neighbour. But it reminded me of an article someone at work pointed to about hidden rooms becoming more popular. This is, basically, awesome. I could easily imagine converting one of the rooms in my house to a secret one, if only because it'd give me another bookcase where I'd otherwise just have a door. :) (For those who know the layout of my house, it'd be the room with the secret fireplace.)
(There's also the house built on the head of a pin link that someone from work posted from BoingBoing a while ago.)
Er, anyway -- anyone know what I need to do to replace a fence? Like, do I need written permission from the person I share a boundary with?
* * *
I finally got around to organizing a game with Sok; I enlisted Superlate and Norm, and we got together on Tuesday for a session of planning and character creation. It took a while to find a idea we were all happy with, but I'm pretty pleased with the result -- I was going to write a summary, but I think it'll work better as a separate post.
But I worry -- maybe I'm misleading Sok as to what roleplaying games are "really" like. I mean, I don't have a specialist gaming table or use digital map projection; heck, we won't even be using miniatures to tactically play out battles for hours and hours, and we're not even using dice! How will we convey the awesomeness of arguing about the minutiae of thick rulebooks?
Oh wait, maybe I'm thinking of wargaming. (Meow! ;)
* * *
And finally, some random stuff. For those who are interested in this sort of thing, there's a writeup of Weta's computing infrastructure, and how it's changed over the years. It looked mostly right, though some of the quotes were a little more glowing in their reviews of various bits of hardware than I remember at the time.
Keeping with the tech theme, there's an article about the Attack of the Flying Killer Robot Insects that we can expect to see coming to a battlefield near you, except for the fact that it's a pretty daft idea.
Oh, and there's a flash animation about the virtues of cats (or the lack thereof) called Catmop. Enjoy.
Posted by svend at October 27, 2006 8:24 PM