Zorac's LiveJournal

Despite copious drinks of water, frayer and I were still somewhat the worse for wear¹ when we emerged from the hotel on Saturday. We spent the morning exploring Cambridge, sussing out the lie of the land. Eventually, we ended up investigating some museums to kill time - those of earth sciences (yay, dinosaurs!) and of archaeology and anthropology. After that, we decamped to a coffee shop and began amassing t00bs, before moving on and getting some lunch in preparation for the main event.

That, of course, was the wedding of wednesdayschild and uqx, held in the chapel of Trinity College. It was a lovely service - the bride looked radiant, and I even knew most of the hymns. The weather was perhaps not as nice as might have been hoped for, but at least the rain held off (just) for the photographs.

After the service, some of us who weren't going to the formal dinner decamped to another coffee shop until chucking-out time before heading over to the reception (via the hotel for a quick change in my case). After sipping drinks in the bar whilst the speechifying went on, I raided the buffet and then proceeded to strut my funky stuff on the dance floor whenever the DJ² played something which I deemed worthy. Somewhere along the line, I completely failed to investigate the chocolate fountain. Woe!

1) For some definition of "somewhat"...
2) I blame his slight resemblence to Errol Brown for the double bill of You Sexy Thing.

Last night we drank many cocktails. We then had fish and chips back here and dealt with some bad cases of Shrek virginity. Today, some of us arrived at the pub later than others - but lunch was better than at the Eagle and Child. After that, there was punting and Pimms. Nobody won the leiabelle Memorial Sweepstake - owlman fled after lunch, muttering something about work. In the end, I was the one who made a rather half-arsed attempt at falling in the river. Doh. Anyway, time for me to head back into town to meet up with the rest of the t00bs for PoA,

Greetings, t00bs! Summer is fast approaching (not that you'd know from the weather), and this year's Punt00bage in Oxford is only five weeks away. The exact dates for those without a calendar handy are Friday 11th June through Sunday 13th June. Hopefully most people will be able to stay over Saturday night, and Friday night is open house too - Sunday is more 'if you need to stay'. I know this is in the middle of exams for some of you, but unfortunately it was the only weekend possible - although there are plans afoot for a mini!punt00bage some time in August.

As usual, this t00bage is open to anyone, but bear in mind that lately they've been more friends-based than fandom based, so if you don't know any of the usual suspects and are coming in expectation of deep discussions of HP, you may be out of luck. The August t00bage will be an invite-only thing.

Tentative plan of action (subject to change pending outcome of poll): Friday night happy hour at Hollywood Cocktails followed by general t00bing chez moi. Meet for lunch at a pub in town, then go punting. Evening plans are a little more vague, but from past experience probably involve copious amounts of alcohol (and possibly an EUD if we can get Cyg drunk enough). Sunday we can probably just make up as we go along. If people are interested, we can go to see PoA at some point, and I have PS and CoS on DVD, so there's the option of MST3King them earlier in the weekend. If you have any other ideas for what we could do, where we could eat, etc, please leave a comment!

Sweepstake rules: Whoever posts a name first gets it. No voting for yourself. No deliberate pushing people in. Judge's decision is final. Prize probably won't be worth winning anyway. FALLING IN THE RIVER MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH.

Greetings, t00bs! This is a pre-announcement for this year's Punt00bage - I'll do a proper one on t00bage some time after folk are back on LJ after the Easter break. Due to having to fit it in after exams finish but before the end of term, this has ended up as the weekend after the release of PoA - Friday 11th - Sunday 13th June - which co-incidentally is exactly one year after the original punt!t00bage.

The current vague plan is much the same as last year - Friday night at the T00blerone, meeting somewhere for lunch on Saturday (but not the Eagle and Child this time, on account of their food being teh crap) followed by punting and Pimms, then more random t00bing for the rest of the weekend. There's at least an outside chance that some people may want to watch Prisoner of Azkaban. Update: Oh, and I'm sure that G&D's and Hollywood Cocktails will also feature. Random unofficial poll follows:

DISCLAIMER: Falling in the Cherwell may be dangerous to your health. Do not attempt to insert punt pole into ear. Results of this poll may be ignored. Offer not valid to employees of T00bage Enterprises, Inc, or its affiliates. This entry features a Gratuitous Icon Post. Spending an exteded amount of time in the company of numerous t00bs may lead to extreme silliness.

So, I went into London to see Peter Pan at the Savoy Theatre with other t00bs.

We all turned up and waited outside for them to start letting people into the theatre. After a few minutes of waiting, with no signs posted or any word from staff other than to someone who actually went to the box office window to pick up a ticket, we discovered that <grolsch>this play is not ready yet</grolsch>. ARGH!

So, instead of watching a pantomime, we spent the evening in the pub drowning our sorrows and indulging in t00by discussions. In partuclar, the whole (not) explaining the true meaning of squick to those who didn't already know. Via the method of interprative dance, of course.

Whilst still an enjoyable evening, it was six hours of travelling to not get what I expected. Plus my DSL has been migrated and is not working at present, so I am posting this over a dialup connection.

Here endeth the woe - I'm off to bed.

The weekend so far: Friday and Saturday evenings were taken up by mini!t00b (which I at one time dubbed the anti!t00b on the grounds of having to refer to malachan by his real name instead of calling him Cygnus) with kay_taylor and Cyg's non-fandom, non-LJ friend Peter. On Friday night we started at Hollywood Cocktails - very understated, very pleasant, and very nice drinks - followed by Thai food at Chiang Mai Kitchen, then back to Hollywood for more cocktails (the Cinnamon Daiquiri is highly recommended). Topics of conversation included a brief history of the fandom, including the complete Fall and Fall of Gryffindor Tower and all the associated wank, and a completely unrelated discussion of Crime and Punishment. Much Kudos to Peter for being unfazed by the fandom wankery. Saturday, we met up again, with the addition of olympia_m, to watch Kill Bill (and not for the first time, for some of us), before having dinner at Meltz. There was (naturally) more discussion of fandom wackiness, plus plenty of discussion of movies (including theories for the upcoming Revolutions).

Some time this morning, the clocks went back. The Evil Time clock lived up to its name by being the only one I had to change manually (alarm clock is radio controlled, video picks it up from teletext, computers adjust themselves automatically). Unfortunately, the theoretical extra hour in bed didn't seem to have any actual benefit as I've still managed to feel strangely tired all day. This seems to have contributed to my coder's block - I'm trying to finish off so perl work I've been doing for RS but have been making painfully slow progress. Meh. Time to go and cook steak, methinks.

T00bage Revolutions: Oxford, 7th-9th November
See Cyg's post for more details.

I can provide accommodation for 5 people on both nights - 2 beds in the spare room and sofa, cushions, etc for 3 in the lounge, and there's plenty of bedding to go around. Let me know if you want to book a space. We can probably fit in a few more if needed, but things would get a bit cramped (and the bedding would run out). I won't be offering the other half of my bed - not least because hermorrine might object...

Went to a t00bage this weekend chez wednesdayschild in aid of her birthday and that kazzik (who was there, despite what some retard might claim). Having smugly found myself maps, I made the fatal error of walking from the station to the mansion in the unexpected heat (Hello? Where did that come from? And, more importantly, where did it go?), so it was straight to the shower for me. Having made myself a bit more presentable, I met up with eleveninches, petulans and starcrossedgirl and a pair of cute fluffy white dogs. Eventually, we were joined by pinguthegreek, marysiak and titanic_days and took advantage of the weather to sit out by the pool.

Supper was an amazing spread laid on by wednesdayschild's mum with numerous salads, cold meats, etc, etc. Yum! As per tradition, the t00bery continued well into the night, although with a fairly restrained amount of alcohol consumption (managed not to kill anyone with the champagne corks - go me!), with some folk heading home for the night and the rest of us bedding down upstairs. Needless to say, none of us were up particularly early on Sunday morning. There was another fantastic repast for lunch, then some of us had to head homewards. A fun weekend, and a special mention to wednesdayschild's parents for fantastic hospitality above and beyond the call of duty.

Oh, and we all got the news about GT. Really, we should be sad to see the passing of any archive - and yet, somehow, I just can't seem to care.

On Saturday, we didn't get up until quite late, so I only ended up seeing one talk in the morning, although I did do some browsing of Kompulsive Alley. Lunch followed much the same pattern as Friday - low scores for the food (a cottage pie and Bertie Bott's) and high scores for the speaker. Ari Rapkin gave a very interesting multimedia talk about how ILM work some of their magic - the cloth simulation being her particular area of expertise. Plenty of nifty clips, including Dobby out-takes and naked!Yoda.

In the afternoon I only went to one talk - a very enthusiastic Steve Vander Ark and angiej on the Past, Present and Future of the Wizarding World - see The Harry Potter Lexicon. I also actually did some shopping - picking up a copy of the Gnome TossFling game for $5, a couple of books (one HP related, one not) and a magic wand - soon to appear in an icon for voldie_zorac. There was also the entertaining Fandom Squares for those of us skipping the Founders' Feast.

In the evening, hermorrine and I took advantage of our money-off coupons for the buffet at Gulliver's - which was nice, particularly in getting to have multiple desserts! I got bullied into putting footwear on by the safety-paranoid staff (it's a fair cop) and had my photo taken with Goofy. Later on, we hosted a game of Trivial Pursuits, where I showed off my lack of knowledge of American Sports and History and expetesso showed off her strength at snapping corkscrews (the one we were sent up was obviously a touch flimsy - on the second attempt, the hotel sent up a Cast Member armed with a more heavy duty one).

Friday was the first day of formal programming, so it was up bright and early to grab donuts for breakfast with the first talk. I caught a full morning of talks, all of them interesting, with the highlight being Dr. Roger Highfield's on The Science of Harry Potter (such that I was inspired to pick up a copy of his book). I also enjoyed talks on Fandom History (having missed most of it) and Fanwords (despite t00b only getting one tangential mention).

The lunch was rather disappointing (soup, plain salad and a cookie), but Judith Krug's Keynote was both interesting and informative (as well as being entertaining). I did know that the HP books had been the target of banning campaigns, but I wasn't previously aware that they were so overwhelmingly the most popular choice. I was pleased to hear, however, that most banning attempts ended in failure. It also reminded me of a TV advert/infomercial I saw earlier in the trip in which a guy asks about a book in a library only to find that it has been banned. The librarian demands his name, and when he refuses and tries to leave, he is approached by to serious-looking men. The tagline was along the lines of how it's great that America is Free (and not like that). Oh, the irony.

The afternoon programming was mostly taken up by the Slash Panel and the one on "Can Draco Malfoy Be Redeemed?" These had been moved to the Great Hall on the grounds of expected attendance - which must have numbered several hundred. Both panels were very interesting, with plenty of good points raised. Some of the audience participation was a touch irksome with people just spouting a long speech on Their Opinion - I kept wanting to say "And your question was..?", but all-in-all it was good.

Next up was the Quidditch. I was playing for the San Juan Seagulls (a.k.a. John's All Stars), along with Captain queerasjohn, aegeus, sternel, thethrillisgone, ursamajr and vlamidala. The game was fast and frantic, but great fun. We eventually lost 60-160, owing to the entire randomness of catching the Snitch (and I've heard rumours that the other team's Seeker had inside information), but claimed a moral victory ;-)

In the evening, it was the FictionAlley birthday bash over at the Copa Banana in the not-a-Dolphin, so for variety's sake, we decided to have dinner at when of the restaurants over there. Big mistake. To start with, no one came to seat us so eventually we picked our own table - the only one that had actually been cleared. No menus were forthcoming so eventually I got up and snagged some from behind the cash register. After we'd been sitting there for the best part of a quarter hour, one of the waitresses deigned to come and take our order - but it was a good ten minutes before even our drinks came, and considerably longer before we got food.

To add to the evening's entertainment, the not-a-Dolphin Fountain decided to live up to its name - without warning, a waterspout appeared out of the floor (we heard someone at a nearby table suggest that the basilisk was attacking). Thankfully, it wasn't close to where we were seated, but other diners were less fortunate - water continued to bubble up for some time until maintenance turned up to fix it. There was no great surprise when the check also took a long time to arrive after we requested it.

The party itself was great fun - nmalfoy spinning the disks, queerasjohn single-mindedly trying to glitter the entire fandom and "mischief maker" drinks in FictionAlley cups. I indulged in much t00by dancing (including my popular Mact00bage number, the Time Warp), proving along the way that despite being male and straight (and thus in a tiny minority), I can still sing along to the entirety of It’s Raining Men and will shamelessly request Y.M.C.A. Thankyouverymuch...