kiya

Okay so yesterday involved going to the falconry class and encountering pointy murderbirbs and then puttering around Northampton briefly before returning home and briefly hiding before being called upon to help manage the Well of Infinite Drama (otherwise known as 'the monkeys').

Today was another up-early day to run to church, where the Coming of Age kids were giving their speeches, and opened up with the hymn that was the ... basically the theme song to the religious education module that I happened to assistant-teacher those specific kids, so I have a sort of warm fuzzy about that. "Something I did somehow made an impact on those kids! Which ... well, I wasn't sure it did at the time because the 12-13 year set is, um. Well, it's hard to tell if one's making an impact...."

After the service was the church picnic which was supposed to have happened last week but was called off for different weather. KJ and I performed "Stand By Me" at the 'parishoners sign up to do a five-minute gig', I have a video (taken by FM) that I haven't done anything with yet, the tent we were under attempted to depart partway through due to wind which led to me grabbing it, slamming it back onto the ground, and proclaiming "stand by me!" before several helpful gentlemen arrived to seize the relevant poles and hold the thing in place. There was much chatting. A polite I-read-a-book Wiccan enquired about the symbolism of my hat, which ... well, she's got decent instincts there. (Also I came up with an excellent summary of the core problem of IRAB paganism chatting with her.) The kids ran around making giant soap bubbles and playing in a sprinkler on the town common and eventually we went home (and made the relevant children change into dry clothes).

After about 40 minutes downtime we packed up and all went out again to a cookout at some friends' new house, slightly complexified by a plague exposure at work but we are dealing and there was masking. ER apparently picked up heat exhaustion while running around earlier and spent much of the evening asleep on an ice pack. Seeing friends was good.

I am very tired. Also I sunburned the tip of my nose yesterday and it's remarkably distracting.

I should probably do something about that.

Today in splorts: so I have been slowly increasing the number of blaseball-related accounts I follow to make a higher density of my twitter feed composed of eldritch fanart generation content, and at some point I got a message from one of the ones I followed saaying "my manager wanted me to say em hotep to you in this the smallest of worlds", which gave me a certain amount of "...?" so I mentioned it to

ardaniel, an eldritch being of certain superpowers, who tracked down a tweet from that account's player that said, more or less, "Bwahaha the indie Kemetic who was a huge influence on me when I started out is now following my blaseball RP account."

I shall have to make some of my art be of that character just because, which should be fun because fanonically she is a four-armed silvery serpentine vampire dragon with an obsession with tea and theft. (Okay, to be fair the vampirism and larceny are canon, not fanon.)

I also managed some support of another behind-the-scenes player in the fanbase, because blaseball cares, and he successfully tagged in the TransCrowdFund so I hope that helps him out more than I could on my own.

Today in religious education: it was our first session of ChUUrchcraft. We had a zoom meeting and then combined it with logging into the server for 100% glorious chaos. First of all, the older kids who are helping run this program had gotten in and planted a bunch of flowers that apparently eat CPU and lining every path they made over a 150x230 block zone meant that every so often someone would actually interact with a plant and the server would fall over. Once the problem was debugged, L (the kid who had caused the problem) logged in solo to fix it, to general razzing.

Then we split up into groups. Now, I am the one instructor with actual Minecraft experience of note. Of the other adults, one is the server guy who has some experience, but on his son's account; one is the other adult in that family; one is an engineer who bought an account to help out but had to have WASD navigation explained to him, let alone all of the everything that is Minecraft. By the end of the session, when he examined his measley row of blocks and compared it to the mosque team, he first asked if copy-paste was possible, and then ordered the team lead K to get her own account because he was not going to flail around at this nonsense alone, another adult needed to be in here to be laughed at by the 10-to-13-year-olds, she wasn't going to get out of being embarrassed so easily.

The kids were having a great time. Some of the kids who were having a great time were having a productive time - the mosque team got a really nice looking building shell started. KJ and I were working on a Hindu temple and I found some reference material for us to run with. Most of the rest of the kids wound up congregating around the Christianity district. They built probably eight or so different Pride flags outside the fence and then, rather than build outlines, proceeded to dig through to the bottom of the world and out the other side, and occasionally plummeted to their deaths while cackling gloriously about their portal to hell. (And teasing Q, one of the kids, about how do you manage to die in creative.)

A good time was had by all.