(no subject)

I had a very interesting weekend. On Friday night, after class, I headed over to tlttlotd and lyssabard's apartment. kyoudai02 and technobushi, and hummingwolf also came, and we ended up hanging out for the night, talking, and just having some fun together. tlttlotd discovered MegaHal and began feeding it various blasphemous texts (such as his .plan file) and getting ideas to modify its source code. Early the next morning we discovered evidence that this may have been a dangerous thing to introduce a Time Lord to, as evidently the MegaHal he impliments in the future may travel back to the past and write the warning label for their air mattress, including such gems as advising its owners not to keep the air mattress where children cannot play with it.

On Saturday, after that interesting discovery (and after a great breakfast courtesy of lyssabard, we all went to the Maryland RennFest with stardansr and hasufin. It's the first time I've been there in six years, and I definitely was not disappointed. We got to see elephants (yes, elephants, I was surprised too) and got some really nice food and hung out and explored all the little shops and everthing... didn't see the Pyrates Royale (the band which originally introduced me to filk) this year, but overall things were quite good. technobushi and I both bought shinai to eventually practice sparring with, and I bought thirty assorted honey sticks (killer bee, royal jelly, echinacea, clover, and blackberry), and a couple small gifts for queerintheburg.

Actually, had a rather unusual experience at the Fest, which seems to be getting weirder the more I find out about it. In addition to my other purchases, I decided to buy a bokken. I bought it from a store called Hollow Earth Swordworks. It was out front, on a rack with a couple of katanas. Very similar in style to them, although it did not have a tsuba and the grip was shaped somewhat differently. At any rate, it fit my tastes more than the katanas. I paid for it, and the gentleman handed me a registration card for it, and remarked to me that I had chosen an "elven fighter sword". Seriously, I am not making this up. As I remarked to the others who were there with me after I met back up with them, I kind of wanted to turn back to him and go "well... duh!" Of course if I had, the joke probably would have been on me: Later on, I was waiting for people to get a few last purchases so we could head out, and I was sitting with the sword, decided to get a feel for how energy flowed through it (one of the reasons I have been wanting a wooden practice sword is that for certain elements of my ritual work I have thought a quality wooden blade may be better for manipulating energy than the "sword" I currently have which is at best described as a metal bar filed into the shape of a sword.) I want to stress this part: I did not attempt to do any energywork on the sword itself. I was just feeling it out. Much to my surprise, it felt like someone had worked with the bokken's metaphysical aspects before me. And the feel of the energetics was rather interesting. Not mentioning my suspicions, I asked tlttlotd to see if he got any feel off of it, and the response I got back meshed very well with my interpretations of what I had felt. It feels very elven (which kinda surprised me, I thought the guy was just hamming it up a bit for the gamer-geek crowd at the Fest), maybe even Aloryan or something rather related though I'm reserving judgment on that point at present. And it gets even better... I've just visited the site of the sword maker. The kind of sword I picked up isn't even listed on it as being for sale. Not really sure what to make of that yet... maybe it's a new line that hasn't been added yet... but you'd think if you were going to invent a whole new fantasy sword line to appeal to gamers, you'd want to make it a fairly prominent part of your selection, wouldn't you? The fact that it wasn't on the site and wasn't labelled as an elven sword even in-shop really makes me wonder.

At any rate, it was a very interesting weekend and I'm very glad that I got the chance to go. I'll definitely have to do it again, hopefully sooner than six years apart this time.