Srafcons

[dolorosa_12]

I've just emerged (sadly) from the other side of a week-long srafcon. (For those of you who do not know what a srafcon is, I shall explain. Sraffies are people who hang out here. When two or more sraffies meet up, it is a srafcon.)

Anyway, the srafcon kicked off when Raphael, who is travelling around the UK for two weeks, met thelxiepia and me in Cardiff.



Raphael and thelxiepia, with my reflection as I took the photo.

thelxiepia and me.

Raphael and thelxiepia again. I would quite like to steal Raphael's Jayne hat. And thelxiepia's knee-socks.

The wind was threatening to blow us away at that point, so we scuttled inside to an excellent all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant.

After that we went to the Doctor Who exhibition, where the others behaved like 15-year-old fangirls and I wished that I had watched enough Doctor Who to be able to behave like a 15-year-old fangirl.


No srafcon would be complete without a photo taken from an emo-ish angle.

I stayed overnight in Cardiff, and then met up with Raphael in London, where we went to the Globe, ate pub food, and were very disappointed that angelofboox was too sick to join us.

Then Raphael and I went back to Cambridge, where he stayed for the week. The pair of us being who we are, the standard touristy-type things were interspersed with lots of hanging around in IRC (where we confused everyone by using the same nick, with one of us typing on the laptop keyboard and the other on an attached keyboard), reading of Terry Pratchett (he, awesomely, brought a three-in-one book of the Death trilogy - Mort, Reaper Man and Soul Music - while I lent him Pratchett and Gaiman's joint effort Good Omens, which losseniaiel had lent me) and talking.

On Wednesday we got up insanely early to catch the bus to Oxford, where we were going to meet soapyhermit and watch_them_grow. Now, if you know anything about His Dark Materials, you'll know that Oxford is pretty much the Republic of Heaven of srafcon locations. Raphael and I had never been there.

We met the others at the Botanic Garden.


We sat on The Bench (now helpfully labelled in the Garden's map).


Graffiti on the bench.

After that we had lunch, and then went to the Covered Market, where we found (serendipitously) little red marzipan fruit.


We went to Exeter College (which is the inspiration for Jordan College in the series) and sat on a bench there and had our marzipan.

Pretty soon after that, Raphael and I had to take the bus home, but not before soapyhermit had corrected the grammar of a sign in the window of a shop. (Amusingly, when we went in to complain, the shop assistant told his colleague we were complaining about a 'punctuality error').

Raphael stayed in Cambridge with me for one more day, and headed off yesterday for more UK adventures. All in all, I've had an excellent week. Sraffies are always awesome, and a group of sraffies is therefore doubly (or triply, or quadruply) awesome.

beatonna's webcomic (which I discovered through Raphael) is excellent. I especially love her most recent comic, an Angevin and Poitevin family portrait.

elle_vee always posts links to marvellously deranged things. In her most recent posts, she's linked to a tie with a usb in it, a grass wheel and advice from the International Society of Supervillains.

Hal Duncan has written intelligently about the new TV series Kings. I've not seen Kings, but Duncan's post raises some interesting questions about common storytelling tropes, adaptation, and television, and is well worth a read.

As you probably know by now, the Pirate Bay guys were found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail. This has meant, of course, that Pirate Bay membership has surged and people are being asked to fly the pirate flag at half-mast in protest. One of these days, content producers are going to realise the majority of their consumers have a totally different attitude to copyright than they do, and that all they achieve in taking Pirate Bay to court is turning the Pirate Bay guys into martyrs for a cause.

John Scalzi (and his commenters) responded eloquently to the whole AmazonFail business.

Also, Fox News has discovered this new site called 4chan. Be very afraid.

Finally, I saw this video from College Humor on sf_drama. As it's called 'We Didn't Start the Flame War', you can imagine it contains suitably flamey language. Consider yourselves warned.

"" (Watch on YouTube)

Watch We Didnt Start the Flame War on CollegeHumor

Edited to add: The poll about the Pirate Bay verdict on The Guardian's website got Boinged. And then apparently the gang at /b/ got hold of it. Nice.