Genius, Buck

Studio Foglio has a Bundle of Holding containing all the collected Girl Genius comics and novels, and the first two Buck Godot volumes. Sadly, the Gallimaufry series is not included, although it’s possible to find mostly-complete archives of the web version.

A Day Without Zoom…

The virtualized conference for the American Kumihimo Society is over, which restores my Saturdays to a Zoom-free experience. It was a great experience, even with the pain of watching a bunch of crafters cope with the quirks of trying to give presentations on a platform that barely works for tech folks. I was not the only male participating (“Hi, Randy!”), which is refreshing for a crafting event.

In many ways, the experience was superior to typical in-person conferences, since there was only one track spread out over three Saturdays and it was all (theoretically) recorded, so you didn’t have to scramble to get into a class with a popular instructor. Also that whole flying-with-bulky-braiding-equipment experience (one of many reasons I drove to last year’s retreat at Mount Hood).

One of the new things for this conference was a severely cost-reduced baby takadai. No, not mine, although some of the limitations of this one have me itching to steal some elements from my design to improve theirs. There are a lot of criticisms I could make, but for now, I’ll simply say that you can get it to work pretty well with practice, sandpaper, and painter’s tape. And a few spare parts you might find around the house:

The yarn-wrapped thread spools are there to create a proper “sword pad”, the blue tape is to hold it stable and cover the edges I haven’t smoothed with sandpaper yet. Not quite visible are the two short dowels keeping the koma (the peg-encrusted half-rounds) from moving too far forward in their tracks.

Cutting remarks

Speaking of Zoom, in a recent informal group meeting, someone threatened to not only implement something in Perl, but to do it the Perl 4 way. I cheered this idea, including remarks about my shameless past with Perl 2.

Leading someone to say, “don’t make me come down there and stab you”, which I countered with something along the lines of not bringing a knife to a swordfight.

Leading that person’s manager to message me asking what style I study, and which local sword instructors I’m acquainted with (she studies with one of the early Shinkendo instructors who forked off in the Nineties).

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