Thursday, March 31, 2011

Adventures in Fairyland

My long term roleplaying group has been playing a campaign that was billed as "brightly coloured fantasy reminiscent of Narnia and Castle Waiting". We started off as a bunch of refugees sent to deepest darkest Devon going through a portal to a fantasy world called Carinthia, had a bunch of adventures, skipped forward in time 25 years to have a look at What Happened After, and have now picked up a set of alternate characters who were slaves in a factory on the fairies' side of the river (Bessie the Changeling, Aster the Cat, Bludo the Troll, and Greengage the Griffin (Greengage was named after his father's favourite kind of jam. He has five siblings, and they're all named after their father's favourite kind of jam.))

Last week, we were a gang of desperadoes staging a jailbreak, creating vast amounts of mayhem, and discovering that Bludo has an oral fixation (quite good for intimidating hobgoblins, we found. Particularly when he spits them out.) This week, we ended up deep in enemy territory with the goal of assassinating the enemy queen. First steps: go to school, and set Bludo up with a date.

Saturday, March 05, 2011

Omigosh!

Yesterday I got a new pair of glasses. Before New Glasses Day, I was figuring that it would be nice to have a new set of frames with yellow racing stripes. After New Glasses Day, I'm really really really noticing the change in prescription.

See, I have one eye that's somewhat longsighted, and another that's very longsighted, and my previous pair only corrected the good eye slightly to make reading easier - the optomotrist I saw back then, and I guess the one I saw as a child figured that correcting the bad eye would give me double vision. This new one, however, declared that my brain was already turning off that visual feed enough anyway, and amped up the lense as much as she could. This means that I can now actually read a normal print book with just that eye if I have to (still not easily, but at least possible), and another little soupcon that the optomotrist didn't warn me about:

Walking home yesterday was very much being in an Imax theatre, or looking at a Gustave Caillebotte painting. I'm suddenly looking at things and realising that they're farther or nearer without having to calculate from relative sizes. It's great. I spent most of my walk home yesterday poking Repton to prove that I could do it without having to guess and adjust like I normally do. I'm still not going to rush off and play frisbee or go for long drives yet (moving my head quickly makes for a feeling of vertigo right now), but still -

Omigosh.