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Not so good a weekend, one that involved searching for a hat, LARP stuff, and a car accident involving me.

We spent a large chunk of the weekend frantically writing for the LARP; My main contribution was working on the system, one that's borrowed from the Lloegyr LARP.  After some additional inquiries to Ryan about his system, it's starting to look good.  I just hope explanations will go easily.

Sunday involved going shopping for a hat for the LARP that is oncoming like a freight train.  As a passenger, I appreciated the ride, however as it turned out, no stores in Fremont had skadelic hats.  They do however have a number of pricey antique stores, crammed with tables towering with fragile expensive bric-a-brac, just waiting for an errant elbow or knee to brush against them and cause the whole delicately balanced mass to topple.  I am absolutely full of random knees and elbows, by the way. It was nerve-wracking. 

The sheer volume of bric-a-brack terrified me as well.  I mean, we talk about consumerism, but then here it is, stores full of stuff that nobody in their right minds would buy.  How do the antique stores stay in business?  We decided they sell it to each other, in some sort of modern tulpa ring.  I'm also pretty sure that someday far in the geologic future our era will only be known by the huge amount of ceramic and glass gewgaws we produce.  It will be known as the bric-a-brac layer, and will be tens of meters deep of glass deer, ceramic santas and gnomes, letter openers, and velvet paintings.  It will be considered to be the work of some kind of social insect.

I'm uninjured as regards to the car accident anyway, there's that to be said.  It was a fender-bender in a residential parking lot, and I have no idea whether the insurance company will find me at fault or not.  I was so shaken I had to have help with basic things like pens, and exchanging infirmation.  It didnt' help that the other guy was new to this sort of thing, and was wondering if the police should be called before moving the cars out of the way of traffic.  The whole thing left me with frayed nerve endings- thankfully palecur came around and helped out.

And incidentally, on the way home, I stopped at a vintage clothing shop on San Carlos st., and immediately found a cheap hat that's perfect.  *sigh* So it goes.

Green Towers!

Now, when I talk about major artifacts of bioengineering in Under the Green Moon, one of the concepts I like to play with is the idea of entire buildings, complexes and arcologies made out of bioengineered creatures (one can't really just call them plants.

This green project for Gwanggyo Power Center in South Korea is nowhere near that level yet, but as an example of thoroughly integrating plants and buildings to the points where the buildings look organic, this is clearly inspirational for what I want to do.





It's pretty inspirational for the current day, as these towers are intended to blend in with the landscape around the current lake, making a "landscape on a landscape" that complements, rather than replaces the natural setting. And more then just being decorative, the planted terraces will have a strong benefit in reducing energy consumption and water consumption, while increasing ventilation.

A very nice trick, if they manage it. As I said, inspirational.