Needles & Nilbogs

 So one thing I’m working on, in my nonexistent spare time, is the Auraic education system. Mostly because I recently spent our road trip listening to the first Harry Potter audiobook and realized how messed up Hogwarts is. What happened to math classes and science and writing classes and discussing literature and actual nonmagical history? What happened to all the things you need to know to function as a being in society? Does anyone at Hogwarts ever take a civics class? So I started thinking about the Auraic Academy for Aspiring Mages. In universe, most of the Auri call it simply the academy. Sometimes they even drop the first syllable; it’s in the neighborhood of Academy Commons, and most folks call that area ‘Cad’my Comm’ns to save a few syllables.  It’s the center of middle and high school education for the city of Valus Dae, and thus for about 60 to 75 percent of all Auri. Valus Dae is not a particularly small city, but as the Auri mature at about the same rate as humans but live

 I don’t really have much to write about today. It’s been pretty busy and I haven’t done anything worth talking about. So instead here’s pretty pictures of a shawl I finished a while ago: the Hand Sown shawl from the most recent knitty magazine.  I used Loops and Threads Woollike, in the Golden Yellow colorway, and a size H hook to make it. I finished it actually way back in early July but haven’t shared it, as I’ve had other things to talk about instead.  So here’s some pictures and the project page on ravelry: BardicWizard’s Hand Sown . Modifications: I shorted a few repeats and skipped the last few edging rows because I liked it better that way, and so it worked with the 3/4 of a ball of yarn that I had.  That’s my bed in the background, all covered with the usual mess of stuffed animals and books (although I cleared it off before I took one of the pictures, and I took another without the books).  All of the pictures are sideways, because blogger has issues. 

 I’m kinda tired. We got back from our road trip on Saturday, then we unpacked, then it was my birthday just a couple days ago, and I’m exhausted from everything.  So I’m just going to dump a bunch of random photos here from our trip, roughly in chronological order, and see if there’s anything I want to say about them. Featured within: the Regal Cardigan I started and finished (link to the Ravelry project page) during the trip (and the Olympic Games, so it qualified for the Ravellenic games too!); random scenery things; and a handful of random drawings I did, including a bunch of characters from the Murderbot Diaries books.  Blogger does weird things on pictures from a computer for some reason, so these may be rotated in random directions. No idea how to fix that, though, so my apologies if it’s hard to read. Also, this is image heavy, obviously. 

I've been on a road trip for the last two weeks, and I'm crammed in the back seat along with other family members.  One of those family members is my brother, aged seven and a half, who really likes imaginative play. I've tried to teach him how to play various rpgs before (sometimes with success), but I think the things he's done that taught me the most about rpgs didn't come from rpgs. It came from watching him play with various toys.  For the last few months, he's been really into the Pixar Cars movies, and he has a bunch of Cars toys. He started out playing the events of the movies again and again, then eventually started making up his own stories and adventures for the cars.  One of the things I saw when I was watching him play was that he told the same story over and over. Sometimes he changed the stories from the movies, like having Doc (a mentor character to one of the main characters, who died between movies 2 and 3) still be alive in the third movie'