Needles & Nilbogs

 So I was up late last night (we went to see the musical Hamilton [!!!], which is playing around here) and don’t have anything to talk about really, and I’m just going to dump a whole list of ideas I had a while ago for role playing games (both actual game-games and story ideas or campaigns, also characters), because I’m running on not enough sleep and I just don’t have the will to write anything more. If you want to use any of these game ideas, feel free to do whatever with them; I’d appreciate credit for them but honestly nobody really reads this anyways so I doubt anyone would use them and it really doesn’t matter. 

Today I have no plan for a blog entry, no sleep, and no time. So I’m just going to share an idea and a world I’ve developed — and (surprisingly for me) it’s not the Auri or their culture. It’s a setting I’ve probably mentioned before; it was intended for d&d, but it mostly ended up being used for Risus games and the infamous Elvish Flirting Law Incident. Because I started developing it in middle school and the gaming club met at lunch, that’s why. And then the past of that world showed up in my high school gaming group, set in the world during its version of a Cold War or world war.  The setting is called Neverron, because when I wrote it, I intended it to be Never Eberron, a world where the premise of Eberron was taken in other directions. However, I wrote it without any real knowledge of Eberron other than the basic “more magitech and politics, less high fantasy” concept, so it’s pretty different.  So. Neverron is a world of magitech and politics, with a lot of both prob...

I was going to do one more week of the course catalogue for the Auraic Academy , but I’m not really inspired to do something like that right now, so instead I present: Making fingerless (and palm-less) gloves in a tiny amount of time, for fun, if not profit!  This is a recipe more than a pattern, but I’ll share the pattern I used to fit my hands, which I’m calling the Blue Gloves, and you can modify as you see fit.  The reason for this is that I recently had to wear blue for whatever reason and I forgot about it until I’d almost left the house. So I grabbed two balls of blue yarn (one sport weight dark blue alpaca/silk, one light blue acrylic worsted weight) and a size J hook, and I made gloves in the car.  Okay, they weren’t great gloves. But they saved me from humiliation. And I embellished them later (see the flower).  Here’s the pattern. Gauge doesn’t matter — to fit your hand, add or remove a repeat. If you’re adjusting the pattern, then make sure that you add o...

Last week I talked about the various classes and scheduling at the Auraic Academy, and I’m continuing that today, with some excerpts from the course catalogue at the academy.  I’m basing this on course catalogues that I’ve seen, so it doesn’t list the teachers but it lists the title and level of the class, a brief description, whether it’s a semester long or a year long (1 credit for semester long, 2 for year long), and any prerequisites. A note: honors classes boost GPA (so an A is 5 points, a B is 4, and a C is 3, rather than 4, 3, and 2 points respectively). I’m not doing this for every class, mostly just non-core classes (but not even all of those), divided by subject area. I have omitted several classes (especially at higher levels) where I’ve given some description of lower level classes and see no point in repeating things.

 I’m picking up where I left off last week, on the Auraic Academy . Today, I thought I’d cover classes, which are a very important part of, you know, being a school.  The academy has a handful of ways to determine what classes students take. Every student has certain classes they must take every year or almost every year; those are core classes. There are also non-core classes, which are further divided into graduation requirements (you have to take the class for a given number of semesters, usually but not always in a given year/years) and electives (you don’t have to take any specific ones but you do have to cover a certain number of credits). 

 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...

 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....