Outcast and Puffy hat Degrees

The title may sound strange, but all will become clear. As a note, this is not all about Larp.
We had an epic weekend at Outcast, the best part being just seeing all my friends from the system again, both OoC and IC. I really know some amazing people.

The weekend started off well, with most of the Fae being possessed by a sorcerer (because it was totally a good idea to fall asleep next to the creepy portal gate right?), and then myself and Ylva (IC name) went and got 2 more people without anyone noticing. We did get caught pretty much as soon as we timed in Saturday morning however. Thankfully people were nice and fixed us rather than trying to kill us. Saturday saw us trying to solve the plot (Rescue our friend from the prison, stop the sorcerer who was corrupting the rock naturae, and find the magic acorn in order to fix Gaia's grove in Varkarna). Unfortunately it had rained the night before, so all of the writings we found on the field had smudged horribly, so translating was not what you would call easy.

Fae pile! (deliberately blurry)

That day, Fian decided to go to war, which has not happened in forever. It meant that Memory (my characters mentor) had to write and prepare the song of war to trigger the story-eater. That night, we fought the tainted rock naturae and fixed the small one, and at midnight performed the song. It was pretty darn spectacular - the guitar and drums together with the chanting and singing sounded amazing. Sunday finally dawned, leading us to find the acorn, fix pebbles, and for myself and Memory to take flight and follow the story eater to war. 

So Sunday evening brought about the unfortunate return of normality. So far this week I've been doing all of the boring induction rubbish that comes with starting a new degree. Whilst its necessary, I really want to just get on with it already. We've had to sit through safety talks and welcome talks and all that jazz. I have to say that the best part of the three days was when they pointed out a number of different things that PhD could stand for, including Puffy hat Degree :D So now that is what I refer to it as.

The puffiest of hats

The most frustrating part of this last week has been that we have been asked to sign up to a bunch of courses that will be really useful/required for our Puffy hat Degrees. What was annoying was that the system just didn't work, meaning a bunch of us have wasted 2 days trying to sign up to the ones that have only 8 places (for 40 of us...), and then when it did all go live people missed out >:( Thankfully I managed to book onto all but one of the ones I wanted, and I'm hoping that the waiting list will mean that the course either runs again or extends slightly. We will see.

Tomorrow we get to go on a trip down south to Rothemsted to see all the cool stuff they do there. Then the weekend shall be filled with LARPing with the university and playing L5R with my friends.

I guess I shall report back when I have something to report.