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May. 5th, 2002 02:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vyvyanxWell, since I got back from Whitby I have been doing various things of limited usefulness :-) Tuesday night after we got back, we went to the Calling. G offered to do the door for a bit, and even I ended up doing it for a short while. Saw many people; danced a little. Chatted much to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
emperor and sphyg who were both getting quite smashed. Discussed other people's love lives, and observed them unfolding.
I have spent a certain amount of time faffing entertainingly with Linear A. I was inspired to this by a book kindly sent to me by G's father, called "The Man Who Deciphered Linear B", which is a biography of Michael Ventris, architect and, er, decipherer of Linear B. Linear B is a script used to write Mycenaean Greek; it was found written on a few thousand tablets dug up mostly in Crete at the start of the 20th century, and took 50 years to "crack", partly because the archaeological consensus of the time held that the language used could not possibly be Greek, and partly because it's a syllabic script very ill-suited to representing Greek, which makes even the deciphered text look not much like Greek! Also, there are no bilingual inscriptions, as helped in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, for instance.
Linear A is a similar script also found on several hundred tablets from Crete, from a slightly earlier period than Linear B, and seems to represent a different language. No one knows what the language is, so Linear A remains undeciphered. I don't really expect to be able to decipher it myself, but I have been having a lot of fun immersing myself in the known Linear A texts, picking out patterns of repeated words, and drawing up tables of frequencies for the various symbols. I want to get an idea of what kind of language it is, even if I can't detect the meaning. (I suspect that if I could translate the tablets, they would be extremely boring anyway - they appear to be records of stores of grain and cloth and such things, just like the Linear B tablets.) There are certain resemblances between the Linear A syllabary and the Cypriot syllabary (and of course Linear B), so I've also been amusing myself doing a comparison of the scripts.
I think I've always had a rather odd fascination with related entities that share a common ancestor, be they species, languages, scripts or manuscript copies of a particular text. I love tree-based classifications which reflect this sort of evolution, and have a rather silly dislike of factors which tangle my beautiful trees and make them network-like - such as hybridization, lexical borrowing, textual contamination and conflation of scripts. I do wonder where this particular feature of my psychology comes from; it seems a very obscure and specific obsession.
Also this week, I have been arranging supervisions, going to boring examiners' meetings, and hassling Jesus College about paying me for supervisions I gave last term. It transpired that they had accidentally paid a guy in the Faculty of Divinity instead of me, since he happens to share my surname. This is the second time this has happened - the same bloke got my payment for some examining I did a couple of years ago. Why people think that a bloke from Divinity is more likely to be supervising and examining MML students than an MML fellow, I can't imagine. Confound them. Anyway, I've got paid at last.
On Friday night, we roleplayed again, for the first time in months. R forgot to come, but G finished off creating his character, and he joined us for the session. It was a remarkably bloodless session; none of us were injured, and nobody else got killed either. And no zombies. Our party's gone to a sort of religious festival (which is strangely reminiscent of Eastercon or Bicon in certain ways!) and will be there for a few days. We've been detailed to find information about security breaches involving our group, and about zombies. We seem to have made a good start - we got hold of a guy called Mike who's working for the government, and who's also at the festival to investigate. He told us there's a government renegade who's been dabbling in the occult, in a zombieish sort of way, and our interests seem to coincide in eliminating this guy. We suspect the renegade may be the bloke who tortured Paul to death a little while ago in the disused crypt, where we were attacked by skeletons.
My character actually managed to shoot this guy in the head at the time, but my gun is shit and it did little damage. So anyway, I guess we'll be after this guy for a bit now. Also, we've heard from a couple of sources that another government hit squad is after us, and will make their hit tomorrow. So we're currently hiding out overnight in a room underneath the main festival area, feeling this may be safer than going back to our booked accommodation. So, an interesting session, and one where G got to take part. He seemed to have a good time, playing an ex-special forces guy of limited intelligence :-) but with useful contacts.
Last night was KB's party. Very good time, got very drunk (still hung over, actually). Also there were GC, GB, T and K, JS and E, R, and D in a remarkable blue PVC kimono. Also saw, to my great surprise, DF, who I met at Bicon a few years ago, when I was still with IWJ (who was also having a birthday party last night!). That was an entertaining Bicon; I had bruises for days :-) Anyway, DF and I caught up a bit (he seems to have acquired an implausible number of partners!) and I moaned at him about my parents' continuing crapness about the engagement. I also chatted quite a bit to GC about, well, other people's love lives, and about the frequency of personal names. Later in the evening, people watched Labyrinth (I'm sure everyone in the room had seen it numerous times before!) which was good, as ever. There was general lusting after Bowie, unsurprisingly.
Got back, and G was extremely smashed - he lay on the ground in front of Great Gate for a while, to my embarassment when a porter came and asked if everything was ok :-) Hopefully he'll recover by this evening, since we're supposed to be going and getting smashed on vodka with an old friend of G's in Cherry Hinton.
emperor and sphyg who were both getting quite smashed. Discussed other people's love lives, and observed them unfolding.I have spent a certain amount of time faffing entertainingly with Linear A. I was inspired to this by a book kindly sent to me by G's father, called "The Man Who Deciphered Linear B", which is a biography of Michael Ventris, architect and, er, decipherer of Linear B. Linear B is a script used to write Mycenaean Greek; it was found written on a few thousand tablets dug up mostly in Crete at the start of the 20th century, and took 50 years to "crack", partly because the archaeological consensus of the time held that the language used could not possibly be Greek, and partly because it's a syllabic script very ill-suited to representing Greek, which makes even the deciphered text look not much like Greek! Also, there are no bilingual inscriptions, as helped in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, for instance.
Linear A is a similar script also found on several hundred tablets from Crete, from a slightly earlier period than Linear B, and seems to represent a different language. No one knows what the language is, so Linear A remains undeciphered. I don't really expect to be able to decipher it myself, but I have been having a lot of fun immersing myself in the known Linear A texts, picking out patterns of repeated words, and drawing up tables of frequencies for the various symbols. I want to get an idea of what kind of language it is, even if I can't detect the meaning. (I suspect that if I could translate the tablets, they would be extremely boring anyway - they appear to be records of stores of grain and cloth and such things, just like the Linear B tablets.) There are certain resemblances between the Linear A syllabary and the Cypriot syllabary (and of course Linear B), so I've also been amusing myself doing a comparison of the scripts.
I think I've always had a rather odd fascination with related entities that share a common ancestor, be they species, languages, scripts or manuscript copies of a particular text. I love tree-based classifications which reflect this sort of evolution, and have a rather silly dislike of factors which tangle my beautiful trees and make them network-like - such as hybridization, lexical borrowing, textual contamination and conflation of scripts. I do wonder where this particular feature of my psychology comes from; it seems a very obscure and specific obsession.
Also this week, I have been arranging supervisions, going to boring examiners' meetings, and hassling Jesus College about paying me for supervisions I gave last term. It transpired that they had accidentally paid a guy in the Faculty of Divinity instead of me, since he happens to share my surname. This is the second time this has happened - the same bloke got my payment for some examining I did a couple of years ago. Why people think that a bloke from Divinity is more likely to be supervising and examining MML students than an MML fellow, I can't imagine. Confound them. Anyway, I've got paid at last.
On Friday night, we roleplayed again, for the first time in months. R forgot to come, but G finished off creating his character, and he joined us for the session. It was a remarkably bloodless session; none of us were injured, and nobody else got killed either. And no zombies. Our party's gone to a sort of religious festival (which is strangely reminiscent of Eastercon or Bicon in certain ways!) and will be there for a few days. We've been detailed to find information about security breaches involving our group, and about zombies. We seem to have made a good start - we got hold of a guy called Mike who's working for the government, and who's also at the festival to investigate. He told us there's a government renegade who's been dabbling in the occult, in a zombieish sort of way, and our interests seem to coincide in eliminating this guy. We suspect the renegade may be the bloke who tortured Paul to death a little while ago in the disused crypt, where we were attacked by skeletons.
My character actually managed to shoot this guy in the head at the time, but my gun is shit and it did little damage. So anyway, I guess we'll be after this guy for a bit now. Also, we've heard from a couple of sources that another government hit squad is after us, and will make their hit tomorrow. So we're currently hiding out overnight in a room underneath the main festival area, feeling this may be safer than going back to our booked accommodation. So, an interesting session, and one where G got to take part. He seemed to have a good time, playing an ex-special forces guy of limited intelligence :-) but with useful contacts.
Last night was KB's party. Very good time, got very drunk (still hung over, actually). Also there were GC, GB, T and K, JS and E, R, and D in a remarkable blue PVC kimono. Also saw, to my great surprise, DF, who I met at Bicon a few years ago, when I was still with IWJ (who was also having a birthday party last night!). That was an entertaining Bicon; I had bruises for days :-) Anyway, DF and I caught up a bit (he seems to have acquired an implausible number of partners!) and I moaned at him about my parents' continuing crapness about the engagement. I also chatted quite a bit to GC about, well, other people's love lives, and about the frequency of personal names. Later in the evening, people watched Labyrinth (I'm sure everyone in the room had seen it numerous times before!) which was good, as ever. There was general lusting after Bowie, unsurprisingly.
Got back, and G was extremely smashed - he lay on the ground in front of Great Gate for a while, to my embarassment when a porter came and asked if everything was ok :-) Hopefully he'll recover by this evening, since we're supposed to be going and getting smashed on vodka with an old friend of G's in Cherry Hinton.
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Date: 2002-05-06 08:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-05-24 08:43 am (UTC)