Dan has been watching The Civility of Alfred Cashier – a musical based on the true story of a trans man who fought in the Civil War and was later put on trial for impersonating an officer.

[Friday] Hugh and I were talking about the geography of Middle Earth in the context of his Minecraft LotR server, and it reminded me about the article I’d read about the problem with Middle Earth’s mountain ranges. I found it, and read it to Hugh, and we discussed the map and looked for a version which contained Harad. During which time we found the expanded map that was part of the role playing game, on Reddit, and tracked down the source to confirm that it wasn’t from Tolkein himself. Then we read the second of the Middle Earth geography posts, on the problems with the river systems, and discussed that too. I was intrigued by the next article, on Arrakis and Tatooine and desert planets, so we read that. I was sad to find that the author only had four posts tagged SFF geography on their blog, and Hugh didn’t want to read the last one.

[Saturday] Dan has bussed up to town to spend the day with a friend. Hugh has been working on a magnificent castle in Minecraft, inspired by one from Skyrim, which impressed the hell out of Eric who has more idea than me of what it entails. During one break we were discussing the tomatoes I have in the dehydrator (“Why is it called sun-dried if they’re made in a dehydrator? Isn’t that false advertising?”), so I suggested maybe it was more a descriptor of the traditional product rather than an actual description of the manufacturing process, which made him ask if rolled oats were actually rolled, so we investigated (yes). He finally investigated Skillshare for programming lessons/courses, although I think that in order to keep him focused consistently and systematically, it probably needs to involve some supervision and help in working out what to engage with.  Later on he went outside and picked fruit, including going up to our favourite apple tree on top of the bank around the corner to see if it had any fruit (yes, but out of reach).

Dan got back in time for dinner (self-assembled pizza) and at dinner time there was a discussion about the idea of the radio play, and after a great deal of disagreement people narrowed down a subject to John Paul Jones, who was a pirate in the American Revolution and apparently supplied the Americans with a navy by nicking it from the Brits. After dinner Eric and Hugh went back to working on their dice roll generating program.