MOOP!

So, I was poking around some old journal entries today, and found this gem¹ from 2012. It's me, saying I'd like to start a dance, host something regular. A chance for my friends to get together with me and do a wide variety of fun stuff.

It's from me not-quite-a-year out of college. Bright and a little naive and always the kind of optimistic that says "what if I could get all my friends to come dance with me!?". Not really thinking about the stress of balancing schedules and the difficulties in advertising and promoting and ensuing the regulars have reasons to come back and the new people have reasons to try it out and everyone can have some fun. I do appreciate the part where I say "in an ideal world I'd just pay for it myself".

It took me twelve and a half years after that post to have the first instance of GenderFree SCD in Somerville. It's not Oella North --this is not an open format "whatever kinds of dance we feel like" melange. It's just Scottish, with a waltz thrown in at the end.

But tonight I was one of twelve dancers, and it was a week with no "newbies" as it were. I looked around at one point and my brain said "I am here with my friends!" and that is true, that is what it is. One of the friends is someone I only met because of this, because she found it random and started attending regularly. Some of the friends primarily do other dance forms, and this is how I am slowly dragging them into SCD. Some of the friends are more experienced than me. One of the friends is my high school friend!

It was twelve tonight, and I think at least 2/3 of the April nights had seven couples. This wasn't even everyone who's shown up more than a few times! I have _regulars_ and I have enough regulars that it feels increasingly like I have something _sustainable_. There are still more steps to go to reach the highest dreams, but oh gods, the dreams that have already come true are so amazing!

part of the genesis for this is the idea of having a space to do Scottish Country where no one cares about your gender or who you're dancing with

I have _successfully given myself that space_. I built it with my own two hands, except that's not true at all, I built it with my own community and all our hands together! And we are continuing to build it, and expand it outwards. A floor where we care about each other's genders in the sense that we love and respect these myriad identities, but no one thinks any of them have anything to do with where you dance.

Tonight we were doing presumptive dances from Book 55, and it felt _so good_ to approach that as a team and a puzzle. We tried out four of them (part of my words goal for tonight is to type up the notes so I can pass those along) and it was great fun! I don't think we would've done so many if we'd actually had beginners this week, but we didn't and so it was marvelous!

It felt good also to be able to make eyes at each other about the various divisors being so clunky about their language. And also, honestly, to be in a space where I could start us off with "hey y'all, I think I'm gonna just do a mental find/replace on role terms" and have people think that's dandy.

And if I'm being extremely vain and just a little smug, it felt really good to be in a space where we tried one of the dances that CambridgeClass tried Monday night. I didn't dance it then, my observation from the side of the room was "hm. That seemed. Semi-disasterous". The two people who did dance it then, seemed to like it much better tonight, and several of the rest of us thought it was extremely good as dances go.

And yeah, a little bit of that is me! I am good at teaching and I'm especially and increasingly good at teaching this class. But a lot more is that I successfully recognized the space that wanted to exist, and bullied it into existing. I built it, and they came, and by they, let's just say, well. The dancers!

It's real great and it makes me _abundantly_ happy, every single week.

I hope you are also happy!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: 2012 02 06

So, I don't think I have a time note for the last time I was at Tech Squares. I know it was pre-2020, I think Austin and I went to two Easthills together, which probably would've been 2018 and 2019. I don't think we were regularly going to class when we did the latter of those. So yeah, it's been about eight years since I've been going remotely regularly, but Eric saw me at NEFFA and was all "so I'm running the class this semester and we haven't had a grand march in ages, I'd love to have them again".

It was a nice evening and I'm glad I went! I also think I'm gonna be pretty happy to go to tech squares twice a year for graduation and not any more often than that.

I'm thrilled that this random first-time-in-nearly-a-decade for me happened to coincide with Tenest's first-time-in-over-a-decade. Both of us have the calls still there, but it was fun to support each other through the squares, and do a little necessary flailing.

It was _really_ interesting to see what I did and didn't remember. I had dug out ~my~ graduation folder, with each week's call lists still dutifully tucked in order in there. (Somewhere I still have a little sticky note reading "you are perfect* *in attendance and other ways", from my own class folder). I didn't like. Fully read and internalize every single call, but I skimmed the names of all of them and tried to see what that triggered.

One of the things I really like about Squares is the patter of callbacks and call-actions, back and forth with Ted. "Spin the Top?!" we say, in increasingly histrionic tones, and he blithely replies "yeah, that's what I said, right?". Snap on trade by, toot-toot for track two, zoom is 02134, and it's oppa dixie style. I was _thrilled_ to hear someone say "like bunnies!" for a couples circulate, but I think I'm the only one who still has deeply locked-in spoonerisms for all the other circulations. JB gave me a hug after one of the tips, and said thank you for being someone else to chant "reduce, reuse" after a recycle.

(and I got exactly once where I was courtesy turning with a person I actually knew well enough to finish the callback for Chain Down the Line. Everyone present knew "catch me, turn me!" but only once could I actually add out loud "chain me down". That turns out to be a fun one!)

I like it so much because it helps ground the calls real well, keeps them in my memory. The fact that I was running at probably 80% accurate after eight years of not dancing is pretty damn good! And it's worth noting that my 80% at dance continues to be a lot stronger than average.

But I don't love that squares still doesn't feel like _dancing_ to me. I'm charmed by a new-to-me callback for one of the weird swoopy calls - "it flows!". Because that call does flow! All the calls flow! Ted especially makes the movements all flow into each other because he's very good at what he does! Now why doesn't the dance floor feel like they're doing that?

Some of it is the need of the floor to compound the challenges. Do the calls faster, weirder, harder. I would love Weave the Ring as a figure, if it weren't inevitably limping sideways to the beat. I don't mind making things more complicated, until they inevitably seem to remove some of the _dance_ from the dance form. Successfully snapswitching can be great fun, but what if it is interrupting your flow, or making you forget where you're going and who you've become?

I understand what I'm getting into when I go to the MIT activity, it's very smart hotshot college students who have always been The Best at everything they've ever done. I am extremely familiar with this batch of people, and am sometimes one myself.

But gosh, that's not exactly what social dancing is _for_. If you are so into the mega-complex puzzle versions of the thing that you can't find pleasure or joy in the simple version instead, that's...a way to do things. But it's not the way _I_ want to do things.

Give me hexes and snap switching, but also give me a solid singing tip and the space to move in. Do hard things badly, but also _do simple things well_.

See you in the fall for the next graduation, maybe!

~Sor
MOOP!

It feels quite beautiful to me that I have a notes file labeled "burn book" which is for jotting down things I want to remember about people to remind myself why they might rub me the wrong way (to remind myself that I have reasons sometimes and not just vibes¹

1: As a contextual note, it might be worth remembering that I lost the entire last three months of my diary of dating my abusive ex, and have had to piece together some of the "was it really that bad?" since then from trauma-touched memories and chatlogs. It was, I know it was, I remember it was, I wish I had more contemporary sources to draw from sometimes. Anyways.

The beautiful part is seeing the sorts of notes I've written most recently. My work bestie's favourite candy. The name of the girl my online friend's been gushing about. One of my DnD friend's favourite animals. The kinds of cliff bar my new friend with the allergies can actually eat.

I like that my burn book, my place to collect small little notes of things I get told or observe and want to remember, is mostly just so kind.

~Sor

I spent Sunday scrobbling in the dirt, because my friend Apollo had a backyard work party! Another friend there described it as "well, we're really being Tom Sawyered right now" and that was a both charming and accurate way to sum it up. Apollo said "wouldn't it be fun if y'all came over and helped me move rocks and dig up weeds and shovel mulch" and you know what? It super was!

Also there was a fire going pretty much the whole time, and when we pulled especially obnoxious bittersweet or tree-of-heaven out we could go and put it on the fire in triumph and that was very satisfying! After we worked, we ate snacks and sang sad folk songs --it wasn't intentionally, sad, just wound up that way-- and it was a really lovely afternoon all around!

But the thing that's really standing out, was somewhere in the middle of dealing with the tree-of-heaven, after we'd gotten some of the bigger root clusters out but still had plenty to go, I wound up spending like...ten or fifteen minutes just digging increasingly deep and pulling out the rocks from the old rock wall the roots appear to have grown through, and trying to get one of the remaining big pieces out. And I just couldn't do it. I made lots of progress, but the roots were still in there.

So I wandered to Apollo, ready to switch tasks, and said "I give up." "I'm proud of you!" they replied, and when I tried to tease about it, they continued "both for trying and for giving up". That felt. Honestly real good. It feels nice in the way I hope it feels nice when I thank people for saying no to me. It felt nice in a recognition that setting boundaries and taking care of yourself is good. It felt like a kindness, being told that not only was it okay to give up on a frustrating task that wasn't working out, but a point of pride.

I like having the friends I have.

~Sor
MOOP!

Iiit's still NEFFA!

Gosh I am suddenly weirdly tired! I can't imagine why this might be! What could've possibly caused this?

Actually, the thing I want most right now is like. Playing video games or something silently by myself. It's been a great day but also a _very_ social day. I have had so many wonderful discussions! Short and long, in snippets across a set or hours wandering and hanging out. Real damn good!

(Highlights include a very rewarding bit of convo about the ways SCD is a little too insular sometimes with Jenny Beer, an extremely illuminating fun fact of learning that the concept of clothing that doesn't fit the people wearing it is even more recent than I thought (it's a post WWII factory conversion thing!), and a glorious two hours hanging with Alexander and Willow, including an amazing reading of the most nonsensical academic paper abstract that has ever been written.)

In terms of actual official things I did:

*I started the day by wandering down to Observe the Morris dancers! Muddy River has a zillion people I know on it! WhistlePig has fewer people I know but as I mentioned offhand to one of the other people watching, it has an extremely high proportion of people I have Big Idle Crush Feels For, which makes a lot of sense for the dedicated queer team. I had good morning chats with bunches of people and also got to see an *extremely* new babby, just two weeks out of his mother and small and neato!

*I managed to miss all of the pre-noon things that were otherwise on my "maybe I'll do that" list, but I hung with Lucretia some and had a lovely-but-sad chat with Val about the state of public school education (grr). I did manage to wander back up the hill in time for Susan dG's "Jane Austen's Squares" session, which surprised me slightly by being not Regency (the period in which Austen's books are set) but in fact late baroque (the period Jane would've been dancing as a 15-20 year old!) It's been a hot minute since the last time I've been in one of Susan's classes, and I found it very pleasant to realize just how much my teaching style is cribbed from hers. (I don't know that anyone else would see the parallels, but yeah, there's some stuff there about how to make hard dancing accessible).

*From there was lunch (more siopao!) with Justin dC and Charis, then Justin and I realized we were both interested in Scott Higgs and Jenny Beer's panel on "Better Dancing is More Fun!". Which like. If that wasn't already inherently enough to catch you, they also had Joanna Reiner give a 3-5 minute spiel about some of the good stuff she intentionally does for her floors. MORE AMAZING TEACHERS OKAY?! It was really good vibes!



*Had a half hour of chatting time with friends, where I confirmed a band for my GenderFree SCD class party in June (yay! This was starting to get slightly urgent! I also confirmed a band for the 2027 party, which I hope will be a Bigger Shindig¹!). I also exchanged Important Baby Gossip with Beth, which was extremely fun to do!

*Off we all went to the beginner SCD session, which was quite well taught (nice job Charles!) and also extremely beginner-filled, in a way that feels heartening and also makes me more annoyed at myself that I forgot to bring my flyers. Sigh! But it was fun! And then I didn't bother to change my shoes, just swapped sides of the hotel for the regular-type SCD, except I forgot that the two events were on opposite of the "sometimes events start on the hour and sometimes they start on the half-hour" thing that NEFFA does, which means I danced three _very_ good waltzen first! Okay fine, technically what Bret and I did was some variety of tango, but Monya and I did an _incredible_ Waltz with lots of lead switching and intensity and good non-verbal communication and it felt soooo goodoooo! And Teah was excited to let me lead, which felt good --leading waltzes was like the single dance skill I really felt like I _lost_ during 2020/2021, and I'm extremely pleased to feel like it has come back some.

*SCD was fine! Howard made some _wild_ choices dance-wise, but he fit the pieces together pretty well. And then I found myself outside chatting with Alexander and Willow, and I guess checking the timestamps on the schedule, that's then what I did from about 6:30 until 10. Huh. Nice job!

Ben stopped by at one point which was Very Good, and Tuesday joined for a bunch of it, and it was really lovely. And we did eat dinner-type things, and I did not successfully buy them gelato this time around, but that will be a future adventure maybe.

*Anyways, I had a hard cutoff of 10 because that was Michael Karcher's "Stream of Contraness" 41-dance hash. To Torrent, natch! Apparently they all signed up together and everything, which is very sweet. I happened to encounter a wild Anna Rain, at exactly the right time to ask her to dance and she said yes and I said "but I prefer not too wildly flourishy" and she said "oh yes that's perfect" and it was SO GOOD!

And then I never made it back to the hotel half of the festival like I intended. I chatted merrily with Keira and Charis and Annie and then with Hannah and Ian and then saw Sammy-the-new-musician-we-like-so-much-at-Scottish who was bubbly and enthusiastic and excited to ask me to do the last contra. How could I say no to that? We did an extremely chaotic and energetic dance and it was grand! (oh to dance with nineteen year olds!²)

I wrapped with a lovely conversation and walk with Apollo, and then it was time to drive back to the AirBnB! The fomo is real, but counterpoint, it's incredibly valuable to not accidentally stay up singing until three AM when I've got rehearsal at 9 tomorrow. Speaking of which...off I go to bed, goodnight!

~Sor
MOOP!

1: This year is "Flights of Fancy" (Emily and Dirk Tiede, Beth Murray) and next year will be Torrent (Sarah and Ross Parker, Nadia Gaya). Hellll yes for all these musicians!

2: I am, first of all, too young to be any sort of "gosh did I have that much energy when I was that age" and also yes _yes I did_. And let's be real, yes I _do_, because there was a very good climbing tree at the NAFest a couple weeks ago, and weirdly no one else was in it at any point.

Dang, today was really good!

And like......I've been saying for a while now that my hypersimplified political stance is "community is good". And while it wasn't the first thing I did today, it was pretty early in the sequence that I looked at the young woman with the small child standing in Park Street station and looking _extremely_ confused about the lack of a map, and so went over with my phone and helped her identify the station she wanted to be at and which train to get on. Then I sat on a bench and did some knitting until my own train arrived. This wasn't the entirety of the day, but it did set the tone really really nicely!

Before that, I had a lovely long phone chat with my mom as she was driving to her sister's to do more work with their dad's stuff --we organized when and how I'll be going to MD to visit this summer, and then chatted about many lovely inconsequential things. And I visited the post office to mail off a book for a friend (I was point person for a kickstarter a bunch of folks on my discord were excited about). And then it was off to bells, where I arrived halfway through but had a jolly time ringing everything after. Not going to bells very frequently means that we suddenly have an all new crop of skilled ringers and that's quite neat to observe!

Bells lunch was lovely, and taking the T home with Laura lovlier still --I got to hear some of her exciting upcoming plans for adventure! And then I was home long enough to change my clothes and take a quick rest and then off to my work-bestie's old house to help him move a bunch of boxen out of his attic. Originally the plan was three of us and I think he was expecting it to take 2-3 hours. The two of us were handily done in well under an hour and I near melted in delight as he said "you being the stupendous badass you are"¹.

(His attic ladder broke right before moving out, so he'd rigged a quite nice pulley setup with a little handmade cargo net. But I don't think he realized how strong I am, and subsequently how quickly I could get things out of the netting and stacked up in the room downstairs. It was a very jolly time!)

Afterwards, I got to see his new house, which is absolutely gorgeous in every way except that it's diagonally opposite our principal's house (which like, isn't an inherent flaw but is very very funny). And he treated me to dinner, which we did at a nice sushi place on Mass Ave that has set out their outdoor seating --it was just warm enough to be happy, and I think we spent the entire time joyfully discussing Taskmaster. I'm real lucky!

Home again home again, and I managed to kick my brain into enough order to get started the newest bit of knitting project (or rather, the first in a series of swatches for thus) before getting into the car(?!) and driving to the airport. It's Magus and Keira's car, on loan while they were overseas, so we can do grocery runs in exchange for giving them rides to and from the airport.

It was my first time hanging out in the cell phone lot, and that was actually quite jolly as well. "Take your time", texts I, "I have music and knitting" and I did and they were both quite good, which was especially good because their airplane did not have access to any stairs for quite a long time and so what could've been a 45 minute errand had everything worked optimally was actually about two hours. But again, I had music and knitting and that was _lovely_. I only had to work on two of the projects (and listen to my CD twice through) and then suddenly we were back at my house and I was handing them the keys.

Dishes properly done *before* coming upstairs to fuck around, and that's where I am now. I have a few hours before bed, I expect, and while I can never guilt-free do things (there is grading and my desk is a disaster) today really was enough that I feel like I can really relax into whatever else I decide to do with my evening.

Community is good! I am so happy I am a part of mine.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Call me pretty and I will smile, call me useful and I will melt. I know what I'm about. (5'2" and carrying classic oldest daughter trauma)

Hey did you know what happens when two highly ADHD nerds get engaged?

They forget to tell people for ages and then drop it into casual conversation and are confused that people are shocked. So uh. Yeah. Tuesday and I are gonna get married sometime!

I am not particularly good at dramatic romantic gestures, and I'm definitely not good at like. Sharing romantic things in my life with the rest of the world. There's a lot of things that make me nervous and weird about it. Tuesday doesn't make me nervous¹ though! They make me happy, over and over and again, and have been doing so for many years now. And are gonna do so for many years to come, is at least the plan! I'm very happy about it!!!

The most likely time for the wedding is "Iunno, maybe 2028?", for both obvious and non-obvious reasons. We're currently in an opposite-of-race with our respective younger siblings about who can get married last, which is very funny. Tuesday has rejected my offer of "okay but hear me out, let's do like twenty weddings" but then countered with "what about one wedding per person we want to invite?" because the two of us are in love with each other but also very much in love with the bit. You'll get accurate details about how many we actually plan to have closer to when we actually decide to have it. (them >.>)

We do intend to get photos at some point, but in the meantime just keep taking cute selfies of us at places --I'll drop a nice one that she took at Pinewoods last summer in the bottom of this post. I want to get them a pretty ring, but we're doing it slow to figure out something they actually want and would wear regularly. In the meantime we've got a lovely pair of matching fidget rings we got at the Rennfaire last October. I really like wearing mine!

I don't know what else to say here. It's 2026 and America is miserable. We're both queer and every day we don't get forcibly removed from the country is a success. We are joyful and happy together and we have families that like each others company --we've started overlapping our holidays in a way that feels real successful! We still don't live in the same place, but that's a longterm plan that we want to make happen, and I like thinking about the ways my life will be like when that happens. Sometimes I'm terrified to even believe I'm allowed to have a future. I'm terrified to try and think about what might happen because all of it is just overwhelming and scary and depressing.



....But at least we'll be fighting the scary stuff together. That's pretty cool.

~Sor (and Tuesday <3)
MOOP!

1: ke does make me weird, but that's definitely on the "pro" column :3

Oh hey, it's April 4th! That means my babymost sister --the one who loved Lord of the Rings way more than any of us other kids-- is finally coming of age, hobbitwise! I'm so pleased for her! Happy birthday Alys!!!!!

And I remembered to check in earlier today, and I know exactly what I'm getting her for her birthday, and it's something you could get her too if you want: the preorder link for The Stolen Women is finally active and the book has a drop date of October 27th! There's gonna be an audiobook (!) version and an ereader (!!) version!

It's "a retelling of the Sabine Women myth 'for those who love Gladiator but hate the patriarchy'"! It's real good sister feels! It's got queer characters! It has a character who I largely want to punch in the face because he's so annoying and also one hundred percent my favourite! I last read it in the back half of 2023, so it's going to be three years of better edits and more refined since then! I am SO EXCITED FOR ALYS!!!!!!!!

I will be purchasing several copies. I might not be joking when I say "oh yeah, I'm going to order a copy from every local bookstore I love". I already started with PSB, I'm sure I'll be able to from Harvard Square bookstore, and probably Sidequest, and then where else. Does Rodneys let you order new? If you want a copy, please hmu and I'll get you one, if you can't get yourself one. Pretty sure I'll see if NESFA lets me donate one to them.

Happy Birthday, Alys! You're so fucking cool! <3

~Sor
MOOP!

We will go to space today!

I'm rewatching the last T-3minutes of the NSF stream, mostly because I really want to hear the guy shout "LET'S GO TO THE MOON!!" again, because that was so charming! Of all of this, that was the part that made me most gleeful, hearing his glee!

I smiled so hard my face nearly started hurting, starting maybe at T-30seconds? Crying too, obviously, I have been crying on and off this entire afternoon as I watch different parts of the stream.

I'm sad Grandpa Perks didn't get to see us go back. I'm distraught ShadowKev didn't live long enough to get to appreciate a manned moon launch. He, at least, lived through one in the past. It's my first.

I'm thirty-six and a half years old, and it's the first time I've ever gotten to watch us launch our way to and towards and around the moon. We're not even landing on it yet (sounds like Artemis IV is aiming for 2028) but it's far and away the closest we've come in fifty-four years.

My favourite-least-favourite-favourite xkcd comic is 65 Years. It is fantastic to think that it's going to be wrong.

We will go to space today. And tomorrow. And next year and the year after. And again and again, over and over again. Somebody will, someday.

~Sor
MOOP!

Austin is over for his usual Monday datenight, made harder by both of us being very _very_ worn out.

(the weather is not helping. the fascism definitely not)

We had a little bit of a "blaaaah what do" and then Austin asked "what do you want to do" and I paused a long while and admitted that what I wanted to do was play video games and not think. And so he pointed out that Slay the Spire 2 has just come out in early release and maybe we could try it? I hemmed a little (I don't like the idea of playing games in early release) and we read some of the literature, and I decided "sure, let's give it a shot".

(I still have steambux from my da, and certainly Slay the Spire original is one of those games that I have put a staggering number of hours into¹ so I do not at all begrudge giving the makers another round of dollarbux in thanks)

And so we went ahead and hit play and cooperated and chatted and balanced our different playstyles and charged on through. And won! We won very satisfyingly, by mostly creating a good deck vibe (all combos around casting vulnerable) and then immediately blowing that up when given a super powerful artifact at the end of act II.

It was a really lovely balance between "this is extremely familiar" and "this is new and exciting". It's very funny playing my obsessive games with other people, because like, I don't think of myself as being an expert in this game or anything, but I suppose yes, I do immediately know what the cards do or which cards are new. There's definitely some intriguing new options popping up and I look forward to doing some replay.

The timeline is going to be absolutely lovely to find out more about --I like me a little bit of explicit lore sometimes! I mean, I do enjoy the scraps and fragments of the story that you get in the first game, but it's _so_ barebones sometimes that there's nothing really to hang onto.

And it's nice that being cozy and silly and collaborative was able to really turn my mood around at least, and hopefully Austin's as well. Now I can go to sleep feeling a little bit better about my universe (in which my last two workdays were 9.5(today) and 12.5(Fri) hours of active work, and the rest of the week is not looking milder.)

The world is bad but sometimes escapism can be quite nice! Especially when done in good company! I hope you are finding some of that too.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: According to a quick skim of my steam library:

1st place: Crypt of the Necrodancer, 631.5 hours
2nd place: Slay the Spire, 416.8 hours
3rd place: Stardew Valley, 388.9 hours²
4th place: Heroes of Might and Magic III, 324.8 hours³
5th place: Rogue Legacy - 293 hours

In summation, I am not a _broad_ video game player, I am a _deep_ video game player. This is why I am still running through the steambux from my da from two years ago, I just don't buy games very much.

2: Please do not observe that the first time I played this game was like, end of May 2025. The rest of these times are on much longer timeframes (like, multiple years apiece).

3: Heroes should be much higher, there's been lots of times where I've owned this through GoG and emulators not through steam, and I should get that set up again because I miss having phoenixes (and the Steam version doesn't have the expansions, sigh.) It's basically been incomplete playing since I switched away from my mac, so like, since 2019 since I've played it "proper".