<insert crazy ramblings here>

Case a:
I turned up early at the V&A for a Sandpit (Pervasive Gaming) evening. I wanted to have a look at the Echo Bazzar \ Fallen London game in particular. So did a lot of other people. And the main organiser was running 15 minutes late. The queue filled the balcony beside the Silver gallery, and all the way down the stairs to the sculpture corridor.

In order to beat the queue, they insisted the first few groups come in in groups of 10. I was with hawkida, viclet, Floo, and Archdeacon (nee StarShirt on this blog), so was halfway there. We grabbed the nearest 4 people to us and set off to solve a series of puzzles round the museum.

On the way we lost the Dutch Couple, who figured out that you could just play the game individually, and kept running another pair of Joinees, but that sort of thing isn't that unusual when you live in the same city.

The Small Word part was when went to the pub afterwards, and convinced the other pair to join us down the pub. It turns out that h4nchan hadn't been to a Sandpit before, but had been to Hitchcon, and recognized a few fannish names. So we swapped Social Network contact details. The first thing I spotted is that she was a fellow DFC subscriber! A rare breed :) The first thing she spotted was we just missed each other at Uni. She would probably have used some of the Jingle packages I put together for student radio station!

Case b:
I'm not under any illusion that all of the couple of thousand regular UK litcon goers know each other, but I really was shocked to find that Paul Cornell does not know the Fishlifters!

Case c:

Today, I joking tweeted that there was no Snow in St Albans (Since a lot of people tweeted about snowfall locations at the start of the year), and it turns out an old colleague had also had his London office shut, and had been moved to St Albans!

[Poll #1471551]

( Reason for poll )

Useful addition to a hosts file to prevent anything from and ads server from being accessed. General info if you want to figure out what I'm talking about.

from Charles Stross's braindump.

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World’s oldest social network reconstructed from medieval land records.

May be of interest to medieval and social network scholars on my flist :)

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I just saw this snippet about MS:

Some populations, such as the Roma, Inuit, and Bantus, rarely if ever develop MS. The indigenous peoples of the Americas and Asians have very low incidence rates.

And immediately thought about the European mutation, that confers HIV resistance, and the way that a lot of stories end up with Natives catching diseases from the colonists rather than the other way round.

Could these three things be related?