March 15th, 2007

beachy

Happy Birthday, makovette!

For your present, here's today's Forgotten English!

gridelin
A colour mixed with white and red, or a gray-violet.
--Rev. John Boag's Imperial Lexicon, c. 1850


The name of a colour, a pale purple or grey violet; sometimes, a pale red. Adaptation of French gris-de-lin, "grey of flax," flax-grey; Littré's French Dictionary (1877) explains it as "a colour partaking of white and red."
--Sir James Murray's New English Dictionary, 1901


Feast Day of St. Louise de Marillac (1591-1660),
patroness of widows and disappointing children. Manners and Rules of Good Society (1901) offered color tips for a widow's second wedding: "Formerly, widows considered it imperative to be married in 'widow's colours,' grey and mauve, and that white was forbidden wear ... [except when] a tinge of colour is introduced. The larger number still regard pale grey or pale heliotrope as more suitable on the occasion of a second marriage, and doubtless this is so when a widow is not in her full youth. A widow may not, of course, wear a bridal veil. She can have a bouqet, not of white flowers only, but mauve or pink or violets, according to choice."

I've been disappointing children for ages. Thanks, St. Louise!

-The Gneech
Legolas Aaah

Handy Links for Gamers

Random Dungeon Map Generator -- Random and pretty. :) Not populated, tho.

Jamis Buck's Random Dungeon Generator -- Not as pretty, but with encounters included -- of the "minotaurs in one room and hill giants in another" variety due to randomness. Old-school dungeon crawling at its most incoherent!

Rules of the Game -- Grappling, Part One -- One of the most important aspects of combat just happens to also be everybody's least favorite subsystem. D'Oh!

Rules of the Game -- Grappling, Part Two -- Okay, once you're in a grapple, what can you actually do?

These last two are particularly important to me, as Arshan seems to do a lot of grappling. Next time I make a character of Large size, I'll make him a monk! ;P

-The Gneech