In which we start thinking that August 1 is just around the corner

You may not think this yet, but the 2015-16 season is slowly closing in on us. Yale and Big Bronx will both open on 8/1, although this year there is no reason to get in the very first minute of either. We’ll be doing the (sorta) MFN approach, where after a suitable amount of time we’ll take entries evenly across all the waitlist, rather than going first come, first served, which rewards people with nothing better to do than sign up for tournaments at the first blush. I noticed last year that the first blush signage is actually rather large: virtually everyone got into Yale, for instance, at exactly the moment of the opening gun. This is because the host was able to handle everyone at the same time; after all, it’s only maybe a hundred or so schools registering their teams. Not exactly a DoS attack. Of course, last year I didn’t start the (sorta) MFN approach until Princeton. One learned. And Bronx had let everyone in right off the bat, up to a team limit, but that’s not going to happen again. For one thing, they’ll only be using room rooms, as compared to spaces that one can construe might be a room if you close one eye and squint with the other. I think that’s a good thing. Who wants to argue in a hallway? And the whole midnight opening? A distant memory. The grownups who register, who also tend to go to bed about nine o’clock most nights because they’re old and infirm, won’t have to wonder how to fill the empty hours until midnight anymore. Then again, this means a lot less binge-watching of “Murder She Wrote,” but there you are.

Meanwhile, I’m taking my sweet time on the processing of the second Nostrum volume. You would think that series 2 would be easy, given that it’s all online, but it’s old enough that it needs a little bit of work, especially on timely references in the epistles that, well, aren’t so timely anymore. The text itself has little of that sort of thing, but when one needs to explain the source of a character, which is one of the new features of the collections, it does slow one down a bit. Halefoil Cumcut is especially problematic, but one does what one can. I’m not going to go back and rewrite history (or Nostrum). Things that happened, happened. You can’t pretend otherwise.