who only by moving can balance

In the run-up to my viva I decided that the nicest way to make my totally spurious personal-use-only hard copy of my thesis would be using a £90 hole punch, so I stacked up some discount codes and bought into the Atoma disc-binding system. Obviously, when you have a £90 hole punch you bought for a single specific purpose, you fairly rapidly discover that you are in possession of a solution looking for problems.

Happily, Admin: the LRP presents no shortage of problems.

... or, more helpfully: after the first event of 2022, we decided that we could do a little bit better in terms of issue-tracking than my horrible scribbled bits of torn paper, and designed and set up a whole entire analogue ticket system based on query slips!

... some background: every player and most crew members get a "player pack", consisting of an envelope with their details -- including character name -- on the front, full of goodies to use during the game! Consequently, one of the things we have to do a lot is print out new packs for people, for a variety of reasons: maybe the one the database is absolutely convinced we already made up for them has disappeared into a pocket dimension halfway down the M6! maybe their character died (in)gloriously in battle and they have a new one! maybe they passed their Test of Citizenship and now get to become a landowner! maybe they just got bored of being the Empress (or whoever) and want to be someone else instead! maybe whoever was trying to find the pack was looking in the wrong set of boxes of which there are, obviously, three!!!

sometimes (often) we just forget how numbers work! and sometimes the player in question has accidentally created two accounts, with the character they want to play associated with one of them and the record that they have booked and are going to be present at this event in very much the other.

The point(s) being: making up new packs happens a lot; often The State Of The Queue is such that we take down people's details and say "great, now fuck off and come back in an hour and we might have managed to wrestle the printers into submission"; much more frequently than we'd like, the person comes back and although I'm sure that I personally printed the shiny new pack out for them and held it in my own two personal hands and there's no way it left the 40' by 50' marquee (... upgrading to 40' by 65' this event...) nobody can find it. Ergo: keeping the query slips with the details on 'em, in a single defined place that is never out of sight of my desk, in a fixed order, so that when we can't find someone's pack there is a Single Source Of Truth: you go to the stack of Packs Printed query slips, you flip through to the relevant section, you find the query slip in question, you go "... no, this definitely says it's in the [main matrix/concessions crate/...]", you double-check, and usually on the double-check you actually find the damn thing where it's supposed to be.

For convenience, I have taken to collating like query slips we'll probably want to refer back to during the event (the background above; lost property; found property; ...) into disc-bound booklets. Alas, "white paper someone's scribbled all over" doesn't really stand out much from The Chaos; happily, this gives me an excuse to make FLUORESCENT NOTEBOOK COVERS with the contents written on the front in BIG FRIENDLY LETTERS.

Because reasons, I had a stack of fluorescent cardstock -- pink and orange and yellow and green. The thing is, though, that Admin: the LRP has A Colour Scheme. That colour scheme is Royal Blue. Obviously, therefore, I wanted some obnoxiously loud fluorescent blue cardboard.

... I was a frankly embarrassing way into tediously unedifying search results before it occurred to me to double-check how fluorescence actually works.

To first approximation, things are colours because they absorb all the visible wavelengths of light except the one they appear to be, which they reflect back to you more-or-less unaltered. Per wikipedia:

Fluorescence is the emission of light by a substance that has absorbed light or other electromagnetic radiation. It is a form of luminescence. In most cases, the emitted light has a longer wavelength, and therefore a lower photon energy, than the absorbed radiation ... Strongly fluorescent pigments often have an unusual appearance which is often described colloquially as a "neon color" (originally "day-glo" in the late 1960s, early 1970s). This phenomenon was termed "Farbenglut" by Hermann von Helmholtz and "fluorence" by Ralph M. Evans. It is generally thought to be related to the high brightness of the color relative to what it would be as a component of white. Fluorescence shifts energy in the incident illumination from shorter wavelengths to longer (such as blue to yellow) and thus can make the fluorescent color appear brighter (more saturated) than it could possibly be by reflection alone.

... oh, I realise, belatedly. Oh. Er. Fluorescent blue is not really a thing in most contexts... because blue light is the shortest wavelength in the visible spectrum... so since fluorescence works by converting shorter-wavelength light to longer-wavelength light... fluorescent blue only really works if you've got lots of UV bouncing around the place... whiiich isn't something that happens very much in domestic indoor settings so it er isn't surprising that (i) there isn't much demand for it, and (ii) fluorescent green is the shortest-wavelength colour that's trivially available on cardstock.

And so! I have resigned myself to making do with the colours I already have available (I've been doing some clearing out of Stuff from my parents', and a giant stash of 90s kids' stationery has mostly gone on Freecycle, but a few bits of it I kept), and as consolation have a bit more of an understanding of How Colours and How Lights, and on the whole I think this is a fair trade.