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CLAWlore

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A collection of tales about the history of CLAWs

Other pages of interest: CLAWthings?

The Move by AdriaanWessels

(Written in about September 2001 and posted to Cthulist)

I joined CLAWs in 1993. One of the major facilities that it had, besides a huge collection of unusual and interesting people, was its own room.

The CLAWroom was on Green Level of the [old] Students Union. It was a rehabilitated lift machinery room - something of a Frankenstein room. It had metal plates that covered the holes that it had needed to operate before its revivification.

The ceiling was extremely low. I remember that Anthony Steele (the first CLAWthing) lying on the CLAW table and reading a printout that he had stuck to the roof.

An aged extractor fan has one of the room's more bizarre features. I heard rumours of people sacrificing neon light tubes to the fan, but I never saw this happen.

For all its shortcomings, the room was coveted by the Student Affairs department, as it was right in the middle of their territory. Luckily this was the one year in which we had a CLAW member, Steffi Anastasiadis, on the Students Representative Council. We thus had warning and a sympathetic person on the body that (nominally) controlled the allocation of space in the Student's Union building.

In view of the effort CLAWs had put into making the room usable the SRC granted us a temporary room. We also secured a non-binding recommendation from that SRC to future SRC that we should always have a room in the Student's Union.

The temporary room turned out to be fairly amazing. It was right near the plaza, and had high ceilings. It also had a view of the legendary proto-CLAWroom called Gargoyle Rock, and a cupboard large enough to store people in. That was just the ante-chamber. The main room was many times larger. CLAWs is still in this temporary room almost eight years later, having successfully fended off several attempts to take the room away.

Some time after Dragonfire? 1993 we had to move. That day there was a stream of people dressed in black running down the [old] Students Union and pooling in the new room. I have particular and painful memories of helping to carry the library cabinets down to the new room.

Various art works were left in the old CLAWroom. I suspect that this was a last attempt to mark our territory. I can remember a drawing on the wall of small footprints leading to a squashed rodent, executed skillfully in tomato sauce.

The new CLAWroom has done wonders for the visibility of CLAWs. Membership has increased, and the room is still packed at lunchtime, even though it is much larger that the old. The effort and trauma of moving has been well repaid.

[Eventually they coveted this room too, but eventually had to change Student Union buildings to dislodge us!]

Chair Camouflage by AdriaanWessels

CLAWS got its new, large room in 1993, but it only had the furniture from its old room. This void was filled with gusto by the office of the IAO (Illegal Acquisitions Officer - a shadow committee post) with chairs from all over the place, especially from the SRC, as their offices were nearby and they were supposedly there for the benefit of students.

The problem with SRC chairs is that while they were standard plywood-and-steel school-type chairs, their steel tube parts were bright red. This made them highly visible and easy for the UCT cleaning staff to find and remove on their occasional visits. We had just got a new batch in, and while sitting on them late one afternoon Giles Kipps (then CLAWthing) and I were pondering this visibility when we noticed some leftover cans of spray-paint.

We had two shades of green and some red, so the obvious happened - we camouflaged the chairs. Just in case we labelled them 'CLAWS' in bright red so that no confusion would arise. Unfortunately no confusion did arise: the cleaning staff confiscated them again, with the result that occasionally while sitting an exam one will see chairs marked 'CLAWS' or painted in camouflage!

Furniture day '97 by AdriaanWessels

One of the CLAWroom's perennial problems was a lack of furniture. Students are notorious for not having two brass farthings to rub together, and in the case of CLAWmembers not even that because they spend it all on RPGs? and CTCGs?...

As luck would have it this was rather dramatically solved in late 1997 by UCT maintenance department having a spring cleaning session. An advert in the Monday paper was brought to my attention by Gavin Chait, a fellow engineer much involved in SHAWCO.

Investigation during lunch turned into an acquisition spree that grew to include tables, chairs, a desk and two IBM XT computers. Why two? Spare parts of course! The operable IBM XT became the CLAWputer.

With assistance from Patrick Schreiber's baby blue station wagon and press-ganged CLAWmembers we hauled our new stuff to the CLAWroom, where it was used, abused (remember Toby & Alan's science experiment that burned a hole in the table?) and sat upon for years.

---

Future topics from AdriaanWessels may include: Mutants with Posters '93, Captain Dorego's (will the memories ever fade?)

Sentimental drivel by LothrielPixie

My first memory of the Claws room occurred in the winter of '96. It was a dark and stormy day. I had encountered Nenad and Alastair ( I knew them from playing V:tES outside Wizards on Saturday mornings) while kicking my feet outside Springfields? on Friday night - I'd been bounced, as usual. Despite the fact that I need to finish reading Lord of the Flies for my exam on the Monday morning they managed to convince me to come to the Vampire Day that had been organised for Saturday where they were going to watch video's in the Richard Luyt and then they needed extras for a LARP/Party they were holding afterwards.

Well, I think I managed to catch Interview with a Vampire (for the god-know-what-th time), skipped out on Nosferatu and had arrived too late for Lost Boys. I then retired to this rather small pokey room off to the side where everyone was gathering. It was rather a drab place sporting a table, a few broken chairs and a number of fantasy art posters stuck to the (rather high) roof. Most of the chairs were occupied and being a rather lost 16 year-old, when the only people I knew disappeared to work on their LARP, I proceeded to climb up onto the cupboard stashed next to the door of the antechamber and sit there, trying to read Lord of the Flies and being consistently distracted by the bizarre conversations going on around me.

The LARP in question was Cedarfalls, to this day I remember Zara's glee as she receive her character, Crystal Starr, with a squeak of 'Nenad! You know me so well!'. I also remember being accosted by one of the oddest people I have ever met - and never met again - wearing a green Robin Hood style outfit. Unfortunately, I had to leave before I learned how the LARP turned out (curfew), but I got plenty more chances with plenty other runnings, two of which I've played in and one of which I've run in Durbs! Oh, yes, and the first LARP I every played in was Cedarfalls, in which I got the delightful task of playing, guess who! Yes! Crystal Starr. The ZCC. <sigh>

Who gave the gibbering idiots access to power tools? by ShadowsLight

I joined CLAWs in 1992. It was an auspicious entry into a new world for me, as I had never role-played at school. All I knew about CLAWs at the time, was that they threw the most amazing video evenings every few months (who could deny that Star Trek, Zardoz, 2001 and Gorn were not perfect viewing for one night?).

It took me a few hours to finally find the tiny little lift shaft office that was the CLAWroom, as it was neatly tucked away in a disused corridor of an ancient stairwell. I soon learned that this was its main attraction, as only those willing to quest to find it, were worthy of being inside it. While it was true that the room was cramped, stuffy, claustrophobic, hot (and cold in the winter) and generally unpleasant, it was the best place for CLAWs in those days. Away from the hustle and bustle of the Old Students Union, away from the inane crap coming from UCT Radio and away from the religious nutters that seemed to infest the steps outside Jamie Hall.

When I first entered the CLAWroom, I was accosted by a face and a rather large body of a person I had never met at any of the video evenings from the previous year. He demanded my name (he may have been asking rather politely, but his size in comparison to the size of the room made him seem to loom above me, and my fertile imagination may have jumped into high gear), and I gave it to him quickly.

"Um... it's Reuel", I stammered.

"Dude... your real name, not your character's name....", came his reply.

"Ya, like, that is my real name.... 'Doos'"

At this point a war of words ensued, as we each tried to out do each other in a creative name-calling contest.

In the end, I called him "Grotesque snotwad". And he called me "Festering pig's liver". It was the start of a beautiful relationship. And if I had Dylan "Tarquin 'Ole Ole F'tang Biscuit-barrel' Mendez" Craig next to me, he would be putting up all his fingers (a sign of how many times he had heard this story from me).

Now... I told you that story to try and explain the true story behind my essay, and the subject of its title. Hopefully, you have gotten an idea of the kind of person that used to hang around the CLAWroom in those days (if that is not enough, I once witnessed a CLAWmember take a plate of "slap chips" and cover it with tomato sauce and mayonnaise, and then squash the chips and sauce into a greyish, gelatinous goo and say out aloud "Ahhh, that's better, now it looks like brains").

Are these the kind of people you would entrust power tools, heavy hammers and picks to? I didn't think so.

However, with enough bribes, damned lies and sacrifices to dark gods, we procured said implements and set about "fixing" our CLAWroom. You see, in the middle of the CLAWroom was a small wall. On top of this small wall used to sit the engine and wheel system that used to run the old lift shaft. However, with the shaft cemented up, and the engine gone the way of the dodos, the wall was just irritating enough so that you always stubbed your toe on it when you wanted to stretch you feet under the table.

It had to go.

So it was with maniacal glee that about 5-10 gibbering claw members set about demolishing the wall. Now, as the room was not big enough to swing a cat in (thanks to Andrew and his successful experiments, I can make that claim), it took a few hours to get the job done. But what we lacked in room to move, we more then adequately made up for in enthusiasm, determination and bloody minded psychosis. And I have to admit, to being one of the worst culprits... and to making the swing which had the most impact. Right at the top of the small wall, was an iron beam that the engine used to rest on. While many of the beginning blows avoided this beam and aimed for the vulnerable concrete, it was I who hit upon the idea of striking the iron bar with all my might (read: I could not hit the side of a barn with a Minivan). I aimed all my might at the cement wall, but struck the iron bar instead, causing a massive shockwave to reverberate through the entire piece of iron and, with in two more blows, it had completely shrugged off its concrete shackles and exploded from the wall. In three strikes, I had cut our job down by a third... of course, after that I was pretty much useless.

Once the wall was demolished, we cleaned the room, repainted it, and generally lightened the place up. It was like a new room. In fact, it was so nice, it was absconded by the SRC (or Student Affairs... I forget which insidious body ripped it from our grasp) the next year.

So I leave you with this word of advice for which ever room you will end up in the next reshuffle... nurture the rats, cockroaches and spiders that are willing to live in harmony with you, as they will be your shields against the greedy fingers of "the Establishment".