A Miscellany of Projects - Gaming, SCA Combat, Arts & Sciences, and Travel

Ideas are dangerous things. In 1996, I was an extremely intelligent, but extremely inexperienced, teenager.  The combinaton of intelligence and inexperience is important in this context, because it creates a target audience for a certain type of book, inviting the reader to believe they're part of some hidden knowledge.  I read a lot of what I suppose could be called "conspiracy" books - Baigent, Lincoln, and Leigh's Holy Blood, Holy Grail , von Däniken, Sitchin, the whole nine yards.  I've re-read many of them since, and found them almost universally full of steaming garbage.  I've also watched them become increasingly mainstreamed - HBHG  as Da Vinci Code . von Däniken and company explicitly in Ancient Aliens. Then there is Graham Hancock. A quick history - Hancock was a moderately successful journalist working in a variety of difficult, dangerous places on difficult, dangerous topics.  He actually wrote a very good, and very successful, expose of the global

  I would love to give this book five stars out of five, but cannot. I found this book promising but deeply frustrating; it is essentially two books, and each of these books is itself a collection of essays rather than a cohesive whole.  The first book is a historiography of Chinese martial arts manuals, discussing the problems of age, the tendency of martial artists to exaggerate the accomplishments of the past, and the Republican Chinese renaissance of martial arts from a generally military field to a more broadly based cultural phenomenon.  This is the half written primarily by Brian Kennedy.  It is not perfect; Kennedy and Guo are very obviously xingyi practitioners and write what they know, and they are both far more familiar with developments in Taiwan than in China as a whole, including Hong Kong, the mainland, and Macau - again, writing what they know, and in the process illustrating the areas that they don't  know and didn't research as heavily. Before I continue, a no

 I have recently acquired Tom Leoni's translation of Capoferro's Gran Simulacro  and a historical survey of Chinese martial arts manuals.  I'll be reviewing these soon enough, but Capoferro specifically helped to crystallize a thought that's been brewing for a while. The thought is this: there are two schools of thought on how to train for combat in general.  One of these starts from first principles then works down to specific examples, the other trains specific examples and the student is expected, via practice, to derive first principles.  Perhaps the greatest historical example of this divide is the argument between Carranza and Pacheco on one side, and Godinho on the other - Carranza being of the opinion that fencing can be distilled to principles and the exacting application of these principles through practice being the key to victory, while Godinho believes that knowledge of the principles is revealed by the practice itself.  I am, of course, using Godinho to s

 Previously , I discussed both an alternate "modern world" and its background, and how I would interpret portions of this in Savage Worlds.  Today, having dealt with an extreme case in " magic Chernobyl ," I will discuss an intermediate state, roughly equivalent to the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and another industrial disaster. Picatinny Arsenal has been involved in armaments production in one form or another since the Revolutionary War; tradition has it that there was a cannon forge on the site in the 1770s and the Arsenal proper was established in the 1880s as a powder storehouse and later manufacturer.  Today it is perhaps best known as the place where mounting rails for firearms were standardized in the 1990s, but at one time it was the primary repository for ammunition on the east coast of the United States, a major center of manufacture and research in artillery propellant, payload, and fuzes, a role it continues to this day.  In the 1920s, a large p

  Therefore, I posit the following propositions: First, that no elemental source may be created, nor destroyed, save by the action of elemental or physical forces in exponential proportion to the strength of the source created. Second, that the force created upon an elemental source is inversely proportional to the distance of the actor. Third, that the force exerted by an elemental source is exponentially proportional to the degree of purity of the source. Fourth, that the force exerted by an elemental source is exponentially proportional to the degree of difference in kind between sources. - Newton, Systema Mundi --- Previously , I discussed the evolution of a system parallel to modern science, of alchemical transformation based on the classical elements, up to Newton's publication of the Principia . What practical differences does such a system make? First, some terminology.  I've already discussed "binding" and "sources" without defining such elements. 

    Note, then, that for each Effect, there is a Cause, and that the Cause must be proportional to the Effect, and that Causes can be compounded by their increase in both magnitude and type; however, an imbalance in Causes must of necessity create an imbalance of Effects.  Further, the compounded Causes are such that no lesser Cause may produce a greater Effect, nor even shall be equal to the Effect, save by proportion, for in all matter there is resistance to action in proportion to its mass.     - Isaac Newton, "Principles of Alchemy," 1686 --- For about a year, I've been trying to figure out how to create what I think of as "magic Chernobyl," or rather a magical equivalent to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster without resorting to it as simply "big explosion, deal with it."  Finally, two days ago, it came to me pretty much fully-formed. The basis of diversion is that the classical Greek elements - earth, fire, air, and water - are expressions of universal