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

Continuing lesson plan, and maintaining front-end material because it's there for a reason and is an important part of any series of lessons.  It can be skipped with minimal loss if read in series, but on refresher read, it matters.  Note also that, from here, the drills are about developing the skills needed to be a successful fighter, not merely the skills needed to get on the field effectively, so they may be run in any order, although I feel the order they are presented is a logical one.  At this point, after a month of practices, a fighter should begin developing a feel for how they move on the field, and the degree of difficulty, and the focus of drills, can change from "how to use the equipment" to "how to fight."  I would go so far as to describe this series of drills as the first "sustainment" drills, because experienced fighters will benefit from doing them to sustain skills. Also, because I find it amusing, I wrote this lesson plan's ro...

Finally, after weeks of thinking through the required skills, the time has come for the first four weeks of drills and lessons for a heavy combat curriculum.  The goal is to start with basic skills and get students swinging sticks, rather than throwing everything at them at once. General Material Command and Control Unless someone is helping with a lesson, and has been recognized and designated as such ahead of class and introduced to the class as such, despite all temptation, they need to stay out of the way and not overrun the class. Corrections Corrections need to be made as close to the moment the need is detected as possible, need to be physical rather than verbal, and need to be brief (adjust the arm into the right place, don't tell them where, and don't describe endlessly, just do it ). Equipment All of the lessons are designed to be taught without armor as slow work.  Students and demonstrators will need a rattan sword with which they are comfortable, and a shield...

It is impossible to structure an open-ended curriculum.  This is generally why open-ended study systems don't typically have lesson plans and structures the way that, for instance, a semester-based plan does.  This has historically been the approach for SCA fighter practices - if there is structure, it is largely self-imposed.  This has advantages - it is sustainable effectively indefinitely, and it rewards self-starting learners, who tend to be the best long-term students because they already have a strong interest.  However, it suffers from severe disadvantages in instructing new fighters, which is where the SCA historically suffers the highest attrition. My goal, then, is to structure a series of lessons sufficient to present new fighters the fundamentals of SCA heavy combat, the historical grounding for it, and the game-isms of the SCA.  I have separately defined the fundamentals as what I think of as the Six Skills - stance, footwork, attack, defense, condi...

There are many ways to structure a drill.  Guy Windsor's four-step approach - attack, defense, counter, counter-counter - has its roots in the layout of Fiore's Flower of Battle , where this was the basic structure of a page.  Another approach is to separate the action into its individual beats, and use those as a counter; this is generally the easiest way to improvise a drill to teach an activity.  I'm sure others will arise, but those are the two I've wound up using most frequently. The first step in any training activity, though, is to define the objective.  What are you trying to teach or learn with the drill, pell session, sparring, et cetera? Undirected practice is not practice, it's play.  "Have fun" should always be one of the training objectives, but it is very often far down the list, given the amount of repetitive movement involved in drill work, pell work, et cetera.  Instead, concrete examples - "today we are going to work on closure sh...

Mental preparation consists of all of the intangible training required to be successful in a field.  In the case of SCA combat, this includes everything from meditative techniques or clearing the mind to just knowing what "hold" means.  Like physical conditioning, mental preparation is mostly an artifact of other training.  It is possible to construct drills specifically to train some mental skills, such as measure and targeting, but they rely on other skills for execution - a walking drill where one opponent throws a shot as soon as the other comes into range, in order to teach measure, still requires a shot thrown, for instance. Mental skills, as I define them, include both the basic combative mindset and knowledge of the rules, and things like measure, tempo, and timing, which are intangible but must be trained nonetheless. Even at this overview level, it would look like there is room for confusion - tempo and timing? Yes, tempo is the pace of the fight, and timing, a...

Therefore there is no doubt at all but that a man's strength may be increased by reasonable exercise, And so likewise by too much rest it may be diminished: the which if it were not manifest, yet it might be proved by infinite examples. You shall see Gentlemen, Knights and others, to be most strong and nimble in running or leaping, or in vaulting, or in turning on Horseback, and yet are not able by a great deal to bear so great a burden as a Country man or Porter: But in contrary in running and leaping, the Porter and Country man are most slow and heavy, neither know how to vault upon their horse without a ladder. And this proceeds of no other cause, than for that every man is not exercised in that which is most esteemed: So that if in the managing of these weapons, a man would get strength, it shall be convenient for him to exercise himself in such sort as shall be declared. - Giacomo di Grassi Conditioning is, in this context, the required cultivatable physical attri...

Defense is simply that which prevents one from being harmed.  In the context of SCA combat, it can be divided into three sub-categories: armor, deflection, and mobility.  As mentioned in my discussion of attack, armor plays very little role in protecting the SCA fighter or a HEMA tournament fighter - the assumption is that a blow is good when it hits the body.  There is a great debate that could be had about the correctness of this interpretation, but that is the game we play.  Deflection, meanwhile, is most of what shields do - blocking attacks from reaching the body in the first place.  Finally, mobility is the art of not being where the blow lands.  Because great weapons, two-handed weapons, and two-weapon fighters have much less to work with on defense, this is where their defenses tend to focus. Our period sources for defense tend to focus on two kinds - deflection, in the form of parry, and mobility, in the form of steps off the line.  Part of th...

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is a large cave complex in southeastern New Mexico, outside the city of Carlsbad.  In the right season, it is also one of the largest migratory bat colonies in the world, and the bats are supposedly what led to the exploration of the cave in 1898.  The place appeals to me for a number of reasons - the story of its exploration, the geology, and the beauty of the setting, in no particular order.  This was not my first visit to the park, though it was the first under COVID restrictions.  The extent of Carlsbad's COVID response deserves some discussion, and it is something that every visitor needs to be aware of before going, so I will address it first. Carlsbad is easily the largest destination of any that we visited; on a previous visit, its off-season crowds looked like any of our other destinations' spring-break crowd.  In a good year, the cave system has multiple guided tour options and bat flights, and the park is a dark sky des...