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

As I wrote up elsewhere , in the alternate Great War setting I am writing up, German scientist Dr. Fritz Haber, in our world the father of chemical warfare, took his prodigious talents a step further and reanimated corpses to solve Germany's desperate manpower shortages.  It is time to put some statistics to that. Dr. Fritz Haber, inventor of the Haber Process Dr. Fritz Haber's revolutionary, some would say immoral, process to reanimate the recently dead relies on modern chemistry and a large electric battery to overcome some of the cessation of natural function at death.  The results of the Haber Process - a term previously applied to the manufacture of nitrates for explosives - are not perfect, but they have allowed Germany to tap previously unimaginable personnel reserves.  These are neither the shuffling "Habers" of later horror movies, nor the mind-controlled "Zombi" popularized in American fiction after the occupation of Haiti, but rather a reanimated,...

There is a tendency to teach hard skills - structure, technique, footwork, et cetera - when teaching new students, with the idea that they   have  to understand those before soft skills - measure, timing, touch, and decision-making - can be of any use to them.  I believe this approach is mistaken. There are practical reasons for teaching it this way - knowing   when  to throw a punch is less useful than knowing   how  to throw a punch, to use the most basic example - but I increasingly believe that the two skillsets need to be taught in parallel.  Let's use an example from my experience. Fiore's first master and first two plays of the longsword in two hands goes from a crossing at the point, breaks sword-to-sword contact, and thrusts.  It's dirt-simple, but as I keep hearing in shinkage, it is simple, it is not easy.  It's also almost   all  soft skills.  To teach that as part of a series to otherwise untrained students, t...

As I discussed   elsewhere , my wife and I went to San Antonio for her birthday, and for one of those days went on a tour of alcohol acquisition in central Texas.  I've already covered the meaderies we visited - Rohan in La Grange and Texas Mead Works in Hye - and here I will cover the other three stops. Hye Cider Company   is, by a quirk of brewing, the oldest meadery in Hye - a cyser is a hybrid made with pears or apples and honey in various proportions, and Hye Cider stocks mostly cyser rather than purebred cider, which uses primarily fruit sugars for fermentation.  That is hardly its only claim to fame, but it is worth noting because my first memory of Hye Cider Company is a few years ago, watching honeybees trying to collect sugars from their countertop.  Their entire sales area is open to the outside world, which can impact tasting flavors depending on the season.  Colder weather tends to suppress some of the aromatic components of taste, while hot we...

I have elsewhere covered the   United States ,   Germany , and   Britain  in what I have increasingly started thinking of as the Electric Age.  Today, we shall be discussing Russia. As the meetings of Tesla and Rice, and Hülsmeyer and the German admiralty, more than show, sometimes small changes can lead to great outcomes.  Sometimes, however, events cannot be left to small changes.  Thus it was that, on March 13, 1881, no fewer than   three  bombers of the Russian domestic terror organization   Narodna Volya  (The People's Will) attempted to assassinate Tsar Alexander II.  Their failure was due to a combination of providence, poor bomb-making skills, and the swift, decisive action of Frank Joseph Jackowski, a Polish nobleman who had been riding with the Tsar in his carriage.  Jackowski bodily covered the Tsar until his guards could whisk him away to the Winter Palace, and in so doing doomed himself.  Jackowski was on...

Continuing writing down thoughts on worldbuilding for a game I may never have a chance to run... No nation entered the Great War as well-prepared for global war, and as ill-prepared for a European war, as the United Kingdom.  Britain's global empire meant that the Royal Navy was the best-trained, best-equipped fleet in the world; meanwhile, the British Army, even with extensive experience in colonial war, was tiny compared to their Continental rivals.   British industry had catapulted the country out of the Enlightenment and into the Industrial Revolution, and the foundation of this industry was the railroad.  By the mid-1840s, two schools of thought had emerged and the first of the great industrial wars - the Gauge War - began.  The two schools were the Wide Gauge, championed by Sir Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and the Narrow Gauge, championed by George and Robert Stephenson.  Despite the term "Gauge War," Brunel and the younger Stephenson began their careers ...

Continuing from   yesterday's post , discussing the American point of departure for a gaming world I've had brewing for a while - and the first of the Entente powers - time to cross the trenches and discuss the Central Powers, specifically Germany. The first forty years of German history were marked by rapid expansion of industrial and military power and an increasing rigidity of thought.  The nation that had produced Goethe and the revolutions of 1848 was now the nation of compulsory peacetime military service and international exhibitions devoted to artillery.  At the same time, though, the "Electric '80s" of America had a German mirror, spearheaded by Siemens & Halske of Berlin.  As Edison General Electric was to the American market, so Siemens & Halske was to Europe from Belfast to the Bosporus.  Siemens was one of the first true multi-national corporations, with branches in London, Constantinople, Moscow, and Tokyo. In the Wireless War, German resea...

Over the years, my wife and I have become drinkers.  Perhaps more importantly, we have a defined palate.  We have a   preferred Washington bourbon provider  (Heritage Distilling Company, for those who don't want to click through, in various spots in the Pacific Northwest), a   preferred Washington cider provider  (Finnriver Cider, in Chimacum, WA), a   preferred Texas meadery  (Dancing Bee, in Rogers, TX), have made elaborate side-trips to stop at   a meadery we like   (Redstone Meadery, Boulder, CO), and have even occasionally made borderline-dangerous U-turns in the rain to stop at   meaderies we spotted from the road   (The Meading Room, Sonoita, AZ).  We have a  preferred import brand of mead  (Dansk Mjød).  It's so far-gone that we currently have something along the lines of twenty stored gallons of homebrew and are considering getting a still. Especially when it comes to mead, in other words, we have s...