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

In the past few months of studying shinkage, and teaching Fiore, I've come across two basic theories of teaching swordsmanship.  One is to teach the movements - say, the individual plays of Fiore, or the basic movements of a form.  The other is to teach the underlying principles of the form, the movements, et cetera.  Neither of these is inherently better than the other.  Knowing the principles is useless if the basics aren't solid; knowing the basics alone isn't enough to make a competent swordsman - or for that matter any other trade or craft, from astrophysics to zither playing. For a craft like swordsmanship where words generally aren't enough in the first place, principles should be few in number, easy to remember, and subject to infinite variation in the details.  This is one area where Fiore succeeds and Thibaut, for instance, utterly fails.  Thibaut's Destreza manual gets into obsessive detail about small matters; Fiore's tries to illustrate general...

One of the points I've continuously emphasized while teaching intro to longsword is that Fiore does not have guards.  Fiore has   poste , which translate as "posts" or "positions," rather than "guards."  There are points in   Flower of Battle  where he does refer to them as guards, but I'll let Fiore himself explain why I refer to them as "positions."  This is from the Getty manuscript, Hatcher's translation: Whether you call it a “post” or a “guard”, you are referring to the same stance. As a “guard” it is used defensively, that is you use it to protect yourself and defend yourself from the strikes of your opponent. As a “post” it is used offensively, that is, you use it to position yourself in such a way in relation to your opponent that you can attack him without danger to yourself. Thus, "the guard of the lady" and "the lady's position" are both acceptable translations of   posta di donna .  I prefer positi...

I have elsewhere discussed the "foundation," the "frame," and the "floppy bits."  I've also addressed what that looks like in the first of Fiore's single-hand longsword plays.  That looks a lot like the Yagyû approach of trying to find the opening and moving with suddenness, and it starts to address what footwork can  do, but it doesn't address why it matters in close contact.  For that, let's consider Fiore's crossing at the point. This is the beginning of the zogho largo  plays - that is, "broad" plays, which Guy Windsor makes a convincing (to me at least) case isn't a discussion of measure, but rather of how wide-open your options are.  At this point, either player has all the options on the table, and can move pretty much wherever they like.  Here's what the Fiore play looks like: Here's the Hatcher translation: This Master who is crossed at the point of his sword with this player says: “When I am crossed at...

As I've said before elsewhere , I've stayed at a fair number of luxury hotels at this point.  I've stayed in the cheapest rooms available in some, and expensive rooms in others, and my standards have drifted some over the years.  What I have never done, until now, is felt disappointed in a hotel that I had looked forward to staying in. The   Hilton Palacio del Rio   was a disappointment.  I was primed to enjoy my stay, and there are touches to it that I   really  like.  At the same time, though, the construction of the hotel dictates that its rooms are basically those of a large, well-maintained Hampton Inn.  To understand why I was primed to enjoy it, and what that construction dictates, I will have to tell the story of the Palacio del Rio, and of how I found out about it. In 1967, Conrad Hilton faced a problem.  Simply put, there was no Hilton luxury hotel in convenient distance of the 1968 Hemisfair - the World's Fair held in San Anto...