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 glo...

  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 ...