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

Mystery Science Theater 3000  once had a recurring gag where TV's Frank would announce that some terrible movie, say, Gamera vs. Gaos , was "a triumph of the human spirit" in the tones of an overblown film reviewer who'd spent the last week on a steady diet of amphetamines and Chariots of Fire .  It takes a lot to make The Room  into an unironic triumph of the human spirit, but that's what Sestero manages. Sestero takes two narrative threads - his relationship with The Room  and his relationship with the movie's creator, Thomas P. Wiseau, better known as Tommy Wiseau - and runs them in parallel until the concluding chapter.  Given that separating Wiseau from The Room  is impossible, the separation is more a matter of the focus of the moment, and on the timeline of storytelling, rather than a true separation.  Because Sestero is at the same time describing his mostly unsuccessful efforts to become a working actor during the same period, the paralle...

It's Valentine's Day, and like many couples, my wife and I spent it doing things together.  Specifically, we spent it starting a batch of bochet out of an extra half-gallon of mesquite honey we had lying around.  For those who don't know, bochet is a mead made from caramelized honey.  This was a much more technically demanding task than the simple 3:1 and yeast that we'd been doing, or even throwing fruit in there and hoping it sticks.  Caramelization was the complication; the recipe was still 3:1, aiming at two gallons, using standard champagne yeast. Now, the first thing you need to know about our setup is that it is thoroughly non-scientific, partly because of a lack of appropriate instrumentation, partly because literally anyone could learn to do it this way with the least complicated setup imaginable.  If I were to do this for a living, like the folks at Dancing Bee , in Rogers, Texas, who taught us, I'd have the same commercial setup and careful controls f...

Cover of the First Edition, "The Bellatrix System" I have been trying for more than a year to force myself through Paul Porter's "The Bellatrix System: Techniques and Tactics for SCA Armored Combat."  Paul Porter is, in the SCA, known as Duke Paul of Bellatrix.  He is rightly a legend in the SCA; he's won the highest honors we offer more than once, his sons  have done the same, and while I can't speak to all of them, I know one of his grandsons, and he's on the same course.  Porter's power-generation techniques, drawn from outside martial-arts experience, literally revolutionized the way we hit each other; I've watched videos from before Paul of Bellatrix and after Paul of Bellatrix, and he brought body mechanics that were simply missing into the SCA.  Not only that, but Paul of Bellatrix has a well-deserved reputation for being not only a teacher, not only a good teacher, but an excellent  teacher.  I don't merely say "well-deserved...

Cover of the Second Edition I will start with the things that you must know about Persimmon Wind .  It is an excellent book.  Lowry's writing, on a purely technical level, is concise and well-paced.  He writes on a subject, and a group of people, that are as near as humanly possible to his heart, and he writes in a thoughtful, thought-provoking way.  I disagree with many of his conclusions, but unlike other books I've read (looking at you, Fight Like A Physicist ) where I've disagreed with the author, Lowry's positions did not strike me as inherently disposable. Because of its intimately personal nature, it is impossible to discuss Persimmon Wind without discussing its author.  Dave Lowry is, in modern parlance, a weeb, or, to put it much more politely, a Japanophile par excellence .  There is simply no way around that fact, though Lowry himself would argue... as would every Japanophile... that he simply has a deep appreciation for Japanese culture, alth...

 In case it hasn't been obvious enough, I picked up a lot to think about out of Dave Lowry's Persimmon Wind .  A lot of that is I find value in what he has to say, but an equal amount, I believe, is in what he misses entirely. Let us discuss the formation environment of any martial art, whether it is Liechtenauer, Olympic fencing, Lowry's Yagyuu Shinkage-Ryuu, or modern infantry combat doctrine.  The martial art forms in response to the combat conditions at the time of its inception; at formation, it is generally influenced by what came before it but what came before it proves incapable of solving the problems of the moment.  In the case of modern infantry doctrine, for instance, the foundational squad and fire-team tactics were largely an outgrowth of Vietnam, where the company-scale operations of WW2 proved to be a poor match for the terrain and enemy of Vietnam in most cases, and the entire host of WW2 infantry tactics evolved in response to the technical challeng...

 It has been a while since I did something specifically gaming-related, so I am returning to that topic.  Today, I will be discussing the Obligation Hindrance in Savage Worlds.  Of course, nothing I do is simple, so I will be approaching this through multiple lenses.  The difficulty with multiple lenses is that some part will always be in sharp focus, and some part will be distorted, but this is a subject where multiple interests of mine coincide. As written, the Obligation Hindrance is, like most Savage Worlds Hindrances, deliberately vague about what is exactly implied.  This allows it to be applied across a variety of circumstances.  Some settings, such as Deadlands, have a little more information - a Major Obligation is effectively a full-time job; a Minor Obligation is a part-time job (at least in terms of what we think of as work hours; the truth is a little more complicated in pre-20th Century settings).  The example given is military rank: Offi...

My current audiobook is Dave Lowry's Persimmon Wind.   Lowry, as a modern student of largely extinct martial arts ( koryu , or traditional Japanese martial arts, as opposed to modern martial arts developed post-19th Century), has very much in common with the SCA fighter, though I'm uncertain that he'd recognize it as such, and many SCA fighters probably don't think that far either.  Perhaps a better description would be that he has much in common with, say, Guy Windsor or other modern reconstructionists, but the subject of how much of SCA heavy combat is SCA-ism is not my purpose today (hint: most of it).  Instead, my task is to discuss what is common and effective in fighting in general.  To steal a phrase from an SCA knight I admire, "fighting is fighting." The biggest takeaway from Lowry or Musashi or even Ignatius of Loyola is that combat is fundamentally mental , not physical.  Proper mental preparation for combat is central to success .  Lowry's most...