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

 I have an idea I've been storing up for years, and have never actually bothered to put on paper, so here goes, since the odds of it coming to publication are, among my other hobbies, slim to none. In December of 1884, Thomas Edison walked into the offices of the Edison Machine Works to find his staff in an uproar.  A young Serbian engineer named Nikola Tesla was protesting that Charles Batchelor, the office manager, had promised him an improbably large bonus if he could complete a Herculean series of engineering challenges, and the last of them was now on Batchelor's desk.  When Edison asked what the number was, he was shocked: $50,000, enough to set the young Serbian up for life if he was careful with his money.  "Well, Charlie," reports have Edison saying, "better pay the man." Tesla proved almost impossible as an employee.  He was brilliant but erratic, exasperating, bad at taking notes and documenting his processes, and terrible at refining his ideas in...

Over the July 4th weekend, my wife and I took a trip to San Antonio and environs to celebrate her birthday.  We stayed at the   Emily Morgan Hotel   on Alamo Plaza, in one of their Alamo-view rooms.  I narrowed the choices for this stay to the Emily Morgan and the   Menger ; both are excellent historic hotels with their own stories, and my choice boiled down in the end to the fact that I have a Hilton Honors account and the Emily Morgan is a Hilton hotel. The Emily Morgan is on the north side of Alamo Plaza adjacent to the courthouse and post office, and consists of two wings of fourteen stories each, in a V-shape, with a bell tower or lookout on top of the junction of the V.  There is a pool on the second floor; while it was open, we did not use it.  We also did not take advantage of the hotel restaurant, Oro, or the bar or room service, so I cannot comment on any of these amenities.  We stayed in Room 407, on the southeast corner of the south wi...

Recently, because of my parallel study of Fiore and shinkage, I've been running into a problem with the "official" version of both, as demonstrated in lessons or manuscripts.  Both schools teach a philosophy of reacting to openings, rather than forcing an outcome, so I feel there's adequate basis for discussion.  The basic problem is this: There are a number of critical lessons that aren't taught, either directly or by implication.  They both do a good job of teaching, by implication, things like measure and timing, because you drill to find the exact moment and distance in which you can Do The Thing.  They also assume that there are fractional differences in skill or ability between two combatants, such that a truly "even" fight never occurs.  What they   don't  teach is what happens when a fight is too close to call. This happens on a fairly regular basis in SCA heavy combat, where two combatants will exchange half a dozen blows each without any of...

  In my last post , I discussed footwork, and started to develop a reference pool from which to draw.  As a quick refresher, there are basically only three ways to move the feet: turning, passing, and advancing.  Fiore's terminology is voltare  (related to the English word "revolution"), passare  (related to... now prepare for this leap of linguistics... "pass"), and accressere  (related to the English word "increase").  He adds tornare  - a retreating passing step - and decressere  - same, but for an advance.  Let's discuss an example. For my money, the best series of plays demonstrating footwork in Fiore is on Getty leaf 20r (the beginning of sword in one hand) and 20v.  20r shows three ruffians - the Italian description is "cowards" - attacking the master; the following page shows four potential responses by the "scholars," or the master's students.  With one notable exception, they all use the same footwork, so for brev...