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

 In cooperation with the incomparable Lindsey Pickard, the following are the tasting notes from Bourbon Madness Night, also known as "what happens when your extrovert friend organizes a small party and then gets sick and can't show up."  All of the following are what I was sent as messages as we were going through my bourbon stockpile.  It is worth noting that there's some synesthesia even when she's sober.  I'm sharing all of this because she did a pretty good job of expressing flavor complexity in a way that I wouldn't normally manage, even if she will probably go "oh God" and hide under something as soon as I post this. She established fairly early on that bourbon's default color is apparently a dark green, like a hunter green or a rifle green, which led to some re-tasting to see what else was in there.  Where possible, I have linked back to my own previous reviews of the same material.  I have lightly edited and reorganized to group produ...

One of the senior students at shinkage said something a few weeks ago that stuck with me - that styles that focused on duels tended to have closer, tighter stances than shinkage, which almost elevates distance from the body to the point of principle.  That, combined with a  video  from Marky Berryman of the Exiles, and Fiore's remarks on what each position can do, got me expanding on my thoughts from the last  Post Office  post. Let's revisit what Fiore has to say about position equivalence, so we have some textual grounding.  Keep in mind that I strongly prefer the term "position" to "guard" - a position is a decision point, from whence you can do things; a "guard" is a position where you are proof against someone else doing something to you.  This may be semantic, but I feel it represents a substantial mindset difference.  In any case, Fiore is here describing two different applications of   posta di donna  that look radically differen...

Outside of Summersville is a small distillery and winery, Kirkwood Winery and   Isaiah Morgan Distillery . which sells rye, moonshine, and bourbon in addition to an exceptionally wide selection of sweet wines - although they no longer sell mead, to my great disappointment.  Their distillery looks pretty much what you'd expect from a still in West Virginia, and they play up the country moonshiner angle as much as they can.  The entire operation is rustic wood and low-slung cabin and barn construction, a far cry from the slick, industrialized-genteel kinds of places that you find in Kentucky.  I cannot speak for anyone else, but I find the big distilleries a little impersonal, and therefore appreciate the smaller places.  There are other reasons for this; buying two bottles of Jack Daniels, for instance, will make no difference, but buying two bottles of Isaiah Morgan (or   Black Patch , or...) feels like you've helped keep someone in business. We picked up t...

In a rather sketchy-looking light-industrial park behind a Wal-Mart in Madison, Alabama, there is a hidden gem of a distillery.  Black Patch Distilling Company  is a veteran-owned and operated small family-business distillery.  Those who were here for the Hye Rum  review probably remember that I like to get the site description out of the way up front, so here goes: Black Patch is in the back of an industrial park in Madison, which is like Huntsville's boring cousin.  Madison isn't bad , but it's like the Hollywood version of the boring nerd girl everyone neglects while noticing her cool sister Huntsville.  Driving up on Black Patch, it doesn't look like much.  We didn't even think it was a distillery until we saw the logo. Personally, I find the logo a little on-the-nose, I don't like the Corinthian as a helmet, and I was a tad leery of the vet-bro vibe.  There is nothing about owning a DD214 that automatically makes you less of a jerk, or makes ...

  I came to Doris Kearns Goodwin's   The Bully Pulpit  expecting to be impressed; I had, after all, enjoyed   Team of Rivals  immensely, and Theodore Roosevelt has long been one of my personal heroes.  Instead, I found myself disappointed both in the book and in TR. Goodwin sets out to chronicle three separate but linked stories here.  First is the story of Theodore Roosevelt, who defined his age to the point that, a century later, we remember who he was while forgetting the presidents around him.  Second is the story of another, more easily forgotten president - William Howard Taft, Roosevelt's hand-picked successor and the only man ever to serve as both president and a Supreme Court justice, who is remembered, if he is remembered at all, for being fat.  Third is the story of an era of journalism focused on politically charged exposes and a breach between old and new formats - the era of the muckrakers, focused on the staff of   McClure...

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...