Swordplay ’11

So. Last weekend was the Swordplay ’11 event, over three days. A quick summary of the weekend:

Friday – catching up with folk I’d not seen for a while, and having some fun play bouts – sword and targe versus sword and buckler with Tim was particularly amusing as I found it nigh impossible to either get around the targe or trick him into doing something silly. We trotted off to lunch at the Flying Nun, during which the heavens opened up and dumped a considerable amount of rain while we tried to convince Puck Curtis that it never rains at this time of year. Through the afternoon I had the distinct pleasure of an impromptu Destreza-101 from Puck, where he dumped about six months of lessons into us in a few hours. The guy is not only a really good swordsman, he’s an outstanding teacher.

Saturday was given over to a full day workshop with Puck, which he broke into two parts. Just over half the day was devoted to working through a set of 10 drills from Rada, and the rest to a flying trup through the basic principles of Destreza, built on top of the Rada drills. Chatting with Puck he mentioned that a translation of Rada is in progress and should be appearing online soon, something which I’m particularly looking forward to: not only are they a nice set of drills just for the sake of drilling, they are beautifully constructed from a didactic and pedagogical point of view. Each builds on the previous, they are self-correcting, and they each allow exploration of variations and subtelties. Touch wood I can turn them into a daily exercise next year.

Sunday was necessarily tied up with the tournament, which flowed very nicely. I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but I was particularly struck by the high degree of courtesy and civility between all participants, by the good quality of the fencing, and came away convinced that the outcome of the tournament was an accurate reflection of the quality of the fencers and a quality of their play. The rules have been simplified and refined over the past few years, and this eliminated the ways in which the scoring system could be deliberately or inadvertently gamed.

The structure of the tournament was tinkered as well, with a “sword” tournament, a “longsword” tournament intended to encourage the Germanic schools to play, and a “mixed” or “open” tournament for the top few particpants in the other two to come together with their weapons of choice. Which pretty well resulted in a lot of longsword versus rapier and dagger, which was great fun for everyone. All in all a significant success for Scott MacDonald.

I’d entered the tournaments for the hell of it, and really didn’t care much about my personal outcomes. I had fun and learned things, and that was and is the only thing that matters to me. Having said that, I want to make some quick notes about my bouts while they are fresh in my mind, so that I can figure out how to improve.

My first longsword bout was with Cassian Humphries. Me in the longsword was a bit silly, as I’ve done very little serious longsword study, and tend to just bang around with a bit of PSSF stuff, a bit of Fiore-ish stuff, and a bit of German-ish stuff. And because we’d had the workshops on Saturday, a bit of Destreza. Cassian had done even less longsword than me, but he’s bigger than me, a lot faster, and a hell of a lot stronger. I did manage to take the bout to sudden-death using a variety of old-man-cunning tricks, but he kept cutting me across the stomach. It wasn’t until a lot later in the day that I could see what he was doing, with a techinque that he’d picked up somewhere and used repeatedly, and effectively: when he was ready to jump in and commit, he’d drop his sword down to the side a bit, do an enormously strong beat with the false edge on a rising cut, then bring it back in a screamingly fast horizontal cut across the belly. I just wish I’d spotted it earlier!

The second longsword bout was a bit of a cheat, as I played with Delia. The trouble with that is because we know each other so well, I was able to just rely on outreaching her, or outmuscling her by taking her sword high and swatting her as she released. All things I will not get away with again.

The way the tournament draw worked (there were an odd number of particpants, so the odd man out at each level fenced a randomly drawn loser from the previous round), I lucked out and went up with Cassian again. The result was fair and unambiguous: as Chris Slee said, I didn’t cover my belly and got hit across it repeatedly. My own sily damned fault. The ultimate reason for it though was interesting: each pass, I resolved to just hang out and wait for Cassian to come to me, to deal with him on my terms. And each time, after waiting a while, the PSSF instinct tickled my brain “hey, nothing’s happening, it’s boring for the audience, do something”, and in I would go, throwing something to draw out a response – which he ignored each time, did the false-edge beat, and cut me across the gut. So it goes.

My initial sword bout with Tim Harris was great fun. I think I had poor Tim at a disadvantage – we’d talked about what combination of weapons we might play with before hand, and I was encouraging him to use his targe, but he opted out of courtesy for the rules to use a borrowed buckler instead with his backsword. I’d also borrowed a sword, to fit in the weapons specification, and found it was a lovely little snakey thing that moved like lightning. Thus it felt like Tim was caught out by the buckler being smaller than he expected, and I was able to sneak shots over the top. For some reason we kept getting stuck in the corner – it could have been that’s where the shade was best!

The next sword bout was fun, but highlights my defects rather well. Bob Dodson is getting fast, and has developed good accuracy on the thrust. We had a yarn just before we went on and opted just to go for rapier alone, for the hell of it. The outcome was rather telling – any time I compromised my distance, Bob would pop in a thrust, usually to my right shoulder as I attempted one of the big open attacks we’re conditioned by PSSF to do. If I went far enough around to his right, I could get the cut or thrust over his sword into his head, but I found myself tired enough – and my right elbow was starting to really hurt again – that I couldn’t do that consistently, and he knocked me out of contention. And again, there’s no argument that the most martially correct fencing carried the day there.

Looking back over the notes above, which I’ve dribbled out through the day in gaps in my work, the word that sticks out is “fun”. I had fun in the competition bouts, and fun in the competition, which surprises me. I usually do not like or enjoy competition much, and very much prefer to play with swords in a context where I can just bash around and explore things, the sort of play where you can say “that was cool, do it again so I can figure it out”. On the other hand, I do agree with Scott MacDonald’s assertion: if you’re serious about studying these obsolete arts, you need to take it out and test drive your ideas.

The tournament component of Swordplay XX (and I really wish more people would remember that the tournament component is only a minor part of the event) is evolving into a really nice place to test yourself, and schools to test themselves. The atmosphere is collegiate and respectful, the stakes are low and abstract, and there’s no shame or loss in not coming out on top of the ladder.

Justin popped up to the top of all three bits of the tournament not because he’s fit, strong, fast, and tall. He’s taken in the sworplay ideas from his school, learned them well, and applied them with great technical competence. Next year he might do the same, or it might be someone else, and it doesn’t matter: the aim of the tournament is met, individuals and schools tested themselves, and everyone had fun doing it.

A final note though. It really saddened me that so few from PSSF came along on the Saturday, and to a lesser extent on the Friday. PSSF had a performance gig on Sunday, so it was understandable that people may not come to watch the tournament, and it is appreciable that folk may have trouble getting out of work on the Friday to take more advantage of the social fencing. But for folk to pass up the opportunity to attend a workshop with someone of Puck’s stature is inexplicable. For folk to pass up the opportunity to spend time with their peers and confreres from other states and schools is just sad. There’s nothing to lose in going out to have a bash around with other sword students, and much to gain. And the really silly thing? Once more people from other schools expressed disappointment that they couldn’t meet with and talk to PSSF students because they wanted to find out how PSSF achieves their fluidity and style.

The tongue-in-cheek motto that Scott has launched for Swordplay ’12 says it all: “If you’re not there, you’re not serious”.

Things I Won’t Miss: Item The Second

I was going to write a big rant about public transport in Brisbane, again, and even began writing one. But there’s really not much point. And I really should try to follow the dictum about remaining silent unless I have something nice to say. But I don’t.

So here it is. My message to Translink, and to Queensland Rail, and to Brisbane City Council and the Moreton Bay Regional Council: guys and gals, your transport system sucks. It’s broken, it’s annoying, it’s expensive, it’s slow, and it’s getting worse.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to be facing trains that are more crowded, probably more grubby, roads that are more packed, buses that are more rattly. But it won’t be in an environment where the service providers keep telling me that they’ve provided a great service, and that they mostly run to time and I shouldn’t expect perfection, and that the 15% fare increase so far this year is because I wanted it.

So no, I’m not going to miss any part of getting around Brisbane.

Things I will Miss: Item the First

Gum trees. And jacarandas, and leopard trees, and those sprawling shady ones with bright red flowers. And the trees in the neighbourhood – such that remain after the frenzy of tree lopping subsequent to the Big Storms before the Big Floods distracted the lopperatzi. But gum trees in particular. Not just the way they look, with their shaggy shambling foliage, and the startling diversity of textures in their bark. And not just the way they smell, although that will be part of it.

Have you ever stopped to notice how the smell of gums changes through the day, and through the year? In the cool morning air the eucalyptus scent is subtle, penetrating, ringing like a very faint chime in the distance. Under a summer sun as the cicadas ratchet up to electric intensity the scent boils out like a great soft heavy blanket. And as the sun sets the smell becomes dusty and smokey. I imagine there will be some other trees that take their place, and I know there are gums all over the world now – some of the oddest cognitive dissonance watching the continuing collapse of the old regime in Libya is seeing rows of gum trees along the street, presumably planted in the ’40s or ’50s. Maybe I will smell cypresses, or yews, or mountain-side conifers instead.

But in the end there is nothing that says Australia, or Brisbane, more than a towering grey green white grey gum tree in the evening with cockatoos or galahs or rosellas hanging heavy on the branch like fruit ready to drop, or a gum tree in the early morning with a family of squabbling kookaburras or caroling magpies.

I think I will miss gum trees.

Things I won’t miss. Item the First

The weather. Really, anyone outside Brisbane must think we live in an idyllic sub-tropical paradise, featuring sunshine and palm trees and tall cool drinks. In point of fact, the weather is a big contributor to my decision to Get The Hell Out Of Here.

Don’t get me wrong – April and October are glorious. Both are crisply cool at the right times of the day, and pleasantly warm at the others, and both have skies so clear that we can read the writing on the plaques on the moon. April in Brisbane invigorates, and October excites. I find the rest of the year alternately poisonous and irritating.

The long crawl into and through Summer is characterised by high temperatures and high humidity, and the violent storms bring no relief, only more water to saturate the air. It’s too hot not to be in the shade, and the still damp air in the shade requires scuba gear to breathe. Your skin feels sticky all the time, and your clothes cling to you like plastic wrap.

Winter is almost worse, and last weekend was a good example. We were camped out for a living history event, a most pleasant and fun weekend hosted by Condottieri. The nights were cool – not cold, it never gets that cold in Brisbane, only down to the point of needing a blanket or too, and a warm coat to go to the nearest tree when required – and the mornings were crisp. And the middle of the day was damned hot in the sun, too hot to really be wearing heavy 15th century clothes, let alone flailing around with swords and halberds. And on Sunday it rained. Now rain is ok. It was cool rain, and heavier than I enjoyed knowing that the tent was not going to be dry when I took it down, but not unpleasant. Until it stopped, and the day just turned sullen and warm and sodden and damp.

One or the other is pleasant. Hot and dry. Cold and dry. Even cold and damp, or cold and wet, can be borne and worked around. But Hot and Wet is awful, debilitating, draining, and inescapable.

So no, I won’t miss Brisbane weather. Except maybe a little bit in April and October.

Here we go

We’ve talked about this for a long time in general terms. We’ve talked about it for most of the year in specific terms. And now, having booked plane tickets to fly out of Brisbane at 3:00 AM on November 25th, we’re talking about it in absolutely concrete terms.

I’m not counting down. I’ve promised to not count down. But my goodness there’s a lot to get done.

I am surprised how complicated it is to clear the house out in preparation for renting it. I would have thought that I would be overrun by people wanting cheap or free Stuff, but that’s not proving the case. Oh, I listed a lot of tools for ridiculously low prices, and most of that has gone, or is going. I’ve passed along a few books (and there’s another 98 listed available for the taking in this list. There’s a few simple things that I’ve done, or can do. The filing cabinet has been purged, and is gone, and most of the should-retain paper is boxed up. I’ll take all the CDs out of their cases and put them in sleeves in a small box. And probably do the same with DVDs. I know where the computers are going, and where I can store things.

But good grief, every time I look in a cupboard I think “what on earth will I do with this”.

Perhaps we should have a garage/house/porch sale. Put everything on the floor and say “take it, it’s yours”

Listening for a voice that is gone

My cat has died, and my heart is aching. Miss Kitty is gone away forever, and I am shattered.

She was in the cattery over the weekend while I was away at Abbey, and as I drove out to get her on Monday afternoon they rang to tell me that she had passed away on Sunday night. I went to see her a last time, and she was curled up in a rug as though asleep. Gone.

They say that she was happy and content and comfortable when they left her on Sunday night, and that she looked to have just passed away quietly in her sleep. She is gone, and I am shattered.

She was my companion, my friend, a personality even though not a person, a mind and a soul, cat-shaped but present. I lived with her for over twenty years, longer than I lived with anyone, longer than I lived with my parents. My cat has died, and my heart is aching.

She was so tiny, even when she was plump, and sparklingly alive. Her ears were torn – once from having a go at a Boxer dog, once from chasing an irate pheasant hen. In her youth she was a ferocious mouser, a terror to grasshoppers, and once bought me a pigeon. She ate lemon grass, and pestered me for the freshest green tips. I grew extra for her, and she would sleep beneath it.

Miss Kitty is gone away forever, and I am shattered.

I keep listening for her, wondering where she is. She talked a lot, telling me where she was and what she was doing, always seeking me out to be near me. She always knew when I was sad, or lonely, or sick, and would lean up against me to sleep. I open the front door, and wonder why she is not there to greet me, or calling out to let me know where she is. I open the back door, and wonder why she’s not waiting to come in and be fed. I see the places in the garden where she has squirmed around and made cat-sized depressions to sleep in the sun.

My cat has died, and my heart is aching.

 

Miss Kitty’s Villanelle

Review – Teaching and Interpreting Historical Swordsmanship

Brian R. Price, ed.
ISBN 1-891448-46-3

This slim volume is very much a mixed batch. Reading it I could not quite decide if that was intentional, or the result of somewhat imprecise invitations to contribute, and I’m unlikely to ever know which it was.

Brian Price put together this collection of essays from a very wide variety of modern teachers and interpreters of historical swordplay some years ago, and it is intriguing to compare what was published here and how things are standing now, particularly as there is a growing movement toward providing a space for competition in historical sword play.

Putting aside any carping, most of the articles in here were fascinating, and there is a high degree of agreement between different teachers around the approach to Teaching and Interpreting swordplay. A handful of articles deal with specific technique, a handful use specific technique to illustrate a teacher’s approach to interpretation or teaching, and some like Stephen Hand’s look at a philosophy of teaching and interpretation.

It was this latter topic that particularly interested me (although Johann Heim’s article on versetzen introduced me to a lovely set of longsword ideas), and the topic that had broad agreement from the other authors. There is a core didactic problem with teaching from historical manuals, or from interpretations of historical manuals. If we go back 10 or 15 years, there was such a paucity of material available, and in such poor quality, that there was a fair degree of emphasis on interpreting the illustrations, not the accompanying text. Serious students quickly discovered that this was woefully inadequate, and that the text was the important thing, with the illustrations supporting the text, rather than the other way around.

That’s where things get messy. As Chris Tobler notes, these texts are not only in very foreign languages, they are littered with dense jargon and precise technical terms that are seldom explained. That makes interpretation – in both senses of the word – difficult, but there’s evidence from these articles that there is a definite trend toward collaborative and cooperative interpretation, enchanced and not detracted by differing interpretations of specific techniques.

The nice thing that is happening is that there has been a general recognition that historical manuals contain codifications of principles, exemplified by specific applications of those principles, and illustrated in part by the images. There are a variety of these general principles held up as exemplars – Silver’s times, the Lichtenauer Versetzen and the guards in Fiore/Vadi.

Balanced against these more philosophical articles are some really nice descriptions of different ways of managing the activity in the salle, different approaches to drills, and even a nice article on how to deal with different personalities and body sizes.

A few of the articles are a bit grating – Price’s own contribution spends some time talking about himself and his experiences, and Chelak’s felt somewhat vague – but overall this is a collection well worth reading.

The context of teaching and interpreting swordplay in the modern world is obviously hugely different to the historical context, and there are significant modern difficulties that need to be overcome. It is encouraging that there is patently a broad and intelligent community of teachers and interpreters considering the difficulties, and communicating a variety of very nice solutions.

Going fast, buy now

So the wheels on the great unannounced project have begun to turn, and I’m thinking I’ll let the cat out of the bag soon. Or introduce a mixed metaphor of unspecified gender and culturel heritage.

To begin with, I definitely need to be disposing of a good number of goods that are cluttering the house up. To that end I’ve set up a page which will list everything I need to clear away. I hope to be able to sell some re-enactment items, but for the rest, I will not set a price.

That might been fool hardy, but I think that I would rather that if there is anything that people want, they will offer what they think it is worth them. Otherwise I am likely to get little for the effort of lugging items to a second hand vendor.

The Trouble With Passwords (Again)

Part of my efforts to grab my life by the corners and twist it into a different shape was a decision to switch my “primary” computer to be a laptop, rather than the ailing iMac. I’ve almost finished making that move, and have just a few things to move across from the old machine onto this laptop. So I sat down last night to recover some passwords and account information that I had been missing that I knew was in the Keychain on the old machine. And there the hassle began again.

It’s been pointed out, and I’ve ranted about it in the past in different forums, that the Mac OS X Keychain is a parson’s egg. It does a really good job of noting authorisation credentials for software running as the current logged in user, pretty well invisibly, silently and hassle free. Most software that needs authentication credentials has been written correctly to use the Keychain, and as long as nobody swipes both the keychain file and the master password, it’s reasonably secure.

Where the Keychain Access program falls down badly though is usability for a specific but pretty common use-case: being able to bulk-export credentials for import to a different keychain.

It’s not that Apple are unaware of this as a failing in the product, their support forums are littered with people asking how to do a bulk export, and the response is always the same – use the Migration Assistant to move the whole account from one machine to another. And there’s the fallacy in their design world view: Apple desig software with the belief there is a one-to-one relationship between a user and a user account on a single machine. For all their talk about cloud services, they still have this vision of a single user with a single user account instance publishing to the cloud. Bzzt. Wrong. It’s only loosely true for most users, and very wrong for the minority that for one reason or another have different accounts, potentially on different computers, for different uses and contexts.

The canonical and simple example is where I was a few months ago – a main desktop which was a document repository and work bench and media player, and a laptop which contained a subset of documents that were currently being worked on. And a computer at my work place with some internet connectivity, and a strict injunction against plugging private devices into the network. Oh, and the FrankenPuter Windows 7 box I built for games. Getting this to work, in general, was fairly straight forward – I used ChronoSynch to keep specific folders in synch, and Spanning Sync to keep calendars and addresses in synch between the two computers and Google. Using IMAP for Gmail kept mail sort of in synch, and Chrome’s facilities for synching bookmarks between instances via Google works ok.

But two things did not work at all well. There was no good way to keep two instances of Things in synch (but they are [working on that]), and absolutely no way to keep credentials and secure notes in synch (caveat, no way without committing to drinking the 1Pass kool-aid, which I may yet do).

I sat down on Monday night to finally get all the passwords out of the iMac keychain and onto the laptop somehow. Exercising Google-Fu, I found a pretty good AppleScript solution which did the trick, even if it had to deal with the annoyances of the Keychain. The trick was to unlock each keychain before running the script, then for each item in each keychain, as the script was running, click “Allow” on the two modal dialogs that Apple threw up. Somewhere over 300 clicks later, I had a text file with pretty well all I needed in it, and a firm decision to leave the data in a text file for reference, and not muck about trying to get it into the laptop keychain (See, I’m already thinking that 1Pass might be the better solution).

The next part of the puzzle was to get it onto the laptop. Now I’m slightly paranoid about things like this, and wanted to have at least a third copy while I got it across. Ok, it was late at night, and I wasn’t thinking straight. I’ve misplaced my last USB thumb drive (damn, need another), so decided to toss the file onto [DropBox] to aid in the transfer. Which led to the next issue: there was no way I would throw this file into the cloud without it being encrypted, and hard encrypted.

Ok, easy solution there – encrypt it with PGP. Done. Now to install PGP on the laptop… wait a minute, when did Symantec buy up PGP? And they want how much for a personal copy? (As an aside, for an example of entirely obfuscating costs and product options, the Symantec PGP subsite is a masterpiece). When it comes to companies I am loathe to entrust with protection of my secrets, Symantec is pretty high on the list. Ok, second plan, grab MacGPG. I’ve used earlier versions, and have used GPG and its variants on other platforms, and am confident in it. On the other hand, I really miss the point-and-click integration of MacPGP. Fortunately there’s a project under way to provide a point-and-click interface on top of the underlying command line tools, and I’m pretty happy with what they are doing. If you need it, go check out GPGTools, but be aware that you’ll probably need some of the beta versions of stuff – the stable release at the time of writing doesn’t provide an interface for decrypting files. The only thing I’m unhappy about is that it automagically decrypts files for me, without prompting for the pass phrase. So while it’s good for protecting the file in the cloud, it’s not so great for protecting the local copy (yes, I know that there’s little protection if someone swipes the laptop).

Which leaves me with the old hack – create an encrypted DMG with the file(s) in it. It’s a pretty straight forward process:

  1. Run Disk Utility
  2. select “New Image” and specify one of the encryption options. Other than the size and name, the rest of the options can be left as their default.
  3. copy the files into the new DMG
  4. there is no step 4

The only alarming gotcha is that it appears that you can decrypt the image without providing a credential, if you have allowed Disk Utility to store the pass phrase in your keychain. The trick is twofold – first, credentials are kept in a cache for a few minutes after use so that you usually don’t have to provide them in rapid succession. You can flush the cache by locking the keychain again. The second part is that by default the keychain remains unlocked after login. You can tweak these settings by going into the preferences for Keychain Access – I like to select “Show Status in Menu Bar”, and deselect “Keep login chain unlocked”.

All of which takes me off on a ramble from what I was thinking about. It seems to me like the battle to allow and encourage strong personal encryption and digital signing has been abandoned, and the focus has shifted purely to secure use of online services. There are a few personal file protection products on the market, of unknown and unverified strength, and a few more business focussed products. The intended widely available public key infrastructure for general public use never eventuated, subsumed instead by an industry focussed around providing certificates for Web sites and certificates for B2B secure communications.

Apple provides File Vault as a means to encrypt the entire disk, and there are similar products available for various versions of Windows, but the trouble remains that for encrypting a subset of files the software remains dodgy or highly technical. And don’t get me started on digital signatures on mail.

Abbey Countdown

It’s really not long until the Abbey Medieval Festival. Every year it always comes around too quickly, but this year feels different. I really don’t have many things left to prepare, but in a large part that’s because I’ve decided not to attempt most of what is in the back log.

Yes, ok, cryptic comments that will be made clear in coming weeks. Skip over that part.

Anyway, the list has become pretty short, and I’ll try to keep this updated with progress:

  • sort out a wider mattress
  • tinker with the big velvet gown for the feast
  • finish my new fencing doublet
  • make a bodice and shirt for Bear
  • make a backgammon board