…Or just crazy.
[People not interested in HEMA can skip down to web links of late. Be forewarned that this entry reads like a Joseph Conrad story printed on cheap, splintery Soviet TP.]
Gawd, CAS Iberia put out some awful thing on sword and shield combat. I won’t link it, b/c it doesn’t deserve any more viewings. It’s already ranked 1/5 on YouTube, thankfully.
OTOH, www.achillemarozzo.it has a number of YouTube clips posted on sword and buckler, round shield, and single.
User Tossetoke has some very cool vids extrapolating Viking shield combat from German fechtmanual techniques. I’ve seen articles before (by e.g. Paul Wagner), but this is the first accurate set of clips I’ve seen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXPujfwQJUg
Or you can do a search for HEMAC 2008 vids. Three guys have posted a fair number of bouts from the longsword tournament. Some terrible footwork, some decent demonstrations of skill (timing, distance, etc.)… Maybe I’ll go next year and show ‘em how an Asian fences. I’ll be the Cuong Le of HEMA!
Other web links perused of late:
http://members.aol.com/illinewek/faqs/casting.htm
http://www.theodoregray.com/periodicTable/Stories/030.1/index.html
http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/eng99/eng99519.htm
http://www.rc-soar.com/tech/casting.htm
How the hell can you consume 2900 calories in a single drink?! Most days, I struggle to reach 2200 (assuming crude estimates of 1200 for my main meal, 300 in nuts and dried fruit, and 800 in milk / OJ / assorted no-sugar-added fruit juices).
http://www.menshealth.com/eatthis/20-Worst-Foods/index.php
http://health.yahoo.com/experts/eatthis/5027/americas-unhealthiest-drinks-exposed/
http://health.yahoo.com/weightloss-motivation/how-to-lose-weight-like-a-guy/prevention–23299.html
Go, market corrections.
http://promo.realestate.yahoo.com/five-cities-with-biggest-decline-in-home-values.html
This was happy good webtrawling for combating depression. Started off innocently enough, with searches for ballistic ceramic.
http://www.armorusa.com/Ballistic%20Ceramic%20Composite.htm
This led to a thirst for greater understanding of what NATO peacekeepers can do to misbehaving targets.
http://www.dec.fct.unl.pt/projectos/impacto/Public_Papers/Report%20on%20Ceramic.pdf
The average insurgent often experiences difficulty in procuring B4C ceramic / aramidic-weave polyethylene fiber plates. Morbid curiosity prompted the search for ways to evaluate bullet performance on flesh.
http://www.myscienceproject.org/gelatin.html
In the name of science, the expression denoting unfeasibility “…like nailing Jell-O to a wall,” had to be assessed for veracity.
http://www.myscienceproject.org/j-wall.html
A side jaunt into enzymatic interactions and effect on proteins was called for here.
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/units/activities/proteins/advice.cfm
Busting adages with the liberal application of science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_%28season_2%29#Needle_in_a_Haystack
Then a resumption of the descent into madness and the merely insipid.
http://www.myscienceproject.org/beer.html
By random link association.
http://www.myscienceproject.org/viagra-flowers.html
The very heart of darkness.
http://www.myscienceproject.org/condoms.html
If you read this far, you need to get a life. If you followed every link, someone should take you out to the pasture and put you out of your misery.
That said, I leave you with a cliffhanger:
The past two months have seen WW I-era Gallic quantities of angst, resignation, fear, sweat, tears, and blood (*mostly* internal lacerations). The blood was from HEMA practices. Everything else was not. Within another month, I should either have stupid-good news, or I’ll be evicted from the poorhouse and put in a Frigidaire box.
It could be worse — I could still be doing door-to-door sales.
Or maybe not so much.
I’ve known the security guard at one of the places I frequent for probably 2 years now. Every week, regular as clockwork.
So her older daughter is getting married in March, and they can’t find a photographer to suit. So she asked me if I could suggest anyone in the $500-$1000 range, me being a student and connected with other students and all. I said well, I could mention it to a couple people. She asked, wait, don’t you take pictures too? And I replied, well, yes, a little — I enjoy candid photography. I’ve never officially done a wedding, and I said so. Family and friend type things often enough, as one of the familial paparazzi.
So I was quick enough on the uptake to recognize an opportunity. I said, why don’t I show you some of my past pics, and if you like what you see, I could do it for her / you. So I got her daughter’s e-mail address, and I’ll be sending along some pics by Monday.
Having hung around enough weddings, I have a vague inkling of offerings and pricing. These folks are pretty working class, and I got the understanding that what they really want is just the goods — a set of nice keepsake photos to trot out every few years for friends and family.
Report on Monday.
Couple nights ago I was hungry after a workout, and the peanut butter crackers I cribbed from work didn’t cut it by 1 a.m. So I stopped by the usual Kroger Signature for some ingredients. Now, they say that one should never go grocery shopping when hungry. That was definitely true, as I browsed for ideas. In the end, I spent just into the teens, b/c I splurged on a jar of olives steeped in olive oil with herbs.
[Random synapse firings remind me that I’ll likely never buy anything but the cheapest dark rum when cooking. Recent taste tests suggest it just doesn’t flippin’ matter. At least to me. Gif, who I once observed finishing a bottle of Mount Gay — on the rocks and without help — in an evening of casual chatting, may have a different opinion. Which will never manifest here, since he doesn’t read this.]
So as I wended my way to and fro amongst the aisles, I crossed through a group of folks hanging out in one of the aisles. I figured 1+ worked there and had just gotten off-shift. One of them asked if sir needed help finding anything. Sir replied that he didn’t merit a “sir” and was just browsing for late-night munchies. We exchanged some light banter, then I moved on.
Halfway across the store, at the olives, it hit me — caprese! Mark and I had just talked about them a few weeks ago. That required passing back by the earlier group, and I was so excited I shook my olives at them and said I had gotten it — caprese!
When I came back that way again, the girl in the group asked me what I’d told them b/c she’d missed it. I repeated myself, and she asked what it was. So I laid it out briefly, and 5 minutes later was talking about parkour with one of the guys. 5 minutes after that, the girl grabbed another guy who wasn’t paying attention, and said, “Honey, he makes swords!”
“Well, a falchion and some knives so far,” I demurred. Close enough, for their purposes. They were gaming geeks, and could identify falchions well enough.
Another of the guys wants to get into kung fu so hard, he’s like Seann William Scott in Bulletproof Monk, even though we both aren’t fond of that movie. And he has a friend who is ex-HACA/ARMA. There seem to be a lot of those around.
An hour and a half later, after a conversation spanning AD&D 2nd through 4th ed, the pope and the Hitlerjugend, art school, leatherworking, yoga, bodyweight conditioning, environmentalism, and spiritual centering (none of which I brought up first), we exchanged e-mail addresses.
Tonight, one of the guys came out to the shop, and proved to be a very able and enthusiastic assistant in the shop. He used to be a Boy Scout, and seems like a do-it-yourselfer, so score one for the shop. We’ll see how Pat turns out in the long run. Initial impressions of long-term qualities are favorable.
In a productive 12 heats or so, we forged the beginnings of some prototype scentstopper pommels out of a 50-lb bar of steel. Pat’s stout forearms were trembling, but he declared our choice of work to be the shit. 15 minutes after he left, I got a call from him asking me if it’d be OK to bring a very interested friend out with him the next time. I said we could meet someplace (for me to vet the guy), and go from there.
OK, so 1st checkpoint passed with honors. Next are the 2nd-visit, 1-month, and 3-month checkpoints. If he passes those, we’re probably set for the 6- and 12-month marks.
And while we were monkeying with the fullering tool (at Mark’s pointed suggestion), Mark was doing round 2 on his first raised copper work. He took the slightly complex four-lobed bowl from last time, and peend out the larger imperfections with his new raising hammers. It looked awesome, though he was less than pleased. I said something less elegant than but along the lines of: You’re seeing it as the sum of 9 hours and probably at least 15,000 imperfect hammer strokes; I’m seeing an intentionally hammer-rough (we’d have used the English wheel in the later stages if a rough texture hadn’t been intended), hand-crafted bowl with some nice curves and lines. He liked the discoloration induced by the annealing heats and quenches, but ended up scrubbing them off.
And every time I see him, he has a new knife or two or three to show, it seems. Plus he’s managing to be a real trooper with work — shut up and soldier, as it is said. Mark is a huge inspiration.
In work news, my Kaplan hours are steadily increasing as things come up — more than I’d thought I’d get. First classes went alright. I think I’ll get into the groove by 2 or 3 or so.
And in further work news, I’m starting to hit the PPAs in hopes that maybe they can get me an in where I’ve been unable under my own sails. :/ Rather not talk about it until I have something to show for it. Grr.
Longsword practices have been really satisfying, though we still have about 5 folks (split between the two practices) missing in action post-holidays. Not too worried about most of them, though have to check on 2.
I hadn’t realized it until I tallied up weekly / monthly hours, but I’ve actually kept my workout hours mostly level around 6-7 hrs / wk all semester (with some dips to 2-3 hrs). Ever since I had to give up SCA practices due to class / work training, I subbed in 1-2 hrs every 2-3 weeks for ba gua / kung fu, and now time with the Rice folks for longsword.
My solo workouts only come roughly every 1 - 1.5 weeks — not as much as I’d like, but enough to preserve sanity. Which is funny, b/c Charles L. says in the past three weeks German longsword has become his new preferred form of mental recentering when he’s stressed with classes. Charles B. and Donna also say they were ultra-disappointed they had work commitments this weekend.
It was only this week, once the bulk of my last project was done on Sat, that I’m looking at reaching 10 hrs. A chunk of that has always been pull-ups and other in-place exercises in my room — I crank out a couple when my computer boots up, as 5-minute study breaks, etc.
On Sat morning, I’ll be putting in some hours at the shop. Only enough time to tie up some loose ends for now and clean up, but it’ll get me back in the flow of it. I figure to limit it to 5-6 hrs / wk, and won’t be taking commissions.
On the whole, I’m actually happier that I’ve reallocated time away from SCA practices. Practices are much more active and worthwhile for me. I spend a lot more time moving and swinging. This week, I’m actually pretty severely muscle-sore throughout the upper body. Good thing I’ve got 3 days to recover before this Saturday. So I mentioned 10 hrs — Saturday’s expected workout is what will bring the hours up to 10. I’ve met a couple guys online in the past week at www.texasparkour.com and we plan to meet near Rice at 2 p.m. From there, we’ll hit a neighborhood park between Hazard / Kent at Sunset, do some civil and courteous workouts on campus, hit Hermann Park, or some combo thereof. This first practice is to meet, vet character, and get a sense for skill / fitness levels. I think I personally need to be able to hammer out 50 pull-ups like it ain’t no thang before I can consider even a basic cat leap.
Parkour is one of those activities where you can’t hide your lack of fitness. Looking good means doing it well. Doing it well means being in shape, such that you’re only having to use 20-30% effort for 80% of your moves. If you’re having to scrounge up an exponentially more difficult 97% of your strength resources just to hang on to and kick off a railing, you sure hell aren’t going to get far.
(Not sure of the exact math term here, but I’m postulating that it’s something like twice as hard to put in 30% strength than 20% strength. I’d sure like to read up on the physiology side of it, but don’t know yet where to start reading.)
It’s like we covered in high school Economics — an economy producing goods at 100% of its industrial capacity is actually less efficient than one producing at 75% capacity. The slack capacity allows for the inevitable downtime for reasons like strikes, resource shortages, vendor holdups, equipment that needs maintenance, upgrades, repairs, replacement, etc.
Like Blane says on www.teamtraceur.com, typical training in many athletic disciplines is 4-to-1 fitness conditioning to skill development.
And after being mocked severely by Guy Windsor at WMAW 2006 (our entire class wussed out after 150 solo drill sword cuts), I’m increasingly embracing the notion that this fully applies to swordsmanship. As Guy said, you can’t focus on learning the swordsmanship if you’re fighting your body’s weakness and fatigue after 10 minutes.
Re: longsword WMA… The younger folks I’m training with are *very* good about drilling (as are my long-time practice partners on Sundays, to be fair!). One of them does dance and TKD, another was in football, lacrosse, and wrestling, a third does parkour and rock-climbing. I can start talking, and they’ll just keep on drilling against each other. Or they’ll talk, but they’ll keep doing repetitions. This totally puts the lie to the SCA notion that people don’t want to train (i.e. get decently good) at something before jumping into the fight.
Interactive, competitive exercises that require some creative thinking keeps people’s interest just as well — and they get better at fencing / fighting to boot! Of my many beefs, this is probably at the core of my feelings on the SCA practice culture I know. I hear about the chiv guys and other SCA groups that really work hard. Having been recently humbled by Matteo in rapier techniques, I think there are many good SCA cultural role models to follow.
I can’t wait to bring all my longsword people together. And I’m encouraging them to think about jumping in the SCA pool to further expand their fighting exposure.
Once / if I free up time again, I still want to get back to rapier fencing at least 1-2 times a month, though. Nothing quite like it.
As an aside, I found myself putting on the turn signal to enter a completely empty freeway. Strange how some habits get broken or picked up so readily.
You have to figure that someone whose first business e-mail to you refers to you as “cowboy” and himself as “snake” is a little flamboyant and laid back.
Sure enough, my client interview for the Project That Won’t End was pretty cool. Basically, the CIO and I should have gotten together and hammered things out 3 weeks ago. That’d have been nice. Then again, 3 weeks ago, we didn’t have what we have now. He and our team had already independently worked out almost all of the same conclusions. In fact, he took us further than we’ve gone, on a few points.
So as we’ve privately speculated, and he has now confirmed, we are effectively playing at pros from Dovers. He wants us to make our boldest pie-in-the-sky recommendations, and sell the client’s upper management on the deal. Then when they look at him and ask, “Can we do this?”, he’ll just sit there wearing a big, shit-eating grin. He admitted he wants to use us to prod upper management into making some bold moves. His IT boys have been just waiting for the word “go.”
If all self-professed redneck nerds are as easy to get along with as him, then the world is indeed a wonderful place.
And to further sweeten the deal today, both my Rice guys really came through for me, based on a mere week’s acquaintance.
Will arranged for some excellent shop time — he cut out 11 aluminum sword blanks on a heavy-duty bandsaw in Ryon Lab, in 25 minutes. That’s, I don’t know, probably 20% the time it would have taken me with what I have. And with cuts straight as an arrow, too.
Charles has taken to the longsword material like a Russian to vodka. He brought two new people, who both seemed to really dig it. Obviously, the 3-month milestone still looms far ahead, but for now, things are looking up.
Job training at Kaplan is proceeding apace. One more session, some paperwork and etc. to handle, one class observation, and then I should be starting forthwith. Saturday classes are not in short supply, so I think I’m set even if I get hired for a for-real position sooner than I expect.
After the final client presentation on 12/6, resources currently allocated to the Hell Project will be retasked to career planning / real job hunting.
And after Kaplan training ends, I’ll be able to go back to Tuesday UH practices. Woot.
When the hell will I find the 66 hours to finish up the 11 aluminum wasters? Uh.. Yeah. I don’t know. With higher priority issues on the table, it’ll probably be 3-4 months before I get through them all. Got some gauntlets and a helm to wrap up, first, anyway.
Oh, an interesting sidenote: The shop supervisor observed that 7075 is government-grade aircraft aluminum. He figured that 6061 would have been plenty good, and for easily half the price. But hey, the 7075 will rock out for a long time to come — if it’s good enough for the F-23, it’s good enough for us. :) So Shea and soon-to-be Conner have high-end aluminum waster blades, even if the hilts are despicably rough.
[Listening to Verso, Reflections album, “Rhymes with Seven” track. Good stuff.]
OK, I’m only feeling awesome for values of it where “awesome” = “bleary”. :P
Wet b/c it’s raining outside. Was raining at 1 a.m., raining at 4 when I got up to take an apparently sympathetic leak (the sound of rain is pretty audible in my room), and still raining now.
Went out to grab some class notes from my car, and figured I’d do a quick little morning kung fu routine in the grass. Whee! Now I’m cold. And wet.
My shoulders were really sore when I woke up, though, and I had a groggy moment of panic — “Oh noes! Delayed injury from my not-so-awesome Friday night flipping out!”
Then, stupid bint that I was, I finally realized it was b/c of the 3×4 sets of behind-the-head pull ups I did in my room yesterday. I know, certain of my muscle groups (where certain = the majority) are wussbags. Including my brain. B/c the brain is a muscle and mine hasn’t gotten enough exercise.
But I heard back yesterday from the exec director of a client organization I had for one of my classes. I recently e-mailed her, asking about where the org was, a year after our group did its research and recommendations on improving volunteer recruitment and mgmt. Preliminary reply indicates that they’ve increased their volunteer base by 52%! That’s something like almost twice what they intended, when we worked with them.
And I found <drum roll> Eli Steenput’s website as a 3- or 4-level deep random web trawl.
Who’s Eli Steenput, you ask?
Well, he’s only one of the cool kids who had a hand in the whole historical armor / WMA research thing back in the early-early ’90s. He once wrote an article about sword fullers. Certain engineering-minded females in Austin who probably don’t normally read my Xanga ramblings would get a kick out of this (nudge nudge, Colsith).
The cross section is similar to an I-beam (if you squish the serifed ends of the I and draw the resultant blobs out into tapering points — voila, fullered sword blade cross-section). And thus, like an I-beam, it is *not* stronger than an unfullered sword of the original weight (before removal of material from the fuller grooves). However, it retains something like 50% of the strength in the direction we most care about (i.e. the cut), while losing 80% of stiffness in the other direction (the flat of the blade) but also 80% of the weight! Well, that’s if you made an I-beam shaped sword. Actual weight loss and stiffness change may vary. See your blacksmith for details.
And it is definitely stronger than an unfullered sword made with the same mass as the fullered blade. A rough eyeball estimate suggests the fullered blade has 8x the stiffness on the direction of the flat (but is still absurdly wimpy compared to the more massive, pre-fullered blade) and 3x the stiffness on the direction of the edge.
It’s a fine distinction, but one that I hear incorrectly made all the time (fullers stiffen the sword). Well, not really incorrectly. It’s incorrect if you grind or cut a fuller. I just realized it’s correct if you forge a blade, then hammer in a fuller, working the blade hot. But since most modern makers cut their fullers, then they’re technically weakening the blade. Hrm.. I should point that out to Steenput and see what he has to say, 9 years after the fact.
Boy, let me tell you, thorny problems like this really keep me up at night. (Not!)
But now you know (and probably don’t care). And knowing’s half the battle, G.I. Joe.
And now I know that Eli’s been teaching dagger plays at HEMAC. Pity he’s out of Belgium and I’m here. At least he’s got an awesome pictorial tutorial on making German kebabs.
Oh, and this is cool, too: Skewers for German schweinhunds.
Finished 6/9 weekend to-do items for school/work yesterday. Just added one, and two can’t be done until Monday now, so I think I’ve earned a fencing practice. Now if only we can pause the rain in the 1-4 p.m. timeslot.
Can’t dally too long, though. Got a 30-slide PowerPoint presentation to rehearse for Monday night — with a 20-min time limit. We’re going to break the sound barrier on this one.
“Look. Data.”
“Oh, more data.”
“Data on your mom.”
“Company-specific data.”
“Fun corporate logos promoting the military-industrial capitalist running pig-dog lackeys of the Western oppressors.”
“Questions?”
Beautiful.
(EAN 978-88-95191-00-3)
Ξ March 3rd, 2007 | → Comments Off | ∇ Metalworking |
Looking back on the past few weeks, I start to wonder if I ran over God’s dyslexic dog.
(more…)
Ξ February 13th, 2007 | → Comments Off | ∇ Metalworking |
Finally got around to taking some pics of stuff I’ve made in the past year, particularly in the past 3 months. Not all of it, but some of the better stuff.
Pretty happy with all of it. No, I’m *really* happy with all of it.
The second falchion pic and the first knife pic have pretty cool angles.
Gauntlets — the bane of my design work.
(more…)
It’ll give you a head-splitting ache. Scratch that — it’ll just split your head.
(more…)
Next Page »
"
"
