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- New Year’s Resolutions Waste My Time
- Dall’Agocchie’s Essential Actions
- My Blog’s Year-in-Review
- Separation of Church and State in Australia
- Swordplay: Context is Everything
- City in the Dust: A Story Setting?
- Homemade Dusacks
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![<p>One recent development has been playing on my mind of late: the height of pedestal on which we place the masters of the various historical fencing techniques we study. In our collective hero-worship no one seems to have considered that the masters’ techniques either just plain don’t work or work only in a limited set of circumstances. This type of hagiography does not to advance our understanding of historical swordplay nor does it provide a useful basis for the future of the sport.</p>
<p>The context in which a particular master wrote is the key piece of information missing from the […]</p>](http://sleech.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/category-fencing1-115x115.jpg "On the Sanctity of the Masters")
On the Sanctity of the Masters
Posted on 15 July, 2011 | 1 CommentOne recent development has been playing on my mind of late: the height of pedestal on which we place the masters of the various historical fencing techniques we study. In our collective hero-worship no one seems to have considered that the masters’ techniques either just plain don’t work or work only in a limited set of circumstances. This type of hagiography does not to advance our understanding of historical swordplay nor does it provide a useful basis for the future of the sport.
The context in which a particular master wrote is the key piece of information missing from the […]
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![<p>This is the second of two posts on how I write role-playing convention scenarios, distilling twenty-odd years of over-thinking what I do. I’m coming out of retirement to write for AusCon being held in October in Brisbane and I figured that was the perfect opportunity to step up on the soapbox again.</p>
<p>Next after the characters (see last post) comes the story. I’m not going to tell you how to come up with a plot for your scenario. As GMs, we all know how to do that. What I will mention, however, is a couple of tricks I’ve learned that […]</p>](http://sleech.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/category-gaming-115x115.jpg "Back in the Game – Part 2")
Back in the Game – Part 2
Posted on 8 July, 2011 | No CommentsThis is the second of two posts on how I write role-playing convention scenarios, distilling twenty-odd years of over-thinking what I do. I’m coming out of retirement to write for AusCon being held in October in Brisbane and I figured that was the perfect opportunity to step up on the soapbox again.
Next after the characters (see last post) comes the story. I’m not going to tell you how to come up with a plot for your scenario. As GMs, we all know how to do that. What I will mention, however, is a couple of tricks I’ve learned that […]
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![<p>Niccolo Machiavelli is the odd man out on my Italian Renaissance reading list in that he is a political theorist rather than a poet and lived around 150-200 years are the other three authors on the list: Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. He’s also completely misunderstood by people who have only read his other famous book, <em>The Prince</em>.</p>
<p><em>Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy</em> (1517) is Machiavelli’s reactions in essay form to reading the Roman author’s history of the great Republic and looking at the political world of his own day and, in particular, of his home town, […]</p>](http://sleech.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/category-arts3-115x115.jpg "Machiavelli’s The Discourses")
Machiavelli’s The Discourses
Posted on 1 July, 2011 | No CommentsNiccolo Machiavelli is the odd man out on my Italian Renaissance reading list in that he is a political theorist rather than a poet and lived around 150-200 years are the other three authors on the list: Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. He’s also completely misunderstood by people who have only read his other famous book, The Prince.
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (1517) is Machiavelli’s reactions in essay form to reading the Roman author’s history of the great Republic and looking at the political world of his own day and, in particular, of his home town, […]
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Back in the Game – Part 1
Posted on 24 June, 2011 | 2 CommentsI’m coming out of retirement to write a role-playing scenario for AusCon in October. I wrote and presented my first scenario at a role-playing convention in 1990 and in the last twenty-odd years I’ve written plenty more. I’m not sure yet what this one is going to be but I thought this was a great opportunity to think again about how I approach the writing process. This is the first of two posts.
Convention scenarios differ from my regular gaming night in two important respects. At an RPG con, I don’t have the luxury of sitting around for the first […]
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![<p>It’s well known to all Australian that after five years 85% of immigrants to this country are still on welfare and two thirds are still unemployed. And like all well-known statistics, it’s bunk.</p>
<p>Where does this figure come from? The only sources I could find was the Daily Telegraph tabloid newspaper and the StormFront neo-nazi website – both reporting on the Department of Immigration and Citizenship report “Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals 2010“.</p>
<p>The study selected a random sample of 20,000 immigrants who have been in the country between 12 to 60 months. So, from the get-go, none of the […]</p>](http://sleech.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/category-random2-115x115.jpg "Australian Immigration Statistics")
Australian Immigration Statistics
Posted on 17 June, 2011 | No CommentsIt’s well known to all Australian that after five years 85% of immigrants to this country are still on welfare and two thirds are still unemployed. And like all well-known statistics, it’s bunk.
Where does this figure come from? The only sources I could find was the Daily Telegraph tabloid newspaper and the StormFront neo-nazi website – both reporting on the Department of Immigration and Citizenship report “Settlement Outcomes of New Arrivals 2010“.
The study selected a random sample of 20,000 immigrants who have been in the country between 12 to 60 months. So, from the get-go, none of the […]
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Meyer’s Rapier: Attacking the Straight Parry
Posted on 10 June, 2011 | No CommentsWhat happens when you face an opponent who read my last post and is standing in front of you in Straight Parrying or, to a much lesser extent, Iron Gate? What do you do?
Meyer is not particularly clear on this point but, as he says, he gives a range of examples from which the reader is supposed to deduce the principles at work, many of which will be familiar from the section on the longsword or from other schools of rapier play. He says in general that “ you should not go out more than a hand’s breadth to […]
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The Venerable Petrarch
Posted on 3 June, 2011 | 2 CommentsNext on my Italian Renaissance reading list is the father of Humanism, Francesco Petrarca, better know in the English speaking world simply as Petrarch (1304-76). He spanned the gap between Dante and Boccaccio, being friends with the latter and his dad mostly likely being an acquaintance of the former.
I’ve read and studied Petrarch before, at university and after. Reading him in translation is always a bit of a disappointment. The translator can choose either to convey his carefully nuanced meaning complete with complex classical allusions or to capture the easy flowing music of his words. No single translation can […]
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Meyer’s Rapier: In the Onset
Posted on 27 May, 2011 | 2 CommentsWhat advice does Joachim Meyer give about how to come on guard and start laying into the other guy? More technically, how should one approach the Onset?
While he doesn’t clearly spell this out for rapier, the sheer weight of text suggests Iron Gate or Straight Parrying. This idea is backed up in the section on the Dusack, to which he continually refers the reader of the rapier section. In the rapier section he explain the entire fight from Straight Parrying before going on to outline specific techniques from the other guards.
“I consider this posture [Straight Parrying] the best […]
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Dante’s Divine Comedy
Posted on 20 May, 2011 | No CommentsNext on my reading list of the Italian Renaissance is the Divine Comedy (or Commedia) of Dante Alighieri, written some time between 1308 and 1321 after his exile from his beloved Florence with the expulsion of the White Guelphs. It can in some ways be seen as Dante’s way of dealing with this blow in the same way as Boethius wrote the Consolation of Philosophy to deal with his impending execution.
Before saying a few words about each of the three books of the Commedia, I want to point out a couple of things about the whole which I […]
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![<p>How should we deal with the problem of double hits in historical fencing bouts? A double hit is when two fencers strike each other at the same time and generally means that they have both forgotten the first rule of fencing, “don’t get hit.” They’ve also forgotten the basic techniques of whatever tradition they study. If they were using sharp blades instead of blunts, the result would be what is known in the trade as “two dead idiots.”</p>
<p>(I know lots of folks are against competition in historical swordplay. That’s beside the point. The scoring system serves here only to […]</p>](http://sleech.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/category-fencing2-115x115.jpg "Fencing Match Double Hits")
Fencing Match Double Hits
Posted on 13 May, 2011 | 1 CommentHow should we deal with the problem of double hits in historical fencing bouts? A double hit is when two fencers strike each other at the same time and generally means that they have both forgotten the first rule of fencing, “don’t get hit.” They’ve also forgotten the basic techniques of whatever tradition they study. If they were using sharp blades instead of blunts, the result would be what is known in the trade as “two dead idiots.”
(I know lots of folks are against competition in historical swordplay. That’s beside the point. The scoring system serves here only to […]