The Kindle is Evil

Yes, yet another hibernation. It's a bit difficult trying to write about what is a very physical activity when winter forces you to pay for places to practice or to stay inside. A brief update, which will be expanded on in the future.. probably.. I'm now an instructor. Not qualified yet, but I have now taken my first lesson and it went a lot better than I hoped. I'm feeling a bit Groucho Marx about this- being a good teacher is important to me, and for all my fretting, it was far too easy. I must have been doing something wrong, apart from the obvious.

Anyway... I think I've mentioned it before- the HEMA scene has a high concentration of academics, techy people and bookish geeks. It's a bit of a necessity when you've got to hunt down and translate 700 year old writing that may have been lost in the sofa of time. By nature, it's driven by people who are dedicated to rediscovering a dead language. The information has spread by the net and people have digitised the manuscripts.

And now- this is why the Kindle is evil. It blurs the line between book and computer in a brilliant way. It's the good side of the uncanny valley- something that you need to see to be able to understand. It took me weeks to stop laughing at the fact that I wasn't looking at a piece of paper.

With a particularly obscure hobby and some training in the intricacies of OCR and digital text- I'm now starting to get annoyed. This treatise database is full of pictures of books. They are, by necessity, pictures of books. OCR has never been concerned with things as valuable and as wibblywobblytimeywimy as knowledge.

Especially when you come to computer representations of knowledge. For us a picture of a word is as good as the word itself. For a computer it's not. 16th century English fonts are easy to read- they require a glance and an understanding of the context. For a computer, the difference between ff and ss is a few pixels. The differences between sh and fi are a matter of bad scanning. Computers don't understand the difference between "I helped my uncle Jack off a horse" and "I helped my uncle jack off a horse".

I've already converted my lesson notes and index cards to the the right format. Once I've got a good library of drills, I could share those with anyone who asked. Hell, thanks to the text-to-speech stuff, I could probably run a lesson without turning up.

I'd love to be able to search the original texts on the spur of the moment. A question is asked and you can remember the shape of the book as you open it, you know that it's on a left page and about 3/4 to the back. You even remember a very specific sentence or phrase.

Even if it's in colloquial 13th century Italian- You, personally, need to know the difference, not the computer.

The Kindle is evil because it makes what was once utterly impossible into something that is just out of reach. Really- who wouldn't want to be able to walk the streets with a library that could encompass all of space and time? Ok- then you're just going to have to ask yourself where to start reading.

However it means that people can self publish on a much easier level.

Just a quickie

I'm terrible at multitasking. It's really easy to carry conversations across people. Still, thing one that I am not talking about went well. Thing two also went well- it seems I'm being much more mobile in fighting (a long running fault that I have been frustrated with)

Ps. Experimental archeology sounds great fun.

Future Developments:

Something is happening soon. It will be the start of me having a new kind of relationship with HEMA and I don't quite know what that will be or how it will develop. I won't talk about it just yet as we're still working out the details and I'd rather let other people sort out the politics of it all. Besides, in a way, it doesn't involve me. That's not a negative thing, just a simple fact- I'll explain more later.

The one thing I will say about it is that I'm pretty optimistic about what's going on and hopefully it will mean that we forge stronger ties with other groups.

I like seeing HEMA as a community, we are an eclectic lot with a very simple connection (swords are cool), there's so many opportunities for learning and so many people with different focuses and attitudes that it's foolish not to use them. Almost everyone takes a different thing away from it- a sense of history, faith in themselves under pressure, self defence, the dashing swagger of a true swashbuckler, or even just a damn good workout that's infinitely more fun than the gym. And probably hundreds of other things I have forgotten to list.

It is a case of no man is an island. Good, clear, solid communication between groups (not just on instructor level) will benefit us all, even if it just means we get to fight more different people. It can do so much more though, if you know the groups well, you will know their strengths and weaknesses and you will know the way to ask the right questions to the right people.

Fightcamp Summary: The quick one.

One of the 'problems' with Fightcamp is that there is always a lot happening- fighting, learning, chatting with new groups and catching up on the past year with others and there are also things afoot that I will be vague about until things are clear and the new direction is signposted and made all pretty.

With that in mind I am still processing information from the weekend and a more HEMA focused entry will appear later.

Things I have learnt very quickly: Slow motion drills are surprisingly stressful on your body. When something goes wrong there are only a few inches between a scare and a tragedy. Finding a good teacher is more important than finding a weapon you like.

And rain is a great way to kill enthusiasm. It was wet this weekend- not just a bit of rain. I'm English, a bit of rain is as much a part of summer as Pimms. This was biblical stuff, and unpredictable- in fact, if I didn't know better, I'd suspect that we were being used as a front for Immortals and that the storms were a result of the Quickening.

Swetnam, maths and distances.

I have already established that Swetnam counts in base 3. That is- there are 3 ways to do this. way one, way two, way three, way three one, way three two and way three three.

It seems that he has two measurements of distance based on this counting method. Three feet or twelve feet. This leads me to believe that three is a short measure and twelve is a long measure. So, how long is a foot?

Today in the Park

Fightcamp is coming up and I've realised how little sparring I've done since the winter. In fact I've been mostly theory and drilling (poorly) for the past 5-6 months. This means that I will get my arse handed to me in competition.


So, in an attempt to get past that, I spent today in the park with the Saturday Scrappers.  Well, two of them, and tried to get back up to speed. Not entirely successfully though.  I don't think I'm going to be much of a longswordsman, I prefer keeping my hands forward and they tend to creep to places that are only vulnerable because some fool forgot to put a complex hilt on my sword.  I'm certainly not going into competition until I've got that sorted out. Especially with the new synthetic swords- They're  pretty safe, you'll get some good bruises from them, but I really don't want to risk my knuckles in really hard play until  I'm more confident with my guards. Hand injuries are terribly inconvenient.



Since it seems I'm flexing my teaching muscles a bit more, I thought I'd run through a few ideas with the guys. Drills, basic concepts and a little sparring and analysis. Capo-esque for the sparring- It was more a matter of shouting "hold" explaining why they should move their blade in a specific way and then watching them do it a bit more- and Swetnam for the drills and explanations (I only have one dagger). The scrappers are longsword to a man, so I get to worry about the intricacies of rapier rather than distance and all of that.

I am starting to have quite a bit of confidence in my Swetnam interpretations, obviously they need improvement, but I know they're going in the right direction. Today was the first time I saw it from the outside and explaining it to people who were not my esteemed and honourable maestro.What  gives me confidence in my interpretation is how little movement is needed to defend- twist the dagger, straighten the blade and your opponent almost impales himself for you..
 
I set up the drill like this:

A takes the dagger in his left hand and holds in a guard.
B Thrusts at A's face
A parries with the dagger,   After they're used to the idea of blocking with their left, I give the defender a sword and tell them to reply with a thrust at the same time.

Repeat with other guards.

I chose this way for two reasons, as mentioned before I only have the one dagger, the other reason is that it forces you to get used to the concept of an off-hand weapon. I know the scrappers are competent fighters and not exactly a good benchmark for difficulty- however, the cackles and mild swearing as they kept on inconveniencing the attacker or suddenly finding a sword in their face suggests I've found a nice little drill to build up the reflexes and that I have got the guards held properly. They also followed movements through, which I didn't tell them about and pulled them off almost identical to how I think Swetnam describes it.

All in all, a really productive day and a good reminder of why we started these sessions in the first place.

Understanding.

I am a great advocate of teaching as a method of understanding something- So, in a bid to improve my
Capoferro skills and get a local sparring partner, I have started to instruct a lady who doesn't get on too well
with my honourable and esteemed maestro's teaching methods...These things happen, we've all had teachers who were good but not good for us.

Why does teaching help you understand a subject?

Well, I have said this before- revisiting the basics is essential. They are the basics for one reason alone- they are what you will use the most. And it doesn't really matter what system you use for a lot of them, the principles are basically interchangeable. Distance is always going to be knowing where you can stand to hit someone, footwork is always going to be about moving in and out of distance. Guards are related to a specific system, but the reasons for them and why they work are not. Methods of striking are dictated by the blade you're using but are still basically stab 'em or poke 'em while staying behind your blade. You will use these regardless of what weapon and style you finally choose. They'll vary a little here and there, and a lot comes down to personal preferences, but in the end- a solid base in these will hold you in good stead regardless of what you have in your hands.

The basics can get a little tedious after a while.  They are essential, but you will get bored with them until you've realised that your disregard for them is the reason behind that lovely bruise developing on your arm. Which brings me on to the next point.

There's a tendency to reach plateaus and stagnate in this kind of thing. You can get into your patterns and you don't push through to understand something that's been responsible for a different bruise because each time you do it wrong you get hit so your old instincts come into play and you avoid the blow in a different manner- making it harder for you to break through to the next level of understanding.

The best way to slow things down is to try to teach someone else.  Firstly you have to ask questions of the text- why is it like this, what's the best way to demonstrate it, how does this tie in with everything else, and so on. Then, during demonstration and explanation, you will realise you've missed a bit or the person you're teaching will ask a question that you really have to think about. This is good. It's even better when the person you've just explained it to replies with a sentence you wish you wrote.

And all through this process, you're teaching someone that you didn't even notice turning up to lessons. You. As you help that beginner, you're putting yourself through drills you long gave up on because they're boring or you had done enough. You're solidifying the basic rules of a fight.

Then there's the reward of a job well done. Just enjoying the dawn of realisation when an 'impossible' task is made possible and the allegedly complex is proven to be quite simple.

People think that sword fighting is complex, it's not. It has things that everyone agrees on and the rest is a matter of personal preference. What happens in a fight (especially competition) is that things go quickly and you never quite see the stages that make them up- that's the point. So you get a blur of movement, a few exchanges and then someone is hit. Daunting if you don't know how straightforward it is.

Today's session was an hour and a half. I reinforced the guards (which were discussed at an earlier time) then covered stepping into distance, controlling your opponents blade and recognising when your blade is being controlled and stepping out of distance as soon as possible. When she gets these down perfectly, it won't be a thrilling fight but it will be a very, very long one that she might win by accident.