Work intervened...

Even the best laid plans must be put aside on occasion.  On days where I work 15 hours, no, I'm not going to write for 30 minutes.  I only worked 11 hours today, so I decided that yes, I will take a few minutes to write.

I probably did write for a half hour yesterday.  I posted several comments on Ricochet and a few on a private Facebook group on various subjects.  I argued my opinion that a willingness to kill is an essential part of heroism, and that the perfection of Superman demands he be willing to kill if the need is strong enough.

...Batman is, as we all know, a moral cripple. Thus him having being unable to take a life, even when not doing so means the the deaths of hundreds or thousands, makes sense. He's not a hero. He's a man working out his vengeance fantasies each night in lieu of therapy.

But Superman IS a hero. He's the best of us. So there has to be a line where Superman will kill. Because an unwillingness to make hard choices is about the most unheroic things one can possibly be. Comic book writers get away with having heroes who don't kill because they tend to write fairy tales where there is "always" another way. But we know that's not true. Having a lot of power at his disposal, there are very few situations where Superman would need to kill, and his unwillingness to do so when it's not absolutely necessary is part of what makes him a hero. But the unwillingness to forego the hard decision and let others deal with the consequences is ALSO what makes him a hero. 

One could argue that Man of Steel failed to accurately depict a situation where Superman would need to take a life, and I think I'd agree. But for Superman to be a truly moral figure, he needs the capacity to kill.

And I argued a bunch about libertarianism.  I'm not a doctrinaire libertarian.  I like our system of government as is mostly, but I believe that we have dangerously limited freedom in this country, and I'd like to see the state, especially the bureaucratic state, pared back.  So I like libertarianism, and I tend to get my back up when people who ought to be fellow travelers on the road away from serfdom nitpick it for not being the perfect be-all, end-all political solution for everything.  On the subject of drug legalization, I said that the libertarian case is weakest when it comes to heroin, for the obvious reason that its addictive nature distorts incentive, and it is damned dangerous.  When Lemmy tells you "don't do heroin", you listen.  But at the same time, a lot of prohibitionists act like, by winning the argument on heroin, they've won the argument on everything.  And it's not too long before what you're allowed to do is what they think is okay for you to do.

Personally, I'd rather err on the side of leaving people alone, even if that means they make bad decisions.  We don't even know they are bad decisions.  We certainly don't have as many facts about their lives at our disposal as they do.  And some guy a thousand miles away has even less.  As a former sufferer of depression, it's entirely possible I'm alive thanks to cigarettes.  The twenty years I smoked may take ten years off my life at some point, but their anti depressant effect may very well have saved my life already.  But the tobacco prohibitionists would have taken my cigarettes away "for my own good", and who knows, I might be dead now.

In response to some post or other about the rise of "social justice", I lamented my fear that despite for instance the backlash of #Gamergate and #Shirtstorm, we were going to lose in the long run.  Yes, the politically correct will overreach.  Yes, society will reach an equilibrium point where everyone sort of knows what the rules are.  But whatever those rules are, they'll be more constrained than they were before.  The tide of social justice isn't going to recede to the point that someone can write an old fashioned book with red blooded heroes and manly men and womanly women and expect to win an award.  It's not going to recede to the point where trigger warnings won't reside alongside content warnings for and discussion above a third grade level.  It's not going to recede to the point where someone can voice their opinion on a controversial political stance without fearing for their livelihood.  We're going to live in a more sterile, stultifying, more Victorian world,  And just like the rampant prostitution of the Victorian world, we'll have our seedy underbelly, where we gush forth our true opinions behind the anonymous walls of internet handles.  It will be the only place where we'll find honesty.

And you can bet, the other side will still pretend they're victims.

Interstellar

My wife and I went to see this yesterday and I must say I'm glad we did.  I can't remember the last movie I saw that was this good.  I can't even remember the last film I saw that even tried to be good.  I guess this is partially my fault.  It's not entirely that Hollywood has stopped trying to make good films.  It's that you won't find that kind of quality in summer blockbusters.  I've heard good things about Life of Pi, for instance, and Hugo, and whatever else, but I didn't want to see them.

Interstellar, on the other hand, I did want to see.  I knew almost nothing about it, and what I thought I knew was mostly wrong.  For the past several weeks, the Physics pages of Facebook had been filled with discussions of it, mostly of one of the story's central elements, the gigantic black hole called Gargantua, that the planets of Interstellar orbit.   I gathered the gist of the setup was "man has destroyed his environment, and needs to find new worlds".  Since that is the plot of dozens of science fiction stories, as well as a large chunk of our political argument today, and isn't that plausible in either case, I was going to skip it, since I've made a solemn promise to myself to waste no more time on anti-human, anti-science, Luddite screeds masquerading as science fiction.  But the rest of the movie sounded so intriguing (a black hole! whee!) that I changed my mind.  I figured I could control my eye rolling long enough to get to the good stuff.  I had hopes that the beginning was going to just be that nod of the head to Hollywood sensibilities that you need to get a film made (Hollywood liberal pieties work much the same way as Chinese political censors it seems to me)-spend five minutes spouting some cliche about "environmentalism", or "diversity" and then you can get to the bang up, shoot em up you intended to make.

I was wrong.  In some ways, the beginning of the film is the best part.  At this point, if you haven't seen the film, stop reading.  Go see this movie.  It's considerably more literate than I am. The central conflict, the one that creates the moral stakes necessary to send human beings through a not particularly well tested wormhole to another galaxy, has nothing to do with handwringing about humanity's lack of love for Mother Earth.  The cause of the central disaster, a nitrogen breathing microorganism destroying food crops all over the world, isn't atrributed to any particular agency.  It's just a problem that must be dealt with.  And, in a brilliant bit of political subversity, it's one that we aren't dealing with.   We're presented with something that looks kind of like our America, specifically that small town, central Illinois/Iowa/Indiana section of America often referred to as "the Heartland", and we soon find out, that's all there is.   A school determines that a young man won't be allowed to go to college because "we don't need engineers, we need farmers" (lines later in the film indicate that the character does go to college, for agriculture, later, for anyone who was worried that farming got insulted there).  And then there is the line about "approved textbooks" which tell the proper story about "how the moon landing was faked".  As anyone who has heard the arguments over curricula, or the lower and lower standards of approved government standards, or seen the way "sustainability" and other nebulous political terms are prejudiced over advancement or excellence, can't help but find this funhouse mirror America eerily prophetic.

From there, we learn that some people haven't given up trying to solve the crisis, specifically by providing a way to find another planet to live on.   There's also a possibility that aliens are somehow trying to help us reach the stars otherwise out of our reach.  And we're off to the races, or to another galaxy.  But the action also continues on Earth, (over a greater span of time, thanks to relativity).

All in all, it was eminently satisfying.  It very consciously evokes 2001-I get the feeling that the makers knew it would invite comparisons anyway, so they threw in some nods to make it explicit.  Spiritually, it feels like a sister film.  It's more to my taste, since this work is considerably more pro-human than 2001.  It is, in the way that all the best science fiction is, optimistic.   It is also, in the way that all the best science fiction is, about the human condition.  It is what Star Trek occasionally managed to be.  And lastly, it reads like a story written by Arthur C. Clarke, if Clarke had Robert Heinlein's values.

4 stars, highly recommended.

Let it Snow, Let it Snow...

Naturally, the day after I proudly drag myself into writing for thirty minutes despite my strong urging for bed and slumber, I put off writing again until I'm barely coherent and wind up not writing at all.  This is why I need the exercise.  I'm also learning something about myself.  I am, against my inclinations, finding myself more creative in early morning.  I've always preferred to stay up late and sleep late (though I haven't been able to do it satisfactorily for at least a decade), but when I look back at my ability to start myself and do something, I find it's a lot easier to do it at 6 am than 9 pm.  And the final product is better too.  So perhaps I should just reconcile myself with being an early riser.

I did have a topic yesterday: the Eldritch Knight.  I told you this blog was going to include gaming material.  Ever since 5th Edition of D&D has come out, this subclass has fascinated me, so I thought I would try my hand at putting together a guide for it.

I also need to add more material for the Hutton saber guide, but with winter come early, the urgency for that has lessened.  Since we do our training at the park, we need at least moderate weather.  Alas, two inches of snow isn't conducive to swordplay.

Almost didn't do it.

I almost gave today a miss.  It would have been easy; I'm tired; what's one day?  I'll make it up tomorrow.  I am tired.  For the past week, I've been waking up at 5 and going to bed early in the evening, close to 9.  That seems crazy to someone used to staying awake most nights until 11 or 12.  But I'm hoping aligning myself more with the sun will help with seasonal depression this year.  And I like having that time in the morning to myself, while the rest of the family sleeps.  Unfortunately the four year old seems to want to be on the same schedule as me.  So that sweet hour of solitude is more like fifteen minutes of nervous alone time.  And these are the joys of fatherhood.

I would trade it.  Fatherhood is joyful.  You can't really appreciate the development of another human being until you see it, up close, on a day to day basis; seeing the sudden light in their eyes as a task that heretofore was beyond their grasp suddenly comes easily; watching them discover the world and struggle to describe, to narrate their experiences into a coherent whole.  It's really amazing.

One of my Facebook friends posted an image macro about no one can know the root causes of someone's antisocial behavior--that outside influences are a thing, yo!  (Am I the only person getting tired of internet lingo like "such and such are a thing now"?).   I didn't care much for it.  Yes, outside influences are a thing, but they are not an excuse.  No one is responsible for your behavior but you.  Just because someone cut you off in traffic does not excuse you being rude to your wife when you get home.  A life of poverty may be sad, but it still does not justify theft.

On that note, you ever noticed that someone who is trying to "fight the system" or "get back at society" usually winds up not harming society, but individuals?  That's because "society" doesn't exist-not in a manifest way.  Individuals do.

By the same token, you ever heard some activist proclaim we need this or that social program to help alleviate the "failures of capitalism"?  It seems to have escaped their notice that the natural state of man isn't abundance.  It's poverty.  Not just any sort of poverty, but dirty,disease ridden, desperate poverty without recourse.  That many of us do not live in just abject circumstances is the success of capitalism.  That the distance between individuals from that life of misery is somewhat closer for some than others is an irrelevancy.

I'm pretty sure this upcoming "net neutrality" legislation is just going to get the government more involved with our lives.  Net neutrality is a solution in search of a problem.  Companies could potentially do something that we think might be bad, even though they haven't yet done this thing and haven't shown any inclination to do so, so we need government to intervene preemptively to stop this notional harm that internet companies might cause, someday, if they get around to it.  Instead we'll have the government causing ten times more harm right now.

And lastly, the internet decided to go into an uproar because the chief scientist of the Rosetta mission to land a probe on a comet wore a shirt that hurt somebody in their nono place.  Advance the cause of humanity by landing a space probe on a thimble of rock hundreds of thousands of miles away?  Less important than the social statement ones sartorial choices make.

There it is, my first political post.  It probably won't be my last.  Hopefully in future they'll be more than just notes on the passing scene.  Since it appears I've had at least a couple people hit my blog other than myself, my apologies for the rather stream of consciousness manner of this particular post.  I'll try to be more coherent in future.  Thanks for stopping by.

Hutton Saber

Posting the beginning of my syllabus.   I think this should count:

Hutton Saber

Alfred Hutton (1839-1910) was an English soldier, antiquarian, writer, and swordsman.  He, along with friends Sir Richard Burton and Eggerton Castle, are credited with the 19th Century revival of historical fencing.

In 1890, dissatisfied with the current military saber practice, he published Cold Steel, a lesson planned based on 18th Century backsword, combined with then modern Italian style.  In addition to the saber, it was adapted for use with the single stick, sword-bayonet, and truncheon.

While being based on earlier English swordsmanship, it uses French fencing terminology. 

Weapons:

The Hutton saber was a light saber, with a mild curve and bell guard.  For practice, the intended blade is a little more than a half inch wide, and approx 31-34 inches long.

It's not necessary to have a saber to practice Hutton Saber.  All moves can be done with a wooden stick approx 3 feet long, and 3/4 inches thick.  The book even recommends this practice over the saber itself.

(Note: all instruction below is written assuming both student and opponent are right handed)

First Position:  Stand straight, feet and legs together, right foot facing forward and left foot at 90 degrees.  Hold sword down along leg, in front with knuckles toward leg.  From this position one salutes, then goes en garde.

En Garde  Stance:

The stance for saber is a fairly standard fencing stance: Feet approximately shoulder width apart, right foot facing towards opponent, back foot facing perpendicular, knees bent, back straight, head facing towards opponent.  The left hand should rest on hip so that left arm is crooked.  Right arm will hold blade in a beginning guard, usually either tierce  or middle  guard.

Weight should rest equally on front and back foot.

Movement:

The primary fencing step used is the gathering step.  To advance, lead off with the front food, and once planted, go back to guard by bringing the back foot forward.  To retreat, do the reverse; step backwards with the rear foot and once planted, follow with the front foot. 

At all times, keep balance.  Shoulders and back should remain straight.  All movement should be from hips down, to the greatest extent possible.

Other types of movement: the crossover (the Passing step in Longsword terminology), the balustra, et cetera, are used in saber, and we will cover those in future. 

For now, we will be training with lateral movement and using the gathering step. 

The Lunge:

A proper lunge should consist of

1.  Extend arm.

2. Lunge-by lifting right foot and bringing it forward.  Front leg should bend no more than 90 degrees.  Back leg should remain straight and back foot should remain planted.  Don't zombie foot! (zombie footing is rolling the back foot so that it drags behind.)

At all times the body should remain upright and not lean forward. 

3.  Recover-push off with front leg to recover back to an en garde position.  Arm should remain extended.

4.  Back to guard-bring arm back into a guard position.

This lunge can be applied to smallsword, foil, epee, and saber.  For rapier, one should use the same basic structure, but lunge more shallowly.  For saber, the attack combined with the lunge may be a cut or a thrust.  For the other weapons-thrust only.

The Guards:

Hutton Saber guards are similar to guards in other fencing forms, though it differentiates based on height, and includes a few unique to it.  The primary guards for defense are:

Note: 2 terms to remember with guards pronated and supinated.  Pronated means knuckles up and supinated means knuckles down.

Tierce: A right guard, with hands at approx. waist height, pronated, with sword pointing towards opponents head, edge out and down.

Quarte: A left guard, with hands supinated at waist height across body, with sword pointing towards opponents head.

Prime: A left guard, with arm across body, with blade pointed toward ground, and knuckles pronated.

Seconde:  A right guard, knuckles pronated  and blade pointed toward ground

Middle or Neutral Guard:  blade held midway between a tierce and a quarte, sword point toward opponents head, and edge toward ground.

Hanging Guard:  A high prime.

Alfred Hutton

It's an entirely predictable irony that in the morning, when I have the energy to write, I haven't thought of a subject to write, and in the evening, when I've had a chance to think of things I'd like to record, I've lost too much energy to feel much like being creative.  That was the case this morning, at least.  Will to write, nothing to write about.  I guess I could scan Ace of Spades until I find something to be outraged about, but it feels a little like cheating.  Later on, my wife suggested I write about something I had been ranting on the day before, about cultural imperialism of imposing the ephemeral values of modern culture on figures in the past.  This had been occasioned by something I noted reading a passage of Robert E. Howard's "Beyond the Black River", that did not match my memory of the story when I was a teenager.  It appeared that a line had been changed to make it less racially objectionable.  I would never change someone else's words for them, but I can understand the urge to.  What I can't abide is it being done in a book that claims to be the original, unaltered work of the author.  It destroys-it murders-the past.  How can we know where we came from, when the very words that preceded us have been destroyed?

 Now I can't know that it happened.  My memory may be faulty.  Or perhaps the edition I had was the inaccurate one.  It's my opinion that Robert E. Howard, while believing much of the foolish pseudoscience surrounding race in the early 20th Century, wasn't personally racist in the truest sense.  If anything, he evinced an admiration for ethnicities he perceived as "closer to nature".  Compared to Lovecraft, for instance, he was positively progressive.

But that's not what I came to talk about.  Turns out, I need to get started on a swordplay related syllabus to prepare to begin teaching saber on Saturday morning.  Thus the title.  Who was Alfred Hutton?  He, with his good friend Egerton Castle, and Sir Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor), was one of the premier scholars of the sword of the 19th Century.  These three men were largely responsible for carrying the knowledge of classical swordsmanship through to the modern day.  Like most fencers of the 19th Century, they believed heartily in the "evolution" of swordplay; that it progressed, in a logical trail, from barbarians whacking each other crudely made ten pound "broadswords" lacking any finesse or ability to cunning foilists they were accustomed to.  This is of course, hilariously wrong, but consider what they had to work with.  The fechtbuchs and manuals they translated were barely closer to their day and time than they are to ours, and they did not have the benefit of on-line translation software, bulletin boards, instantaneous communication, or digital printing.  They tried, using all the skill the resources a classical education gave them to keep the ancient knowledge alive, and for that we owe them a debt.

Say what one will about their knowledge of medieval and Renaissance swordplay (which was better and more accurate than I give the impression above), Alfred Hutton developed a system of saber that was more technical than the crude efforts taught the English military of his day.  Remember even into the Nineteenth Century, the saber was still an important weapon, especially for cavalry, and the English had fallen behind Europe in skill, especially the Eastern Europeans (who still excel with the saber).  His method was based largely on earlier manuals for backsword and cut-and-thrust, and he took those plates and developed a system that conformed to modern fencing terminology.

So that is what I will begin teaching on Saturday-Alfred Hutton's system of saber fencing, as laid out in the book Cold Steel.  My students for the most part have more of a HEMA background, so it will be interesting to teach someone whose background is longsword, rather than foil.  Should be interesting.

Since this meandered much more than I thought it would, that means I've got my subject for tomorrow-to write the beginning of the syllabus.  See ya then.

Veteran's Day

Today is Armistice Day, or Veteran's Day, as it is more popularly known.  It's also the 16th anniversary of my enlistment in the United States Army, and for that matter, the date of my discharge a year later for medical reasons.  After fifteen years of nearly constant war, there are a lot of soldiers who have done more than me in service to their country, and given more, but nevertheless I'm proud of my service.  There aren't too many Americans who have chosen to serve, and even one who has served in such minimal capacity as I have has done something to take pride in.  Third spear carrier from the left may not seem of great importance to a stage production of Romeo & Juliet, but you would feel the lack if they weren't there.  So to all who served, who stood up and put their right hands in the air and swore to the protect this nation and the Constitution with their body and blood if necessary, whether they did it out of patriotism, or boredom, or desire for college money, you deserve a day of salute.   And from this broke dick 11 Bravo to you, thank you and Hoo-ah!

As a note of days:  Yesterday, one day too early to properly recorded in this journal, someone stole a bunch of my swords from my stupidly left open car trunk.  Fortunately, they either thought better of themselves, or assuming they were local teens, as seemed likely, couldn't get them past their parents, and dumped them in someone's yard a few houses down.  So I got them all back.  I'm not out anything more than the stress involved in dealing with it.

And between my earlier post and this one, it appears I've written for thirty minutes.  So yay!

A beginning

And thus begins the start of a new endeavor.  As the name implies, the purpose of this journal is to encourage myself to write for thirty uninterrupted minutes a day.  Currently when I try to write, I get a sort of cognitive congestion as I attempt to put words on paper (or computer screen, as the case may be).  So, as a way to work through this mental constipation, I'm going to force myself to write for a period of time each day, until I find it easier to express myself.  

Naturally, some time has elapsed between the intention and the doing.  Starting something new is hard.  Stopping something is hard.  Making a change in how you live your life is not an easy thing to do.  It's a lot easier to keep doing, or not doing, whatever you are doing, than it is to adjust it to a healthier way.  I've done this sort of thing before; I've quit smoking.  I've changed to a low carb diet, I quit drinking the massive quantities of diet soda that I had drunk for 20 some odd years.  That last was actually the hardest, I think.  Giving up an addiction involves a period of time where you're actively not doing things.  "Hey man, what are you doing?"  "Not smoking."  "That's cool, I'm not drinking.  Later on, I'm going to go out and not eat a big bowl of ice cream.  Wanna come?"

Hopefully, keeping this going will involve somewhat less in the way of willpower.  After all, this is only a commitment of thirty minutes a day, and the mental energy involved in composing words to put down on paper.  As this disjointed narrative attests, I'm not currently investing too much mental energy in what words get put down on the paper.  I just want to keep the flow going.

So what kind of subjects might this cover?  Anything that suits my fancy--gaming, historical European martial arts, politics, philosophy.   Essentially, whatever I'm thinking about in the day.  It might get a little rant-y.  I'm a ranter.  As I grow more confident, and the words flow more freely, I may try my hand at fiction.  I've always wanted to write stories, but have lacked the willpower to sit down and force them onto paper (or pixel--it is the computer age after all).  Again, we see the purpose of this journal.  It's bench presses for my brain and sit ups for my typing fingers.

If you were wondering, the above was written over 15 minutes.  I don't intend to make every post a stream of consciousness logo-rhea, but it seemed kind of appropriate for the first post.