YAY!
Photograph copyright 2016 by Meredith Bailin Hull, who is awesome.
This is a photo from my OGR ceremony at Pennsic. One of the most joyful moments of my life, if I'm being perfectly honest.
This blog started on a whim. I decided that I was frustrated that I didn't understand how to fence Destreza, so I wrote a flippant post on a tumblr I made in order to antagonize people who fence Destreza into defending their Art and addressing my concerns. It didn't really work, but it meant that I created a tumblr.
A year later, I started writing in it more, because I had many fencing thoughts and generally people didn't want to discuss fencing with me as much as I wanted to discuss random fencing theory. This became doubly true as I gradually realized that the work I truly enjoyed was entirely ignoring the established work of modern HEMA interpretations, in favor of creating my own. The joy in the work became the feedback loop of making a theory, testing it, and either refining it or scrapping it based on my results.
Indeed, I have created interpretations which "fly in the face of reason". This is part of the fun of the self-directed learning that our largely unstructured environment allows. Additionally, this self-directed interpretation makes life that much more exciting when I run across an instance of parallel construction of techniques in a historical manual, or in the teachings of another person.
There are downsides to my approach. There's a lot of back-tracking and deleting things which are just bad from my game. But I think it's worth it.
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Anyhow, for my 100th post, I wanted to grab a representative set of posts so that I could link them to people relatively quickly, and give people an overview of my blog. My blog currently only gets linked by my G+ account, and I'm thinking of linking it on Facebook, so having this as the first post people see would be useful.
- The Tumblr Days
- Bargain-Basement Destreza, part 1!
- Here it is. The post that started it all. In those days I had a far more flippant style. I had intended this blog to be overblown criticisms of various fencing styles, but that ended relatively swiftly. I eventually moved to Blogger because tumblr's comment system is the worst.
- The Tempest
- This is a bit of an interesting, non-standard post. Here, I detail one of the many things I did outside of my fencing in order to improve my fencing. At the time, I was feeling a lot of Tournament Anxiety. I chose to face a more intense form of public performance, so fencing in front of people would feel comparatively easy.
- Principles of Motion
- One of my first theory-posts. Here, I classify various mistakes that people make when fencing. I don't really use about the principles I outline here directly any more, but this post has historical importance to me. Also, the title is a nerdy reference to a role-playing game.
- Practice Reports
- Monday Practice
- This post contains an example of the all-important plus-minus-plus method for making oneself feel better about a terrible practice. I suggest you read it and make use of the plus-minus-plus method in your own fencing, and life in general. It sounds really dumb, and feels super awkward to do, but I swear it works.
- How to Fight Like a Lupold
- A bit of a weird practice report. This post outlines the full flowchart of how I used to fight, a few years ago. It uses terminology that rose fully-formed from my brain, to describe techniques which work well from a pragmatic viewpoint. There are a few fatal flaws with this style, but it's still a fun way to fight without having to think.
- Historical(-ish) Work
- Lupold's Simplified Bargain-Basement Destreza
- While I have come to believe that this is an incorrect interpretation of how to fight in a Spanish way, it's still a useful and interesting compendium of a complete style, detailed in the way I like to write. The reason I believe it is incorrect is because it doesn't work against the ideas raised in the below post, Penetration, Width, and Parallax.
- Fabris is Hard
- In the "Flying in the Face of Reason" category of things, I decided that guards are boring and skipped Fabris Book 1 after reading through it about 1/4 of the way. Onwards to Fabris Book 2! Here, I break down Fabris's Principles for Proceeding with Resolution into a set of simple mnemonics. This isn't detailed by any means, but it's a useful reference-post.
- Fabris Principle 1
- This is an excruciatingly detailed breakdown of Fabris's Principle 1 for Proceeding with Resolution with Single Sword. It's intended to be used as a reference, so that you can take it in and drill portions of the Principle with a partner or practice dummy, eventually leading into drilling the entire thing based on your opponent's reactions.
- Quick Notes on Daggers
- I got salty about people on the internet saying that SCA daggers were too long, and wanted to compose a central repository of information stating that that, in the Spanish tradition, daggers are very long. If ever I started doing Sword Arts & Sciences, I'd probably use this post as a basis for whatever paper I wrote.
- Principles of Fencing
- Triangular Thrusts OR Opposition in Motion
- This post. I love this post above all other posts. Some day, I will actually finish filling in the illustrations that go with it. This post details how one can strictly win in a subset of relative guard positions. It is as close as possible to Truth that I have found in fencing.
- Touch, Small Angle, Large Angle, Renegotiate
- This is a decent post. It is very succinct, and describes a way of thinking about defense and attack in a very general, readable sense. I'm also pretty sure I was polled on the OGR list around when this post happened, because traffic to my blog briefly increased around this time.
- Penetration, Width, and Parallax
- My current baby. Here, I break down the three ways to overcome defenses, and the way to defend against each. I use bro-math to determine exactly how far one needs to parry in various circumstances. All of this is in service of attempting to learn how to use a shorter weapon, so I can better teach people how to beat people who outreach them.
And that's my blog. I feel good about the writing I've done on it. It is good work. It has improved my fencing. Some day I want to compose a book out of the contents of this blog, when I grow a bit more sure of myself and my fencing. I realize that nobody will read it, but having a book would make me feel good about myself.
Good job, Lupold. Good blog.
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