jducoeur

verdantry gave me five questions. (Thanks!) If you'd like a set (and I know you well enough to have any clue), comment here and I'll give you some to put in your own journal. (Eventually -- coming up with questions can be hard.)

Which of the SCA activities you've dabbled in is something you'd like to get back to, one of these days?

Sooo many to choose from. Hmm...

Rapier? In principle I'd love to, especially given that the state of the art has improved so much, in so many interesting ways, since I was active in it. But realistically it probably isn't going to happen.

Sewing? I've tried and bounced off of that a couple of times, and there is no good reason why I can't learn it more properly. Maybe.

I'm halfway-tempted to say Cooking, since it's been something like a year since I did any real reconstruction. But I think that one is still active, just at a low simmer.

Let's say Archery: I'm quite fond of it, and it's probably the single art where I am most proudly Adequate. I occupy a surprisingly unusual niche in it -- when you look at the scores at Pennsic, I am better than most of the populace, while still being comically amateur compared to the people who actually work at it.

I've been fond of it for most of my life (I picked the sport up as a kid, and have done it now and then throughout my SCA career), but got sidelined a couple of years ago by tendonitis. Now that my shoulder isn't bothering me routinely, it would be interesting to see whether I can get back into the swing of it, once circumstances are easier.

What's the most thoughtful gift someone has given you?

In terms of impact on me, it would probably have to be Inae pointing Kate in my direction ten years ago. But I think that was more for Kate's benefit than mine (to encourage her to have more social life), so "thoughtful" may not be quite right.

Really, I have no idea about most, and would probably come up with a different answer tomorrow. But let's choose a tiny one that affected me profoundly.

It was the SCA 25th Year Celebration down in Texas. I was very much an up-and-comer -- I think I had recently started The Letter of Dance, and was starting to get well-known, but I was still pretty low on the totem pole. I wound up spending most of the event hanging out with what I came to describe as The Dance Cabal, and it was a fairly momentous event for the SCA dance community, because while there were only maybe a dozen of us, we represented a wide swathe of the Society. It was the first time such a diverse bunch of dancemasters had worked together, and we had a blast.

Anyway, part of TFYC was a Laurels' Prize Tournament -- I believe the first one I'd ever encountered. I believe that I didn't enter (I've never been particularly into A&S competitions). But afterwards, Mistress Lizbeth Ravensholm (one of the Society's more serious dance scholars) came up to me and gave me a prize anyway, because she'd been impressed with my dance teaching during the week. It was just a little pewter spoon, but it blew me away, knowing that a leading Laurel from across the country had noticed me like that.

The moral of the story is that the little things can sometimes really matter to someone.

What type of stories tend to really hook you?

I don't think it's entirely consistent, but looking at what I like, there seem to be four common elements:

• Interesting world-building. That doesn't necessarily mean in the sense of creating a science-fictional or fantasy environment, but I always like to have the sense of depth that comes from someone having thought through the details.
• Good writing, and specifically richly-drawn characters with motivations that I can understand. (Whether or not I can relate to them.)
• Thematic depth: a story that means something, on some level.
• The sense that I am reading a story, dammit, not just a serialized adventure. That means having a beginning, middle and end, and preferably a good chunk of foreshadowing.

I'm amused to note that this list is in order of importance, from least to most -- and also in the order in which they came to matter to me. That gradual shift in priorities goes a long ways to explain why my taste in comics has changed dramatically over the years.

(I've just restarted the epic Inventory The Comics Project. This has been in process for, no shit, 25 years now, but I'm gradually making progress on it, having restarted two days ago after about a two-year hiatus. It's already probably the largest single Querki Space, and has a long ways to go -- I'm currently in "F". I'm sorting all the comics up through around 2007, and breaking them down into "Discard", "Keep Permanently", and "Think About It Again Later". And it's fascinating how many of the comics I adored in college now go straight into the Discard pile, because while they are nerdishly fun, they aren't all that well-written, and they aren't actually stories.)

Tell us your favorite "No shit, there I was" story.

Surprisingly, this is the tricky one. Most of my usual "no shit" stories didn't actually happen to me. (I'm quite fond of telling The Vis Cycle.) And the ones I do tell most often about myself aren't appropriate to post online. (Sometime when this is all over, and we can actually sit down together, and we have half an hour and appropriate beverages, remind me to tell you The Saga of the Trip to Quebec, aka How I Spent My 19th Birthday, aka How I Just Barely Didn't Get Arrested.)

But okay -- let's go way back to the beginning...

No shit, there I was -- at my first Pennsic. I was an innocent in nearly every sense of the word, not yet a year into the Society, and had been invited to camp with The Barony-in-Exile of Branswatch, otherwise affectionately known as The Filthy Greenshirts.

(Yes, we had green shirts, and yes, they were often filthy. Branswatch's claim to fame was the Pennsic Woods Battle. We were led by the late and much-lamented Earl Sir Aelfwine Dunedaine. At the beginning of each Woods Battle, he would cry "Follow me!", and vanish into the woods, with the rest of us trying desperately to keep up behind him. Traditionally, the Midrealm would march down the causeway, mighty warriors that they were -- and we would descend upon them from all around. Filthy Greenshirts made great camo.)

Anyway, back to "there we were"...

It was the middle of Pennsic, and the Midrealm King put out a call for guards for The Mighty Midrealm Camp Gates. Thing was, though, he never said that the guards had to be Middies -- or even vaguely loyal to the Mid. This seemed like a fine opportunity.

So we spent the next day drilling. Our commander in this scheme, James the Fair, drilled us in "Left Face!". And "Right March!". And all sorts of terribly impressive-looking, utterly irrelevant military crap, such that by the end we were clearly the best-drilled, well-trained candidates to "guard" the Midrealm, who were obviously so disciplined that we would never do something like filch the Midrealm's Crown. No, never.

We would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for that meddling kidknight. As we were performing our audition as The Best Guards Ever, one of the Midrealm Chiv happened to wander out, look at us, and pull the watch commander aside. Thing is, Aelfwine wasn't going to let the rest of us have all the fun without him, and he was a wee tad recognizable. So it was back to the lab, to await another night to take over the world.

(Really, that was one heck of a War. It was also, IIRC, the year that we built sturdy sedan chairs, to ferry Aelfwine and Arastorm into Pennsic Great Court, forcing Berowne of Arden to spend a good minute using his Mighty Heraldic Baritone to intone, "Siiit dooown, siiit dooown -- they're not royalty...")

What are you hoping to see come out of the aftermath of the pandemic?

Honestly, what I most want to see is for more of the country to wake up to the fact that cronyism and incompetence at the top is dangerous and deadly, and is what we have right now. Governments regularly get brought down by the death toll from wars; this is going to see a lot more deaths, and most of them could have been avoided by a competent administration.

More positively, though: I'd like to see folks seeing the lesson on the ground here, which is that we're better when we work together. There are so many cynical forces setting us against one another, but when push comes to shove, most people do work together and try to do the right thing, especially when they are given good information. For all the dysfunction at the top, many states (although, sadly, not quite all) are working hard to keep their people safe, and the ones that do so are being recognized for it -- many governors are way more popular than their parties are.

The moral of the story to me is that people still like sane, competent leadership, regardless of party affiliation. I'd dearly love to see that trend continue...