FYI for the SCAdians in the audience:
Having just discovered The Scallion -- the SCA's own version of The Onion -- I'm rather enjoying it. It's fun, silly, occasionally rather sharp satire of the Society.
So I've syndicated it here as ![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
thescallion_feed -- folks who like it may want to follow along!
(I've just sent this to the relevant officers, but I'm also sharing it publicly: this is a serious topic, more than worth some proper public discussion, not just random conversations on Discord. Comments are welcome, but keep them civil, thoughtful and productive; I will squash or delete anything that gets too heated. I encourage you to write your own letters -- feel free to crib from here if that seems useful to you, but please make your feelings known to the powers that be.)
Unto Their Majesties and Highnesses of the East, the Kingdom Seneschal, and the Board of the Society, Justin du Coeur sends greetings and concerns.
I read yesterday's updates to the COVID policies with some dismay, which was heightened by the online discussions around it. As I had expected, the result is that a number of members are no longer comfortable attending indoor events -- which in practice means all events for about 4-5 months in these parts. Realistically, some of those people will just give up and go away. Worse, the folks who are least comfortable with the new rule are in many cases the newest and most enthusiastic members; given that retention is a long-term challenge for the Society, anything exacerbating that is, IMO, a grave mistake.
And the hell of it is, I don't think any of it is necessary. Fundamentally, the problem here is micro-management. We've swung from "All Events Everywhere Must be Fully Masked" to "No Events Anywhere are Allowed to be Fully Masked". (Yes, yes -- it is possible to get exemptions from the SocSen, but let's get real: very few local autocrats are going to even dare to send that email. The broad perception is that you've forbidden it, and that's that.)
Putting it bluntly, that sort of rigid rule only makes sense in a world where there is broad consensus about the problem -- and we don't live in that world. On the one hand, we have people claiming that the pandemic is over and everyone should just go back to normal; OTOH, we have the reality that hundreds of people a day are being killed by COVID, vastly more are being crippled by it, and lots of folks are extremely worried. I know too many SCAdians who have had their lives destroyed by Long COVID, and many of my friends are terrified by this rule change, despairing of what it says about the SCA.
A lot of people are making entirely reasonable risk-analysis decisions that, for them, the new SCA rule is irresponsible. And indeed, it is out of line with much of the rest of geekdom -- most of the other activities I participate in (ranging from dance gatherings to SF/F conventions) are nowhere near this casual about masking yet, so we look even more irresponsible.
And no, it isn't enough to say, "if you are worried, wear a mask yourself". The science is crystal-clear here: having everyone masked is far more effective at preventing the spread of COVID than just doing so yourself. The rule as it stands comes across to many people as a statement that the SCA as an organization does not care whether you live or die -- and moreover, is actively preventing you from being safe, even if the local branch wants to be.
To address this, I propose a small tweak to the rules. We need an additional codicil, saying basically:
* Specific events may require more stringent masking and/or proof of vaccination. Any event with such rules must state them clearly in all event announcements and publicity.
I'm sure that people will fiddle, catastrophize and wordsmith this to death, but really -- that's all it needs to say. By allowing events to have stronger rules, we provide for variations in local culture, as well as the different nuances of, eg, indoor vs. outdoor events.
Different areas will make very different decisions about how to handle this, based on real-world culture as much as SCA. Some places will take a purely laissez-faire attitude, along the lines of the new rules. Other areas (likely including this one) will tend to require masks for indoor activities for the time being. Some will likely split the difference, experimenting with both styles and seeing what folks prefer. That's fine: our cultures are different, and the problem here arises solely because of a bad habit that tries to squash those differences out of existence with rigid universal rules.
I urge you to seriously consider this straightforward amendment to the policy. Allow local branches some latitude to see what works for them. It isn't that hard, it would largely defuse this crisis quickly, and it would better allow the SCA to conform to the differences in real-world culture that are the reality we need to deal with.
In Service,
Justin du Coeur, OL OP
Chatelaine, Barony of Carolingia, East
(I was reminded today that, while I've told this story many times, and a fair number of you have heard it, I don't recall ever writing it down. So...)
No shit, there I was -- on the tarmac in St. John's, Newfoundland.
The year was 1993, during the reign of Tsurunaga and Genevieve, and the Shire of Ar n-Eilean-ne had decided to hold an East Kingdom University.
Now, the thing about Ar n-Eilean-ne is that it is the northernmost point of the East Kingdom. And the easternmost point. Indeed, it is more or less the north-easternmost point of North America: St. John's is way out there. It's in the East Kingdom, but I believe it's technically closer to England than to Boston. It's a serious trip.
Of course, they invited everyone in the Kingdom to join them for University; of course, very few folks from the US actually came. In practice, IIRC, the American contingent wound up being four Carolingians and the King.
The event was delightful. My top (if by now rather vague) memories were discovering that five-year-old stockfish (from the autocrat's mother's larder) can make a truly fabulous dinner when the cook knows what they are doing, and His Majesty leading everybody on a small pub crawl afterwards.
So -- no shit, there I was the following morning, at the airport in my plane home. The flight up had been uneventful, and I fully expected the same to be true of the return. And that was true for the first half of the flight.
Down we flew, stopping at Yarmouth Airport (more or less the southwestern tip of Nova Scotia) for refueling, and thence on to Boston. All seemed to be going fine, and after a few hours we were approaching Logan Airport.
We began to circle for our descent. And circle. And circle.
After about half an hour of this, the pilot came on the PA, apologized for the delay, and announced that free drinks would be provided for all passengers. A small voice at the back of my head said, "Uh oh".
We continued to circle for a while, collectively partaking of the free spirits, and the passengers at the back began to get a little boisterous. I learned that they were a women's bowling team -- precisely why they had been visiting St. John's I don't know, but they greatly appreciated the booze.
Another half hour later, the pilot came on the PA again, terribly apologetic, and explained that we would be unable to land at Boston Logan. Boston was fogged in, and while that would normally not be a big deal (because instrument landing), the Tall Ships were currently in the harbor, and there was a non-zero chance of clipping a mast during the landing. We would be seeking other airports to land at.
Twenty minutes or so later, and the mood was getting a bit uglier. The pilot came back on the PA, and the ladies at the back began to vigorously heckle his French accent. He was terribly apologetic, but there was an additional problem -- none of the airports that were nearby and still open at this hour on a Sunday evening were international airports: they didn't have Customs, so we couldn't land at them. So we would have no choice but to fly back to Yarmouth.
An hour or two of backtracking later, the pilot came back on the PA, terribly apologetic, to explain that Yarmouth was now also fogged in. To this day I'm not quite sure why that mattered -- I halfway suspect that Yarmouth airport just didn't want to deal with us -- but we were going to have to keep going.
And so it was that, eight hours after boarding the plane, we landed -- at the next gate over from the one that we had originally taken off from. No worse the wear, but collectively cranky and tired as only a group of fifty strangers stuck in close quarters in an existential nightmare can be.
(Yes, the airline put us up for the night, and I got home the next day: bigger plane, clear skies, and as uneventful as I had originally expected. But it says something that that flight is my dominant memory of the trip.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.)
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.
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.
I don't think it's entirely consistent, but looking at what I like, there seem to be four common elements:
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.)
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...")
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...
Pardon a brief grouse. From the Gazette's unofficial summary of Curia, in the Chatelaine's report:
Every group will now need to submit a demo form so the Kingdom office is aware in advance that demos are taking place. The required demo form is available on-line.
I'm sure many people will go, "Oh, it's just a little bureaucracy", but I'm sorry -- it still would have deterred some of those demos from ever happening. Many people like doing things, but don't like paperwork: force them to do paperwork, even a little, and some of them will simply nope out of being involved at all. This is doubly true of younger, newer officers who have recently gotten started themselves and are still figuring out whether they like this "officer" thing, who often run the best demos because they connect best with potential new folk.
In some domains, paperwork is necessary; in others, it's at least extremely useful. It is not necessary in this case -- we've survived for 50 years without it, and I can't say I've ever heard anyone say that they needed the higher-ups to be managing them more.
And seriously -- this is the domain where every little bit hurts. We need new blood, more than we need very nearly anything else: without new folks replacing those who leave us for one reason or another (at the age of the Society, often due to death, sadly), we aren't going to survive in the long run. And if this causes even a few percent of our demos to not happen, that's real harm to the Society.
So I'm going to call Bad Idea here. Encouraging folks to do voluntary writeups, sure, particularly if after-the-fact is fine. But mandatory paperwork for demos is actively harmful, and should be scrapped.
All of this is purely IMO, but I'll claim a little moral high ground here: I suspect that I have been directly involved with more demos than anybody else in the Society. (Well north of a hundred, at least -- I was Carolingia's point person for college outreach for a long time, and was thus involved with a large number of demos per year for a couple of decades, and taught many people how to run them.)
(As things quiet down very slightly for the summer, let's see if I can get back into the habit of posting.)
Last weekend was the Known World Dance and Music Symposium, a bi-annual event that's been running for a good long time now. It moves around the world (Carolingia hosted it something like 20 years ago); this year was in College Station, outside Houston. I wound up traveling with Thyra and Jesse -- they'd already been planning on attending, and I decided to tag along at nearly the last minute. I'm glad I did.
General summary: very good event, remarkably good given that they threw it together relatively quickly. I gather that the Anstreorrans had been planning on bidding for it next time around, but when the bid for this year fell apart due to logistical difficulties, they decided to assemble it with less than a year's notice. That's not a minor deal -- this is more con than event, and requires lining up a hotel, a deep staff, a Guest of Honor, and a rich class schedule. It was a great time, and the team deserve some serious kudos for it.
The GoH turned out to be a highlight of the event (and that may be the first time I've ever said that). Emily Winerock is not primarily a dance reconstructor; instead, her focus is on the role of dance in Renaissance theater and court spectacle. As a result, I learned a lot more from her than I usually do: this is a subfield that the SCA knows precious little about AFAIK, and we could stand to learn more.
Her current hobby-horse is a recently-discovered dancemaster's manual that, rather than being all about choreography in our usual sense, is about what I think of as small-scale marching band maneuvers: arrangements of dancers on the floor that spell out letters and figures and things like that. (I believe this is Footprints of the Dance in her bibliography.) Emily rarely has access to large numbers of experienced Renaissance dancers, so she had lots of fun asking us to try these figures out experimentally, seeing how we could dance from figure to figure.
I think she particularly enjoyed being able to put galliard music on, and having everybody just start galliarding through the figures. We even wound up with one place where we found ourselves with two spare measures, so (IIRC) Peter decided to spin in place, and I picked it up, and by the next run-through the entire set of twelve dancers were spontaneously spinning in more-or-less decent sync. It was delightful fun, and something that SCA theatrical productions definitely need to add as a tool for shows.
We sort of wound up adopting Emily for the duration of the event: we invited her along to dinner a couple of times, and drove her back to the airport at the end. She's lovely folks, and lives outside Pittsburgh, so I'm hoping the SCA dance community winds up hanging out with her more.
The event this year didn't wind up printing a Proceedings; instead, they opened up a Google Drive where participants could upload their papers. There's a ton of great stuff there: I recommend digging through it.
Some other highlights:
The first class I took, and arguably the most fun, was Jamie's "Contrapasso Da Farsi in Tutti I Modi" -- all six versions of Contrapasso crammed into one intense hour. It only worked if you knew at least one of them, but Contrapasso in Due is common enough at this point that everybody did. It was a wonderful illustration of how dance evolves, and provided lots of neat little variations to change things up. I'm planning on bringing this one to dance practice this fall, albeit spread over ten weeks instead of in one session. (His "Barriera Da Farsi in Molti Modi" -- all four Caroso Barriera variations -- was also a good deal of fun, although less well-suited to dance practice.)
Thyra ran a "Reconstruction Workshop" -- basically, a public version of an Accademia della Danza reconstruction session. She was worried about whether anybody would show up to a 9am Sunday class, but in fact we got about a dozen people, which is about the maximum the format can handle. The first hour was spent on Il Papa, the second on Gresley; as expected, we didn't generate any complete reconstructions in that time, but I think folks got a sense of how we do it. Hopefully some people will take the idea home.
All the King's Men: Emily had decided that, if she was in Texas, she should get barbeque; we all thought that was a lovely idea, and promised to stop on the way to dropping her at the airport. The place she had intended wasn't open on Sunday, so we wound up here instead. It was probably the most distinctively good meal I had down there: well-made meat, interesting sauces (the Savoury Espresso sauce was excellent), and fine sides. Worth a stop if you happen to be in the neighborhood.
So, the SCA has just released (like, minutes ago as I start writing this) a survey about SCA Peerages. Great -- this conversation is many years overdue.
Corporate being what it is, the very first question is "Are you a member?". Because of course it is.
That would be okay -- but if you say yes, it requires you to enter you member number. Moreover, it requires you to enter your expiration date. So even those of us who have our numbers memorized have to go find the damned card before we can take the survey.
Right by itself, this illustrates perhaps the Society's worst failing at this point: it is so obsessed with paid membership, and so terrified that all Those Evil Non-Members might try to stuff the ballot box, that it is going to lose a lot of respondents to this survey. Because, really -- many people aren't going to be arsed to go find their blue cards in order to do so. They'll just decide that the survey isn't worth the hassle and drop it.
Seriously -- the club needs to get its bloody priorities straight. Being so bloody paranoid should not be a priority; getting feedback from the participants more than once a decade should be...
ETA: and wow -- now that I'm actually into the survey, I am very disappointed at the number of assumptions built into it. Just offhand:
There is one open-text field at the bottom, which I used to explore these topics, and to encourage them to start an open conversation on the subject. I'll be curious to see if there is any sign of them listening to it...
ETA2: for those on Facebook, see this fine, fiery and correct rant on the subject, pointing out just how insulting the whole thing reads to the fencing community. Somebody seriously blew this one...
I'm starting to get my stuff together for EK 50th Year this coming weekend, and just discovered that my modern nylon cabin tent, which I was planning on using, isn't where I expected it to be. I may have simply misplaced it (I'll check my storage unit tomorrow), but it raises the distinct possibility that I loaned it to somebody and forgot about it, some time in the past two years.
So -- if I've lent you my tent, could you please drop me a line? I have no idea who "you" might be in this case, but I've loaned my tents often enough that it would be in-character for me. Thanks...
No shit, there we were...
... walking around the annual Holualoa Coffee and Art Stroll, our last day in Kona before we head down to the Volcano. We pause in front of the bakery stand (which is doing the end-of-day "make me an offer so I can get rid of this and pack up" sale), when the lady standing behind me says, "When were you at Pennsic?"
So I explain "a fair fraction of the past 30 years", and ask who she knows in the SCA. At which point, the lady standing in front of us turns around and says, "Oh, my son used to be King of the East".
And so it is that we got to meet Sir Edward's mother and sister, randomly, while wandering around Hawaii. (Along with a wry observation that I get to see her grandson more often than she does.) Such is the power of a well-chosen shirt...
I'll take it as read that you've heard about how bad things are down in Texas. That's the SCA Kingdom of Ansteorra -- we have a lot of folks down there. An unofficial relief fund has been set up -- details can be found in the EK Gazette.
In the news today are a bunch of obits for director George Romero. Pretty much all of them focus on Night of the Living Dead, and to be fair, it's the work he is best known for.
But let's pause a moment and remember his movie Knightriders -- the closest thing the SCA has to its own motion picture. Legend (maybe true, maybe not; I honestly don't know) has it that Romero happened to attend a particular SCA Crown Tournament, and was swept up by the drama he saw there; his producers weren't thrilled by the idea, and said, "Enh -- maybe if you add motorcycles and a good soundtrack, we'll think about it". So he did.
Knightriders has always been on my personal list of Movies Every SCAdian should see. Not because the club portrayed is the SCA, mind. It very much isn't: it's essentially a traveling RenFaire where they joust on motorcycles. But the feel of the group, I've always thought, reflects the SCA beautifully. You have the folks who are dead-serious about The Dream, who see something better in the ideals of their club. You have the stick-jocks who are here for the sport and the babes. You have the craftsmen who are making it all possible, and, yes, you have the folks who are just here to party. (There's even poor Patricia Tallman, better known for Babylon 5, in her first major role as the token mundane who is enamored by the whole thing but doesn't quite seem to get it.)
The movie gets a bit full of itself at times, and some people mock it mercilessly, but I love it -- not least for Ed Harris (in my favorite of his roles) as King Billy, who is trying desperately to keep his people both safe and united, and to pursue his dreams while everything around him is falling apart. He is a wonderful study in obsession, illustrating both the advantages and problems of having a strong leader.
If you haven't seen it, check it out. It's not the most brilliant movie ever, but it's wonderfully human. For pretty much every character in it, I can say, "Yeah, I know folks just like that". That's one of the higher compliments I can pay a director...
Those of you who know Niki know that her great passion is for historical medicine -- whether it's teaching SCA folks about bizarre period cures for the plague or her novella about life in the medical tents of the Revolutionary War, she's all about the topic, and has lots to say about it.
She's just begin a weekly blog, focused on Renaissance Medicine, Saltatio Medica. I've just set up a feed here on Dreamwidth for it, saltatiomedica_feed -- that should populate later today. Check it out!
Today's the 25th anniversary of my Laureling. That's kind of scary, a tad melancholy, and occasions a few random thoughts and a lot of feelings.
(Some very random, like the fact that so much of my life is dominated by the SCA and Scala. Fate has doomed me to ambiguous tag prompts.)
The most obvious thought is, of course, "Holy crap". I haven't quite been a Laurel for half my life, but it's getting close.
On the melacholy side, I have to say that I think the SCA has continued to steer somewhat off-course, albeit mostly in predictable directions. We've become much more regularized and consistent, at the cost of a lot of the distinctiveness that individual branches used to have. That's cut a bit of the wonder of the club for me: I used to enjoy travelling more, not least because the Society was so very different from place to place. It made things more interesting.
The award system continues its gradual slide into being an unmanageable and counter-productive mess, with ever-more awards proliferating and the Peerage getting pushed ever-further out of reach. I don't recall the exact statistics, but IIRC it now takes something like twice as long to get a Peerage as it used to. I find that both terribly sad, and deeply stupid.
It's sobering to realize that I probably wouldn't get a Laurel today. And I don't mean "me then wouldn't get a Laurel by today's standards" -- I mean that, the way the Laurelate talks, I'm a little skeptical that I would get voted in as I am now, even with 2.5 decades more experience.
More optimistically, the SCA has improved in some respects -- not least, we've largely found our feet as a "family" organization, which was emphatically not the case around here when I was starting out. I mourn the loss of nearly all of our college students (locally, at least), but at least it's no longer a Herculean challenge to have kids and stay active in the SCA. That gives me hope that the club still has a future.
Mostly, though, I am left with a bad case of, "what next?". I've stayed active in the Society for my entire adult life largely through finding new worlds to conquer every 5-10 years; for the first time, I'm having serious difficulty finding something that really grabs my attention and passion, and fires me up anew. Not sure why -- it's entirely possible that all those brain cells are so focused on Querki that they aren't available for other things -- but we'll see where I go from here...
I just came across this marvelous essay on the SCA fun/authenticity false dichotomy, and a different way of looking at it. It was written some years ago, but is still worthwhile reading for any SCAdian. (It's from Tibicen, who some of you might remember from days of yore.)
I totally agree with the philosophy here: while I'm pretty indisciplined about it, I'd say that "atmospherist" nicely describes where I think the Society is at its best, and I think we still hamstring ourselves by under-emphasizing it. Indeed, while I've often thought of myself as a "funnist", I've always been clear that the distinctive fun of the SCA -- what makes this club particularly fun -- is the atmosphere...
