Arisia con report, part two.
Jan. 21st, 2003 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasLesse . . . when I ran off to do stuff, I'd just gotten up to telling y'all about Saturday morning at 10 AM, when the Higgins Armory Sword Guild did their demo of sword techniques.
I think Dr. Jeffrey L. Forgeng has one of the coolest jobs in the world: he gets to translate medieval manuscripts to work out training methods to teach people medieval martial arts. I mean, along with lots of other people.
Anyway, last year, they just did longsword demos, which were nifty: the longsword,or hand-and-a-half sword, is a weapon that's pretty well understood now, because of the weapons training manual written by Joachim Meyer in 1570. This year, they did more extensive work with longsword (because they'd worked out more), but they also did demonstrations of broadsword-and-buckler, dagger, and halberd. Neat, neat stuff.
Oh, wait -- I forgot to talk about the Friday night 1860s dance! Lis and I didn't dance, but we did watch people dance, and what reminded me of it was that a few Civil War reenactors did some rifle drill stuff, which, on Saturday, the halberd stuff reminded me of.
So, after the Higgins demo, I wandered and did some massages, and wandered into the Junkyard Wars thing, where people were trying to make machines to throw beanie babies into a bucket hanging from one of the balconies. I ran into my friendsvonbeck and ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
undauntra and we went to the ATACC demo.
The Autumn Tree Armored Combat Company is almost nothing like the Higgins Armory Sword Guild. The HASG is a bunch of academics who are interested in recreating complex and deadly systems of martial arts.
The ATACC is a bunch of lunatics who like to wear heavy armor and beat the snot out of each other with blunt weapons.
Yes, they actually do correspond with each other, and get (limited) amounts of help from one another. The HASG can go to the ATACC folks and say, "This manual suggests using this maneuver, why don't you try it out," and the ATACC folks will go beat the snot out of each other using that maneuver and see if it works. If it doesn't, the Higgins folks can try a different translation and see if it works better in a different way.
Watching the Higgins folks is fun in the way that watching dance, or martial arts demonstrations is fun. Watching the ATACC folks is fun in the way that watching monster truck rallies is fun.
But the ATACC folks have actually gotten a lot better in the past year. They've started using the halfsword techniques that Higgins has rediscovered, and it makes their combat a lot more effective and fun to watch. They're no longer simply lunatics who bash each other with swords. They're now lunatics who bash each other with swords, use grapples and throws, and use complex blocks and precision attacks to hit weak points in armor, which is a lot more fun to watch.
I did some more volunteering until it was time for Masquerade, which is one of the highlights of Arisia -- the costume competition. This year, there were twenty two entries.
Before that, they had a guy from DC comics show up and show trailers for upcoming genre films, which was fun, but not all of the trailers were appropriate for small children, and, since small children are often at the Masquerade, that was probably a miscalculation.
A few of the costumes stick in my mind. Rae Bradbury, as always, put in a disturbing and hysterically funny effort: GeneriCostume. She and two other folks showed up wearing elaborate and intricate costumes made out of brown cardboard! There was a barbarian swordsman, with (cardboard) fur loincloth, (cardboard) gigantic sword, and (cardboard) pointy helmet, a mermaid with a cardboard tail with cardboard scales ("attached with genuine Elmer's Glue!") and cardboard "optional modesty-protecting seashells", and a cardboard "Drama Queen Outfit with Big-Ass Headpiece And Inflatable Ego".
Another one, as we found out, would have been good had the presentation gone off as planned, but, because of the error which happened, became truly great.
One person did a recreation costume of a Jedi knight. He posed and flourished his lightsaber as a voice spoke about the duties of the Jedi, and how they had to train constantly to keep in top condition. As the voice spoke of training long and hard to keep their skills up, the fellow did a particularly vicious slash, and the bit of tubing that was keeping the glowing part of the lightsaber rigid flew off to the side. The glowing bit of the lightsaber was still there, and still glowing perfectly -- but it was completely flaccid. Hilarity ensued.
Nobody in the audience knew it was an error. It was absolutely beautiful, and perfect. I only know it was a mistake because Lis told me that she complimented the fellow on the brilliance of the concept afterwards, and he told her it had been an error.
After that, I went back to do more massages, I went out to a party, and I went to sleep around three or four in the morning. I'd wanted to get to the "Rocket Fuel" party (a party in which they serve a concoction which includes everclear, dry ice, and limeade, I think), but didn't get around to it.
Sunday morning, I woke up around nine, did some more massages, and hung around Massage Den. Around one, I went to a falconry panel, where they had a real red-tailed hawk, and learned lots of neat stuff about hawks and hawking. I ran intobrowngirl who was stressed about being Filk Czar, and gave her a hug, and found out that there were no more tickets for the ice cream party, bought a copy of a Looney Labs game called Nanofictionary, which really needs at least three players, so Lis and I walked into the gaming room, found a Lab Rabbit who wasn't doing anything, and shanghaied him into playing Nanofictionary with us. It's a great game.
We went back up to Staff Den, and saw two of the Looneys (the Looneys were the gaming guests of honor), so we asked them to sign our Nanofictionary, and they had us follow them back to the Presidential Suite where the Guests of Honor were staying so that we could get all three Looneys to sign our deck. I gave Andrew Looney a neck massage, and I mentioned to them my theory that the reason that there are so few recent good two-person games is that so many of the good game designers are poly. They thought the theory was interesting, but didn't seem terribly convinced.
And I then hung out in the Massage Den until it was really late and got a massage fromchaiya, and eventually went home, and that was my Arisia.
I think Dr. Jeffrey L. Forgeng has one of the coolest jobs in the world: he gets to translate medieval manuscripts to work out training methods to teach people medieval martial arts. I mean, along with lots of other people.
Anyway, last year, they just did longsword demos, which were nifty: the longsword,or hand-and-a-half sword, is a weapon that's pretty well understood now, because of the weapons training manual written by Joachim Meyer in 1570. This year, they did more extensive work with longsword (because they'd worked out more), but they also did demonstrations of broadsword-and-buckler, dagger, and halberd. Neat, neat stuff.
Oh, wait -- I forgot to talk about the Friday night 1860s dance! Lis and I didn't dance, but we did watch people dance, and what reminded me of it was that a few Civil War reenactors did some rifle drill stuff, which, on Saturday, the halberd stuff reminded me of.
So, after the Higgins demo, I wandered and did some massages, and wandered into the Junkyard Wars thing, where people were trying to make machines to throw beanie babies into a bucket hanging from one of the balconies. I ran into my friends
vonbeck and undauntra and we went to the ATACC demo.The Autumn Tree Armored Combat Company is almost nothing like the Higgins Armory Sword Guild. The HASG is a bunch of academics who are interested in recreating complex and deadly systems of martial arts.
The ATACC is a bunch of lunatics who like to wear heavy armor and beat the snot out of each other with blunt weapons.
Yes, they actually do correspond with each other, and get (limited) amounts of help from one another. The HASG can go to the ATACC folks and say, "This manual suggests using this maneuver, why don't you try it out," and the ATACC folks will go beat the snot out of each other using that maneuver and see if it works. If it doesn't, the Higgins folks can try a different translation and see if it works better in a different way.
Watching the Higgins folks is fun in the way that watching dance, or martial arts demonstrations is fun. Watching the ATACC folks is fun in the way that watching monster truck rallies is fun.
But the ATACC folks have actually gotten a lot better in the past year. They've started using the halfsword techniques that Higgins has rediscovered, and it makes their combat a lot more effective and fun to watch. They're no longer simply lunatics who bash each other with swords. They're now lunatics who bash each other with swords, use grapples and throws, and use complex blocks and precision attacks to hit weak points in armor, which is a lot more fun to watch.
I did some more volunteering until it was time for Masquerade, which is one of the highlights of Arisia -- the costume competition. This year, there were twenty two entries.
Before that, they had a guy from DC comics show up and show trailers for upcoming genre films, which was fun, but not all of the trailers were appropriate for small children, and, since small children are often at the Masquerade, that was probably a miscalculation.
A few of the costumes stick in my mind. Rae Bradbury, as always, put in a disturbing and hysterically funny effort: GeneriCostume. She and two other folks showed up wearing elaborate and intricate costumes made out of brown cardboard! There was a barbarian swordsman, with (cardboard) fur loincloth, (cardboard) gigantic sword, and (cardboard) pointy helmet, a mermaid with a cardboard tail with cardboard scales ("attached with genuine Elmer's Glue!") and cardboard "optional modesty-protecting seashells", and a cardboard "Drama Queen Outfit with Big-Ass Headpiece And Inflatable Ego".
Another one, as we found out, would have been good had the presentation gone off as planned, but, because of the error which happened, became truly great.
One person did a recreation costume of a Jedi knight. He posed and flourished his lightsaber as a voice spoke about the duties of the Jedi, and how they had to train constantly to keep in top condition. As the voice spoke of training long and hard to keep their skills up, the fellow did a particularly vicious slash, and the bit of tubing that was keeping the glowing part of the lightsaber rigid flew off to the side. The glowing bit of the lightsaber was still there, and still glowing perfectly -- but it was completely flaccid. Hilarity ensued.
Nobody in the audience knew it was an error. It was absolutely beautiful, and perfect. I only know it was a mistake because Lis told me that she complimented the fellow on the brilliance of the concept afterwards, and he told her it had been an error.
After that, I went back to do more massages, I went out to a party, and I went to sleep around three or four in the morning. I'd wanted to get to the "Rocket Fuel" party (a party in which they serve a concoction which includes everclear, dry ice, and limeade, I think), but didn't get around to it.
Sunday morning, I woke up around nine, did some more massages, and hung around Massage Den. Around one, I went to a falconry panel, where they had a real red-tailed hawk, and learned lots of neat stuff about hawks and hawking. I ran into
browngirl who was stressed about being Filk Czar, and gave her a hug, and found out that there were no more tickets for the ice cream party, bought a copy of a Looney Labs game called Nanofictionary, which really needs at least three players, so Lis and I walked into the gaming room, found a Lab Rabbit who wasn't doing anything, and shanghaied him into playing Nanofictionary with us. It's a great game.We went back up to Staff Den, and saw two of the Looneys (the Looneys were the gaming guests of honor), so we asked them to sign our Nanofictionary, and they had us follow them back to the Presidential Suite where the Guests of Honor were staying so that we could get all three Looneys to sign our deck. I gave Andrew Looney a neck massage, and I mentioned to them my theory that the reason that there are so few recent good two-person games is that so many of the good game designers are poly. They thought the theory was interesting, but didn't seem terribly convinced.
And I then hung out in the Massage Den until it was really late and got a massage from
chaiya, and eventually went home, and that was my Arisia.