After a perhaps a full year when my sore elbow kept me from fencing at all, and then kept me from fencing longsword, so that all I could train was dusack and rapier, just a few weeks ago my elbow seemed entirely recovered. And, by happy coincidence, very shortly after that, my local fencing group (TMHF) added a second daytime open hall session most weeks, lately on Fridays.
So for I think three weeks now, I’ve been training twice a week, and finally once again making some progress in getting better at fencing. See the last bit in this newsletter for a video of a recent sparring match, and expect more fencing updates in the future.
Aside from that, things are much the same. I get little writing done besides this blog, but I have not given up. I walk the dog for long stretches every single day. A while ago I bought a new DVD player, and Jackie and I are revisiting our collection of DVDs that we hadn’t been able to watch for a couple of years, since our old DVD player gave up the ghost. We’ve rewatched all three of the extended editions of Lord of the Rings, and are about halfway though rewatching both Buffy and Angel.
Oh, and a bit I didn’t share in my blog, but that I thought was funny:
Somebody on the sword fighting discord asked about ergonomic/split keyboards, so I provided a link to Toby Buckell’s long rabbit-hole dive into them. And got these two responses:
“You’re always out here with the best sources.”
“Yeah I feel like Philip’s a low key, cited, encyclopedia for some very random, specific things.”
It’s always nice to be appreciated.
So later that day, I told Jackie:
Groundhog’s day is the “cross-quarter” day, halfway between the solstice and the equinox. Now there are 21 days until the equinox, making today halfway between the cross-quarter day and then equinox.
Therefore, by the power vested in me by being “a low key, cited, encyclopedia” and “always out here with the best sources,” I declare today to be the “criss-cross” quarter day.
I hope you enjoyed the criss-cross quarter day. As our local groundhog did not see his shadow, we can expect an early spring. Perhaps in as little as 20 days from yesterday.
We celebrated by hiking at Homer Lake.
Go Left, Young Writers!
Okay, this is really, really good. About writers and writing (via @doctorow).
Makes me want to write some proletarian literature.
Characters in proletarian literature are often misled into believing that their individual flaws account for their miserable conditions, but then encounter a union organizer or a wise old Wobbly who tells them the truth, setting fictional men and women on the revolutionary path.
Source: Go Left, Young Writers!
Another Valentine’s Day feast at home
Ten years ago, instead of taking Jackie out to a restaurant and sitting with a bunch of other couples wanting to overpay to order off a “special” Valentine’s Day menu, I decided it would be more fun to cook her my own little feast.
As my inspiration, I reached back to October, 1991, and the very first meal I ever cooked for her. (She was threatening to go home because she was tired, and I said, “No! Stay here! I’ll fix dinner! You can just take a nap and I’ll do everything!”)
Some of the details have varied (the flourless chocolate cake was new maybe 4 years ago), but rock cornish game hens and long-grain and wild rice have always been there.
Claptrap immunity
Stephen Miller would have ICE agents (and the rest of us) believe that they have “immunity” to perform their “duties.”
This is, of course, false. Depriving any person (not just citizens) of their rights “under color of law” is its own crime. But it is in that light that we should view their position on face masks as admitting that they know they have it wrong:
The administration’s perceived need for face coverings evocative of Iranian secret police and Russian security agents helps us recognize that assertions of state supremacy and citizen insignificance are claptrap…
Source: All the king’s masked and anonymous henchmen
If they were immune, they’d not hesitate to show their faces. The fact that they feel the need to keep them hidden makes it very clear that they know they’re totally exposed in a legal sense.
They want serfs
A pretty good recent episode of Gil Duran’s Nerd Reich podcast had an odd hole in it.
In the one I’m talking about, the one with Quinn Slobodian, Quinn explains that there’s a reason the many efforts to create a seastead, charter city, network state, and such never go anywhere: They’re unnecessary.
[Y]ou don’t actually need to create a new polity to have your own sense of entitlement and privilege reinforced in every imaginable way, and to have your own economic comfort facilitated by the institutional arrangements of the state in almost every way. With some creative accounting and some use of offshore havens and trusts and so on, you can really game the whole thing very well already, right?
Having said that, they do talk a bit about why, given that there are already tools to protect your property and money (freeports, trust, special economic zones, and the like), anybody would work so hard and spend so much money to create an actual place that’s outside the control of any government. They don’t quite come around to answering that question, which I think is unfortunate, because I think they both know the answer.
The people pushing these efforts want serfs.
They don’t want workers who can join unions. They don’t want software engineers who hesitate to create autonomous munitions or tools for surveillance capitalism. They don’t want maids or pool boys who feel free to resist their advances.
They want the right to be mean to people, in a situation where the people have to just take it.
That’s what places like Próspera offer that you can’t get from a family company incorporated in a special economic zone.
Arm strength in longsword
For the first couple of years I was doing longsword, I had real trouble keeping my arms extended and pushing my hands up (due to a lack of strength, lack of endurance, and lack of the habit).
I did all manner of training to work on this—exercises for arm strength, especially overhead pushing, endurance training for those same exercises, and of course sparring to train the habit. (See in particular Fitness training for longsword.)
I’m not there yet, but it no longer seems to be my worst problem. Here’s a sparring match with one of the better fencers in our local group:
I’m not quite all the way there, so it’s a thing to keep paying attention to, but it’s no longer my biggest problem.
