Ice Dragon pentathlon

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 03:05:59 GMT

There is (in non-pandemic times) a major event in my kingdom (AEthelmearc), Ice Dragon. A feature of this event is the arts & sciences pentathlon, which used to be the premier A&S competition in the region. It was the premier A&S competition in the East Kingdom before AEthelmearc split off into its own kingdom.

The competition is divided into several major categories, like clothing and cooking and performance. Each major category has sub-categories like pre-1400 women's clothing and bread and storytelling. You can enter things in individual categories, and if you enter at least five different major categories, you can compete for the overall pentathlon prize. An important feature of the competition, in my opinion, is the cross-entry: if an item qualifies for more than one category, you didn't have to choose only one. Embroidered gown? Clothing and needlework. Belt woven from wool you spun, with a buckle you made? Spinning, weaving, and metalwork. And so on.

I haven't been tracking the event lately (I stopped traveling for SCA events even before the pandemic, due to both changing interests and the inherent Shabbat complications). I was reminded of the event by a post I saw tonight on the kingdom blog, which referred in passing to the limit of two categories for cross-entries. I'm not sure when that was introduced, but it was not always there.

With that rule change one small but fun challenge went away: the single-item pent entry. Can you come up with one work that legitimately fits five major categories? I did this one year and had great fun trying it, and learning some new crafts in the process (which should be one of the goals, encouraging growth). I'm disappointed to learn that this small bit of the event's history is no longer accessible.

It was a book. A book of music that I composed, illuminated (like books of hours), with an embroidered cover. I performed one of the pieces. The book was a gift for my then-baroness (of blessed memory); she had appointed me as her bard and I made the book to honor and thank her. But I embroidered the cover because of the Ice Dragon pent. And I might well have bought a blank bound book, focusing on the music and the illumination (my actual skills), but for the pent.

And I'm glad I did make the book. I learned about bookbinding. I asked a curator nicely and got a private tour of a collection of actual renaissance volumes so that I could inspect their bindings (which are usually not very visible when books are displayed open behind glass). My embroidery was not very good but was full of spirit, as they say.

The single-item pent entry is not the optimal path to winning the pent (if winning the pent is your goal). You can probably make five stronger entries by focusing and avoiding the constraints of other parts of the project. I did not win the pent the year I entered the book. But I had loads of fun with the project (and apparently made an impression). And my baroness really liked the book. So, win all around.

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a testing memory

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 04:55:20 GMT

My high school was solidly mediocre, which meant it had basically nothing to challenge me. I don't say that to say "hey look how smart I am" but rather to say that the school lacked the means to challenge students at a variety of skill levels, so if you were at the wrong ones, high or low, you lost out. Everything was calibrated for the C-student, pretty much. Aside from having the option to take algebra/geometry/trig instead of "math 10-12", and a couple optional science classes, there were no choices for the college-bound. (There was a strong vo-tech program, and there was a "business track" to train secretaries. I kid you not.)

So anyway, when I was in, I think, 10th grade and we were offered the chance to take a national aptitude test just to figure out where we were actually stronger or weaker, I took it. It reported results in six broad categories. In five of the six I was 99th percentile, so that didn't help and I don't even remember what the categories were.

In the sixth category I was fourth percentile. The category was "clerical speed and accuracy". The test consisted of pages and pages that looked like this:

CCCOCCOCCCCCCCOCCCCCCCOOCCCCCCCOCCCC

Line after line after line, no spaces. The task was "count the 'O's" and it was a timed test. The score depended on both how many you got right and how many blocks you got through. (Just to be clear, this was a paper-and-pencil exercise. No search. :-) )

I thought of this today during one of my most-loathed tasks for our team's documentation releases: the "production check". Everybody on the team is given a slice of our (very large) HTML documentation set to "proofread" before publication. The instructions actually say "proofread", like I could possibly read all that in a day or even two. (And have I mentioned that our team is half the size it was a year ago?) I scan each page looking for anything that jumps out, like weird formatting or bad headings or suspicious syntax blocks. I spend more time on parts that have been heavily modified since last time (I can haz source-control logs), but it's still scanning. Meanwhile, my wrist is unhappy because the navigation requires lots of mouse-clicking, and I wonder how I could make it more keyboard-driven but never solve that. (There's a multi-pane focus-grabbing thing I don't know how to solve.) But mainly, my eyes start to glaze over after a while. And all I can think of is that this isn't so different from "CCCCCOCCCCCOOOCCCCCOC" after a few hours.

Fortunately this only happens four times a year, for a day or maybe two. The rest of the time I can get out of the fourth percentile. Maybe even into the 99th.

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Monica

Ice Dragon pentathlon

a testing memory