Entries tagged with sca: aethelmearc

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[SCA] sad news from AEthelmearc

Master Remus Fletcher, who was an instigating force in music in the Debatable Lands and at events across the kingdom and beyond, died on Friday. The obituary talks some about his SCA participation, and there'll be an AEthelmearc Gazette post.

This is such sad news. Remus encouraged music and was sometimes a one-person source of ambience. During events, if there was no other entertainment happening, he would sit in a corner and play. He was happy to put instruments in curious people's hands and teach. Some of the people he drew in went on to surpass him musically, but I never got the sense that he felt threatened by that -- he just wanted there to be more music. Before there was a Debatable Consort, Remus showed up at fighting practice every week with packets of photocopied music and a bag of recorders and the Consort grew from that. He was part of the Debatable Choir during its early days, and sang individually at events frequently.

Remus was friendly and welcoming to all. He encouraged people he knew to reach higher, to stretch, but he didn't judge -- he invited, never criticized. I will miss him.

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sca: aethelmearc

the fruitcake of the Laurels of AEthelmearc

Once upon a time, when the kingdom of AEthelmearc was young,¹ a mixed multitude of peers and non-peers sat around a camp at Pennsic entertaining each other. And one of the Laurels did observe that the Chivalry have their ancestral chain of fealty, and the Pelicans their ancestral medallion, both of which are passed from inductee to inductee as new people are added to those orders, but the poor Laurels had no such tradition. And someone else did observe that the Laurels could create a new tradition, and in so doing also find a way to mitigate the impression of the order as "stuffy". And then a clever Laurel (who may choose to self-identify) suggested that, rather than a medallion or a wreath or some other such conventional item of reusable regalia, we should have...a fruitcake.

Think about it, this Laurel said! They had cakes containing fruit in the renaissance (Digby small cakes), which are tasty, but the canonical modern fruitcake² is often a thing you give away, perhaps several times in sequence over a period of years, but never actually consume, it being rock-hard and coated in sugar to the point of seeming shellacked, and would you eat something containing those bright green cherries anyway? The Laurels could have an ancestral relic, one that would pass from member to member (perhaps like the matham of fandom -- a thing you receive and immediately seek to divest yourself of), in the form of an ancestral fruitcake.

The company present was delighted by this idea and promptly had another round of ale.

Time passed, and one of those present received a writ of summons for the Laurel, and another (who was not yet a member of this order) researched cakes of fruit in the renaissance and set out to produce the cake and its reliquary box besides. And this was introduced as the Ancestral Fruitcake of the Laurels and presented to the new inductee in court.

Others thought this was great fun, and that it did have the effect of making the Laurels seem less stuffy and more down-to-earth, and before long another candidate received a writ of summons and asked that the fruitcake be included in the ceremony. And others followed, and the fruitcake became part of AEthelmearc tradition. Along the way the fruitcake was actually shellacked to prevent unfortunate surprises, and a custom arose of new inductees adding some sort of token to the reliquary alongside the cake, over time accumulating quite the entourage to accompany the relic. That first fruitcake-receiving inductee wrote a poem that, for a time, was extended by a verse for each new member, though I do not recall how long that tradition continued. The fruitcake, cared for by so many Laurels over time, was said to have acquired mythic properties, though legends conflicted about the nature of these powers and whether they came from eating a small piece or not eating. The creator of the fruitcake was later inducted into the order and received the cake.

This ceremonial element is silly, which some inductees do not prefer, and other inductees create ceremonies specific to a particular time and place into which the ancestral fruitcake does not fit. It has always been up to each inductee to decide whether the fruitcake would appear in the ceremony -- most have, some have not. There is something entertaining about hearing the herald ask the assembly: "Is there a medallion? Is there a cloak? Is there a wreath? Is there a fruitcake?", especially when it is a newer herald who has not read the script in advance. But it is not for everyone, and the custodians of the fruitcake do not impose where the relic is not invited.

In recent times the ancestral fruitcake of the Laurels of AEthelmearc has come under attack and faces banishment from public view. And it is long past time for its story to be told, which I have endeavored to do from my own observation and memory, having been present for that initial discussion and at many of the ceremonies thereafter.

¹ I think this happened in 2002.

² In which category the delightful cakes made by minoanmiss do not fall, let me be clear.

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Pennsic

I'm home from Pennsic. Brief notes in the form of bullet points:

My good friend Yaakov HaMizrachi was elevated to the Order of the Laurel! Yay! The Laurel is the SCA's highest award (peerage) for arts and sciences. He's also now known (additionally) as Yaakov HaMagid, Yaakov the Storyteller. The ceremony felt like a reunion of old friends, and it was a nice touch that they had his son chant the scroll (in Hebrew).
The part of Atlantian court that I attended (because of the previous) was very well-done and engaging. I don't live there, I don't know most of those people, and yet I was not bored. They moved things along without it feeling rushed, and everybody speaking from the stage could be heard clearly. They also mixed it up, instead of doing all recipients of one award and then moving on to the next. Sprinkling the peerages throughout the court works well and, really, it's not a big deal for order members to get up more than once in an evening. (Also, if peerage ceremonies are burdensomely long -- theirs weren't; ours sometimes are -- it's nice to be able to sit down between them.)
I don't think I've ever heard "we're ahead of schedule; let's take a 10-minute break" in the middle of court before, though. I wonder if someone on the stage had an urgent need?
They elevated another bard to the Laurel, and that one sang his oath of fealty. While he was doing so I wondered if the king would respond in song -- and he did. That he used the same melody suggests some advance coordination (beyond "we're singing"), I wonder which of them wrote the king's words.
I had long, enjoyable conversations with both Yaakov and Baron Steffan. I miss the deep email conversations I used to have with both of them, before the great fragmenting of the digital-communication world (some to email, some to blogs/LJ/DW, some to Facebook, some to Google+, some to Twitter, some to places I don't even know about). It's harder to track and stay in touch with people than it used to be.
No I am still not going to start using Facebook. It's frustrating that by declining to do so I miss more and more stuff, but I'm not ready to let yet another thing compete to be the center of my online life. Also, Facebook in particular is icky in some important ways.
SCA local group, that means you too. Plans for a baronial party at Pennsic were, as far as I can tell, announced only on Facebook. (I've checked my email back to the beginning of April, so no I didn't just forget.) And thus I did not bring a contribution for your pot-luck. I do not feel guilty about that.
The Debatable Choir performance went very well. I conducted a quartet singing Sicut Cervus (by Palestrina), which I think went well. Two of the four singers had not previously done a "one voice to a part" song with the choir, and I'm proud of them for stepping up and doing a great job. I hope we got a recording.
I went to a fascinating class on medieval Jewish astrology (taught by Yaakov in persona). I've seen zodiacs in ancient (and modern) Jewish art and in synagogues, and a part of me always wondered how this isn't forbidden. It turns out that astrology is more of an "inclination", a yetzer, than a hard-and-fast truth -- there are stories in the talmud where astrology predicted something bad but the person, through good deeds, avoided the bad outcome. Also, in case you're wondering (like I did, so I asked), the zodiac signs get some solar smoothing, so if there's a leap-month (Adar Bet) there's not a 13th sign in those years.
Our camp has two wooden buildings (besides the house on the trailer, I mean), which we wanted to sell this year because we're making a new kitchen trailer that will replace both of them. We succeeded in selling the larger one (yay!). Maybe we'll be able to sell the other next year. (We'll set it up and use it for something else, because potential buyers would want to see it set up.)
Overall the weather was good. There were big storms on the first Friday ("quick, grab snacks and alcohol and head for the house!" is our camp's rallying cry), but only occasional rain after that and it wasn't sweltering-hot, which makes a huge difference.
The last headcount I saw was around 10,500.

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fun with ceremony (Coronation)

This past weekend I had the chance to participate in something really spiffy -- a recreation of a historic coronation ceremony. Most SCA ceremony is fundamentally modern, dressed up in renaissance trappings; the chance to do more-serious recreation is pretty special.

Of course, there are some special considerations -- historically, ceremonies like this would have been Christian religious services (part of a mass, I think), which in addition to being problematic for some participants (ahem) also would be a violation of SCA rules. So some work needed to be done on that, but I'm impressed by how real it felt nonetheless.

baron_steffan wrote/adapted the ceremony based on the Coronation service of Maximilian I (1486). Music was a central part (rather than being incidental as is sometimes the case), and we had about 20 singers from across the kingdom (about half from the Debatable Choir), organized and led by

ariannawyn. We sang four songs: "Te Regem Laudamus" (adapted from a "Te Deum"), Non Nobis Domine, the roll of kings and queens (more on that below), and "Da Pacem Domine", which we'll be using throughout the reign as processional music.

By ancient custom, the coronation ceremony includes the reading of the roll of all the past kings and queens. Usually this is read by a herald; we chanted it (adapting the Te Regem). One thing that was fun about this was that, to make it not clash, we sang Latinized versions of all the names (thanks Steffan!), and "collapsed" different rulers with the same names. So if you listen to the chant you'll hear Christophers 1 through 6, but that's really two different people each ruling three times. Some names underwent more transformation than others; I think the biggest change was "Rurik" to "Rodericus". I wonder how many of them were startled by hearing their names this time. :-)

dagonell has collected the ceremony, its documentation, the sheet music, and recordings (and other stuff from the event). Check it out! (The recordings here are of the music parts; I do hope somebody was recording the rest of the ceremony and that it'll make its way to that page.)

I don't go to a lot of SCA events any more, and almost never ones not in my local group, but this was totally worth the effort.

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[SCA] a good day for the barony

Today at the Agincourt event

byronhaverford received a writ for the order of the Chivalry and

hildakrista received a writ for the order of the Pelican, both to be answered at baronial 12th night. Woo hoo! (These are both peerage orders, the highest honors the SCA gives out aside from the rank you earn if you sit the throne. Chivalry is for skill at arms and Pelican is for service.)

hildakrista's husband, Brandubh (who is not on LJ), was also elevated to the Pelican today. (He'd received a writ at Coronation last month.) He looked really spiffy in the clothing

lefkowitzga made for him; I don't have pictures but I assume somebody will post some. :-)

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use this power only for good

For the last several days there has been an increasingly-tedious discussion on the (SCA) kingdom mailing list about an incident involving another kingdom's monarchs and the corporation. Well, was until yesterday, when a tedious discussion of chocolate milk took over the mailing list. (The prompt for that is that the dairy farm that produced the chocolate milk sold at the Pennsic site has gone out of business.)

Lesson learned: you can't necessarily make tedious discussions go away, but you can displace them. I must remember this. Maybe I should choose a few likely topics to start discussions of, when needed.

It might be past time for me to just shut down the moderated version of the mailing list. (I run a mailing list that receives all the traffic from the open list, and I send along the subset I deem to be appropriate. Some days that's everything and some days, like today, it's 10%.) There aren't a lot of subscribers, so the moderation effort per subscriber is high, and don't most of us have procmail or gmail auto-sorting or Outlook rules or suchlike by now? The mailing list can overwhelm an inbox at times, but it doesn't need to go to the general inbox. I have a few lists that pile up until I clean them out every week or two. Is that approach common now? It takes more effort for me to moderate a message (either yea or nay) than to just delete it from a mail folder, and if most people don't care... (If I decide I'm inclined toward this I will of course bring it up with my subscribers; I'm just thinking out loud here.)

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[SCA] war practice

Yesterday after I got home from services we went up to Cooper's Lake for AEthelmearc War Practice. This is a multi-day event (I think it's up to four now, maybe five), but, well, only Pennsic is worth the hassle of camping, so we just went up for the day. And it's been raining all week, so I would have punted even that, but we had reasons to be there.

New since last Pennsic: they finally put a traffic light at the end of the exit ramp from I-79N onto Route 422. Yay! That left turn (onto an often-busy 55MPH road) is the worst part of my drive to Pennsic. (The left turn out of the campground is the worst part of the drive home. No, I didn't get that lucky. :-) ) There seems to be some small amount of development along that stretch of 422; there is another (new) light before getting to the campground, at what used to be an open field sometimes occupied by a farmers' market, and now occupied by a gas station, a McDonald's, and a Subway. Hmm. If they add a beer outlet and grocery store, the two weeks of Pennsic business might pay for the rest of the year.

( the event )

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sca: aethelmearc

gee, thanks

I moderate a mailing list, and I'm going to be out of town with poor net access for a while later this month. So yesterday I posted to the list asking for volunteers to be fill-in moderator. I think I even said that it's usually not much work. (The list is a "filter" on an unmoderated list, so you don't even have to deal with rejection messages -- just approve the stuff that's on topic and otherwise appropriate and delete the rest.)

Within hours, a firestorm occurred. Usually the list gets about 5 messages a day; for today alone we're well over 50. Maybe 60 or 70. I lost count. I could check the archives, but I'd probably be depressed. (And I'm talking about the stuff that got through; about a quarter of it hasn't.)

So far I haven't gotten any nibbles to be temporary moderator. Gee, surprised? :-)

(If worse comes to worst the list will just go dark while I'm gone, but maybe this will die down and someone will volunteer.)

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last few days

Apropos of nothing... this essay by

dglenn on no longer being special in the modern era resonated with me.

Tonight's D&D game was a lot of fun. The party is slogging through some difficult terrain, and the visual imagery has been effective for me (both terrain and monsters). This is going to be a several-days trek that will wear the group down over time, but I think that's the right thing from a story perspective. Sure, if Frodo and Sam had had the ability to teleport straight to the heart of Mordor they would have, but had they done so Lord of the Rings would not be the classic it is. I play these games for story and character, and for me the story demands the trek.

Ever since we moved to our current house I've been building my sukkah using 2x2s, rope, and existing structures (a fence and a trellis). That's nice in a lot of ways, but it's a bit of a challenge to set up alone, and some of my infrastructure is hard to use. Meanwhile, a couple years ago our Pennsic group got a new shower frame made out of no-tools-required pipes that just slot together, and I think that's pretty spiffy. So today I ordered a tubular sukkah -- passing on their walls, as I've prefer the lattice I've been using for that. This gives me a free-standing sukkah that should go together very easily. Woo hoo. Who wants to come for dinner during the festival?

It was nice to get back to Sunday dinner after missing a few due to Pennsic. We began to see distant flashes of lightning not long after we finished eating; then we started to see really impressive lightning bolts with lots of forking that just lit up the sky. It was a very pretty storm (I wish I'd had my camera with me), and the liquid component was short-lived. It did a decent job on the humidity and didn't knock out our power. What more can you ask of a storm?

I moderate a mailing list that's a filter on an unmoderated SCA list. I reject messages that (1) clearly should have been sent privately, (2) are off-topic, (3) are flame-filled, or (4) duplicate other messages (the 17-replies-to-a-FAQ problem). Most of the time, I approve pretty much everything that comes in. But since Pennsic there have been a lot of rejections, first because of an accusation someone made that got a lot of people riled up, but then because of an inane thread on laundry. Yes, laundry. Not just things like how to clean tent canvas, which I believe to be on-topic for an SCA list, but discussion of dividing chores, whether it's ok for men to do laundry (!), horror stories involving bleach, and stuff like that. Sheesh. I hope that ends soon.

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grumpy (but light) short takes

Attention appliance manufacturers: there are correct and incorrect ways to fail. Correct is to unambiguously modify output upon failure, so the user knows there's a problem. Incorrect is to blithely go along reporting bogus information while your sensors fail, such as an oven reporting the wrong temperature, a radar detector failing to see the bogeys and reporting that all's clear, or a bathroom scale reporting the wrong weight. Maybe the last isn't as important as the others, but it's still annoying. Stop that. I didn't gain 10+ pounds by changing a battery; honest. You could have beeped or flashed at me to say "battery is low", you know. Sheesh.

An SCA officer posted a badly-worded announcement to the kingdom mailing list, prompting the vast quantities of speculation and challenges that she had hoped to avoid. (There had been none previously on this list.) There are better and worse ways to announce that something bad happened but you're not allowed to release any information yet. A good one is to say, e.g., "It is my sad duty to report that an SCA participant died at a fighting practice this weekend. We do not yet have permission from the family to release more details. Stay tuned.". A bad way is to say "something bad happened, please don't spread rumors, you'll be told what you need to know later, the presence of the word 'sad' in the subject line should give you a hint (nudge nudge, wink wink), no we really won't tell you anything, don't worry about it, don't bug us, and don't gossip". That trick never works. (As the moderator of a related mailing list, I now get to decide how much of the resulting traffic should get through.)

I would like for Java to provide one more publicity level than it does: "internal-public" (or, conversely, "api"). Not all public classes are meant to be used by applications; some are public only because they have to be visible to other classes in your code base. I'd like to be able to label which are which. I'm using a customized javadoc tool to produce the subset of documentation we want, but I get no compiler support this way, so I have to rely on home-grown tools and visual inspection to determine whether I have a self-consistent subset tagged for the API. This could have been easier, given perfect foresight. I'd be delighted if it were easier in the future. (I understand that .NET has a similar concept.)

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sca: aethelmearc

children in adults' bodies

I run a moderated "mirror" of an unmoderated mailing list. In other words, I edit a filtered feed, cutting out the spam, off-topic posts, gratuitous HTML, duplicate postings, and misdirected personal replies.

Recently (sometime during Shabbat) someone posted a long, off-topic message on a controversial subject. This was unwise. Someone else then posted a reply saying, effectively, "keep your off-topic drivel off this list", which was unwise, misdirected, and somewhat childish. Someone else posted twice, saying (and fully quoting the messages both times) "yay" and "pbbbttttt" to these messages, which was unwise, misdirected, and definitely infantile. Other people have responded to all of that. And then, the AOL/raspberry guy posted something saying we shouldn't be continuing this discussion, to which he'd already contributed noise.

All in under 24 hours.

Children, children, children... can't live with 'em; can't shoot 'em. But y'know, every time something like this happens I pick up another subscriber or two for the moderated list. :-)

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sca: aethelmearc

SCA note

Belated congratulations to

dagonell for being named the kingdom bard last Saturday!

Current Mood: amused

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sca: aethelmearc

(no subject)

Saturday at the SCA event Rufina showed up with the "peer trading cards" (a fundraiser for the kingdom). Each package contains one chocolate frog and one card. (Obviously we have Harry Potter fans in the SCA...) It was extremely successful, and I hope she does it again so I can get more. (Due to limited supplies, I only got one. It took me about an hour to actually see one of mine.)

Current Mood: disappointed

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sca: aethelmearc

clean sweep

A couple of years ago, I created a moderated mailing list to act as a filter on an existing unmoderated SCA list. (The owner of that list and I have very different ideas about appropriate content, so where I (were I list owner) would have posted the occasional "let's bring this back on-topic or take it to email" message, he posted things like "please label your off-topic posts in the subject line". He sees no inherent problem with off-topic banter that goes on for 20 or 30 messages in a single day.)

Usually the list is well-behaved and gets maybe half a dozen posts a day. Occasionally it flares up.

I think this is my first "clean sweep" of a moderately-sized approval queue, though. 10 messages this morning and not a single one appropriate for passing through. During the past few days only about a quarter of the messages have made it past the moderator, so this isn't too surprising I guess, but it still startled me. It hasn't been this bad since all that virus-related traffic came through last month. (I didn't think we needed 60+ messages trading virus horror stories, either.)

I've come to realize that if the moderator of a mailing list is doing his job, most subscribers have no clue that he's doing his job. :-)