SCA Banner War Retrospective

Ok. Getting back into this. Might take me a minute.

          I didn't make a post on Friday, as the prophecy dictates, and for that I apologize,but I have my reasons. The reasons in question being that I was suddenly invited to embark on a journey I have not undertaken in some time: The Society for Creative Anarchronism, or SCA, specifically for the event Banner War.
         This event was a little different for me for a number of reasons, the primary two being that: A.I apparently have nearly no skills when it comes to camping under precipitation*. And B: that Banner War received a visitation from one of my Media Idols at the previous years event(which he cataloged himself in his particular venue), so I was hoping that a repeat visitation would be in order. This was not the case, but it nonetheless illuminated my experiences in a subtly different way, and I found certain experiences that I had mirroring those, including the aftermath , which I will catalog at the end of this post, since the lines of thought are different enough to merit separation. But if you don't want to read that one later: I got deliriously sick as soon as I got home.
          But right now I want to talk about my experiences in the SCA, in both a positive and a negative light, as especially through the lens of this year's Banner War. While making the drive down to the Masonic Park in Snohomish, two things were already pretty clear to me: This would be the most non-regional event I had been too since my first foray in 2012, which happened near Bremerton. And this would be the wettest. I now readily admit that my SCA experience has definitely been on easy mode.           Rainy camping completely changes the paradigm for just about every aspect of camping. I had purchased and was prepared to make two full meals a day for two people. But with my minimal rain protection and equally bad lighting, maintaining a functional kitchen was basically impossible. I cooked once aside from morning coffee, and I'm pretty sure I risked seriously under-cooked food. Just about every other campsite had secured, or gained invitation to a campsite that had access to a covered structure that served both as meeting and leisure, as well as a kitchen setup.
          There were a lot of cool things that I was allowed to partake in as well. I was a member of the spectating chorus for carbomb races, and even was allowed to challenge the Lord of Bacyn, head of one of my favorite houses, to a single race, which I proudly bested him in. My biggest moment, though, was when I got to play my autoharp and sing songs for the drunken afterparty, which was a step up for me in both SCA Barding and my mundane pursuit of performance. Until Saturday night, I had never performed my autoharp for more that 5 people. That night, I performed for well over 50**, which was a confidence boon i could not imagine until I felt it.
          What this really drives home for me is that if I want to participate next year(which I do), it is very much time to invest more heavily in the SCA than I have been, both in money and in effort towards custom. At the very least, I need to register as a full member and petition to join a damn house.

Follow up:
          So, I had an inkling I might be coming down with something just before I set out for Banner War, but after I had started preparation and set out, it had resolved itself to little more than a runny nose. But I have noticed in the past that this behavior is less of an immune-response than a kind of demonic pact: I am given leave of the majority of my symptoms until my desired event has concluded, but upon its conclusion, the severity returns, seemingly in proportion with the length it was held back for.  I had no sooner unloaded and unpacked my gear after returning home, than I collapsed in a feverish delirium which did not cease for almost two days. Even while writing I still feel its lingering effects.

-Will         

Editors Notes:

*You're almost 30 years old and you don't know how to camp in the rain. I don't think I can reasonably express that level of shame without violating some kind of law, even if it ends up being a natural one.
**50 drunk people. Don't let your head get too big, champ.

         

20 ways to explain a mundane activity badly

          This is a list of things we do every day. See how many of these regular activities you can identify based on the questionable descriptions below. Warning, some of them are very risque'.

1. Lay back and let a stranger explore your mouth, sometimes drawing blood.
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2. Wander aimlessly in a sea of green until a local helps you find growth.
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3. Indirectly arrange and direct electrons until you make sharp, joyful breaths.
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4. Swing with a partner until you cant get it up anymore.
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5. Send a relative to the best sauna available.
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6. Sad musical chairs.
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7. Give your noble steed a proctology exam
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8. Go to a strangers house and have a nap.
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9. (with number 8)Tell everyone your opinion of the people you never met after you leave.
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10. Call up a stranger and ask them to fix something you don't understand, then be upset because they did and you don't know how (or didn't, but they absolutely should know how.)
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11. Receive a call from a stranger who babbles incoherently at you until they feel better, then hangs up after calling you names. Repeat weekly.*
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12. Citing the french revolution as inspiration, make an example of several million bourgeois blades of grass, ensuring they respect the working class. Repeat monthly.
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13. Make uncomfortably sensual noises while a stranger tenderizes you.
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14. Tell someone your deepest feelings and longings. Wait 1-3 weeks for them to be aware.
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15. Spend 3 weeks learning what not to do. Do anyways
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16. Spend the same 3 weeks learning what to do. Never do any of it, ever.
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17. Call a relative long distance and then pretend to be them when they don't answer.
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18. In the style of the Romans, eat until you physically cannot, throw up, and go back for pie.
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19. The endless torment that stretches out, each moment confirming more than the last that you have passed beyond the veil and are now in a pit of hell, doomed to endless toil, your mind wasting away into complete madness as the ringing of sacrificial bells tolls you closer to oblivion.**
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20. Beach combing for terrible prizes.

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Answers:

1. Going to the dentist
2. Wandering around the Lowe's garden section until someone helps you find fertilizer
3. Watching Youtube videos
4. Doing tandem crunches at the gym
5. Cremation
6. Speed Dating
7. Getting your car an emissions test.
8. Staying at n AirBnB
9. Reviewing your AirBnB
10. Call Tech Support
11. Doing Tech Support
12. Mow the Lawn
13. Get a massage
14. Write a love letter
15. Take a diet and exercise class
16. Take a diet and exercise class
17. Use a Ouija board 
18. Dinner at Grandma's
19. Waiting in line at the DMV
20. Cleaning the litter box.

-Will

Editors Notes:

*WE GET IT, YOU'RE AN IT GUY.

**Nope. Not even going near this. Its a level of his psyche I want nothing to do with.

Staying safe on the internet

          Its been a strange day. I discovered my debit card had been compromised. This was most likely because of an internet faxing service I had used*, because the IRS hasn't moved into this century yet, but it got me thinking about information security, so I thought I'd share a little wisdom about staying safe on the internet.

4 ways to not get ripped off on the internet:

1. HTTPS. The first one is something that goes relatively unnoticed but has gained a particular amount of prominence in the last few months. Look at the left side of the address bar of whatever browser you're using. The address most likely starts with HTTPS. Now as you ramble about the internet, keep an eye on the addresses of sites you visit. You might notice that occasionally it starts with HTTP, with the S being omitted. And this is important: If there is no S, either get off the website or find a version that has HTTPS because it is terribly unsafe. The S literally stands for 'Secure' and means that your information is encrypted against people sniffing the info. It doesn't necessarily stop people from grabbing the raw data, but all they get when they read it is garbled nonsense. Luckily if you use google chrome, the distinction is made much more obvious, since google started identifying any HTTP based website with a 'Secure/Not secure' listing next to the address. Thanks again google!**
   
2. Grammar counts. One of the age old ways to stop an internet scam is to proofread***. The first line of defense in the war on scammers is to remember that they are cunning but ultimately lazy. They don't check their content for spelling, punctuation, or in some cases, English, because that amount of effort puts them at a net negative in the time-value calculation****, so they fling their badly written dribble as quickly and as much as possible and collect whatever comes back. Whenever you get an email or go to a website, just ask yourself: could a 5th grader write more coherently than this, and judge accordingly.
   
3. Old things. This one is a two-parter. Internet fraud artists ply their trade largely on old people; who don't understand the internet, and old technology; which doesn't work well with the internet. Often it is done in tandem, because you have someone who likes using old technology and wants it to interface with the new. This is precisely how I got duped*****, though obviously I'm not that old******. I needed to send a fax from the internet rather than a fax machine, and chose the wrong 'service' to do it. So if you need to merge old tech with new, talk to a professional instead of clicking things on the internet.
   
4. Name Branding. As uncomfortable as it is to some people with the 'buy local' attitude, on the internet, the bigger the name, the more trustworthy they are(I caution here that this just means that they are more trustworthy in a transactional-legal sense. It's the ethics question. They might screw you, but they'll just do it legally, and they wont charge you anything outside of what their lengthy and impossible to understand agreements say they will. So its kind of like deciding if you want to have a shitty day now or on buy it on layaway.) A large, well known company has a lot to lose if they don't appear to be running legally and providing a secure, safe service. Remember the Target breach? They lost some serious credibility and profit over that, and it was largely due to neglect rather than malice on their part. Imagine what would happen if that kind of thing happened regularly and knowingly?

          What I'm getting at here is that the internet preys on people who are unfamiliar with it. So take a class, talk to someone experienced, or just stay off the internet entirely and keep writing checks at the supermarket.*******

-Will

Editor's Notes:

* He's way less sure of this than he'll admit.He does enough dumb stuff on the internet that you could steal his identity with a google search.

**This is unrelated, but he has a google home and always thanks it when it does stuff for him. The disembodied voice doesn't require your appreciation you tool.

***Ironically something he needs me to do and probably how he got his card compromised.

****Based on which I am out about $300 and one cheese omelette.

***** See footnote 1. He surfs the internet like a tourist covered in steaks in a shark tank.

****** Last week he asked a date what their favorite 'Anime' is and almost cried when they said 'Naruto'. It got worse when they said they 'found out there's an anime based on Pokemon Go'.

*******I HATE EVERYONE WHO DOES THIS WITHOUT EXCEPTION


   

Try not to make it personal: An unlicensed guide to discourse in the modern era.

Welcome to the start of a new school year!

          That's what I would say if I was in school, which I'm still giving some serious thought. But I'm not, so we can move on.

          Today I want to talk about what I will continue to refer to as dreaded politics. I'm not trying to undermine the importance of politics and the civic duty of being politically informed. The title is more of a statement on where social interaction goes when topics under the heading of 'political' get brought up. And that place is approximately into the toilet, due to the Backfire Effect. I'm not going to go over the particulars for you. The Oatmeal does a particularly good job of that here.
          The point is that because of this, and because of the deeply divided nature of politics, and other issues. It inevitably leads a political conversation to be less of an exchange of facts to establish an agreed statement, but instead to an informational snowball fight, where we chuck our best soundbytes regardless of actual validity or context.
          Situational Example: Two young men are at a party. And they strike up a conversation about common ancestry and about the bible. One man,(Lets call him 'Dave'), is a devout Christian and while not taking a completely literal interpretation of the bible, he believes in the idea that there was an Adam and Eve, that were common ancestors of all modern humans. The other, (Lets call him 'Buster'), is a staunch Atheist, and with that, has no truck with what he calls 'Biblical nonsense'. And believes in no sense that there is single common ancestor, believing instead that we grew as a species, but there was no 'Adam and Eve' pair at all. At first the conversation is informative for both sides. They learned things about pair bonding, and migration patterns. It was great until they came up to the core of the discussion:

"There absolutely was no Adam and Eve." says Buster. "Species are large malleable groups that evolve and don't bottleneck to single reproductive pairings"

Dave is a fairly reasonable person. He believes in a sort of Proto-Evolution, and he tempers his Christian beliefs enough to allow for it as a more complex version of 'The Creators Plan'. But between Buster's tone, and making a statement in direct contradiction of the biblical text, Dave officially falls of the 'Reasonable' cliff and starts trying to protect his belief's. And his first volley in this conflict is one of my least favorite: The Cliche Misconception.

If I had to list out the top 10 weapons in the death of discourse, coming in at around #5 would be the use of the 'Cliche Misconception' Which is the use of a fact or set of facts, which sound perfect for your viewpoint, but are either factually accurate, but misleading, or factually inaccurate entirely, having often been wholesale disproven long ago. They nonetheless find their way into the Zeitgeist and come back again and again, robbing people of their ability to rationally discuss any topic.

Some wonderful examples of this in the modern era:

• Vaccines causing Autism
• Eating fat alone makes you fat
• Mother birds abandon chicks who are touched
• Flat Earth

So Dave responds, "Well they had to start somewhere, and animals of different species can't interbreed, so there had to be a single point of origin and speciation." Quoting the common misconception that the defining characteristic of the species classification is that two species cannot reproduce together, which is only about half true*.  The defining idea here is that he has already read otherwise, but his brain is selecting the best information to defend with, not necessarily the most accurate. **

And this becomes a stepping stone for both sides that eventually completely obscures the discussed topic, and has both hurling insults. I'll summarize for the sake of time:

"You're in a cult for a murderous imaginary friend!"

"You think we evolved from monkeys!"

And now paraphrasing(for even BETTER time savings):

"You now represent the opposite of everything I find to be Good"

"(repeat)"

And hopefully the conversation ends when their partners take away their wine and scold them for 'Making a scene'

          The point here, and the question I am always asking, both of my own interactions, and of others is: How do we stop this cycle? How do we have a conversation about topics like this without letting our emotions turn it into a verbal(or physical) fight. I don't have the answer, but I came up with some guidelines, which are kind of outlined by the Oatmeal comic above, but I'll make my own statement.

• Am I disagreeing with the statement or with the person? (Has this debate already gotten personal?). This usually requires backing up the discussion with the other person and getting it back on track if possible.
• Don't be too neutral. Utilitarianism is a particularly cold line of thought organization built around efficiency and is often the tagline of people who believe that the nature of the universe is to be ordered and fair, therefore less regulation of systems*** will always cause them to be more balanced. This is kind of true in a physics sense(Things become more chaotic, but more evenly balanced), but not in sense that is appropriate to life and consciousness****. Life is not efficient, and in fact struggles under too much efficiency because as organisms, we need energy to use on enjoying the fruits of our labor. A viewpoint predicated on the idea that people should be able to keep living already has a non neutral stance because it implies that we should expend at least a minimum effort towards keeping others alive. If your argument reduces someone to a number to their detriment, or depends on not acknowledging their needs as humans*****, then re-check that you're even on the right side.
• If you can't stop yourself from getting heated and personal, at least find the right venue and don't ruin everyone's day unless its really important to do so.******

Will -

Editors Notes:

-You probably notice that editors notes and footnotes are interchangeable. That's because I go through the post and add context to some of the more unclear, or, frankly, dull moments. I'm lucky Will remembers punctuation.

*I spent 2 hours looking up a cohesive definition of species, but there just isn't one. The definition changes dramatically, depending on which subset of biology or zoology(or taxonomy) is doing the defining. The most commonly accepted definition in terms of biology and evolution is a stage at which two groups cannot produce viable offspring. So making a mule still counts as inter-species erotica.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species#Attempts_at_definition

 ** The weirdest part about this fictional argument is that they are both sort of right. We can genetically trace our lineage to a mitochondrial x chromosome ancestor and an originating y chromosome ancestor. However, note two things:  

• Mitochondrial Eve actually changes to someone else as certain sub lineages of humans die off, meaning that the common x chromosome ancestor of all humans becomes someone more recent. 
• The currently accepted Mitochondrial Eve died an estimated 50,000 years before Chromosomal 'Adam' was born, they likely didn't live on the same continent, and he is her distant grandson. Take that Fry.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve (Yes its a Wikipedia article, but the bibliography section is longer than this whole blog post. We're ok)

*** Fun fact: There are two groups who most closely align with the Utilitarian ideals(though often highly distorted for personal gain): Libertarians, and Nazis. Just putting that out there. I'm not saying that Utilitarianism is inherently bad, but it is a malleable enough concept to be twisted to some super shitty ideologies.

**** I have had the 'Deregulation will fix everything' argument with so many people I may just distill it down to asking them to get into a room with a boiling pressure cooker and saying 'Don't worry, I removed the pressure regulation valve!' 

***** "Food? If you needed food you shouldn't be starving in the first place. Thinking ahead is all you need to do to avoid these situations."

****** I'm saving Will from himself and the collective wrath of the internet by saying that visibility for vocalizing issues is important. Kneel during the game, make people understand that bad things are happening; just don't angrily knock over a bottle of Rose' because 'Jerry is a shill who doesn't understand the regulatory importance of the capitol gains tax.' We want to be invited back over.