fbhjr: (Merlin)
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Smith College, about an hour and a half west of where we live, has a science fiction/fantasy convention every March, and we’ve been doing shows there for many years.
This year they seemed a bit less organized than normal, for instance as I write this it is the third day of the 2019 convention, and their website is still set up for the 2018 one: https://sophia.smith.edu/conbust/
We only got our schedule a week ago, but it all worked out in the end.


My wife and I were part of a discussion panel at 9AM, so got there early as there had been no coordination between the panel members about our topic. (Writing realistic fights.)

The construction crew working on rebuilding the library were the only folks who beat us there.


For the convention, only the inflatable deer beat us there.

Later I asked the young woman who organized it why they left the lecture hall open with only an inflatable deer head to watch over it all night. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," she told me.
She then insisted I have my photo taken with the deer.

Not sure why…

The discussion group got way off topic. My wife and I kept trying to bring it back to fights instead of discussion of the economics of peasants, tiffany windows, bad superhero costumes and such.
It was still an interesting discussion, but not even close to what we should have been discussing.

But, then we did our historical show. It was a bit cool in the morning (18C or so) and had rained the day before, but we still did the show on the lawn in front of the convention instead of in the gymnasium a 10 minute walk away.




Casey and his daughter started the show with their sword fight. She was very big on this idea as she hadn’t gotten to go to Florida with us at the start of the month to perform, and wanted her chance.


The boy of glass did well too.


Then, we all went for pizza.


In the afternoon, we did a small class on George Silver’s paradoxes of defense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Silver
The good news is it had gotten much warmer (20C or so) and the sun came out some. So, it was much nicer.

The lessons started with my wife and Devon actually demoing it with swords and daggers.


Then, we handed out wooden dowels for folks to use and lined them up to do it.


I’m sure they would have preferred real swords, but this was better for our insurance.



Of course there was no pressure that we were being watched by one of the founders of the historical sword guild we learned this stuff from, or two of the instructors who first taught us historical sword fighting.

It isn’t really a worry. We’re all friends.

Two of the three of those went off to play with their pikes afterwards.


We had a nice visit with our other instructor while that went on.


Much of the discussion revolved around Carl, his hat and underhat, and his mustache.


As we had been out there fairly early, we didn’t hang around too long after our shows and headed home before 5.


Overall it went well. They seemed happy. No one got hurt with the lesson.
That’s a good day.

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