The HMA GUY Journal

It’s been a mad dash for THE END over the past few days. A dash that will continue until the 15th, at which point something with “the end” written on the last page needs to be submitted to my agent, the Tartan Ninja. Today needs to be a stellar writing day so that I can fuck off to Meltdown Comics for the big 100 Bullets bash tomorrow night.

The handbook to English heraldry By Charles Boutell, Arthur Charles Fox-Davies, R. B. Utting is now online.

Yup - it's a straight scan of the book. Looks pretty darned good, too.

Various types of volunteers are needed at many of the Pennsic Services (http://www.pennsicwar.org/penn38/GENERAL/volunteers.html).

That includes needing volunteers to come work at Heralds' Point this year. While we obviously need heraldic help, we also have a number of tasks for those without any heraldic knowledge!

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By the way... we've MOVED this year. You'll need to look for us across from the bathhouse near the barn instead of over near the A&S tents.

I hope you'll consider volunteering with us at War this year. I look forward to seeing you there!

Ailis Linne
Heralds Point Coordinator, Pennsic 38

Some of us who live near Pennsic and have storage trailers on site like to drop things off before Land Grab to reduce the load on the big day.

If you're one of those people, you might want to know that they are closing the camp to non-staff as of the end of the day THIS SUNDAY, July 12. I just got off the phone with a member of the Coopers' staff, and she said after Sunday, only Cooper's and Pennsic staff will have access to the campground until July 25.

Greetings
If you are going to Pennsic, have any interest in period games, and are looking for someplace to volunteer, please consider spending some time helping at the Games Tent.  For those who don't know, the Games Tent is a place people can come all through the second week of war to learn and play period games.  There are scheduled classes, but the rest of the time, the tent is open to anyone who wants to stop by to play and learn period games.  The tent will be open from Saturday, August 1st through Friday, August 7th from 10am - 6pm.  We still need volunteers to let this happen.  There are two 4 hour time shifts per day that need to be filled by people familiar with a variety of period games ('gamer' shifts) and four 2 hour shifts per day that can be filled by anyone interested in helping ('helper' shifts).  If you know you are interested in helping out and know a time that you are free, please contact me and I will put you on the schedule now.  The schedule will be at the tent if you want to schedule a time to help once you get to Pennsic.  
Any amount of time you can commit will help and is greatly appreciated.  Feel free to contact if you have any questions.

Thank you very much
Naomi bat Avraham

Greetings!

 

Pennsic is almost here and we are still in need of some wonderful volunteers for the Children’s Fete, on August 5, 2009 from 1:00 p.m to 4:00 p.m.

 

 

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--
Yours in Honor and Service to the Children of Atlantia,

Elisabeth Hänsler  

Chancellor of Youth, Kingdom of Atlantia
Chancellor Minors - Barony of Windmasters' Hill
Deputy Seneschal - Canton of Attillium

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."  ~Eleanor Roosevelt</div>

We are the subject of today's Mini Page! Find a newspaper and dig through it. There we are. The Society for Creative Anachronism (uh-NA-kruh-ni-zum). Complete with Nifty Word Find. :)

x-posted.

ETA: The Mini Page is a section of children's articles and activities, usually focused on a specific subject, found in your average newspaper about once a week. Somewhere near the comics. The Mini Page has been in newspapers for a very long time. I believe it was originally published by cavemen on walls.

ETA 2: Average American newspaper. I always forget that this is an international forum.

ETA 3: Okay... further research shows that there are over 500 newspapers in the U.S. that use the mini-page. So... not every paper or every city or anything like that. But we have a positive newspaper feature in over 500 papers across the US today? Doth that not rock? Meanwhile, I have found a site that posts pdfs of the paper about a week after they have finished their syndication cycle (which is July 11th for this particular one.) I will come back and post a link when it's available for anyone that is interested.

Meanwhile... double check your local paper. I would not have known the Mini Page was there if I did not always check for my kids.

I'm still having a tough time coming to terms with Edith's suicide. The hardest thing for me, I think, is feeling like I failed as a friend. That I should have done more, somehow. I realize, intellectually, that there really wasn't anything that I could do to "save" her, but it's still so hard to shake that feeling. I think it's gonna be a long time before I stop waking up at night to find myself analyzing and picking apart our last conversation like a haunted detective, compulsively searching for that one tiny missed clue that will make it all make sense.

The outpouring of support I've received from both friends and strangers has really been amazing and I wanted to share the following email sent to me by a reader who had some really ballsy, insightful and powerful shit to say about surviving breast cancer. I can't say reading it made everything all better, but it did help me to understand some of what Edith might have been going through. I'm reprinting it here with the author's permission in the hope that it may give similar insight to anyone else out there who's still struggling.


Christa,

For the first time in a long while I was reading your livejournal,
and I came
upon your post about your friend Edith Speed. I was going to write
you
a quick response but it kept growing, and finally I just said fuck
it and
decided to mail it to you. I hope it gives you a little comfort.
If not,
I apologize. I don't mean to meddle, but when I saw what you typed
about wondering if you could have done anything different,
everything
in me wanted to scream through the computer, "No, no, NO sweetie,
it's so much more awful than anyone lets on, this whole cancer
shit!!!"

Anyway. Here's what I wrote:


Two random events today:
--I was standing at my sink, struggling, wondering what the
statistics are of how many of us breast cancer survivors commit
suicide. Because lady, it fucks you up. You're never the same.
Chemo separated me from my Self in a way few people would wish to
survive. It is a strange, awful wondrous thing to be a survivor,
and every day the war between the horror and the wonder rages. I
think there's a lot of us out here in the world who die and the
"cause of death" column reads "suicide" but what it really needs to
say is, "breast cancer treatment".

--Tonight, on a lark of following links I come to this post.

Please let go of any blame on yourself you may be holding. The
landscape after breast cancer is bleak and comfortless and lonely
no matter what fucking happy faces we put on for everyone else. As
much as you are suffering such great loss and questioning yourself,
please factor in the mountains she had to move every day and the
great weariness of soul that comes from moving those goddam endless
Sisyphus stones. It is living hell. No one else can do it for us.
No one else can be there with us in that dark place where our
butchered spirits meet the unknown at 3am. Worse, we're not
supposed to talk about it. Cause we're supposed to be happy and
pink and cheery. Come on lady, look at Lance Armstrong! So much
of breast cancer treatment and aftercare is a monstrosity of
"positivity or else". We are basically told that if we don't think
positive we'll die. But no one talks about the horrors that follow
us back out of chemo. That take up residence in our minds and
don't leave. That haunt us and choke us and bleed us all day long.
The neuropathy. The constant pains. The swelling, the tiredness,
the devastating sense that we went into surgery ourselves and came
out Frankenstein's abandoned creations; alone in the world and
enraged. Only happy breast cancer survivors need apply to society,
so we say all the right things about living in the moment and
loving our lives while we lay awake at night insane and plow
through our days crazed with DRIVE over the STRESS of a MOMENT IN
TIME. Those of us who stumble out of treatment broken, reanimated
and spiritually razed find little to no comfort in all the things
we ever knew before. Not even in you, our dearest loving friends.
Because WE are not the same. I wonder how many of us are out in
the world just floating, wandering dazed; our collective Dr.
Frankensteins living happily their heroic cancer doctor lives, and
we left observing the happy villagers through their windows, trying
to learn the language and mimic the motions of human life. Trying
to learn how to fit in but knowing there is no place for us because
in truth, there is something in that goddam chemo that kills the
part of us that could know what "I" ever meant. It's a bitch,
sister. A real bloody bitch. I don't care if they paint the whole
damn world pink, some of us just come out of that shit ravaged
beyond what we could ever speak to the people who love us. They
throw anti-depressants at us and send us to support groups and look
at us like we're ungrateful because we dare question the wisdom of
the barbarity. Save my life at all costs, isn't that it? Even if
the body and the mind I'm left with afterward are so unfamiliar I
feel like a ghost haunting a life that used to be mine?

Even now, I fight the urge to type, "BUT HEY, IT'S GREAT. I'M
GLAD TO BE ALIVE. IT'S GREAT. EVERYTHING'S GREAT."
It feels like my societal duty to say so. I feel like a cad, saying
anything different. But I have whispered with a few
other brave women, that we do not all get the Cheryl Crow
Melissa Etheridge E-ticket Experience and Matching Gift Bag.
Who knows, they could be lying too. For the rest of us, it's a
hell of
a lot more like MK Ultra meets Mr. Toad's Wild Ride meets the
Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

My heart goes out to you. It wasn't your fault, and it wasn't
because you didn't call enough or tell her you loved her enough.
If I may be so rudely bold (as I clearly already am,) I would say
it was because she just could not live without her SELF any more,
and/or that the fallout from treatment in all its varying forms,
was just too much. Just too damned much.

Edith Speed, rest.

Lastly, if it pleases you to do so, support these brave women
who take on the breast cancer industry AND refuse to take
money from the drug companies. The fact they exist
gives me hope that yes, some people DO know the hell of
chemo/aftercare for breast cancer, and are fighting hard
to find a PREVENTION as well as a cure.

www.bcaction.org

Take good care Christa. I know it hurts so much.

Warmest regards,

EKW

How many people here would consider their SCA activities a form of cosplay? Would you consider them two different types of dressing up as a character/persona? Do you do cosplay in addition to your SCA time? Do you think one is better than the other?

I am recently getting back into the SCA after some years of not being involved. I don't recall getting asked about cosplay before, but this time around when I talk about my costume research and my persona I have ended up in a few conversations about the correlation with making a costume for a convention. I'm sure there's a difference between SCA garb and Halloween costumes, but the closer you get to the die hard "I am so-and-so when I am in my costume" players, who spend time and money to have the best, most perfectly researched costume, and create a persona to go with it ... then it's harder to define how SCA is different. For me I always thought of us as being a little better, honestly, because I could see the point of SCA garb, and going to events, as a learning experience. I get a lot of useful knowledge out of my research, and from going to colleges and events. There's also the aspect of history: we're not recreating the perfect wig to go with our anime character, we're recreating historical recipes and craft techniques, and making things based on arts that might otherwise be lost. I am biased, I admit.

On the other hand, I know long-time SCA folks, kids who grew up in the society, who also make costumes to wear to Victorian events, steam-punk outfits, or anime cosplay garb, and don't think there's much of a difference.

Thoughts?

Two Mexican midget wrestlers apparently found murdered in their D.F. hotel

From Wrestling Observer:

"--Brothers Roberto and Alejandro Mejia, who wrestled as La Parkita (I think
the original from AAA 15 years ago, not the one on AAA in recent years) and
Espectro II, were both found dead near Arena Coliseo yesterday in a hotel
room. The police believe they went to Room 52 of Hotel Moderno with two
prostitutes at 6 p.m. Sunday night. The manager went to the room on Monday
when they hadn't checked out, nobody answered the door, and when they opened
the door to clean the room, both bodies were found in bed and were dead.
The belief is they were drugged and robbed by the prostitutes, as none of
their belongings were found. Both were 35. They are both younger brothers
of the original Espectrito, who was the superstar mini with Mascara Sagrada
from the early days of AAA. La Parkita had wrestled in the U.S. with
CHIKARA."

Britain's Queen Elizabeth is preparing to have her swans counted.

Buckingham Palace has announced that the annual Swan Upping, a tradition dating back to the 12th Century, which involves a census of the swan population on the River Thames, will be conducted by the Queen's official Swan Marker from July 20-24.

"With the assistance of the Queen's Swan Warden, Professor Christopher Perrins of the University of Oxford, the swans and young cygnets are also assessed for any signs of injury or disease," Buckingham Palace said in announcing the count.

The process involves the Swan Marker, David Barber, rowing up the Thames for five days with the Swan Warden in traditional skiffs while wearing special scarlet uniforms and counting, weighing and measuring swans and cygnets.

It may seem eccentric, but it is very important to the Queen.

According to custom, Britain's sovereign owns all unmarked, mute swans in open water, but the Queen now exercises the right only on stretches of the Thames and its nearby tributaries.

In medieval times, the Swan Marker would not only travel up the river counting the swans, but would catch as many as possible as they were sought-after for banquets and feasts.

This year, the Swan Marker and the Swan Warden are particularly keen to discover how much damage is being caused to swans and cygnets by attacks from dogs and from discarded fishing tackle.

It is also an important year because Queen Elizabeth has decided to join her team of Swan Uppers for part of the census.

She will follow them up the river and visit a local school project on the whole subject of swans, cygnets and the Thames.

"Education and conservation are essential to the role of Swan Upping and the involvement of school children is always a rewarding experience," Buckingham Palace said.

Masalaama!

Last year Melissa the Loud organized the "More Period Hafla" which met with notable success. This encouraged more thought and action in the same vein.

This year, another effort in the culture is "Folkloric Dance", to be offered and open on August 1 at the ME Arts Tent in the evening. Please consider attending and joining in.

Salaam, durr

Hello Everyone!   (Please feel free to cross post to any lists that you are on.) 
 
Pennsic is here soon and we are seeking the help of volunteers with this years Children's Fete. 
 
The fete will be on August 5, 2009 from 1:00pm to 4:00pm.
 
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