Does anybody have a bionic elbow?

So I aggravated a long-term minor elbow injury at he beginning of the month. Though oddly hitting people seems to make it feel better. And by that I mean there is no pain when I fight and then less pain for a day or so afterwards. I'm trying to just get it to remain functional until October, fight in Crown and then rest it. Here's a clip from last week's Thursday practice: (I'm the one in blue and green)

And here's my bread and butter combination at half speed.

Time to get serious about Crown Tourney if I want to win this time. As I was told at Pennsic, it is all abot the flat snaps and leg wraps. We'll see.

Speedy Week

Wow, the last week went fast. Hopefully the summer will slow down soon so I can enjoy some of it.
Last weekend was an SCA event, rain forced the fighting indoors. I did very well, actually won the tournament. Day started out with fights like this:

And as the day went on the fights got longer, better opponents. I fought through Master Wolfstan the Unshod and Sir Murdoc Bayne, fights I don't usually win. Then I was in the finals and took two fights there to win the tournament:

Maybe it is a harbinger of good things if I can keep up my physical raining and get to some more fighter practices.
July is going to bring a ton of work, mostly instruction, but it will mean a chance to kind of play executive producer on some documentary projects. Hopefully I can get some traction on some personal stuff too. Do some writing, start some editing and finish at least one short film. Time will tell.

Fighting Weekend

So Saturday was a full day demo at the Ice Festival in Scranton and Sunday was a regional fighter practice in Syracuse. I don't know how the Ice Festival was, as I spent the entire time fighting at the demo. But my wife and son walked around and they said it was small but the ice sculptures were nice. And I got to be in the local Scranton papers the next day. I've put up one of the picture's here, where I'm giving a flower to a particularly blood thirsty girl. I'd taken (cut off) one of my opponent's arms, so in keeping with SCA convention, he dropped his shield. I asked the crowd if I too should drop my shield, sometimes seen as the chivalrous thing to do, and the little 4 year old girl yelled "Keep your shield", the prudent choice. I won the fight and gave her a fake flower we had to hand out to on lookers. Overall a nice Valentine's Day.
My elbow was killing my Saturday night, but fighting on Sunday seems to have mostly fixed it. That's my second injury a full day of fighting has fixed, the first one being a badly wrenched back a few years ago. I was able to stay on my exercise schedule on Monday, so it looks like just some lingering pain, not a serious impairment.


So yesterday starts the cleaning for my son's birthday party. YEAH! Nothing like a two week cleaning schedule to make things fun. Plus I still need to start the trivia DVD for the party.
And we go a new digital camera over the weekend. To replace the one with the non-functional LCD screen. And I got to try it out last night when my son started putting stickers on my wife's back while she was watching TV. After a few pictures I tried to test out the video function and got the following reaction: he says "Don't do a video of me" then takes the camera and puts it back in it's case. I'd already started the recording though, so here's what I got:

Busy, busy, busy

Last week was very busy and the next two look to be just as packed. But I did get a mostly relaxing weekend at home, which I won't see again until the middle of February. Work last week was a rush job putting together a video to run during an inauguration party (up on my YouTube account), getting the score together for my short film, getting ready for the official presentation for the launch of the STAP media campaign, and helping a friend get a demo reel together so he can try and get a job at a local television station.
On the SCA side, I went to two practices last week. A bit closer to what I'll need to be doing for crown training, just different practices (need more challenging opponents). BIG tournament this Saturday, that will be a good measure of where I'm at training-wise.
Finally, we started the longest craft project ever. Okay a small exaggeration, the project was to excavate a plastic Brachiosaurus skeleton from a "plaster block" using a plastic knife-hammer and a small paintbrush. The "plaster block" could be better described as a brick. And the "tools" you were supplied with would be great if you were proceeding at a paleontological pace (SLOW) but if you were an actual child then the "tools" were mostly inadequate. After about 6 hours of work time, spread over 2 days, produced the pieces of the skeleton and a brick sized pile of dust spread over WAY too big an area. But we do now have a completed Brachisaurus skeleton and know that next time we should just buy the loose pieces to assemble, as that's what my son really wanted to do anyway. Here's a little video of the start and end of the project.

Taking a Squire

So this is going to be a mostly SCA post. At Kingdom 12th night I took my first squire. This is something that I can do since my knighting in August. The squire/knight relationship is going to be interesting, its somewhere between teacher, mentor and advocate. It's tough to explain if you aren't familiar with how the SCA works, and if you are then I'm sure you'll have you're own idea of what being a squire means. I didn't have a lot of time with my knight, though I did have a number of surrogates, as a result I'm kind of modeling what I want the relationship to be off a number of influences. However, I realized that at the end of the day my expectations may be too high when taking my new squire's oath of fealty one of the things I responded with was "I won't ask anything of you I wouldn't do myself" which also means I may end up expecting my level of commitment and dedication from someone else, and I'm not sure if that's fair but I think that is what's going to happen.
For regalia I've decided to go with the traditional red belt, a silver squire's chain (more common in AEthelmearc than it was in Atlantia, but something I'm comfortable with), a spear (something ha my knight did with his squires that I really liked), my wife is making a fighting tunic and wanted to continue the tradition of giving the new squire's lady amber (something my knight did that she really liked) and finally I let him be gifted with sliver spurs (something that I hadn't considered, but am okay with). All things that are now kind of set as what I'll do for future squires. And now I know how to make a spear and a chain necklace. It was funny, while I was making the chain for my squire my son became interested in the links and wanted his own chain, so I made a shorter one for him, he wore it for about half the time we were at 12th night.
So SCA goal for this year is the same as the last two years, win the next crown tournament. There's 15 weeks until crown tournament. That should give me 3 weeks to finish general conditioning, then 6 weeks of strength work and fighting basics and finally 6 weeks of speed and conditioning work with as much fighting as I can get. I think I'll be buying a heavier kettlebell next week, it'll also help with my son's increasing weight and continuing insistence that he still needs to be carried and then falls asleep.
And now for those of you who need more pictures of my son:

Video Contest 4

Well, I've made my fourth entry into a video contest in as many weeks. I've put together a quick montage of SCA fighting that we did at a kind of super sweet 16 birthday party. I was also coordinating the video of the party, so we managed to get a 2 camera shoot of the fighting for bettering editing. Anyway the video can be found here. Don't be afraid to watch and rate it, though I don't know if that will have any impact on the contest outcome.

With Thanksgiving next week, I don't know if I'll shoot any personal video. But I suspect I'll be entering more contests in the near future.

No real pictures or movies to post right now, but there are some meat ones over on my wife's blog.

Summer Movies

Back from a brief trip to Vermont. I went to a science center with my son. There were a TON of kids there, I'm guessing it was a mandated state-wide field trip day. But we managed to move around and get some time at most of the stations. Apparently there is a similar museum about an hour from where we live, which we may try and get to at least once this summer.
Here is a movie of my son playing at the Vermont science center.

So, I'm about ready to start another series of movies with my son. I've got a noir mystery sort of scripted, but I'm going to need some actors besides just my son for it to work. So, maybe I'll collect footage for that and edit / post it later this summer and do a quick series with just him for now. Also, I've been looking at some on-line video contests that could be some fun. But with those I usually need voting help. Get ready for mass e-mails. I was going to start with a Ben & Jerry's Birthday Video contest, but they state in their rules that no one under 18 can appear in the video. And since my idea involves my son, and he's still a bit under 18, I think we'll skip this one.

Movies I've seen recently (over due):
Iron Man: Another addition to good superhero movies being produced. It's not as good as Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins, but it is close to the level of the first Sam Rami Spiderman (which get bonus points for re-establishing the superhero movie as a viable franchise.) Iron Man works due to an excellent selection of enemy that works for the non-comic fan (Mandrin would have been a disaster). It also only updates what needs to be changed to work as a current story (IED in Iraq rather than a landmine in Vietnam, for example). The humor and playfulness was fantastic as was the feel that the armored characters were really there not a CGI paste in (see Ang Lee's Hulk). However, I think the movie spent too much time on the build process and not quite enough with villain development. The War Monger seemed to be there just so that there could be a fight at the finale of the movie. On a serious note, movies don't all have to be 2 1/2 hours long for me to feel like I got my money's worth.
rating: 3.5 out of 5

Speed Racer: Okay three things. 1, there was enough racing from my son (good). But, 2: there was too much monkey for both of us. Seriously the three year old was unimpressed with the monkey sidekick. 3: Too much close-ups. I know this is because of pressure to make movies more accessible and enjoyable on smaller screen (phone, ipod, ect) distribution. It's just disappointing to see what I assume is studio pressure effect artistic decisions in film making in a way that detracts from the overall quality of the film. For Speed Racer, there was the potential for a good movie there, the Wachowskis just didn't quite get it to the screen.
rating: 2 out of 5

King of Kong: Documentary about the world record high score on Donkey Kong. I remember making my dad get me past boards on the Atari 2600 version of Donkey Kong so that I could play the later levels. This is a fantastic documentary. There is a wonderful story arc, characters emerge develop and evolve. There are heroes and villains. As someone who as a hobby that falls outside of the normal range of leisure activities, I found a lot to identify with in this movie.
rating: 4.5 out of 5

Finally, on my leisure activites. I'm helping to train an army for Pennsic. For those of you who don't know what the large scale stuff we do looks like. Here's a link to Blackstone Raids, a much smaller event at the end of April. If I remember correctly there were 180 fighters on the field that day, about 80 on one side and 100 on the other. Pennsic will have numbers closer to 400 on a side.

Finally, here's another movie of my son. Doing a sword fighting drill he made up:

Hopefully I'll have a new movie up Monday.

Back to Blogging

A month with no blogging. So, lets update:

SCA. I feel like the Buffalo Bills of AEthelmearc. Crown tournament is every 6 months. If you win you sit as Prince and Princess for 4 months and then as King and Queens for 6 months. Over the last two years, or the last 4 tournaments we've (my wife and I) finished second 3 times. Here are the finals from this year:
Spring 2008 finals
Pennsic is 12 weeks away. Time to focus training on that.

Production. Without the deadline of the puppy movies, I haven't done any work on personal projects. I have been getting work, which is good. But it's time to get back to some personal stuff. So, let's say I'll start another series with my son in June, and get my short film ready for festivals by June.

Movies. We went and saw Iron Man as a family for Mother's Day. And I'd say we all enjoyed the movie. The next few months look like they'll see more of my son and I going to the theater to see movies. So far he's been very good about sitting through the movie with minimal fidgeting. We're seeing Speed Racer on Thursday, I'm hoping for lots of racing scenes. That seems to be what my son is expecting. And with a 2hr and 15min run time, racing and action will be important to keeping him interested. Though Iron Man was almost that long, and Water Horse was too. And he got through those, so I suspect we'll be okay.

Well, I'll try and get back in the habit of posting again.

SCA Combat

Over the weekend I took a trip to a huge SCA tournament Birka. I ended up fighting for the better part of 4 hours. It was a very surreal experience to walk into a tournament with about 150 fighters and really not know any of them, in fighting style or experience. The fighting was run continuously with the fighter feeding into 10 pits. Then after the fighting I had to leave to get back home almost immediately, so I had no idea of where I was in the standings at the end of the day.

Here's a picture from what I think is about mid-day, notice the sweat soaking through and darkening my tunic (I'm the one in Green).

So today I fond the tournament results posted on-line. And it turns out I finished 9th, which I happy with. (Actually ranked 8, because they didn't do ties right)

magnus Tindal

Wins 75
Losses 49
Double Kills 3
Total Fights 127
% of Fights Won 59.1
Rank 9

But at the same time it makes me wonder if I the drive and time I've dedicated to the SCA serve me better if directed to say, my film making. I looked at me schedule over then next few months and see it divided pretty equally between work and SCA. Is that too much hobby?

However, the SCA does keep me motivated to keep physically fit and mentally healthy. I get fairly lackluster and depressed if I go for more than about a week and a half without fighting.

Anyway, I'm going to try and get back to my project goals and accomplish something this week.