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Archives for February 2016

To boldly go… thoughts on the new International Armizare Society.

February 25, 2016 By Guy Windsor Leave a Comment

The first and second plays of the first master of the zogho largo.
The first and second plays of the first master of the zogho largo.

It is an exciting time to be a Fiore scholar; the Getty recently released hi-res scans of the treatise, Michael Chidester of Wiktenauer fame has just released his concordance of the techniques in the four version of the manuscript that survive, and Freelance Academy Press has announced it is bringing out a scholarly edition of the manuscripts (which they've posted about on Facebook, but I can't find it on their website or I'd link to it). This all in addition to my latest scribblings.

And now, we have the International Armizare Society, an organisation that, to quote from its mission statement exists to:

…maintain and pass down canonical Armizare as recorded and left to posterity by the Founder, Fiore dei Liberi, and the work of successors determined to be within his tradition. In furtherance of this, the IAS also seeks the “preservation and promotion of Armizare as a complete, traditional, but living and functional martial art”.

In furtherance of these goals, the association is to provide a common set of curricular and performance objectives such that inter-school rank recognition by signatories is facilitated. As a result, the IAS will also form a testing body and formal testing regimen for instructor certification to ensure transmission and proper preservation of the dei Liberi Tradition, as the IAS sees it.

Their website went live last week, and I have been fielding questions about it ever since. I found out about it perhaps 24 hours before it went live, thanks to an email list I’m on, so it’s taken me some time to assemble my thoughts on the subject. Here they are:

This society has the potential to be a hugely beneficial force in the HEMA world, and a hugely important step in the long-term study of Fiore’s art. It may also end up petering out into nothing, or acting as net drag on progress if it becomes calcified into a “cult of one truth” (which is unlikely given the current membership).

The people involved, (Sean Hayes, Greg Mele, and Jason Smith) are all first-rate researchers and practitioners, who have long track records of distinguished service to the Art of Arms. I have high hopes that this organisation that they have put together will be able to accomplish its stated mission; to provide a certification program for Armizare (Art of Arms) instructors.

It’s worth reading its charter in its entirety, because it has clearly been thought out and worked up in detail.

They have assembled a dream team of advisors, divided into the Research Council, peopled by Bob Charrette, Tom Leoni, Daniel Jacquet, and Marco Quarta (the last two being professional academics); and the Martial Council, peopled by Devon Boorman, Puck Curtis, Roberto Gotti, Roberto Laura, Marco Quarta (again!) and Orazio Barbagallo (the only person on this list I don’t know). These are all names to conjure with.

Very sensibly, they went live only after assembling an impressive and useful set of resources: blog posts, articles and videos. This bodes well for their website becoming one of the more useful armizare resources out there, regardless of whether one chooses to join them or not. As any qualifying body must, the IAS has its own curriculum based on the founders’ interpretations of Fiore’s surviving books. This is necessary, of course, but runs the risk of becoming monolithic. All institutions tend to institutionalise; I guess that the function of the research committee is to make sure that there is a mechanism by which changes to the interpretation and thus the curriculum can be made. Let’s hope it works that way in practice.

It’s impossible to know at this stage what the tangible benefits of joining would be; the curriculum seems well thought out in broad strokes, but it’s not published (yet?) so I haven’t been able to look at any of their actual drills. I imagine that there would be some kind of mentorship of long-distance students, who would have access to the details of drills, techniques and so on that the curriculum must contain.  It is also impossible to know how compatible that curriculum would be with those of other Fiore-based schools. But I have had Greg, Sean, and Jason’s students in my classes many times, and crossed swords with many of them outside of class, so I know that they are more than capable of training excellent swordsmen.

My concerns:

At the moment, the Society is an idea with a website. It has no legal standing, as far as I can tell; it’s not a registered charity, or a business, or any other legal thing. This worries me, because without that kind of legal framework, I think it may be especially difficult to attain the goals that the organisation has set for itself.

Given how spread out geographically the current membership is, and how part of their mission is to organise events (which Greg Mele, at least, as the force behind WMAW and other events, knows far more about than I do), the annual 20 dollar membership fee seems totally inadequate. It would make more sense to me if it was closer to 50/month, to create a fund to help with things like subsidising the cost of exams (flying examiners in, for instance), subsidising the events they want to create, and so on.

The testing requirements look good, and with Sean and Puck both being qualified fencing masters, modelling the examining structure on their classical example makes a lot of sense and should work very well. But until a body of masters has been built up, organising exams will be very very challenging. And until their curriculum is made public, it’s impossible to know what the qualifications they offer actually mean. I’ve written here about certification, and here about mastery.

As one would expect, the organisation is currently completely controlled by its founders, and fair enough. Organisations or people who choose to join it will have no voting rights until they are qualified at the highest level of the organisation, magister. Which again is fair enough. But it does mean that for at least five years (the minimum time that you must be a member before testing at the magister level), the organisation is effectively completely dependent on the guidance and energy of its three founders.

Most organisations die in the first 5 years. Most of those that survive, die in the next five years. So I am not optimistic, but I am hopeful, that in ten years time we will see a mature and functional Society that is supremely capable of ensuring the long-term viability of Fiore’s Art. We are witnessing the birth of a new School; it is only fair to judge a school by the quality of the students it attracts and produces. I look forward to seeing the first IAS-qualified instructors in action!

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Filed Under: Reflections Tagged With: certification, fiore, hema, IAS, international armizare society, mastery

The Cargo-Cult Theory of Security

February 19, 2016 By Guy Windsor 3 Comments

cargo-cult_1

During the Second World War, some tiny Pacific islands were suddenly strategically important, and inundated with Japanese or American service personnel and material. In the years following the war, islanders started dressing up like servicemen and doing parade ground drill with wooden rifles, carving headphones out of wood and sitting in control towers wearing them, lighting signal fires on the runways, and in short doing everything they could to bring the influx of material goods (“cargo”) back. You can read all about these “cargo cults” here.

Because they did not understand the underlying structures behind the sudden appearance of all this wealth, they simply copied the external behaviours that seemed to attract it. They mistook form for substance, and sure enough, the cargo planes did not come back.

Financial security: multiple income streams

A friend of mine recently went from being employed to being effectively a freelancer. We were discussing how having lots of separate income streams was actually much more secure than having just one, when she came up with the analogy for the way people can mistake the trappings of security (a big house, a smart car, a good job) with security itself. It’s a kind of cargo cult. And ironically, many of those trappings make us less secure. A mortgage (literally translated as “death grip”) is the very opposite of security. Your home is secured on the mortgage so the bank will lend you the money to buy it: the security is the bank’s not the borrower’s. And the bank will take your house if you fail to keep up the payments. This has happened to several friends of mine, in the UK and the USA, in the last recession. It is horrible.

Whenever a friend of mine gets laid off, my first reaction is to congratulate them. I have discovered that this can come across as me being an asshole, so I have learned to choke back the impulse to shake them by the hand, and offer condolences instead. But inside, my actual feeling is “you’re free!” Because while a job is no doubt one perfectly good way to spend much of your waking hours, and can pay well, and even at times be worth doing for its own sake, the one thing it absolutely cannot provide is security. No company, government, or any other employer lasts forever. Countries rise and fall, companies come and go, and if you rely on a single income stream, then your financial security has a single point of failure. It doesn’t matter if you have an iron-clad lifetime employment contract: if the company goes bust they stop paying you. There’s a saying in the military: “two is one, and one is none.” It refers to redundancy in any situation; you cannot rely on anything for which there is no backup in place.

The primary solution to this is to have more than one source of income. In my own case, my income derives from teaching in my school's various branches, royalties from my books, and seminars taught outside my school. I think three is a safe minimum. Any one of those streams could fail tomorrow, and we would still be able to pay the mortgage. Just. But none of them can fail instantly, because none of them rest on a single person or entity. My readers can fire me one at a time. But I have several thousand of these wonderful people. My branches and other groups can stop hiring me for seminars; but they are unlikely to do that all at once (more likely that some catastrophe would prevent me from being able to teach).

For most employed people though, running a side-business of any kind is problematic; if it’s within their field, there may be conflicts of interest, and if their job doesn’t give them much time to spare, then there may just not be time. Some friends of mine just do not want to run a business. Fair enough. So the approach then is to siphon off at least 50% of the income into income-generating assets. This theory is beautifully presented by one of my favourite bloggers, Mr Money Moustache. In brief; learn to live off 50% of your income (easy enough if you earn more than about 40k/year, something I have never done!), invest the rest in index funds, reinvest all the income from the funds, and keep doing that until the passive income from the assets reaches the point that it meets your current expenditure. Bingo, you’re secure. Or as Mr Money Moustache would put it, retired.

But…

Well, up to a point. Because the problem with money as a marker for security is that it is highly unreliable. When my family moved to Peru in 1986, my parents bought a new car, a Nissan Sunny, for 150,000 Inti. Three years later, a beer in a nightclub cost half a million. That’s an extreme example of inflation, but we all remember the recent bank crashes, pension fund fraud, and a host of other things that can strip you of all your savings in a heartbeat. War, for instance. The Soviets invaded Finland in living memory. The property I own here would become immediately worthless if that happened again, because I would grab my kids and run, leaving everything behind. Afghanistan in the 1970s was generally a safe nice place to be. Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner has a lovely description of it. Some Europeans and Americans even retired there. Oops. Likewise Lebanon. Before the civil war, Beirut rivalled Monaco as a place for Europeans to footle off for a nice safe vacation. Less so since it tore itself apart. I don’t think it’s likely that Russia will invade Finland, nor that Europe will plunge into yet another maelstrom. But I’d be a fool to rest my sense of security on it.

What is safety?

So what is safety? Mostly, an illusion. You can lose everything, including your life, during your next heartbeat. Life is dangerous: everybody who tries it dies eventually. So step one in non-cargo-cult security is to make friends with risk. Everything is risky; if something feels completely safe, you’re wrong. Then learn to evaluate the real risk, as opposed to the perceived risk. Which is more dangerous: driving a car or eating candy?

Driving your car is very, very dangerous. About 36,000 Americans were killed in car crashes in 2012 (source). Eating too much sugar is much more dangerous. In 2010, according to the American Diabetes Association, 69,000 died from diabetes, with a further 234,000 whose death certificates credit diabetes as a contributing factor (source). In 2010, there were 25.8 million diabetic Americans. Only 1.25 million of those had type 1 (which is not caused by lifestyle). Type 2 diabetes is caused almost entirely by abuse of sugar. There are other factors, but in short, you can’t get Type 2 diabetes from a diet with no fast carbs. Here is a documentary that is worth a look.

I digress somewhat; my point is that human beings are very bad at assessing risk, and treat as safe things that are dangerous (eg sugar) and treat as dangerous things that are safe (letting your kids walk home from school). One very good book on this topic is Against the Gods, the Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter L. Bernstein. Read it!

So what's the answer?

So the question then is what is real security? I refer you back to this post. Love is vastly more reliable than money. I know for a sure and certain fact that no matter what happens to me or my wife, my kids will neither starve nor be homeless, because somebody among my family or friends would take them in. That may seem obvious to you, but at root, this is what security means: the freedom from watching your children starve. Those friends of mine who lost their homes? They had a couple of shitty hard years, absolutely. But their children didn’t spend a single night in the open or a single day hungry. Because they had friends, sources of income other than the jobs they lost, family to take them in until they got their feet under them again, and so on.

So here are my recommendations for actual security:

  1. Spend time connecting with the people you care about. If the shit hits the fan, they’ll be there for you.
  2. Diversify your income. Have more than one stream.
  3. Build up income-generating assets. An assets is something that generate income; your home is not an asset, unless you rent it out.
  4. And most importantly: understand and be ok with the fact that it could all collapse in an instant, life is inherently unsafe. If you feel completely safe, you’re wrong.
  5. Get some perspective. What, really, are the chances of you starving to death?

I anticipate that this post will ruffle some feathers, because people don't like to be told that their sense of security is based on illusion, or that they are not managing their money very intelligently (I have friends who have earned 150k or more per year for the last 10 years and still owe money to the bank. That is baffling to me). I'm sorry if I've hurt your feelings. But comforting illusions cause more trouble than they are worth, and it's always better to see what's really there.

 

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Filed Under: Reflections Tagged With: How To, lifestyle, risk assessment, safety

An actual blog post

February 2, 2016 By Guy Windsor Leave a Comment

It’s easy to forget that “blog” is shortened from “web log”, which is adapted from “ship’s log”, which is a daily record of every notable thing that happened on board ship; your position, distance travelled, direction, weather conditions, Seaman Jones flogged for impertinence, Midshipman Smith lost overboard in a freak encounter with a Kraken, that kind of thing.

So, in the spirit of the log, I thought I’d update you on my current position, progress, and floggings.

I am working on five major projects at the moment. They are (in order of likely to be finished soonest) Audatia’s Liechtenauer Expansion Pack and the Patron’s Duel Deck; Mastering the Art of Arms volume 3, Advanced Longsword, Form and Function; Sent: Surviving the Boarding School Experience; preparing to move to Ipswich in the UK, in June; and sorting through and fixing the damage done when I was sent to boarding school. I am also working on a few minor projects, such as organising and uploading photos of various books.

Audatia

Our dashing Patron
Our dashing Patron

You may have read my post on playtesting the almost-perfect decks. Rami and I have received corrected pdfs back from Jussi Alarauhio, our fabulous artist, and they should be good to go on DriveThru cards very soon. The main delay has been that this is Rami’s side of the business, and he has been struggling with some family issues that have kept him away from work a lot over the last few months. I won’t go into details because it’s not my story to tell, but suffice to say no decent person would expect him to be doing much work at this time. I’m taking up the slack as best I can, but I can’t replicate his expertise. Still, I am confident that all the printed decks will be shipped to our backers and the print-on-demand service will go live, very soon.

Advanced Longsword

Just this very morning I sent back the 5th corrected pdf of the final version of the book; with only three minor fixes to do. The covers are also done; I’d be very surprised if I don’t get the book uploaded to the printers by the end of next week. Fingers crossed!

Advanced Longsword

Sent (and other projects)

I received a grant from the Suomen Tietokirjailijat Ry (Finnish Non-Fiction Writers’ Society) last month to write this book, and I’m now 35,000 words into the first draft. I’ve not written much for the last week or so mostly because I’ve had a horrible cough for the last fortnight, and I only work on difficult tasks when I can give them 100%. The cough took the edge off my writing, so I stopped for a while and did things that take less brainpower, like for instance organising the photos of my copy of the 1568 third edition of Marozzo’s Arte dell’Armi, and uploading them for free download (or pay what you want) from my Selz account.


I’m also half way through preparing the free download of photos for Advanced Longsword, and of my 1606 Fabris and 1740 Girard.

It’s been really interesting to see the number of downloads, and the range of payments people have chosen to make. It has been downloaded 516 times, with the majority paying nothing (of course!); and a generous minority paying as much as 20e for the photos. It’s raised over 200e, which is very helpful.

Moving to Ipswich

This is a major undertaking, especially with two children. We know where in Ipswich we want to live, for the sake of getting the kids into schools we like, and we have some idea of what we are going to do there. After writing about it here, and posting the final destination on Facebook, the two most common questions I’ve been asked are:

1) What will happen to your school? This tells me that the asker thinks that the Helsinki Branch is “The School”, which is not accurate. It’s just one branch. The School will carry on exactly as before, and so will the Helsinki branch of it. While I can’t predict the future, given the excellence of the students running it, I confidently expect the branch to go from strength to strength. I wouldn’t have planned to leave Helsinki if that were not the case. As for the wider school, well, flights are cheaper from the UK than from Finland, so it should be even easier for me to get to visit the branches worldwide.

2) Are you going to open a branch in Ipswich? No. I have already gone to a foreign country and opened a school of swordsmanship. That went very well, but I have no plans to repeat the experience. As I wrote in this post, I consider myself now a consulting swordsman. I’ll be happy to come along and help any school in the UK that wants it, but I do not intend to open any kind of formal training establishment in Ipswich. At some point I imagine I will need a cadre of people I can train with and bounce ideas off, as I have done with my senior students here since forever, but I expect that will happen organically. Starting a branch is a huge undertaking, and I have other things to do.

I have already packed up my fiction books. Non-fiction next. Then woodworking tools. Then swords. Then disposing of unnecessary items, and packing the rest for shipping. This is a long and tedious process, but it does offer a great opportunity to get rid of clutter, and think really hard about how much stuff we actually need. My core fencing kit is three longswords (blunt, cutting sharp, and pair-drill sharp), two rapiers (blunt and sharp, plus matching daggers), two smallswords (blunt and sharp), two foils (left and right handed), schiavona, backsword, cavalry sabre, arming sword, buckler, mask, gloves, gauntlets, freeplay plastron, coaching plastron, stopwatch, teaching stick. But lately when I travel to teach, I bring absolutely nothing. Hmmm….

I spent much of yesterday afternoon in my shed, fiddling about, and thinking about what tools I absolutely cannot do without. I noticed that I have 21 different woodworking planes, and thirteen different hammers. Non-woodworkers might think that's a lot; craftsmen will wonder how I manage with so few. If you're interested in a more detailed exploration of the de-cluttering, packing, and moving process, as regards books, tools, or swords, then let me know in the comments here, and I'll start documenting it.

Stuff in the shed
Stuff in the shed

Boarding School recovery

This is indirectly tied to writing Sent, of course, though oddly enough I haven’t had any real emotional issues when writing. My wife was worried that I might, but it’s been fine. The place I have got to, through talking to the right people, meditation (which has been really helpful), and just thinking about things, includes the following:

  • While there has been a definite emotional cost to the experience, it has come with some benefits (especially education).
  • Given the outcome (I am happily married, in a great job, with lovely kids and friends and so on), there is no reason to think that it was the worst course of action that could have been taken. I could have been eaten by a lion in Botswana, or died of cholera in Peru; who knows?
  • I am out of it. I got out. And I got out without incurring the kind of damage that I recognise in many of my peers.
  • Looking back I can see the many, many occasions in which I found a feeling of family and home in the kindness of the people around me.
  • I’m still having trouble with the mercilessness of it. Boarding school back then was wilfully, deliberately, spartan. And even that was an order of magnitude more civilized than even a decade before. But still, the whole idea of sending little children away from home “for their own good” is, except in really exceptional circumstances, utterly wrong.
  • The time is long past for a minimum age for boarding. Many of my friends chose to board, from the age of 15 or so, and loved it. While every child is different, and any specific age limit is arbitrary, we still recognise that people are legally adult at 18; can drive at 17, can smoke at 16 (in the UK at least); can watch certain kinds of movie at 15, or 12, and so on. So here’s a thought. The next Pirates of the Caribbean movie will have, in the UK, a 15 certificate. Is a child who is not yet mature enough to watch Pirates of the Caribbean old enough to be sent away from their parents to boarding school? I think not. So I think I will campaign to introduce a minimum age for boarding. That will keep me busy in the UK, I think…

Floggings

There are no floggings to report. If you think there should have been, you can take it up with my wife.

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Filed Under: Projects Tagged With: advanced longsword, audatia, boarding school, guy windsor books

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