Guy Windsor

Consulting Swordsman. Writer.

Facebook bye-bye

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I just deactivated my Facebook account. I did a bit of behind-the-scenes jiu-jitsu to keep my Author Page active, and the Messenger app functioning as before. But it's now impossible for me to fall down the rabbit-hole without first clearing away a whole load of brambles.
In a couple of months I'll probably delete it altogether: it's only Messenger that's keeping me from doing that right now.
I have been inspired by the examples of both Jessica Finley and Roland Warzecha, who have active FB pages but don't use personal FB accounts at all. I've also read Jaron Lanier's excellent and provocative 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, which I thoroughly recommend.
The point of this is simply to remove a distraction. I find the scroll-scroll-click simultaneously frustrating and addictive, and it does my patience and well-being no good at all.
My friends and fans, and yes my detractors too, will have no difficulty finding me: my email address is right there on the page. And whenever I want to post something, I can do it on my blog (which I own and control).
This should help me get on with the things that matter: reading, writing, training, teaching, and spending time with real people in real time.
Of the 2200 “friends” on Facebook: 70% of them are sword people I've never met. Another 20% are sword people I actually know, but aren't exactly friends- we only have swords in common; I don't know anything else about them except they like swords.
Another 10% are actual friends, who are very welcome to message, call, or visit, and have all the necessary information to do so.
This is not a criticism of you or your social media habits. This is just me letting you all know that if you want to find me, look here, not there. You'll probably find me reading a book! Or writing one.

A can of worms

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Every time I post something even remotely concerned with human rights on my blog, I get a slew of bile from all quarters. Most of it comes from my natural enemies, such as this moron responding to my post Fascists are poisoning HEMA:

Or this one:

That’s quite incontrovertible evidence that the post was worth writing; if nobody’s calling you a cuck, you’re not working hard enough.

“Cuck” is an interesting choice of epithet, isn’t it? Short for cuckold, it is a derogatory term for a man who can’t control his woman- so she goes off having sex with other men. Personally, I don’t own a woman, and if my wife wanted to go and have sex with other men, I’m sure I’d be quite upset. But the notion of controlling her is abhorrent.

When I wrote in support of legalising gay marriage, I got things like this:

My last post, Let's Illuminate Invisible Women, garnered a similar crop of responses, indicating to me that there are a lot of very, very, strange people who read my stuff.

Take this from the comments, for example:

But don’t worry. Soon enough all of this terrible society in which women-gays-blacks are so oppressed will disappear and in it’s place we will have Islam. The “religion of Peace”. You all will manage to get what you really want. And it will serve you right.

So, if we close the data gap and stop treating men as the default human, and encourage women to become instructors, we’ll somehow open the door to an Islamic takeover of the West? Hmm, unlikely. Not least as Islamic culture generally has less sexual equality than we do. And women armed with swords are less likely to put up with anyone telling them they are second-class citizens.

But here’s my favourite exchange of them all. This occurred via email, rather than in the comments. Yes, I’ve redacted this person’s email address as they chose to remain anonymous (unlike the commenters above), and I wouldn’t doxx anyone. Other than that, this is the complete text:

Isaiah 3:12

As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths.

Be careful, Guy.  You might have to hang up your sword and trade it in for a knitting needle.  I hope you don't still urinate standing up, you misogynistic pig.

😉

Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

Where to start? No salutation, and a wink emoji for a signature. Hmm. Obscure biblical quotation… can anyone explain what “destroy the way of thy paths” is supposed to mean? The Contemporary English version is a bit clearer:

Though you are God's people, you are ruled and abused, by women and children. You are confused by leaders, who guide you down the wrong path.

OK, that makes more sense. But how do we get from “women should be treated as equal human beings”, to “I want a matriarchy”? (I’m not saying I’m opposed to matriarchy, actually, but it wasn’t implicit in my previous post.) and what on earth makes this person think I’m likely to be in the slightest bit interested in his biblical authority for patriarchy? 

It may seem odd that I’m an avid fan of getting swordsmanship knowledge from books, and yet discount the bible as a legitimate source of advice on constructing a society. Let me explain: I’m interested in how to win sword fights, so it makes sense to read Fiore (for example), as I’d love to be able to fight like he did. I have no interest whatsoever in living in the manner of an Israelite from two millenia ago. A.J. Jacobs famously had a go at it (read The Year of Living Biblically if you’re interested), and honestly, it just doesn’t appeal to me. So I truly don’t care what the bible says about the proper organisation of society.

The second paragraph is really illuminating. Is knitting unmanly? If it was, would I care? And I can pee how I like, right? I especially appreciate the completely malapropistic use of misogynistic. Clearly, a dazzling intellect. 

Besides, I’m British. Our Head of State has been a woman since 1952. Indeed, our most famous monarchs of the last 500 years include Queen Victoria (reigned 1837-1901) and Queen Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603; a time in which the monarch was very much more involved in the day-to-day running of the stated than they are now). Pretty much the highest honour I could get from my country would involve literally kneeling at a woman’s feet while she taps me on the shoulder with a sword.

I replied with a simple “Fuck off”, and manually deleted them from my mailing list. Which I thought covered all bases adequately. This prince among men replied with this awesome message:

Feel free to take me off your mailing list.

A society where the men allow their women to be either “equal” to them or dominant over them is a society that is about five minutes away from being conquered by another society ruled by more virile and masculine men.  If you fancy yourself a swordsman, you should probably also be interested in combat, self-mastery (WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR MEN WHO ARE DOMINATED BY THEIR WOMEN), and the like.

Does your wife or your mother give you permission to play with swords?

Seriously though, Guy, if we men don't get out courage back, our society WILL be conquered.  In fact, that is already in the process of happening…

Best Wishes.

Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email.

My first thought was “he clearly hasn’t met my wife”. My second thought was “actually, perhaps he has!”

Fortunately, I don’t fancy myself a swordsman. I simply am one. Also fortunately, I don’t need permission from anyone to play with swords. And yet again we have bizarre connection with treating women as equals and being ‘conquered’ (I give you one guess by whom, in this moron’s head).

My reply was a model of decorum and restraint:

Real men sign their emails with their real names.

I already took your email off the list.

Yours

Guy Windsor

And of course, Mr oh-so-brave-Anonymous chose not to reply…

Compared to the hazing, death-threats and the rest that many people have to put up with, this is very small potatoes. But just in case anyone here thought we were living in Utopia, I thought you might find these examples instructive.

The post was also sent out to my mailing list. I usually use 4-8 subscribers every email (which is normal, see here for how mailing lists work), this one lost me 19. That's totally in-budget for cleaning misogynists off my part of the internet. I should also point out that these examples represent a tiny minority of the people responding. The positive comments, thank-yous, and overall goodwill vastly outnumbers the negative.

Here's one lovely example (I've redacted the signature as the writer generally prefers privacy):

Yes! I’m so glad you wrote this.

This is where a young person would say, “OMG this! I’m low key shook AF because reasons. This post is literally everything right now and I’m stanning.”

No linguists were harmed in the making of this email.

 

Surfing Success

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Surfing is both huge fun, and very hard to get the hang of. On my last trip Down Under I was offered the chance to try surfing for the first time in my life, and jumped at the chance. My friend Jen Rowland and her two lovely children Rafael and Maya took me on a warm Sunday morning to Collaroy beach in Sydney. The weather was perfect- warm enough, but not too sunny or hot. In borrowed wetsuit shorts and shirt, lathered in sunscreen, I took Rafa’s board out into the surf and had a go.

An hour and a half later, I was done.

In that hour and a half, I spent exactly two whole seconds actually standing on the board. Proof, if you don’t believe me- Jen happened to catch the very moment!

There are many parallels to learning swordsmanship. 

Measure, for example. You have to be in exactly the right spot to catch the wave as it starts to break. Too far out to sea, and it just bobs you up and down. Too far in, and the moment has passed. Expert surfers get on their boards and paddle to get themselves to the right place. Beginners like me stand still and hope. This is so like fencing. When teaching beginners, it’s best if they start out standing still. Doing the same action while already in motion is much harder- and a necessary aspect of their development. Board paddling = footwork.

Timing. You can be in the right place all you want, but if you don’t hop on the board at exactly the right time, you’ve missed the wave and have to wait for another one. Get on too soon, and you drift. Too late, and the moment has passed.

Patience. I spent a lot of that hour and a half waiting for a wave that would work. I don’t think I missed a single one through impatience, which was great. I missed a lot through not realising early enough that it would be a good choice though.

Precision. A little too far back, and the board tips you off backwards, or goes shooting out from under you. A little too far forwards, and the nose dips and you get thrown off forwards. In theory one can feel either of these and correct for it, but I didn’t manage to realise in time even once. 

When it’s right, it’s easy. On several occasions I got myself to the right place at the right time, mounted at the right part of the board, and kneeling, surfed along in fine style. Standing up only happened the once, but I can totally see that when you have the knack, it will be exhilarating and effortless.

Feedback. The sea is a perfect feedback mechanism. It doesn’t care about you or your silly board, it just throws wave after wave at you, tirelessly. You either fall off or you don’t. Either way, the next wave is coming. The sea cannot ease up on you, or give you false positives. You can find gentle spots safe for beginners, or monster waves to challenge the very best surfers. Anyone can get perfect feedback every time. How much faster would we learn swordsmanship if that was true in our training?

Danger. Disrespect the sea and it can kill you. Get unlucky, and it can kill you. Sounds a lot like swords to me. I did stub my toe trying to snap onto the board, badly enough that it’s still visibly bruised a week later, but other than that it was an injury-free experience, because a) Jen chose a safe spot, b) it wasn’t crowded and c) we were lucky.

Failure. This feedback system generates failure automatically. My rate of failure was about 99.9%, if you take standing on the board and surfing ‘properly’ as ‘success’. This meant I got tons of real practice in, and definitely improved. Because ‘failure’ was fun as hell, I totally didn’t care how often I failed. By the end, I understood surfing much better than I did at the beginning. In swordsmanship practice, you should always be operating at your optimal rate of failure, usually somewhere between 20 and 40%, and this is true in every other field too. So the question is what constitutes failure? On each individual attempt, success was being in the right place at the right time to catch the wave. When that got easier, success became getting onto the right place on the board, after catching the wave. In those areas, my failure rate was around 40% (that’s what it felt like, anyway, and my instinct is pretty good about these sorts of things). This is a useful lesson- a big mistake I see beginners make is to view full-speed execution of the technique in competitive freeplay as ‘success’- which is a very high bar, and will keep them at 100% failure for a long time. It’s important to identify lower bars to jump, or steps on the ladder to climb, and to have a specific definition of ‘success’ for every iteration of the action.

Know when to stop. Fatigue is the enemy of skills acquisition, so when I felt that I’d learned everything I could that day, I stopped. (This is the voice of wisdom borne of painful experience.) After 90 minutes, I was getting mentally tired and my toe was sore enough that I had decided to not even try standing for the last fifteen minutes or so. After I’d made the decision to bring things to a close, I stopped after the next successful wave- it’s always a good idea to finish on a success.

Another actual blog post

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I thought I’d let you know what I’ve been up to the last few weeks.

Firstly, I’m editing video at the moment: the legendary Jessica Finley has provided some footage for a Wrestling module for the Solo Course. This will include an introduction and warm-up; mat exercises (like shrimps and sit-outs); footwork practice; and practicing with a dummy. Existing course members will get access to the material as soon as I’ve edited it together, as it will be included in the course package. You can of course join the course at any time!

I will be off to Australia and New Zealand next month, starting in Melbourne (6th-12th), Adelaide (12-14th), Wellington for the awesome Sword Symposium (15-17th), then Sydney (19th-25th). If you are in the Antipodes, and want to know details about any of the specific seminars, organisers, and so on, please drop me an email.

It’s a good day for Capoferro fans too. Remember the version of Vadi’s treatise formatted as a CBZ file? Well Alex Beaudet has done the same for Capoferro. You can find it here. 

Finally, as you may know I’ve bought a house, and as it turned out, the dead tree at the foot of the garden was actually on our property.

So, lots of money to a tree surgeon and suddenly I have a lifetime’s supply of brown oak.

There's a chap with a sawmill coming round so I can get it in stick. (In stick means sawn into planks and stacked up with little sticks between each plank to allow them to dry). This should be usable in a couple of years, depending on how thick we saw it.

All of this means that the Fiore Translation Project has slown right down, but don’t worry, I’ve not forgotten it…

Comic book treatises? Whatever next?

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I have the best readers. They are forever coming up with great ideas that I would never have thought of myself, and then sharing them with me. For instance, a while ago, Alex Beaudet contacted me with the suggestion of creating versions of illustrated fencing treatises in the format used for the ebook version of comic books and graphic novels. This is obviously better than the standard pdf or epub because it is precisely designed for distributing books made up of image files, rather than text.

But it's something I know absolutely nothing about, so I replied along the lines of ‘great idea, but not something I can do myself'. And so Alex kindly volunteered to do it.

We started with Vadi's De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi, which has come out beautifully. It's free, but feel free to pay something for it if you want to support this kind of work. You can see it for yourself here:


De Arte Gladiatoria

And we have Capoferro in the works!

You may also notice that the mailing list sign-up form below every post has changed… do you have a copy of Swordfighting yet?

The price of being at the cutting edge

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I got back from a wonderful trip to Swordsquatch last week, and am writing it up… but at some point there has been yet another technical snafu with PrettyLink, and my blog's urls- for instance it's just lucky that I'm already signed in to the back-end of the website, because the url for the login is now going to a 404 error message.

Most critically, this means that some or all of the links in my workbooks and the Fiore Translation Project books are not working. I will get them fixed of course, but I don't know how long it will take. All the videos are currently hosted on Youtube, but they are ‘unlisted', so can't be found without a direct link. But as I'm in the process of transferring all my videos to Vimeo, at the moment all of them can be found with a bit of searching on my Vimeo account. They are totally unorganised, but they are there if you look… my Vimeo account is here: https://vimeo.com/swordschool

For those of you frustratedly pointing your phone's QR code scanner at a book of mine and wondering where the hell your videos have gone, I can only apologise, and say “I'm working on it”. I'm also paying competent people to work on it, so there's light at the end of the tunnel…