As a freshman I joined a LARPing group that did foam fighting on the Esplanade, but that was just a gateway drug to a real HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) group that fought with real steel blades (blunt obviously) using documented historical techniques.
During one of our practices I was approached by Rebecca (East-Oda) who asked me a lot of questions. Not the usual dumb questions like “is that a real sword?” but like super nitty-gritty questions that clued me in something weird was going on. She took me back to her and Frank’s house and NDAed me, and like ten minutes later I was with Tristan teaching him the Four Grounds and the Four Governors of George Silver, the Elizabethan backsword master who hated Italian rapier fighters with an unquenchable fiery hate LOL.
Later I found out I had passed a background check, and after I had peed in a jar and all the other stuff I was sworn in and have been working for DODO ever since—I guess seven or eight months now. I am responsible for having set up most of DODO’s basic IT infrastructure such as the intranet, the wiki, etc. but don’t hate on me because it was all supposed to be temporary LOL.
Dr. Frank Oda was also kind enough to take me under his wing and get me in on the ground floor of the Chronotron project. DISCLAIMER RE THAT: I am not a physicist and so all of the quantum mechanics underlying the chipset of the QUIPUs (the Quantum Information Processing Units) is totally incomprehensible to me. All I know about it is that it runs really, really fast and solves problems that would take forever using traditional non-quantum computation.
Fortunately for dumbass computer scientists like me, at one end of each QUIPU unit there’s a connector where you can jack in a plain old Ethernet cable, and from that point onwards it just looks like a traditional computer, albeit a really fast and weird one, to the outside world. All of the cables from all of the QUIPUs (as of this writing, 128 of them—soon to be 256) feed into the Chronotron itself which, never mind what people say about it, is JUST A BIG OLD COMPUTING CLUSTER that happens to be tied in to a lot of historical databases, etc. Which is more my speed.
In layperson’s terms: if it has to be dunked in liquid helium to work, I don’t understand it. If it’s in a rack with fans blowing on it, that’s a different story.
—IF YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE IN A SWORDFIGHT—
This comes up a lot and I am working on upgrading the relevant wiki pages, but people seem to end up here anyway LOL.
My basic advice: DON’T DO IT! It is ridiculously, fantastically dangerous. Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance.
Admittedly, an unfortunate precedent was set by Tristan’s getting into a rapier-vs.-backsword duel in DTAP 1601 LONDON. This is fully documented in the relevant after-action reports, which, as our roster of DOers has expanded to include others in the “Fighter” class, have achieved somewhat legendary status within DODO. But this IN NO WAY suggests that swordfighting works as a standard operating procedure.
If you’re in the process of getting “trained up” to carry out a specific DEDE (Direct Engagement for Diachronic Effect), you’ll know that each DTAP has a highly localized weapons environment. What is true in one DTAP might not be the case in another that is fifty years or fifty miles away from it.
So, you have to start by knowing exactly what weapon type(s) can be carried by an individual of your assumed social class in your DTAP without freaking people out.
Since you’re going back naked, you’ll have to score weapons after arriving. If you’re fortunate enough to be visiting a well-established node in DODO’s witch network, there may be some weapons waiting for you there. In my copious spare time LOL I plan to visit those DTAPs to inspect the available weapons with the modern eye of a trained metallurgist and to check them for fatal flaws. But, never mind what you’ve seen on the History Channel, these people really didn’t know dick about steel and so most of it is crap, and likely to break at the worst possible time.
If you are “breaking trail” in a new DTAP, then once you have evaded pursuit and stolen some clothes, you’ll have to acquire your weapons in whatever way you can (“proceeding adaptively” LOL). This means evaluating them through visual inspection and, if possible, by subjecting them to certain simple tests which I can explain to you—eventually I’ll document these on the wiki.
Assuming you have a good sword, you’ll have to know how to fight with it. Which starts by defending yourself from the other guy. Which means you have to know how he fights. Which means learning the martial arts techniques prevailing in your DTAP. One day, I hope we’ll have a vast library of every known historical swordfighting system, but as with so many other things at DODO we are just getting started—just scratching the surface. Here’s what we are currently sort of good at:
- Late medieval backsword (a personal fave)
- Italian rapier
- Medieval longsword
Come and talk to me if you really think you need training/instruction in these. In the meantime, it helps if you’re in some kind of decent physical condition and you know where your body is in space—we’ve had good luck with wrestlers, circus acrobats, gymnasts, and dancers. People who spend all day looking at pixels, not so good.
Stay tuned on ODIN for more relevant pages as I have time to write ’em!
Peace out
Mortimer
DODO WHITE PAPER
BRIEF NOTES ON “WENDING”
(formerly, “super-witches”)
BY REBECCA EAST-ODA
Submitted to ODIN archive, Day 580
(Note to readers: Please consider this a temporary placeholder in lieu of a more thoroughly researched document to follow. I am feeling an urgency to head off the increasing use of the term “super-witch” and replace it with a more reasoned approach. —REO)
KCWs Fitch (colonial Boston) and Gráinne (Elizabethan London), while employing similar techniques in most respects, exhibited a marked difference in their understanding and utilization of Strands.
As best as we can make out, Goody Fitch had a general knowledge that multiple Strands existed, sufficient for her to conduct practical magical operations.
Gráinne, by contrast, appears to have had an additional ability that Goody Fitch didn’t (and perhaps couldn’t even have imagined). Namely, she had the ability to shift her stream of consciousness from one Strand to another, effectively inhabiting different versions of her body on different Strands. Gráinne jumped “sideways” from one to another as it suited her purposes. In this manner she was able to encounter and re-encounter Tristan on different Strands and thereby to collaborate more mindfully and effectively with him as he repeated the same DEDE.