hrj

1. What/when was your first event?

Not counting an only semi-SCA halloween party, that would be 12rh night, Jan. 1978. Nobody had explained events to me, they just said, "You're coming to Twelfth Night, right?" Not wanting to sound like a doofus, I said, "Sure," thinking to myself, Twelfth Night -- that's a Shakespeare play, right? We're all going off to see a play in costume. That sounds fun. This was one of a number of occasions in my life where I did a bunch of mental scrambling on the spur of the moment to avoid having people discover how clueless I'd been.

2. What was your first war?

I'd have to do some actual research to figure that out. It would either have been one of the West-Caid wars we used to hold in the Tarnmist area or one of the Burro Creek wars. I know I went to Burro Creek in 1981 when I had my pickup truck, but I'm not remembering whether I got a ride with someone else to an earlier one. So probably it was a West-Caid.

3. What is your favorite part of an event/war?

When it happens, my favorite part is that time when I've spent the late afternoon putting together a lovely little cooked-on-site medieval meal, and my friends and I are just finishing eating and are chatting about interesting and intellectual things, and maybe someone breaks spontaneously into song or poetry, and there's nowhere any of us have to be in a hurry .... Yeah, well, doesn't happen very often.

4. What A&S skill/talent do you have or wish you had?

It would seem greedy to wish for any additional skills and boastful to list the ones I consider myself to have. But I think research is the skill I'm most proud of.

5. Why did you choose the elements of your Coat of Arms/device?

The arms have evolved several times over the course of my career, but the falcon in addition to my simply liking birds a lot is because I was heavily involved in bird of prey rehabilitation at the same time I joined the SCA, and the chevron (formerly per chevron) motif echoes the "green hill" (glasvryn, formerly mynydd gwyrdd) in my name, and green has always been one of my favorite colors.

6. Favorite SCA song?

I'm egotistical enough that it would have to be one of my own compositions, although I always have a hard time picking favorites among them. For plain and simple effectiveness of what it was trying to say, I'll pick "The Herald's Farewell".

7. Favorite garb?

Whatever I've been researching most recently. I'm not really a clothes horse -- it's all about the research.

8. Best advice received/given?

Don't wait to get permission or approval to do the things you think will make the SCA a better place. (Obviously I'm not talking about formal, structural things -- I'm talking about every day "doing stuff".)

9. What is one thing you would like to change about the SCA?

Only one? I'd like to see more focus on events as an integrated wholistic historically-inspired experience. So much time and energy at events is sucked up by organizational mechanics, checklists of disparate and discrete "things that have to happen", and the lumbering juggernaut of the Traditional Event Template.

10. Why do you do this hobby?

Efficiency. No other organization or activity combines so many of my interests and hobbies into a single package as tidily. I've never gotten much out of the whole "SCA as one big loving family" thing -- never gotten much out of the "one big loving family" image of sf fandom or filkdom either. Just me, I guess.