Them Canadians guys have had something of a fascination with maiming one another over the years. All things considered it's probably not the best hobby to have, but it's kept us busy. The main stay of our efforts has been swords. Yes, swords. It wasn't the brightest of ideas, but it caught our attention. It started with finding a practice blade in our local sword shop and deciding that it would be just perfect to buy a couple of them and wing 'em at one another. Now, these weren't just some wooden make-believe things either. No, apparently we managed to find the one place that sells steel swords you can use for practice. Real weight, real steel, just a blunt(-ish) edge.
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| Personal Portrait - Andrew |
Naturally our first course of action upon getting them home was to try them out. Since this was literally twenty minutes after we purchased them on a whim our protective gear consisted of a real firm hope that we wouldn't kill each other. As time went on and we learned; which is to say we've now included several pairs of thin leather gloves to the mix so we don't lose as many nails. At this point I think I'm forced to caution anyone who might be dumb enough to follow along a similar path that of how dumb doing anything even remotely like this was. Anyways, we had a hell of a time. It's quite amazing to see people get into wailing on one another so much that they're removed coats due to exhaustion in negative 20 Celsius. Eventually our collection would be upgraded over time to include four swords and a couple of bows. The latter proved quite an interesting addition - once we managed to assure ourselves that applying tennis balls to the tips of the arrows would keep them from taking out eyes. We could host ourselves tiny battles.
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| Trevor - At Work/Casual Sunday Outing/Sleeping/Sex |
Of course it was about then that the SCA came to our attention. No, no, it wasn't like some one told us about it and we had a moment when we realised we could have done all this without endangering life and limb - no, we knew about it before. We even briefly looked into it. It just never struck us as a critical need to find a less insane way to wage our wars. Honestly I think the only reason we came across it a second time was the promise of
bigger battles. Now that was something we couldn't swing all on our own.
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| Josh - Spreading Good Sportsmanship |
Off we went to find a way to join a war. Somewhere along the line we found out that most people consider fighting without a full grade metal helmet using wooden sword was already mad. I'm not certain precisely how far off the scale of 'stupid shit to do' we fell in their eyes, but I'm willing to bet pretty high. So now we're trying the
proper way to flail at one another using armour and all. The only stumbling step is a cost that might just kill us, but it beats paying in litre's of blood.
