The Pirate Show

Of Dungeoning and Dragoning

2009-03-30T15:59:51Z

I've played Dungeons and Dragons since 2nd Edition (also known by its nerdier title, "Advanced Dungeons And Dragons"). I've mucked around in loads of other roleplaying games as well, and enjoyed most of them, but D&D has a special place in my heart. It's always provided me with the most entertaining characters and memorable moments. I know certain people have a real hate-on for d20-based games, and I understand why- the ubiquity of that rules system led a lot of companies to simply produce new contexts for the d20 rules rather than design something new and innovative. This is sad partially just for the loss of new stuff that might have been, but also because d20 isn't a good approach for most settings or genres. But does a better job than anything else I've tried at telling heroic Tolkeinesque fantasy stories, and that's what D&D is about.

When Wizards Of The Coast (WOTC) released the game's fourth edition last year, there was a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of nerds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Said nerds had spent hojillions of dollars on books for the previous edition of the game, books that had superseded and outclassed each other to the point that very little of the game's original material was relevant or competitive any more. The game was a bit of an unwieldy mess of addendums and exceptions, and dozens of sourcebooks with different design approaches meant that hundreds of new rules could interact with each other in some truly stupid ways. This isn't to say that there wasn't fun to be found in the game's third edition (and its bastard stepchild, 3.5), it's just that as players you had to work to find that fun. In any case, the concern upon the fourth edition's publication seemed to be that WOTC would be coming to nerdly burrows everywhere and pilfering the now-obselete books, which clearly hasn't happened. Lots of folks are still happily playing 3.5, and many others have moved on to Fourth Edition. Like me.

I'm currently running a game for a group of my friends, and I honestly believe the new edition is the best thing that's happened to the game. This is for lots of reasons, but most of them come back to one thing: the game, for the first time, has been approached by the designers as a game rather than a simulation. As much as roleplaying games are about group storytelling, they don't need to match up to reality as long as they're internally consistent. As the Dungeon Master, I don't care about verisimilitude, I care if my players are having a good time. With the new edition, we've yet to have to forage through sourcebooks and crunch heady rules in order to find the fun. Moreover, everything the player characters do has the feel of epic fantasy heroics, in which realism has very little place. That sounds like good game design to me.

Last weekend, I had a brief meeting with a group of gamers who were looking for another player for their D&D 3.5 game. I still own the relevant books, and I don't dislike the system- and in any case, the most important thing about a roleplaying game is the people playing it. Good gamers can have a great time with a mediocre system, and socially inept pedantic nerd-tards can ruin anything if they try hard enough. This particular group had a firm handle on the latter. Without boring you with too many obscure details of in-game rules mechanics, they seemed to get off on ranting about how unrealistic the new edition is. Heck, even 3.5 required a number of extremely odd house rules to bring it up to their standard of verisimilitude. I bowed out, for two reasons: Firstly, I'm irritated by the notion of adding more and more context-specific rules in order to model reality more accurately in your roleplaying game- it makes the game less like a game and more like a simulator, which isn't fun for me. And secondly, I was about to turn bright crimson and break out ranting until cartoon steam shot out my ears. Because:

-If you want a game that's realistic, why play a heroic fantasy game at all? Someone has surely published 'Houses And Humans', in which you struggle through a day job before returning home to your family. Someone has to change little Bobby's diaper? Roll for initiative!

-D&D gets lots of the details wrong when it does attempt to model historical stuff. Splint mail and banded mail armour were of limited historical relevance, but they show up all the time in D&D. Rapiers had no martial combat application- NONE. There's no such thing as 'plate mail' armour. The list goes on, but even the mundane details don't support a simulationist approach.

-Who even cares if the goblin warrior's armour is historically cromulent? IT IS ON A FRIGGING GOBLIN. Any arguments about what would be 'realistic' stop right there.

-Fourth edition, unlike 3.5, supports balance- a twentieth-level wizard, for example, is exactly as powerful in his own way as a twentieth-level fighter, simply because the players have more fun that way. Complaints that a wizard should 'obviously', in a realistic system, be more powerful than a swordsman of comparable experience, simply because wizards are magical and fighters are relying on talent and skill, are ludicrous. You want realism? Great. THERE ARE NO GODDAMN WIZARDS.

The list goes on, but the long and the short of it is this: why do some nerds give us socially functional nerds a bad name? Why the condescension towards gamers who 'just' want to have fun, tell a cool story, or enjoy a game for what it is?

Facts!

2008-11-15T10:45:35Z

Fact: I have a cat now. His name is Thac0, and he was the resident wacky stray at littlehoudini's place. Now he lives with me. He is adorable and cuddly and does funny cat things, though his catulence is beyond belief. His butt, as we frequently tell him, is possibly the worst place in the universe. The rest of him is great.

Fact: I am toiling away on a production of Romeo And Juliet with the Tempest Theatre Group, playing Benvolio and doing the set and prop design. It is a very exciting approach to the play, full of turn-of-the-century style and vintage music hall panache. It runs next week, and I'd be delighted to see you there.

Fact: I recently got to do the voice work for a very cool game by the talented hopping_v called Night Of The Cephalopods. I think it is awesome. You can play it at Spooky Squid Games. Be prepared for spectacularly overwrought dialogue.

Fact: it is nearly six in the morning, and I haven't slept because I know if I do I won't wake up for my 10AM rehearsal. Going to bed early was not an option, as there was (and still is) far too much to get done on this set design.

Um, what?

2008-07-06T00:45:26Z

Whoa... so it looks like the Fringe show I'm doing scored five stars at Eye and four Ns at Now. Ridiculous! It's called "It's Just A Phase", it's at Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace, and it is Super Gay. Come and see me sparkle, friends!

the_pirate_show @ 2008-05-11T23:22:00

2008-05-12T03:31:50Z

Bloggy blog blog. Here are some tidbits!

I'm drooling heavily over Nerf toys lately. There may be a ridiculous steampunk six-shooter in my near future... given spike20's wacky steampunked Tommy gun, I have a challenge to meet. What an odd sort of keeping up with the Joneses, yes?

I'm in my third production of Macbeth with Tempest Theatre, in a slightly exciting new role. I'm playing Macbeth's head goon Seaton, who in this production is also the Bloody Sergeant and the Doctor. It's a very dynamic, very violent take on the play, and I think you should come and see. We run from May 12-16 at the Danforth Music Hall, with erratically-timed shows that you're best to check the website for. In any case, if you enjoyed Duel Of Ages at last year's Fringe Festival, I think you'd enjoy this Macbeth.

Extra strange: in order to seem older, meaner, and uglier for Macbeth, I opted to shave my head for the role. I can't stop touching my meaty noggin! It is all weird. I'm looking forward to having hair on the top half of my head again, though feeling the breeze on my naked scalp is kind of nice on these hot summer days.

There's more- there's always more, of course- but I'm damned tired right now and a bottle of port beckons. Here's hoping I can get to using this thing as regularly as I used to, but I always say that.

News dump!

2008-04-05T18:05:32Z

Wow, was last night ever good. redknot is older now, and I got to hang out with a pile of excellent people, and shenanigans were had, and I didn't get home until four in the morning. Everything is awesome!

Before the partying, I saw Lars And The Real Girl with littlehoudini. Aside from being the most outrageous example of constant boom-mike-in-frame that I've ever seen, it's a lovely film. I was expecting something in the vein of a smarter Weekend At Bernie's, which was way off the mark. It's well-written and spectacularly well-acted (how does one play a scene opposite a Real Doll without a hint of irony or self-awareness? I'm not sure I could manage it). It's also a wonderfully human film: characters are awkward, complex, desperate, and inarticulate at inopportune times. I heartily recommend it, particularly if you can mask off the top few inches of the screen to hide the microphone.

Tonight I'm going to see some friends in Sansanus Production's The Compleat Works Of William Shakespeare (Abridged). Tonight and tomorrow afternoon are the final shows, and it's well worth seeing. A pile of 37 plays and 154 sonnets crammed into two hours is not graceful, but it is hilarious. Oh, how I love my Willy.

There needs to be a DS night before the end of the month. Any preferences for which night of the week we do it? This dunderbus ain't gonna ride itself, you know.

Additionally,

1. My username is _____ because ____

The_Pirate_Show, because I liked the sound of it. Pirates are excellent, and I work in theatre. "The Pirate Show" was additionally the original name for what eventually became The Plunder Monkeys.

2.My name is _____ because ______.

My name is Scott Emerson. Scott is the middle name of both my father and his twin brother, and Emerson comes from my maternal grandfather who died before I came along. I like Emerson better, and have often contemplated using it instead of Scott.

3. My journal is titled ____ because ____.
See #1. It's a frigging pirate show, people.

4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.
It's titled "My Natural Predators (mostly ninjas)", but I can't imagine that anyone besides myself ever sees that. Constant vigilance is required to avoid unscheduled pokey shuriken death.

5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.
It's always been some variation of me in a pirate get-up, and currently it's the delightful portrait that say_it_with_pie made. Except for the busted tooth, that's exactly what I look like.

My Job Is Awesome

2008-03-10T23:30:33Z

I assume that you all know that I play pretend for a living (supplemented by bartending, but that's Canadian theatre for you). 'Actor' is my official job description, but it often feels like I'm getting paid to play the same game of make-believe that I enjoyed when i was seven. I regularly can't quite believe that I'm making a career of such shenanigans.

This week, it's even stranger/awesomer than ususal. Casa Loma is, for the duration of the March Break, hosting a crazy pirate event for kids. There's a pirate magician, a pirate juggler (he juggles cannonballs and knives at the same time), and my pal Adrienne Kress reads from her recently-published (and very very funny) novel, Alex And The Ironic Gentleman. Jolly Rogers flap in the breeze of comically enormous electric fans, and a pirate ship seems to have moored in the basement's unfinished swimming pool. To extend the piratical atmosphere to the entire building, a gang of actors have been hired to lead treasure hunts. So I, ragged map in hand, lead gangs of children on a meandering quest for the Lost Pirate Treasure of Casa Loma. Just to reiterate, I get paid to do this stuff.

Having roughly laid out the route that the treasure hunt would take, our employer gave us supplies and had us craft our own treasure maps. Most of the others made something abstract, cartoony, and usable only as a prop. Their treasure hunts are performances, where the kids follow along and watch a pirate sort through the clues on his/her map. Which is fine, but not enough for me. My map is a top-down map that combines elements of all four floors of Casa Loma into one layer, littered with rhyming couplet clues that direct the reader to the next point. I really enjoy showing kids the map and letting them figure it out, which they're usually able to with only a bit of help from me. Yesterday, I had a group of teenagers who insisted on going on the hunt, and I took them as a separate group as an experiment (they were all dressed in highly snappy pirate costumes, and seemed very willing to play along). I swore them in as pirates, gave them the map, and told them to figure it out for themselves. They were able to take my map, and with some scheming, find the treasure on their own. All I did was follow along, mutter snarky things to throw them off their game, and activate the animatronic skeleton that gives the final clue. Yay, I designed a thing that works!

Most wonderful are the kids. Some of them are shits, of course, but I meet many children each day who leave me smiling for hours. One girl, perhaps three years old, asked if I was married (I wear my grandfather's big gold ring on my right ring finger, and it's blingy enough that I leave it on when pirating). When I explained that wedding rings go on the other hand, she checked the placement of her mother's ring and confidently imparted that her mommy was married. I asked to whom, and the girl pointed at a nearby man and said, in the utmost seriousness, "that guy". She went on to identify 'that guy' as Daddy, but her initial candour was hilarious.

Another little girl- about five years old- came along on one of my treasure hunts and spent the entire time tugging at my coat and sharing Important Facts: she likes ponies, has three princess dresses, and planned on buying a boat and becoming a pirate when she grew up. When the tour was over, she came up and told me in her most grown-up voice that the adventure had been great, that she loved her shiny pirate coin (the giveaway at the end of the hunt), and that she wanted me to have something. She then took a shiny red plastic ring off her biggest finger, and wedged it onto my pinky. I initially felt bad taking it, but she insisted very eloquently, and I couldn't possibly turn her down. I told her that I was honoured and would take very good care of her treasure, and she smiled a huge smile. What I love about all of this is that it never occurred to her that I'm anything but a Real Live Pirate, taking her into my confidence as a trusted accomplice. I guess that's why I revel in playing pretend for a living: it's the closest I can get to seeing the world through eyes like hers.

There will be pictures when I remember to bring my camera to work. We've taken to sitting around the various levels and ledges of the Great Hall staircase, creating the impression of (according to the event's producer) a 'big crazy pirate brothel'. We look pretty sharp, and swaggering about a big old mansion makes me feel like a real pirate raiding the Governor's home. I have the coolest job in the world.

On failed saving throws

2008-03-05T09:06:11Z

It seems that Gary Gygax has passed away. I'm sure that most of you, being of the nerdly persuasion, have heard this a dozen times today already. I don't care.

I didn't get into D&D until I was eighteen, and it was my first experience with a roleplaying game. Prior to that I had spent years immersed in Warhammer and its spinoff games, all of them designed around a structure of one player attempting to trounce another at all costs. Second Edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (in all its blue-and-black-inked glory) redefined my paradigm of gaming. Even now, playing mostly wacky European strategy games, I still look for interesting ways for players to interact before I look for ways to win. Anyone can crunch the numbers of a game and steer it towards victory, but it takes a particular approach to find the excitement of a well-told story in a jumble of hex tiles and funny dice. Without the work of Gary Gygax, I'm sure I would never have found the passion that has kept me gaming. So thanks, Mr. Gygax, for the gift of imagination. Enjoy eternity in the plane of your alignment of choice.

Rich Burlew has made a fitting eulogy in his excellent webcomic, The Order Of The Stick.

the_pirate_show @ 2007-10-03T21:30:00

2007-10-04T01:31:42Z

DS Nerdstravaganza

2007-07-20T05:59:18Z

Hey friends,
It's that special time again. Thursday the 26th, we're doing another DS event at the Victory Cafe. I will be there at 8PM, and the awesome will proceed from there. Bring your DS, games, your boozin' hat, and friends.

Woo!

My Nifty Show

2007-07-08T15:46:44Z

So, the reviews are in: Now Magazine rated us NNNN (out of five), and Eye Weekly gave us a big two, but look at the feedback.

I am so very proud of Duel Of Ages. I hope you get to see it.

Show!

2007-07-06T15:47:11Z

Hey inter-pals,
I am still alive, just real busy. Our show, Duel of Ages, opened last night to great acclaim. I seriously think we'll be selling out soon, so come before it's too late! There are twenty-one actors in a very small stage space, fighting with swords and guns and kung fu, so someone might die one night. You wouldn't want to miss that, would you?

Events for your calendar

2007-06-08T05:18:09Z

Hey pals,
Two fun things:

1) Tonight is the fundraiser party for Duel Of Ages, my Fringe show. It's coming together really well, and I think you'll have a great time. So come! If you're Facebooky, you can also check it out right here.

2) Next Wednesday, the 13th, is our next DS party at the Victory Cafe on Markham Street. These are always a good time, and you oughta come even if you don't have a DS- you can certainly borrow mine when my thumbs get tired. I'm big on Custom Robo Arena at the moment, and it seems to have a fairly excellent multiplayer element.

3)I'm not very good at counting.

I CAN HAS UPDATE PLZ?

2007-06-06T05:27:20Z

I've been hard at work on Duel Of Ages, our Fringe show, so updating here hasn't really been on my mind. I'm not really feeling the need to write about much; this space became my lifeline to sanity and reason while I was on the road, and I don't really need it for that anymore. Because I like you, I will write more better stuffs whenever possible.

I've just received some very exciting news of a distinctly piratical bent. I will say nothing here until I have signed contract in hand, but I'm very excited and only a little surprised to see it come together. I now have to go tricorn shopping.

Finally, and this may be an utterly frivolous use of bandwidth, but I got bored of my beard (it's awfully itchy in warm weather) the other day, and took pictures at each stage of facial defollication.

Here's the beard I had going. It takes me about ten days to acheive a reasonable beard, so if I need it again it's never far off.

This look I shall call the Riker.

Thanks to QC, I can't help but call this the Jimbo.

The Rathbone:

I'd like a better name for this than "The Internet Stalker", but I'm coming up dry:

This is the Chaplin, not the Hitler. The hat makes all the difference:

And this is what I look like now:

Hopefully this has been edifying. Or something. If you've made it this far, I have a prize for you: LOLbots is a send-up of the cat macro phenomenon, and I find it amusing. My favourites are these two, but your mileage may vary...

DS Nerdstravaganza

2007-06-01T03:16:47Z

Okay, the next DS party is set for Wednesday June 13th. I guess we'll do the Victory, because sofas please The Monkey. I'll put it up on toronto, but feel free to spread the word...

And a question, so the non-DS folk aren't left out: now that I'm done travelling, what the hell should I do with this Livejournal? It was my lifeline to home while I was on the road (and many thanks to all who read it, you kept me sane), but what can I chronicle now? Any suggestions are welcome... I really don't want this to become a WankJournal.

Obligatory Pirates Review

2007-05-30T03:52:53Z

First, a point of planning: I lied, I'm in a cutlass workshop on the evening of the 15th. How's the following Friday, the 22nd, for the next DS Nerdstravaganza? All previous challenges, throwdowns, and shit-talking still stand.
EDIT: Or how about Wednesday the 13th?

We saw Pirates The Third the other day, "we" in this instance comprising (from left to right)myself, dwarvenaxe, Siobhan, and stevetassie. Invisibly concealed in that shot are also redknot and dunderbug, who I sure hope aren't ninjas of any sort. Most of us were heavily engarboned in pirate threads, and all of us were pillagy in spirit. I won't confirm or deny the presence of rum.

Disclaimer: I adored the first film, and greatly enjoyed the second despite its flaws.

Is it any shock that I had a ball? It's a big ambitious movie, and the story is more than slightly awkwardly-shaped to get in all the requisite bits. But, unlike the second film, it never fell apart into a Jack Sparrow gag-a-thon. It might be argued that the scene of Jack in the afterlife, captaining a landlocked Black Pearl and a crew of several dozen Jacks, crosses that line... but I can't think of a worse (or more amusing) hell for him than having to deal with himself.

There are a lot of killer performances, particularly from the bit characters from the first film who get some pretty great payoffs. Pintel and Ragetti, that midget, Lord Beckett, and even those two Mutt-and-Jeff redcoats all get their dues (the exception to this is Norrington, who disappointingly pretty much reverts to his personality from Curse Of The Black Pearl). Very funny dialogue abounds, much of it absurd and self-referential, and most of it quite character-based. There are also some lovely details thrown in for the historical piracy nerds among us, my favorites being the references to Ching Shih and Kanhoji Angre. And Will Turner, entirely forgettable in the first film and not much better in the second, gets an immense finish to his character arc. I wish they'd found a way to get Chow Yun-Fat more screen time as Captain Sao Feng, though... he was electric.

But for all the enjoyably accurate minutiae, the film goes much further into fantasy than its predecessors. Number two may have had a Lovecraftian villain, but number three liberally employs non-Euclidean geography. Folks are either going to love or hate this, but I personally have no problems engaging a film that puts the rules of Adventure above the laws of physics. When our heroes sail off into the horizon at the end, it's satisfying to know that they're off to a world of literally endless possibilities.

Really, though, the reason I so enjoyed Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End is because it is extremely piratey. Like way more piratey than both previous films put together. We can partially blame Keith Richards for this, given his cameo as an older and crustier Jack doppleganger, but the whole movie turns the swashbuckling pirate shtick up to eleven. The biggest perpetrator, and my favourite part of the film, was Geoffrey Rush's Hector Barbossa. He is clearly having the time of his life, hollering "Arrr" and giving the evil eye and generally chewing scenery wherever he goes. Moreover, he manages to do this without hogging the spotlight of a big ensemble film. That man is my hero.

So, in summary: How awesome was it? So awesome that even a mighty Herald of Galactus got in on the action. Yarr!

Things From Your Future!

2007-05-28T22:22:23Z

Hmmm, a few things yet-to-come that bear mentioning:

First of all, I have a show in the Toronto Fringe Festival! Duel Of Ages (scroll down, it's there) is a big (twenty-one actors) fight show exploring the history of the duel of honour in Western culture. It is cleverly-written and action-packed, and anyone with an interest in swordplay or martial arts would certainly enjoy it.

To support said show, we are throwing a fundraiser on Friday June 8 at the Rhino, a nifty bar on Queen West. I can promise that this party will contain (among other things) burlesque, violence, hilarity, and makeouts. What more could you possibly want? For bonus points, I will buy a drink for the first four of you who start a conversation with the Secret Code Phrase: "Who needs trousers when you've got a perfectly good can of paint?" THE RACE IS ON.

Because there isn't a huge awesome fundraiser party on the following weekend, I propose another DS party for Friday the 15th. Who's in? I just scored Custom Robo Arena, and my first impression is very positive. I'm thinking we hit the Victory again, as it was big and couchy in accordance with my needs.

And finally, ha.

Yaaarrrrrrrgh.

2007-05-23T17:02:33Z

First of all, a matter of business: Pirates The Third is on for 8:00PM this Friday. I shall be dressed elaborately, and I shall recommend that you do the same. If you need assistance and are me-sized, I may be able to help piratify you. Additionally, I'll be smuggling a flask of delicious rum... and I humbly suggest that you undertake the same.

Now, the exciting bits:

So, the five-day-long Blackbeard's Ghost stage combat workshop in Wiliamsburg, Virginia. I was a bit mad to undertake it only a day after returning from a twelve-week-long tour, but it seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. I'm certainly glad to have gone for it, as I learned a lot.

High falls were quite scary. We started going off a table level with the crash pad to ensure good landing technique, but eventually moved up to jumping off this twenty-foot roof (the lower archway, not the red brick building). It took some doing, but I got over myself and did several sideways falls onto my back from this height. Others were attempting the head-first 'suicide fall', which held very little interest for me.

I coined a phrase that saw a lot of use that week: "the building ain't gonna jump off itself!"

We also did some work on a rope- swinging around is one thing, but swinging around and looking cool involves some very specific techniques (and some serious arm muscles). I made a huge amount of progress in this discipline- by the end of the week I was swinging around in various controlled shapes, changing direction mid-swing, and recklessly hanging upside-down. Newtonian physics can suck it.

I've already gone on about the crazy flintlock pistol, but I wanted to show it off. It really is a gorgeous piece of kit, though it looked somewhat less pretty than this once we were done with it. Firing a flintlock pistol gets ash everywhere... the sleeve of my coat still smells a bit of blackpowder.

And of course, no pirate boot camp would be complete without cutlass training. David has, over many years, developed a system of theatrical cutlass that, while having little historical justification, does make good sense. It draws on many fighting styles that pirates would have encountered, it works well in very limited space (important when fighting on board a ship), and it looks very flowy and cool. We spent all week developing a big single cutlass fight and taping it, but I don't yet have a final edit of it. But for extra fun, we spent a morning working on case of cutlass (meaning wielding two cutlasses at once) and did a quick-and-dirty taping of it. There are some burps in the choreography, but you can see the flowing footwork and circular cuts starting to take shape. I'm the bad pirate, while Doug is the swashbuckling hero. Or something like that.

David will probably be in Toronto on June 16, if anyone is interested in a cutlass crash course. That evening is the (annual?) pirate-themed Fetish Masquerade, and I can't think of anything finer than attending that party after a day of actual swashbuckling.

That week was huge fun and a much-needed change of pace, but I'm so very glad to be home. I sure didn't miss the landlord (who lives directly below my bedroom) flipping out and screaming profanities and throwing his furniture at his walls, though. That I could do without.

Arrgh?

2007-05-20T17:41:51Z

Who's in for dressing up as pirates and going to the new PotC film on Friday night (time TBA) at the Paramount? We could go cause trouble afterwards. It seems like a Good Idea to me.

Also, actual conversation from the past week from a fight rehearsal:

Emmy: (scream of rage with much shaking of swords) How was that?

Pirate: Yeah, that's scary. I especially like the little hilt-shake.

Emmy: Like this? (shakes swords further)

Pirate: Truly, your hilt-shake brings all the boys to the... what?

I stopped there because everyone was staring at me in vague disappointment. I thought it was funny!

Kaboom!

2007-05-19T14:52:58Z

I shall be posting a much longer tirade about the week later on from the airport. To amuse you in the meantime, here's how we ended the workshop:

Ian is a fight director from Philadelphia who does a great deal of Revolutionary War reenactment stuff, and this muzzle-loading pistol is part of his act as Alexander Hamilton. It is very similar to a handgun used by the Royal Navy at the time, and therefore would not be out of place in the hands of a pirate. It fires exactly the way a true flintlock pistol did, which is explained quite clearly here for those interested. From the flintlock we get the figures of speech: "going off half-cocked" refers to the misfire that occurs if you hastily fire before fully pulling back the striker, and a "flash in the pan" is when the powder in the frizzen ignites without the flame going down the touchhole to the charge in the barrel (giving a flashy start with zero effectiveness). I think that's neat.

I'm back tonight! This week was a terrific experience and a much-needed vacation, but I'm really looking forward to being at home and not going anywhere for a while.

In other news of nautical entrepreneurship, Odyessy Marine Exploration has recovered five hundred million dollars worth of gold and silver coins from a 400-year-old shipwreck near England. They're being cagey with the details, but I'm still excited. I wonder what ship it was, and how it went down?

OUCH OUCH OUCH

2007-05-15T23:34:28Z

Circumstance has given me an evening off by myself, and as luck would have it the campus is adjacent to Colonial Williamsburg, the beautifully-preserved British colony that dates back to 1699. Many buildings have been restored as little museums: an apothecary's teaches about period medicine, the millinery shop displays fine clothes of the period. The entire neighborhood is one vast living history museum, populated with more costumed interpreters than I can keep count of. There must be at least thirty or forty such people, and that's not counting the nineteen-piece fife and drum band that I stumbled on (and by "stumbled on" I mean "heard from a mile away and had to track down.") It's really lovely, very alive and vibrant and green. Also, it's amusing to see a large-scale American celebration of the side that lost... Union flags and redcoats are everywhere, and it is quite a sight.

The pirate-themed fight workshop that brought me here has been incredible so far- there are only five of us taking the class, but with two full-time teachers it adds up to a ton of individual attention. I am unbelievable sore, of course, and here's the approximate daily itinerary to give you an idea of why:

09:00: warm-up, stretching, and many push-ups

09:30: unarmed Eastern martial arts exercises to examine principles of cutlass work.

09:50: cutlass! The fellow who organised the workshop created a system of cutlass that I've sampled twice before, based on a combination of European saber technique and Pacific Rim stickfighting styles (all possible influences on the average pirate's combat style).

12:00: a much-needed lunch break, rum sadly not included.

13:30: rope work, a callous-inducing class of swinging about on ropes in various exciting ways. Today I carved great arcs through the air while others ducked my kicks and swung cutlasses at me.

14:30: high falls, which are exactly what you think they are. Jumping from up to eighteen feet (we go much higher tomorrow), leading with feet or back or even dropping head-first, and controlling a safe landing into a heavy pad. (Don't worry, Mom, it's quite safe.) This is my biggest obstacle, as talking oneself into diving face first off the roof of a building is quite tricky.

15:15: Fighting for film, which is actually where most of my bruises have come from so far. It's alarmingly up-close, and some moves require a slightly more aggressive touch than I'm used to for stage combat. Film can tell when you're lying, which is a challenging concept for me.

16:00: Whatever we feel like! David has a great imagination for random wacky pirate stuff, so he'll have us run obstacle courses along the lines of 'jump down two feet and land silently, dive over a small crate and land in a roll, pick up the cutlass while rolling, and then catch the boarding axe that gets thrown as you stand up.' Or we'll create a pattern of running around the room, throwing and catching weapons to each other on the run. There's a lot of fun in building the kind of crazy sequences that get done in wacky pirate shows.

I'll post some pictures of all of this soon. Would you believe that I've forgotten to take a single photograph so far? This may be in part because my muscles are too sore to worry about extraneous ways to spend energy... just about everything on the curriculum is a merciless full-body workout. It'll all be worth it, though, as I'm going to leave this week with some truly awesome skills under my belt. It's also important that this workshop is doing wonders for my sanity; the combination of absolute mental focus and extreme physical exertion is just enough to keep me from worrying about anything else. And I sleep like a log out of sheer exhaustion, which is a welcome change from the sedentary nonsense of the last few months. Things are good!

NEXT!

2007-05-13T05:06:59Z

I'm now procrastinating in the middle of packing my bags for the fourth time in three months. I ought not to complain, because spending a week in gorgeous Virginia learning advanced pirate skills is clearly a brilliant opportunity. But I really need a week or two to sit around at home, hang out with my friends, and decompress. Hopefully getting back into stage combat (with a new group of mostly strangers) will provide a certain degree of relaxation, because I've had moments in the past week where I could have happily sucker-punched a random stranger out of sheer stress. If made to guess, I'd surmise that to be unhealthy.

I was lucky to see several dear friends at the bar the other night. I'm aware that I probably wasn't the greatest company, but just seeing familiar faces was better than I can possibly describe.

The first thing that I did when I got home from the American leg of the tour was sit down at my desk and wonder "what next?" I'd been itching to get home, but what could I do that would make it sink in? Just being in the building wasn't doing it for me.

At the Getty Museum in L.A. I acquired a bad of hundreds of 'Fotoclips', little single and double clips that grab ahold of photographs (or any other thick paper) and combine with each other via limited modular ball joints. I don't know why I bought them, because I don't bother with getting photos printed. Sitting at my desk, I took them from my suitcase and stared at them. I saw a stack of index cards sitting on the nearest bookshelf- the ones I use for various acting things. I did what any rational person would have done in my place: built a spaceship.

I'm aware that this is ludicrous, but making stuff is kind of my Zen space. Hence proton packs, hence miniature painting, hence the endless projects that I tinker with at my war zone of a desk. The rocket shuttle thing is still taking up valuable real estate in my workspace, ugly though it is, because it's the only thing I've had time to do that reminds me of myself. I'd build it a landing pad and maybe detail the cockpit, let my Stikfas pilot it or something, but instead I have to pack my life back into a box on wheels for one more week. Sure, why not?

My Five Cents

2007-05-11T05:28:56Z

Hey, the Internet works again! Of all the hotels I've lodged in since March, the Knight's Inn in Sudbury wins the shiny no-prize for Worst Wi-Fi. It's been flickery since I arrived here yesterday, but it seems kind of stable now.

Sudbury is odd. The center of it seems to be nickel mines and refineries, but suburbs have sprung up as well. Consequently, big box stores and Tim Hortons are everywhere. But what's missing? A sense of identity as a city, I guess. There's no architecture that predates 1970, no sense of community, and the attractions seem a bit desolate. Science North is cool, but kind of devoid of personality. I saw a Romeo and Juliet at the Sudbury Theatre Centre last year that impressed me immensely, but the cast was imported from Toronto. And the few locals that I've met seem awfully... tired.

I should emphasize that Science North was pretty cool. It's no Ontario Science Centre, but I had a good time. I got to touch Tiger Snails and a Giant African Millipede (those things have more twitchy little legs than I can deal with). The impressive skeleton of a whale (beached the year I was born) hangs in the main vertical space, and a computer lab let me noodle around with the excellent iStopMotion. Shiny!

We hung around to catch an IMAX feature on the excavation of ancient Greece, which introduced me to a new concept. So a city is buried by volcanic eruption, and paintings excavated from the site provide new information about the way they lived. But if we can only ballpark the age of the eruption, the paintings don't provide as clear a reference, right? So take a sample of dirt from that volcanic ash, and compare it to cores of ice from deep inside a glacier in Greenland. Each year leaves a distinctly countable layer in the ice, and gunk traceable to that eruption was distributed across the globe when it blew up. Cross-reference, and you know that the island of Santorini was buried in exactly 1642 A.D. How cool is that?

The thing that really blew my mind was the butterfly garden. A hundred or so species of butterfly and moth fly free in a lush greenhouse, and because I got there early I was the only human there. The sense of tranquility was like a warm blanket. I managed a few pictures, but mostly I just wandered about wide-eyed.

Having been through a total of thirty-five states and all over Ontario in the last three months, I'm grateful as ever to have been hired for this show. Nonetheless, I'll be glad to get home. Touring has become my life lately, and I'm looking forward to re-adjusting to living at home and having some stability once more. Of course this weekend is but another stopover in Toronto before I fly away to Virginia for a week-long pirate-themed fight workshop, but the change will still be a huge relief.

the_pirate_show @ 2007-05-08T20:47:00

2007-05-09T00:52:56Z

I've been light on content lately, I know, but I've not had too much to add. My weekend in Toronto was much-needed. I spent hours and hours just walking around the city, which was downright meditative, and seeing familiar faces was so good as to leave me speechless... well, as close to speechless as I ever get, anyways. I know I didn't really get to see everyone, but I needed to decompress more than I needed to be very social. Touring is wonderful and eye-opening, yes, but it's also stressful. No matter how laid back the schedule is, it feels a little like being constantly 'on the clock' for ten consecutive weeks. I'd do it again given the opportunity, but not until after some serious downtime.

We spent the last two nights in North Bay, Ontario... a small town with two redeeming characteristics. The first is a terrific game store run by a crazy old military wargamer. He carries all of the good European board games, of course, and plenty of roleplaying stuff, but the focus is on miniature wargaming. He's got plenty of the usual mainstream stuff, Warhammer and the like, but his real love is obscure historical gaming: an entire wall of toy soldiers from every conceivable nation and period, plus some very neat pulp and historical fantasy pieces, and piles of different rules systems for using them all. This guy is one of six retailers in the world who carries Perry Brothers minatures! I restrained myself to a pile of oldey-timey gangsters in suits and classy hats, a few dames packing heat, and a completely gratuitous purchase of three pulp-style Nazi Rocket Commandoes. As I get them painted up, I will perhaps get some photographs up here... after all, I'll need something to keep this space interesting once I've landed again.

The other thing I really liked about North Bay is the outdoorsiness of the place. The air tastes deliciously fresh, trees abound, and the beach is unavoidable. Most of the city parks border on Lake Nipissing, including the aptly-named Sunset Beach. Surrounding a green space is sand on one edge, and large rocks around the rest that extend out to a small point aimed due west. I wandered out there after dinner and found a little gap in the rock to curl up in as the sun set.

After some of the less pleasant moments of the weekend past (of which I don't wish to post details here), it was wonderful to just sit and think. Contemplating something too big to all fit in my brain at once is oddly meditative, the mental equivalent of getting peacefully lost in the woods. But with less bears, which is pretty much alright.

Welcome, home.

2007-05-02T03:09:34Z

I'm back in Canada. Kemptville, Ontario, to be precise. Tonight I had my first Canadian beer in over two months- Keiths', as luck would have it. It tasted marvelous, and the second and third ones were even better. I keep forgetting that I'm back in Canada; every time I open my wallet I am briefly confused by the colourful money. I am so close to home that I can taste it. That doesn't make this much easier, as I am officially on tour until the twelfth (and then immediately ship out to a week-long fight workshop in Virginia on the 13th).

This was the last picture I took in the United States. I don't know what exactly I mean by posting it here... but it sure is pretty.

I think I shall overhaul some of my basic assumptions once I'm home.

Almost there!

2007-04-29T03:59:29Z

I'd love to have tales of adventure or pictures of silly things, but I spent eight hours in the truck today plus breaks for meals. It sucked. I got through the final levels of Bomberman DS (a better single-player mode than I expected, really), read as much of Heinlein's excellent The Cat Who Walks Through Walls as I could before the intricacies of pretend quantum mechanics made my brain hurt. Stupid sexy Heinlein.

Tomorrow night we stay in Syracuse, and then cross the border the next day for our next show in Cornwall, Ontario. I expect good weather for my return. I already miss palm trees a little bit, but I'm really looking forward a lot to being home again.

I have a weakness for cross-genre geek humour. Consequently this made me laugh a lot.

Hmmm... it's certainly a good thing that no pirates of my acquaintance are headed for teacher's college soon. I hear that can lead to trouble.