Wednesday-morning randomness

[felis_ultharus]

This is my first day to relax and be lazy in ages. I've gotten more work done on that short fantasy story, but I think more research is in order. There's a SCAdian event downtown on Saturday, and I may go to that to see swordfighting -- or at least the modern equivalent of it -- close up.

Researching this and other things randomly -- including anything that just catches my interest -- I keep stumbling across all sorts of data and information, which is always a pleasure.

Or usually a pleasure -- this article about Microsoft relocating to BC because the US keeps refusing its Korean techs visas was less-than-pleasurable because Bill Gates' face is there. He's wrinkling -- I guess bathing in the blood of fifty Linux programmers daily has not kept him young.

I came again to this statistics page breaking down religious denominations in Canada by number, and -- reading it more carefully this time -- was startled by how quickly religion has changed. Just twenty years ago, the country was 90% Christian. Now Christianity is haemorrhaging numbers, and its current adherents are aging. Meanwhile, Muslims and Buddhists quintupled in the same twenty years, and Hindus tripled.

It also notes that Wicca/Neo-Paganism has almost tripled in ten years, making it the fastest-growing religion by percentage, which religioustolerance.org notes, "To our knowledge, this fact was ignored by all media commentators."

On a completely different note, seeing this cheetah running video made me wonder how someone chose a dance remix of "Bittersweet Symphony" for a nature program. That just seems so random.

Comments

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

We-ll, *technically* SCAdian stick fighting isn't terribly authentic--but it can be fun to watch. Someday, I might even take it up again.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Well, unless things heat up again between the House of Lancaster and the House of York again in downtown Montreal, or Westmount invents the longbow and decides to press its claim on Parc Extension, I'm pretty much out of luck for the real thing.

I want to at least get a sense of how the body moves when fighting.

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. SCA stick fighting is, by necessity, not all that much like medieval armed combat. It's more a modern "martial" art based on medieval armed combat. We have very non-medieval rules and restrictions in place to keep from breaking our toys (if you break your playmates they tend to not want to play with you anymore), and weapon and armor standards that don't have any medieval correlation.

The video clips page from the historical types: http://www.thearma.org/Videos/Videos.htm

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Thank you -- I think that'll help ^_^

[pixel39.livejournal.com]

You're very welcome. :-)