![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
ekgazette_feedAnnouncing the New Armored Combat (Rattan) Handbook
https://www.sca.org/news/announcing-the-new-armored-combat-rattan-handbook/
Corpora Amendment Commentary Request – Inclusion of DEIB and Chatelaine as Greater Officers
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkit
ekgazette_feed
Above is the team photo from yesterday.
Today was a busy day at the range! Here are the results through Day 4 of the Populace War Point shooting:
Wednesday - Aug.5 Total to-date
East/Mid Alliance East/Mid Alliance
Clout 1255 856 2051 1679
Soldier 1479 1151 3245 2370
Window 568 752 1399 1384
Friend/Foe 1422 1599 3208 2900
Total Points 4724 4358 9903 8333
Archer Rounds 690 671 1459 1384
Average 6.79 6.02
Photo graciously provided by Mistress Arlyana van Wyck.
Any errors are the fault of this humble reporter, compiling them at home. Mistress Ygraine of Kellswood.
ekgazette_feed
This Pennsic, the East and Midrealm are working together against the Known World “Green Alliance”. For archery, this meant fewer champions from the East. There have also been changes in the archery war point shooting. For the first time ever, part of the championship competition was a head-to-head shoot by 10 hand-picked archers from each side. Here is an account:
Sunday morning, as the first war point of Pennsic 52, the first ever Heroic Archery Champions war point occurred on the archery range at 9 AM on Sunday Aug. 3, 2025.
Five members of the East and five members of the Midrealm joined forces to take on the best archers of the known world.
The field consisted of four targets on each side of a central target. The shooters had to hit the four targets on their side and then hit the central target in under 60 seconds with only eight shots in their quiver. Whomever hit the central target first or whomever had hit more targets on their side at the end of 60 seconds would win their round. If neither archer had hit the central target and both archers had hit the same number of targets, 10 seconds were added to the clock and two shots added to their quiver as a tiebreaker.
Eastern Heroic Archers were: Team Captain Godric of Hamtun, Queens Champion Jozef Ludwiczak, Li Kung Lo, Magnus Surtsson, and Kusonoshi Yoshimoto.
Even though every competition was tight, including several rounds where multiple tie breakers had to be held, only Yoshi was able to take a point for the Purple alliance. Thus the Green alliance prevailed, taking nine of the head to head matches. They took home two well earned war points.
Ryan Mac Whyte, Captain General, Marshal in Charge of the Heroic Championship Shoot
The Archery Champions Team competition took place this morning, Tuesday Aug. 5, 2025. It consisted of a Roving Range plus a timed Friend/Foe shoot and was contested by teams of 30 archers for each side, with 10 alternates available to step-in if needed. Before the competition began, Jozef and Lada, the EK Royal Archery Champions, each received the Order of Apollo’s Arrow. The team competition results are now in, and the Green alliance won, earning another two war points. Final scores were: Friend/Foe 29 to 16, Roving Range 971 to 883.
Eastern archers on the champions team this year were:
And serving as alternates:
There are 4 Populace Archery Shoots this year — the usual Clout, Castle Window and Advancing Soldier, plus an untimed Friend/Foe shoot. Altogether, these will be worth 2 war points. There are shooting times for the populace war points every day through Friday. Archers can shoot each up to 5 times. Here are the results from the first three days of shooting:
Tuesday - Aug.5 Total to-date
East/Mid Alliance East/Mid Alliance
Clout 39 174 796 823
Soldier 80 279 1766 1219
Window 20 87 831 632
Friend/Foe 82 215 1786 1301
Total Points 221 755 5179 3975
Archer Rounds 40 131 769 713
Photos graciously provided by Mistress Kay Leigh Mac Whyte and Master Ryan Mac Whyte.
Any errors are the fault of this humble reporter, compiling them at home. Mistress Ygraine of Kellswood.
matildalucetsidereasiderea[3:15] [Jon Favreau:] Dan, how does this explosive revelation – that we all saw coming – change the nature of this almost 3-week old scandal?And:
[Dan Pfeiffer:] I would hope that this changes how everyone, ourselves included, talks and thinks about this scandal.
Because we've had a lot of fun about with this. We're going to have fun about it on this podcast, I hope. It is... There's something amusing about it.
But I feel like everyone has been treating this kind of from a perspective of...bemusement? Like, "Ah, look at these conspiracy pushing grifters who've been hoisted on their own petard!" right? Where the real crime here is hypocrisy and deception. Right? That they they say they released the Epstein files but they didn't do it. Trump's breaking a campaign promise, ha! Take that! The dog that caught the car, and all of that.
But I think we do really have to to take a step back, and I know this is going to sound like hyperbole, and I know it will, but I truly believe it: that this scandal, now with this revelation, this scandal, now, should be treated like Iran-Contra, Watergate, other major political scandals.
Because what we have here is the president of the United States, the attorney general, the intelligence community, the FBI director, and the Republican Congress, all part of a conspiracy to cover up information about the President of the United States' relationship with America's most notorious child sex trafficker.
[Jon Favreau, profoundly missing Pfeiffer's point:] And lying about it, right?
[Dan Pfeiffer:] And he lied– he lied to the American people. Whether– either by direct order or by implicit request, the intelligence community! We have intelligence professionals, like, the most– what's theoretically supposed to be the most, one of the most apolitical parts of the government, concocting a bullshit report we're going to talk about to try to distract people from the political fallout of this. You have the Republican Congress shutting down and going home, for a month because they are so afraid to vote on a measure that could shed light – once again – on the President of the United States' relationship with America's most notorious child sex trafficker.
Like this really is a giant deal. Like, we need to know what is that hearsay Trump's worried about, in the files? What is in there? What do we not know about Trump's relationship? Like, what, what other steps have been taken to try to cover this up? Have there been efforts to alter or destroy the records? Right? What what other government officials have hid it? Who else has been lied to? Like, this is a big deal and it should be treated as a big deal, in my view.
[...]
[...] this is one of the clues that [5:44] you and I took as evidence that Trump knew his name, or at least suspected his name, was in the Epstein files, was he kept saying, "How are we going to know they're real? Maybe Comey and Biden and whoever else doctored them?" To put his name in there, right?
[...]
I mean the, the chain of events here is they were planning to release the files; they were on Pam Bondi's desk; they released that first tranche that had his name in it, that did not– that at that point they did not say We're not going to release more, because after that went out Pam Bondie said These are on my desk for review; she reviewed them, found something that she thought would be quite embarrassing to the president, and they changed their plan. And they've continued to believe that the massive amount of political fallout they've been getting now for almost 3 weeks is preferable to whatever they believe is in the files.
[Jon Favreau:] How do you think Dems should [17:09] handle this issue over the next few months?Commentary follows, below.
[Dan Pfeiffer:] I think our goal should be to keep the issue in the news as much as possible without putting too much spin on the ball. Right? I've seen other testing which shows that the most effective online posts are not Democrats talking about it. It is clips of Republicans or people who previously supported Trump – you know, podcasters, influencers – criticizing Trump for this. That's the most effective medium.
When we think about how we, like, if we are messaging– if you're an elected official and you're thinking about how to use your platforms, that's one way to do it. If we're thinking about it in the context of how all of us are messengers, and people in our lives, and you're sharing things in your group chat, the better thing to share is the clip of Andrew Schultz talking about this on Flagrant, than it is, you know, some Democrat ranting about this on MSNBC. Or Pod Save America, or anywhere else, right? It's like the... Think about someone who is– who's motivations are not automatically questioned even in an issue on this one where they're, they're quite sincere.
writerkit
jducoeurOh, and here's a little note worth calling out:
Over the past year, I've been getting more into Scottish Country Dance. I'm by no means an expert -- sadly, I've had to accept that I'm not as bouncy as I once was, and after fracturing my foot a couple of years ago I'm allowing my style to be loose and sloppy -- but I've become a regular member of the Gender-Free Scottish Country Dance class happening in the NESFA Clubhouse twice a month, and am quite enjoying it.
A couple of weeks ago was ESCape, the annual Pinewoods week co-hosted by the local English, Scottish, and Contra communities, which has become a highlight of my annual schedule. Classes all day and balls all night, it's a dancer's dream, and the community is relatively young, queer, geeky, and thoroughly fun to be around.
A particular tidbit this year was the day where Sorcy taught McCloud's Wedding (? I think that was the name), a delightfully weird, intricate, five-couple dance where basically everybody is active. Wild stuff, and at the end of the rather large class they asked for ten volunteers to perform a demo set during the ESCape Chocolate Party on Thursday. They got over a dozen volunteers, so I demurred, but told them that if they came up short, they should pull me in.
Not astonishingly, the party rolled around and they were short on people, so I got grabbed for a quick once-through and then on to the performance. And it was caught on video, so if you're curious what this SCD stuff looks like (in a rather complex form), give it a look!
jducoeurWow, I've completely failed to do any long-form posting lately. Mastodon is a seductively easy outlet, encouraging quick thoughts (and occasionally rewarding them highly with boosts and faves) without the effort of serious writing. I'm kind of disappointed in myself in principle, but not sure whether it's likely to change.
That said, it's been A Lot recently, so let's catch up on some stuff. This is going to be a bit of a long wander across several topics; hopefully it won't be entirely boring.
As promised, I took three months off for a sabbatical, before starting to look for a new position at the beginning April. I did talk to a few companies, but in practice, it turned out to be all about Networking, as usual.
When I say "it's all about Networking", mind, I don't mean spending all my time pressing the flesh at cocktail parties. Real-world networking mostly consists of being good to the people around you, helping them out when you can, and being pretty clear about when you're looking.
In practice, I got Just Plain Lucky this time. Right around the time I started looking, I got a ping out of the blue from Carlos, asking, "Hey, Justin -- would you happen to be in the market?" After a response of, "Wow, good timing", we got to talking.
To explain this, I have to step back half a dozen years. From around (it's complicated) 2017 through 2021, I was working for Rally Health, primarily on a project called Rally Recover. Recover was great -- a product I was really proud of, to help surgical teams keep in touch with patients post-op. There was a lot to it, but the backend was mainly three of us: me (the Scala expert), Steve (the Ruby on Rails expert), and Carlos (not quite as expert in either, but solidly good at both, so he acted as the essential glue).
Sadly, Recover got cancelled -- great though it was, Optum (our Corporate Overlords) weren't figuring out how to sell it effectively. So our team got shunted onto A Project Of Which We Will Not Speak (suffice it to say, it was a political clusterfuck, and largely collapsed after six months), and thence over to start building a new product called OnePass.
I laid down a good deal of the technical foundation of OnePass (built in my preferred stack: Scala, using the Typelevel functional-programming framework), and was having fun on it when The Merger happened.
Like I said, Rally had been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Optum (which itself is part of the UHG empire). We'd known for most of a year that Optum had decided to absorb Rally, and a lot of folks were nervous about that, but I'd initially blithely said, "We build all of the best software in Optum -- surely they won't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, right?"
But some months later, one or two senior folks who I particularly trusted abruptly left, so I started to get nervous. I wound up interviewing at Troops while on vacation in Hawaii in late 2021; by the time I got home, the merger had happened, and I survived precisely one day at Optum before noping out, giving notice and joining Troops.
Anyway...
After four years "incubating" at Optum, they apparently decided that OnePass was going to thrive better as an independent company, so they were spinning it off. Carlos knew that I don't enjoy working at a corporate giant like Optum, but a scrappy startup like OnePass is becoming is right up my alley.
So basically, I'm boomeranging back to my old project, even through it's a completely new company. I know that I like the tech stack, and I can probably bring a lot to the table -- it seems like the right move.
My first day is tomorrow, so I'm preparing for the roller-coaster now...
During the sabbatical, and even more during the subsequent months while negotiating things with OnePass (we agreed to wait until the company was fully established before starting the process, so it's taken a while), I've been finally making progress on Querki.
Reminder for those who haven't been following it forever: Querki is my little garage startup, which I've been working on (with a lot of help from Aaron, who also owns a chunk of it) for a dozen or so years now. It's a hybrid between a wiki and a database, designed for "small data" problems -- enabling individuals and small communities to keep track of and organize stuff.
Fairly early on, I made a decision that seemed like a good idea at the time. Querki was built using a product called Conductr -- an early "containerization" system that was optimized for the Scala/Akka architecture that Querki is built on. It seemed like a good fit, and as a result I wound up as the smallest customer for Lightbend, the consultancy behind Scala, Akka, and Conductr: we had a handshake agreement that I would alpha-test Conductr and help them work out the kinks.
But things change over time. Lightbend decided not to be the primary supporter of the Scala 3 language (which is instead managed by the Scala Center), and has instead doubled down on Akka; indeed, they changed the company name to Akka recently.
And Conductr? It just kind of quietly died. It was a clever idea, but Kubernetes sucked all the air out of the containerization room, and there was no point in competing with it.
Querki was, AFAIK, the only third-party product ever built using Conductr (that is, the only one not built by Lightbend). And by the time Conductr was clearly dead, I had a dayjob, and didn't have time to extract it from Querki's architecture.
But there was a huge problem: Conductr was invasive. Much of its power came from the fact that it was actually laced through the application itself, not just wrapped around it. And it was built using Scala and Akka.
Which meant that Querki was bound to the specific versions of Scala and Akka that Conductr had been built with. And Conductr was dead.
So Querki has been stuck on an increasingly antique platform for the past ten years. I was able to make some progress on features during that time, but have been more and more stuck because of that.
So the sabbatical was spent learning enough about AWS to figure out how to do the things that Conductr had been providing, and then "ripping out the tablecloth" -- rewriting Querki so that one day it was built on the Conductr architecture, and the next day it wasn't.
Since then, I've been speed-running a decade of ecosystem evolution: step-by-step upgrading Scala, Akka, Play, and dependencies. That's not yet done (indeed, there's quite a lot to do yet), but making progress has been extremely satisfying, and I'm probably halfway there.
(The next step is upgrading from Cassandra 3 to 5, because Querki's Cassandra host will be removing support for 3 late this year. Thank heavens I've gotten as far as I have, or we'd be in serious trouble come November.)
The plan is to get it all up to Reasonably Modern -- probably not Scala 3 (which is a big jump), but modern versions of Play and Akka (or more likely Pekko, the open-source fork that got set up when Akka locked down its license). Then I'm going to fix a few horrible long-standing bugs (eg, Eric discovered the hard way that Querki Spaces start having serious trouble loading if their history becomes very long), and make some long-desired architectural changes (in particular, rewrite the heart of the QL engine to use cats-effect and fs2). And then I can figure out what comes next.
I've mentioned before that I'm on the Steering Committee for Typelevel, the above-mentioned organization that OnePass (and many other companies) is built on. Suffice it to say, there are some changes coming there: it's not all public yet, but I expect my responsibilities to grow in the coming months. I've been avoiding taking on additional responsibilities elsewhere as a result.
That said, it's been a busy year for me in the SCA, especially for my two offices.
I've been Baronial Chatelaine (the new-people officer) for just about three years now. I mostly enjoy the work, but I've been getting a little toasty, and was starting to get quite worried by the beginning of the year: I wanted to hand it off, but had no idea to whom.
Once again, I got super-lucky. Within days of each other, around the time of Birka, Thorfinn and Revna -- both of them young, energetic fighters -- asked whether I was looking for a deputy. I gratefully said absolutely, and suddenly found myself heading a Chatelaine team, which is a vastly healthier state of affairs.
Both of them have been very helpful, and Thorfinn in particular has been a force of nature, doing much of the work to drive the new Baronial Discord, working with the Webminister to improve our site, and generally help new folks. So I'm happily trading places with him around now (we haven't really worried about exact dates, but Pennsic is my three-year anniversary), with him stepping up as Chatelaine and me stepping down to Deputy. I expect that to continue to work well.
One of the questions I kept hearing from new folks was, "Do you have a dance practice? I'd like to try dancing!" And of course, we allowed Dance Practice to go quiet a year or two ago, so I didn't have anything to tell them.
So early this year, I basically declared that I was coming back as Dancemaster, but changing it up a bunch.
Aaradyn managed to get us the "friends and family" discount for the church she works at, which eased the way a lot -- having a nice site within walking distance of Harvard Square made it much easier to get things going again.
Since we've had difficult sustaining a frequent practice in recent years, I decided to scale it back to monthly for the time being. That allows each Dance Practice to be a bit special, and lets me lean into the publicity harder.
And I decided, entirely on my own recognizance, to start running it using the gender-free "Larks and Robins" protocol. That replaces "Lords and Ladies" -- it's mnemonically brilliant, and I've been using it with great success for the Arisia Renaissance Ball for the past couple of years. The younger dance community in this area are largely used to it, and I'd very much like to bring in some of those folks, so I decided that we're going to follow along.
It's going reasonably well. We're not getting the 30-40 dancers we had in our heyday (much less the 150 who show up for the BIDA contradance in Porter Square), but we're generally getting a decent critical mass, including a fair number of new folks. I'm taking the summmer off, but plan to continue in the fall -- it's being a good deal of fun.
Suffice it to say, I'm trying to keep my head on straight during these "world on fire" times. It's not easy, finding the right balance of staying engaged while not letting myself fall into fear or depression, but so far, so okay.
I miss y'all! I'm trying to stay social, but opportunities don't present themselves enough. I hope to see folks more: we need each other, if we're going to stay sane through all this.
As always, comments and questions on any of this highly welcome...
ekgazette_feed
Greetings East!
Her Highness Chatricam Meghanta has selected Lord Albrecht Ostergaard as Her Captain of the Guard!
It was fate; guard was already in his name.
If you participate in a martial activity, and are interested in serving Her Highness as a member of Her guard, please reach out to Lord Albrecht at furtumvictus@gmail.com.
writerkit
ekgazette_feed
Greetings East!
Their Royal Highnesses, Donovan Shinnock (he/him) and Chatricam Meghanta (she/her), are still seeking bids for their upcoming reign.
Along with the usual winter reign events, they’re also seeking bids for the Thrown Weapons Championship. Typically, this is a summer reign event but was unfortunately unable to happen thus far.
Their Royal Highnesses need bids for:
Below are each event’s requirements.
Fall Crown Tournament
Champs Tournaments
Their Highnesses also wish it to be known that they are always happy to receive bids sooner than the listed deadlines!
Event bids should be emailed to trm@eastkingdom.org, trh@eastkingdom.org, seneschal@eastkingdom.org, exchequer@eastkingdom.org, and eventclerk@eastkingdom.org.
If you have any questions regarding event bids, please contact the Event Clerk at eventclerk@eastkingdom.org.
ekgazette_feed - News from the Corporate Officewriterkit - Leftist Conspiracy Theoriesekgazette_feed - Pennsic 52 – Populace Points, Day 4xkcd_feed - Snake-in-the-Box Problemekgazette_feed - Pennsic 52 Archery – Champions Resultsxkcd_feed - Groundedmatildalucet - Viol camp 2025siderea - How Not to Run a Bank, Credit Card Edition: Stuck Like Blue [banking, surrealism]xkcd_feed - Canonsiderea - Our Side and Epstein [curr ev, pols, Ω, Patreon]writerkit - Stanley Cupsxkcd_feed - Bad Map Projection: Interrupted Spheresjducoeur - Dance!xkcd_feed - Kite Incidentjducoeur - State of the Justinxkcd_feed - Geologic Periodsekgazette_feed - Captain of the Guard for Chatricam Meghanta Announced!writerkit - Media Analysisekgazette_feed - Event Bids for Winter Reign Still Needed!
