I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on t he PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Thirty-Five Years With Blade in Hand A Young Kingdom Part Nine As the school year started in 1986, I moved out of my parents' house for good. I was now in the Shire of Caer Galen. The shire and the Barony of Caerthe worked well together and closely. We sometimes referred to the two as the Greater Caerthe Galen Co-Prosperity Sphere. Those were simpler times. The move to Caer Galen coincided with the running of Premier Blade. The tournament(s) came off reasonably well and Peter Proudsword was the overall winner. I passed the blade itself off to him to carry for a year. The Premier Blade sword at the time was a wall hanger rather than a functional rapier, or, indeed a functional sword. In those pre-commercial-Internet days, options for acquiring a lot of kit were pretty limited. I mentioned buying épée blades from the bloke who sold them out of his garage. If you wanted other weapons, well, there were a couple of branches of 'The Naked Edge' cutlery store in the area, and they had some things which could generously be called swords. It didn't matter, of course. The sword was a symbol and I loved it and was proud to carry it. My roommate at the time was an old friend who was also going to CU. I had semi-dragged him into the SCA a few years earlier as part of my proselytization campaign to import my gaming friends into my new hobby. It didn't really take with any of them, but he lasted for a few years, at least. He and I both took up heavy fighting at about this time. Sir Michael the Strange lived in the area and was upgrading some of his kit, so there was loaner gear to be had. Michael had been a squire to the legendary Duke Albert von Drekenveldt, and was knighted just before the Outlands went kingdom. His arms are: Sable, on a bell vair ancient a bat displayed gules. For the non-heralds, that's a black field, with a bell on it. The bell is 'vair,' one of the heraldic furs. On the bell and contained within it is a red bat. That makes it 'a bat in a bell furry.' Because that's how we rolled in those days. He had recently bought a new helmet, with an open face and bar grill to replace the one he'd been using for a while. On the one hand, that was a shame because the helmet he was replacing looked awesome. It was a nightmare to fight in, though. Given the 'bat' theme, it will perhaps come as no surprise to learn that the helmet had rubber bat wing 'ears' - I want to say made from car tires? - narrow eye slots, and vertical slots for the mouth. It looked, as I say, awesome. Of course, you couldn't see very well out of the eye slits, you couldn't breathe very well through the mouth slits, and the bat wings channeled any shot coming in from above directly into the top of your head. That become my loaner helm, but not for long. Michael was friends with Jarl Freana, whom he called 'The Great Geard,' and Freana and I were both fencers, so we ended up hanging out quite a bit. Micheal provided some loaner kit and helped me start to get my own kit together. I inherited leg armour from Cassandra La Sable, later Morrigan de Winter, who had given fighting a try but didn't find it to her taste. The legs had been made by Earl Mika Longbow, and were of padded leather. I had to add rigid knee protection fairly early on, since the padding alone was not quite rigid enough. Either Freana or Michael pointed me to a pattern for a Visby coat of plates, which looked good. I bought some leather, some thermo-forming plastic, a bunch of rivets and put together the coat. I'm still fighting in that coat more than thirty years later. Boulder - Caer Galen - was also the home of the IFGS, the International Fantasy Gaming Society, one of the earliest of the Live Action Roleplaying games; they formed in 1981, and were named after the organization in the Larry Niven and Steven Barnes Dream Park novels. Unsurprisingly, there was considerable overlap between those active in the SCA and the IFGS. I had bumped into the IFGS a little before, and played in a couple of games. The GM for the first game I played in later joined the SCA and is known as Duke Irel these days. (He was also a squire to the previously mentioned Sir Michael for a little while.) The IFGS was alright, but the SCA was a better fit for me, so I didn't stick with it. The SCA had a bit of a reputation in the IFGS for hitting too hard, with some interesting side-effects. The IFGS ran a big 'town' game for a few years, and it had been getting lawless, so the organizers approached some of the local SCA folks to be NPCs as the town guard. This might have been 1987. Michael and I (among others) volunteered, and I was told that after they bruited it about that SCA fighters were to be the town guard, they had the most law-abiding game in recent memory. Disclaimer: This is based on my memory of the events and people, and although I have bolstered them where possible with references, it is a work of recollection. Errors, omissions, and all such-like are mine. If you are reading this, remembering this, and wondering why you aren't mentioned, or are mentioned only in passing, or by reference and not by name, I'm trying to be very careful about other people's privacy. As an experiment, I'm linking to a Diaspora posting for comments and such. Comment thread on PlusPora

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