I’m seeing a lot of yelling and screaming on unofficial SCA social media regarding the recent passage of RFRA legislation in the state of Indiana, including a lot of impassioned pleas for people to contact the SCA Board of Directors and ask them to move the SCA 50 Year celebration event (to be held in June, 2016) to a different state.  I disagree with moving it, for several reasons.

Before we get into that, let me tell you where I’m coming from, so you know my inbuilt biases and can appropriately frame what I have to say.

1.  I’m a resident of the state of Indiana and have been my whole life.

2.  I’m a member of the SCA, active within the Barony of Sternfeld – the most active local group near the site where the 50 Year Celebration is being held.

3.  I’m not personally involved in the planning or organization of the 50-year event.  But it is being held within 15 minutes of my house, and many of the event staff from our area are people I consider friends.  I have seen the hard work that people are putting in to make this event happen.

4.  I’m a supporter of the LGBTA community, as a straight ally.  I believe that sexual orientation deserves to be considered just as much a protected class as others like age, gender, race, etc., and that discrimination against folks in these communities is a violation of their civil rights.

5.  I know firsthand what it is like to be persecuted for being gay – throughout my middle school years I was targeted and bullied by several students in my grade for being gay.  (Their reasoning:  I don’t fit the profile of a typical “manly” man, so clearly, I must be gay.)  I’ve been beaten, tripped, pushed into walls, spit on, and called names.  And those in power at the school ignored my pleas for help.  So I know what it’s like to be discriminated against for being gay.

6.  I’m strongly against RFRA, as it was passed in Indiana.  Both the intent, and the different wording make it a much more poisonous version of the law than the one other states have passed.  There’s a lot of online debate as to whether the law is the same as it is in other states.  I’ve seen sufficient evidence to indicate Indiana’s version is not the same RFRA as in other states as it can be applied to private interactions, not only to actions involving the government.

Having said that, attempting to move the SCA 50 Year event at this late hour is a bad idea all around.  I’ve heard several arguments as to why we should pull up stakes and move the event.  Allow me to comment on a few of them:

Myth 1:  Gen Con said they are moving their convention and breaking their contract – we should do the same thing.

While Gen Con has indeed stated they were looking at the possibility of moving to a new state/venue if RFRA was passed in Indiana, they aren’t willing to break their contract to do so – they would make a move at the end of their current contract.  Large events like this sign long-term contracts with their vendors.  Gen Con is no different – in fact they have a contract through 2020.

I’m sure that the SCA has signed contracts for the 50 Year Celebration already.  I am not a lawyer, but I’d imagine we cannot break those contracts without some sort of financial penalty, and that doing so may even open ourselves up to a lawsuit.  Additionally, it is impractical to throw out all the work that has been done on the event so far, just to start over with just over a year to make all the arrangements.

Additionally, the Barony of Sternfeld, the Indianapolis SCA group, regularly uses this event site – it’s the best winter event site we’ve found, which is why we hold our Better War Through Archery event there each year.  This year we are also holding our largest event (A Simple Day in the Country) there as well.  This event site has been a fantastic boon to our local SCA group.  If the SCA were to pull out now, I worry that it would damage our local group’s ability to get and use this site in the future.  We’ve had a hard enough time finding event sites that meet both our needs and our budget – making it hard for our group to put on affordable events.  Losing one of our best options would be difficult for us.

Myth 2:  It will hurt the State of Indiana financially, which will help get the law overturned.

While it is absolutely true that the SCA 50 Year Celebration will have an economic impact on the area (obviously it will – I believe I heard an estimate of $2.5 million in local media), it is but a drop in the bucket compared to other events held in Indiana, such as Gen Con ($50 million each year), the NCAA Final Four ($71 million each year), and others, who have indicated their interest in pulling their events in the future if the law is upheld.

Additionally, several major corporations (Angie’s List, Salesforce, and others) have all stepped forward and stated they are cancelling/scaling back their plans for Indiana expansion due to the law.  Likely totaling in hundreds of millions of dollars lost from the local economy.  They’ve put an immense amount of pressure on the Indiana legislature to fix the problem.

In comparison, the economic impact (to Indiana) of moving the SCA 50 Year Celebration, a one time event, is negligible.  Would it send a message?  Perhaps.  But given the many other loud voices in the local business community sending much bigger messages with a longer term financial impact, I’m not sure our message would be especially helpful.

Myth 3, etc:  Atheists are in mortal danger if they visit our state.  When purchasing condoms, people are required to indicate who they will be using them with.  Etc.  Most of these sorts of comments are coming from one or two fear-mongers who are being especially loud and offensive.

I’ve seen many of these arguments (some of them more than once).  They are absurd.  The RFRA, as passed in Indiana, does not trump other laws, such as laws against assault, murder, etc.  The atheism example is especially bizarre – how does a gas station attendant know you are an atheist in the first place?

No where in this state are you seriously going to find a drug store that is going to ask specifics about what you plan to do with condoms you purchase – that’s just weird.  As homophobic as a small minority of people are in this state, people in general tend to live and let live and mind their own business.

Most of the services used by people visiting the state for 50 Year will be in one of the following categories:  Gasoline, Pharmacy, Restaurants, Groceries and Hotels.  There’s not a lot of reason for the topic of religion or sexuality to come up in those contexts.  Not impossible, but highly unlikely.  If there are specific businesses that (by the time of the event) have signs saying they don’t serve certain people, they can be easily avoided – there’s tons of businesses that won’t care who you are – discrimination is bad for business!

In addition to it being harmful to the event and to the SCA to move the event, given the climate on the ground here in Indiana currently, I would be very surprised if RFRA stays on the books in its current form – there’s already movement towards fixing, removing, or replacing the bill.  The national attention this issue has received has been extremely loud and has got quite a few politicians ready to fix the law to be more like the implementation in other states (where it is used to protect people’s religious freedoms, not to explicitly justify discrimination).  This issue should be resolved long before the event actually happens.

Thanks,

Antonio Bellini (mka Dan McGillen)

SCA Member for 6 years, residing in the Barony of Sternfeld, Constellation, Middle Kingdom, Knowne World

 

So I’ve seen a ton of messages on Facebook and elsewhere online about the recent decision of the Board of Directors of the SCA to not create a new Rapier/Fencing Peerage.  I’ve heard a lot of arguments on all sides of the issue, and recognize it’s a sticky situation.

I had a dream last night that presented a possible solution.  At 2 AM it seemed perfectly reasonable and logical to me.  When I woke up properly this morning, it seemed to make even more sense.  I spent my morning commute thinking the idea over in detail, and the more I thought about it, the more I think my idea could work.  I’m interested in hearing what others think though.  After you’ve read my proposal, I’d appreciate feedback – if I’m wrong in part or all of my assumptions on this, I’d like to know why.  My ego is not at stake on this being a good idea – I believe it is, and if it is not, I would appreciate being corrected as to why.

Before I get into that, a quick disclaimer – I’m not a fighter – Armored, Rapier, or otherwise.  I literally do not participate in martial activities AT ALL.  I never have, and although I’ve learned to never say never, I probably never will participate in martial activities.  It’s just not where my interests in the SCA lie.  But plenty of my friends do.  These are people I have a great deal of respect for – people in the Armored, Rapier, and Archery communities who are exceptionally skilled at their chosen martial form and also demonstrate the Peer-like qualities that the Orders look for in their members.

But I don’t personally have any irons in this fire.  I’m not going to elevated to the Chivalry, or any new martial Peerages that may be created as a result of the ongoing discussion.  This isn’t going to affect my day to day feelings about the SCA much, aside from giving me the warm-fuzzies for my friends getting the recognition they deserve for practicing the martial activity that they choose.  Having said that, the continued lack of a forum for Rapier fighters to get Peer-level recognition seems like a slight towards them.

A lot of the discussion revolving around the issue seems to hinge on a few key points.  The first key point being that the Chivalry is unwilling/unable to accept other martial activities into its ranks.  Whether or not they are unwilling, I can definitely see difficulties – it is my understanding that one of the things the Chivalry does when evaluating a candidate is looking at their combat prowess.  The styles of fighting (Armored vs. Rapier) seem substantially different enough that I think that would be hard – I’m not sure an Armored fighter would be qualified to properly evaluate the combat ability of a Rapier fighter.  This is not a slight on the Armored fighters – the styles are just substantially different.  I would expect that the same problem would exist if the roles were reversed.

So I’m not sure the Chivalry would necessarily be qualified to make that determination.  Rapier fighters would best know how to judge Rapier fighters, and so on.

The next key point I’m hearing is that maybe the rest of the martial activities (i.e. everything but Armored combat) should all be grouped together in one Peerage.  I think this has the same problem – the Rapier community is not well-equipped to evaluate the combat prowess of the Archers, or those who participate in Thrown Weapons.  Additionally, it puts the Chivalry in a position where it can easily said to be “above” the other martial Peerage.  There would be the Chivalry, and “everyone else martial”.

The key difference between hypothetical martial peers of all stripes, is the form of martial art that they choose to do.  Considering there are many other criteria that matter beyond just combat prowess, I can see where the argument for grouping all the martial Peers into one Peerage would come from – pretty much every other criteria that would be considered for a potential martial Peer would be the same, regardless of their chosen form of combat.

But I do think that chosen form of combat is a very important distinction.  There is nothing we do in the SCA that has as many rules as our combat does – and that’s for many reasons, most important among them safety.  If someone does something wrong, someone could be seriously hurt or die.  So we have standards – standards about how armor must be, standards about what valid properties of weapons are.  We have rules about how the martial activities are run.  Even setting that aside, the forms of combat that are practiced in the SCA are so varied as to be nearly unrelated.  Much of that’s for safety reasons.  We don’t want Target Archers putting actual holes in Armored fighters, so we separate those activities, where they would have gone together in period, during actual war.  We setup our martial activities to be exercised in as period as possible a fashion while still safe for the participants.  Each form of combat has its own issues and considerations, and I think these distinctions are important enough that any Orders composed of martial artists should logically be segregated along those lines.

This leads me to the proposal that came to me in my dream last night – the essence is this:  “A Peerage is not the same thing as an Order”.  Currently and historically in the SCA, the words mean essentially the same thing.  But do they have to?  Here is what I’m thinking.  We create a new Peerage – the name that came to me initially was “Defenders”, but I’m not wed to the name so much as the concept.  This would mean we’ve got Laurels, Pelicans, and Defenders.  Unlike the Laurels and Pelicans, the Defenders as a Peerage is NOT an Order.  In this case, the Peerage contains multiple Orders.  The Chivalry would be the first such example.  They could continue to function in the same way they do now.  As it seems appropriate, additional Orders could be created, all of which fall under the blanket Defender Peerage, but have their own customs, titles, symbols, heraldry, etc.

In short, all members of any of these Orders would be members of the Defenders Peerage.  The Peerage does not need to have gatherings or meet necessarily – and the Peerage cannot induct people directly.  For matters of great import, I could see the Orders of the Peerage meeting together – but for day-to-day business, I don’t think it would be necessary.

I feel like this solves several problems.  We don’t tip over the wagon of the Chivalry and force them to change their Order and who they accept.  We are able to recognize individuals who participate in other martial arts in the same fashion that we currently recognize the Chivalry, without making them feel like second class citizens.  We don’t force all the non-Armored forms of combat into one mold.  They can each have their own traditions.  This increases the richness of our game.  We also leave the door open for future forms of martial activities – as there is sufficient support for a given martial activity to have a Peerage, it can be created – and I believe the time is now for Rapier.

I’ve heard several repeat the argument that if we don’t include all the non-Armored forms of combat in one peerage, we’ll just continue to have to keep creating new Orders.  This might be true to a certain extent, but it seems somewhat self-limiting as there are only so many different forms of martial arts in the SCA and it takes substantial time for a new form to become popular and develop enough of a following to support an Order.  Additionally, not wanting to do something because it will cause future work is not really a convincing argument.  We should be so lucky to have 30 different forms of martial arts with followings equivalent to those that the Armored fighting and Rapier fighting currently have – that would be a much larger, healthier, more vital SCA than the one we have currently.

I also recognize that several among the Laurels could easily argue (and have seen it written), “but we lump every different type of Art and Science together – why shouldn’t they have to do the same thing?”  I don’t have a perfect answer to that, although I think my discussion of the substantial differences between these communities and their forms of activity starts to answer the question.  Also, it may be worth considering that while many individuals in the Arts and Sciences can take a strong interest in other Arts and Sciences than their own, and indeed can pick up a lot by just reading about them, it is much harder for the martial community due to the hands-on experiences required to be a practitioner of their arts.  While a cooking Laurel can appreciate the construction of a beaded veil, I think it’s a fair sight harder for an Archer that doesn’t fight Armored to fully understand and appreciate Armored combat without taking on the art themselves.  This is as much due to our complicated rules as any other reason.

Additionally, the question arises – does creating this structure hurt the Laurels in any way?  If it does not (as I believe), and if it will improve the enjoyment and stability of the Society (as I believe), is it not worth pursuing?

I’m very interested in hearing people’s opinions on this.  I’ll be collecting opinions via a post linking to this on Facebook and also on Reddit.  If you don’t specifically want your opinion visible online, as it would be in either those places, please feel free to email me at danmcgillen@gmail.com if you feel you have an insight you’d like to share.

I plan on taking everything I learn from you all and submitting my comments and this idea as a suggestion to the Board of Directors of the SCA.  Thank you for your time and your feedback.

So, I’ve heard stories in the past of someone minting coins and selling them for a dollar, and buying them back for a dollar, such that people could use them to buy things from merchants at SCA events and then the merchants could trade them in with the individual who minted the coins for actual money.  In general, the impression I get is that people thought it was really cool and enjoyed it a lot.  Until something happened with the relationship between the person minting coins and the SCA corporate office.  I’m not exactly clear what happened, and I’ve heard the story more than one way at this point, so I won’t speculate on what actually happened.  As I understand it, though the core problem with the whole scheme was that one person was in control of the currency, in effect.

Which leads me to my weird idea…

Why not an SCA currency?

What if it was a cryptocurrency, like BitCoin?  Yes, it sounds completely bonkers, I know.  I’ve been doing some reading about BitCoin and other alternative cryptocurrencies like DogeCoin recently and it’s apparently really not that hard to put together a new cryptocurrency.  Most of the software needed is open source – it just requires tweaking to get the parameters the way that is desired.  The benefit of a cryptocurrency is that it can be tracked electronically, is decentralized, and isn’t really controlled by any one person, as I understand it.  In essence, it just requires some people to get together and build the thing, set it in motion, and then poof, you’ve got a currency.  The tricky part is apparently convincing others that the currency has value, which, like other real-world currencies, happens when people start to use it.

Now obviously, we don’t necessarily want people having to whip out their smartphones at events to pay for things (although people are already doing payments to merchants at events using things like the Square reader for smartphones, paying via credit card, etc.).  So what if there was a way to convert the digital currency to a physical coins?  Obviously this would need to be decentralized.  The actual logistics of this would need to be worked out, but to avoid the concept of having one specific person who controls the currency, anyone who wants to should be able to mint their own coins and tie them to a specific set of crypto-coins.  Anyone who wanted to do this would need some sort of digital platform that ties the coins to the digital coins.  I think I remember reading before this has has been done, but maybe not in a way that anyone could make their own coins?

The idea came to me in a flash today when reading an article about DogeCoins.  I’m going to continue reading and thinking on the subject.  Anyone think this might be a good idea?

Below is a link to an essay I wrote that was published in the Middle Kingdom Newsletter, “The Pale”.  I wrote it to try and get some ideas out to others holding the same position in other groups.

Web Ministering for Your Local Group

Explanation

A year or two ago, there was a request for comments made by the Board of Directors of the SCA regarding the proposed change of the wording in Corpora regarding qualifications for Crown Lists from:

“Each competitor in a Royal Lists must be fighting for a prospective consort of the opposite gender.”

to:

“Each competitor in a Royal List must be fighting for a prospective consort of the opposite sex unless the Crown has elected to permit a competitor to fight for a prospective consort of the same sex.”

Below is what I forwarded on to the email address they provided for comments.

Comments, As Sent to the BoD

I apologize if this comment is strongly worded – I have attempted to ensure it is civil, but I also feel the need to express how strongly I disagree with the wording as proposed and why.

While I think that the proposed language is an improvement in that it could lead to opportunities for same-sex royal couples (which the current language does not allow), I feel that the revised wording fails to solve the problem sufficiently.

“Each competitor in a Royal List must be fighting for a prospective consort of the opposite sex unless the Crown has elected to permit a competitor to fight for a prospective consort of the same sex.”

All this does is pushes the discrimination away from the Society level and pushes it down to the Crown level. It then is up to the Crown whether to grant same-sex couples the ability to fight in Crown, based solely on their sexual orientation. I honestly find this extremely offensive. I am well aware that the Crown can decide to allow or disallow individual couples based on their own criteria – but those criteria should relate to specific society-related things, like combat prowess, progress in the Arts and Sciences, etc. Not things that the individuals are identified as.

To see how offensive this is, try the following wording on for size:
“Each competitor in a Royal List must be fighting for a prospective consort who is of Caucasian descent unless the Crown has elected to permit a competitor to fight for a prospective consort of Black descent.”

Obviously the SCA would never back such a proposal. I suggest to you that there is little difference between the above and the proposed wording. People would be equally upset if there were maximum age restrictions, or a requirement that people don’t have disabilities, or if we didn’t allow Catholics to fight in crown, or disallowed veterans from fighting in crown. The wording proposed suggests that the SCA is perfectly ok with allowing discrimination against homosexuals based on nothing other than their sexual orientation. The main difference seems to be that for these other classes of individuals, it is codified in law that we should not discriminate against them based on their status – it’s not yet universally accepted in this country that people should not be treated differently due to their sexual orientation.

As a group, we are usually extremely friendly to people with alternative lifestyles – the SCA is by and large very friendly to the gay community. I know many homosexuals within my local group – they are well liked for who they are as people, not who they sleep with. Indeed, my kingdom has had at least one major officer who happens to be homosexual. We induct them into our highest orders of the Pelican, Laurel, and Knights. We do not prevent gay people from serving the society in other ways and I see no logical reason to prevent them from serving as our crown.

Furthermore, many large corporations have a very strong non-discrimination policy that includes sexual orientation and gender identity. They are not required by law to do so, so why bother? The answer is that in addition to being the right thing to do (and let’s be honest here, that’s not going to get most companies to do it), it’s good for business. I would very much like to see the SCA be ahead of the curve on this issue. We try to recreate the best of the middle ages, and toss the negative parts. Why not toss discrimination?

Here’s the wording I’d like to see:
“Each competitor in a Royal List must be fighting for a prospective consort.”

Short, simple, and nondiscriminatory. Dictionary.com includes several different definitions of the word consort, but the two that matter for this discussion are: “a husband or wife; spouse, especially of a reigning monarch.” and “a companion, associate, or partner”. Neither of those definitions actually specify that the consort must be the opposite gender.

Personally, I’d like to see the board of directors take this a step further, as well. In the document “THE CORPORATE POLICIES OF THE SOCIETY FOR CREATIVE ANACHRONISM, INC.”, available online at http://heraldry.sca.org/laurel/precedents/wilhelm/atoc.html, section XII, I’d like to see the current text:

“The SCA, Inc. will not discriminate against any member or participant on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, age or disability. The SCA, Inc. will comply with all laws of the nation in which the meeting or event is held. For any meeting or event held in the United States, the SCA, Inc. will comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The SCA, Inc. will provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities to enable all participants to fully enjoy the events whenever it is possible to do so. The SCA, Inc. will at all times attempt to provide reasonable accommodations, while preserving the fundamental nature of the SCA event.”

amended to:

“The SCA, Inc. will not discriminate against any member or participant on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age or disability. The SCA, Inc. will comply with all laws of the nation in which the meeting or event is held. For any meeting or event held in the United States, the SCA, Inc. will comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act. The SCA, Inc. will provide reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities to enable all participants to fully enjoy the events whenever it is possible to do so. The SCA, Inc. will at all times attempt to provide reasonable accommodations, while preserving the fundamental nature of the SCA event.”

Although we are not legally required to do this yet, current events suggest that it’s only a matter of time before sexual orientation is added to the list of protected classes. We would do well to be proactive on this issue.

Thank you for taking the time to read and consider my thoughts on this issue. I’m more than happy to discuss further, and can be contacted via email at antonio at danscomputing dot com, mail at 502 S Jefferson St., Brownsburg, IN 46112, or phone at 317-985-3178.

Antonio Bellini (mka Daniel T. McGillen)
SCA Member for 4 years, residing in the Barony of Sternfeld, Constellation, Middle Kingdom, Knowne World

My name is Antonio Bellini.  Well, not really.  My name is Dan McGillen, but I am known to some as Antonio Bellini.  Sometimes people include the title Lord in front of that, but I don’t get bothered one way or another about it.  I’ve been active in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), a medieval reenactment/history group for about five years now.  Six years ago this past spring, I started going to the Barony of Sternfeld’s dance practice, which was being led by my then girlfriend, Alice/Colette the Seamstress (who I’ve since married).  I went to my first event (Baronial Border War) in Ionia, Michigan, back in Early Summer 2008.   When I first started, I didn’t totally understand what the group was about or what we were trying to accomplish – and what little understanding I did have was full of inaccuracies and misunderstandings – but I did at least think that people were doing interesting and novel things and I wanted to see more.

Going back a bit further, I’d first heard of the SCA about ten years ago, but the person who told me about it originally scared me away from even considering attending or participating before I ever set foot near an SCA activity.  This is someone who was part of the group who thought I might be interested.

This is an important point that bears highlighting, I think.  People need to consider how they describe our hobby to people who are not involved – it turns out the SCA has a lot of things going on that I’m interested in but I would never have given it a chance because I was given a false sense of what it was about.  Indeed, had I not met Colette, I probably would not have ever gotten involved.  She has been part of the SCA since approximately the year 2000.

Other than dance practice and going to an occasional event, I didn’t do much the first year I was around the SCA.  By the end of that first year, Colette had moved in with me and had decided to put in a bid to be the Autocrat for Grand Pageant, a dance event Sternfeld used to hold annually.  Knowing that I would be helping her out with a lot of the elements of planning the event (it’s hard not to when you live with someone), we put in a bid together as co-autocrats.  Because of that, we needed to attend the Baronial Business Meeting each month and also started attending Fighter Practice.  The event happened in Fall 2009, and after it was over our involvement could have very easily stopped.  Dance Practice was starting to be very poorly attended, and without that or an upcoming event to plan for, we might have disappeared completely.  Except two things happened that year – the first thing was that we went to my first Pennsic War.  Colette had been several times before, and I’d heard good things about it, so was excited to go.  It ended up being an amazing experience – nothing else I’ve done has been quite like it.  That probably wouldn’t have been enough to cement my involvement however – I probably would have kept going to Pennsic annually and not given a fig about the SCA.  The second, and arguably more important thing was that we started to get to know people in our local group.  We made a lot of acquaintances and started coming around more often.  We also made closer connections with a handful of people and started spending time with some of them, even in some non-SCA contexts.  And that, as they say, is that.

Which actually leads to my second point – attracting new members and keeping them is really hard.  So much of what we do in the SCA is social activity – if new people don’t make new friends and connections quickly, they will stop coming.  It’s our job as ambassadors of our hobby (and like it or not, we all have to be, or our hobby dies eventually) to get to know new people personally, make them feel welcomed, and connect them with people they will have commonalities with.

In SCA terms, I’m still a relative newbie – I’ve only been around six years, and only really been active for five of them.  Compared to some of the people I know that have been in for 30 or more years, it doesn’t even compare really.  But I have been involved.  I’ve been the Web Minister for the Barony of Sternfeld since May/June 2010, and picked up the role of Chronicler for Sternfeld this spring.  I’ve worked at most of our events over the past few years, often as a department head.  I’ve been to Pennsic five times in a row.  In short, I’ve been a lot of places and heard a lot of things.  I have heard opinions ranging far and wide about what the SCA is and is not and what we should be doing.

I’ve been seeking out opinions and ideas, and listening more carefully to what people have to say – and it was starting to get me down.  I’ve recently heard a peer suggest that creating the Order of the Pelican (however many years ago) was a mistake.  Someone else questioned whether we actually needed to recruit new members or encourage new people to come around.  I’ve seen complaints that people don’t strive for 100% period perfection in everything they do in the SCA, and conversely, I’ve seen people complain about people being a stickler for authenticity.  There’s been a lot of negativity about newbies in general.  A lot of people seem to think that there’s only one way to play this game – their way – and all other ways are wrong.  And that’s not the attitude I want people to see from our hobby.  As a member of the SCA, I would prefer our group be seen as fun, interesting, welcoming, encouraging, diverse and worth the time, effort, and money.  I’d like to see our local group grow and for the region, Kingdom, and Society to grow and become healthier.  I’d like to see less administrative overhead and more focus on doing fun medieval things!

And that’s ultimately why I’m starting this blog.  I’ve got opinions, and I want to share them.  I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the SCA and what it means to me as an organization.  Where is it going?  How is it going to get there?  What are we doing wrong?  What are we doing right?  All these thoughts are useful to me to decide how to comport myself and how to guide my own actions and activities, but I also want to encourage others to think about these same topics and even make a difference, no matter how small.  I also hope to do my part to make playing in the SCA more fun for me and others – it’s our shared hobby, and if people aren’t having fun, what’s the point?

Before I dive in to what I’ve been thinking about lately, I’m going to repost two previous things I wrote about SCA topics.  First up will be a reprinting of a letter I sent to the Board of Directors regarding same sex couples fighting in Crown Tournaments.  There was a request a year or two ago for comments and it was a hot-button issue for me.  Secondly is an article about Webministering for a local SCA Branch, which was also published in the Middle Kingdom’s Newsletter, “The Pale”.  With those two things posted, I plan to move on to new topics…

I have turned off comments completely on this blog – past experience with WordPress blogs tells me I would be buried in spam comments quickly.  So instead, I encourage you to email me at danmcgillen@gmail.com if you wish to communicate with me directly about my postings.

Lastly, I assume this goes without saying, but I’m going to go ahead and say it:  any opinions expressed on this blog are mine and are not the opinions of the SCA, it’s Kingdoms, or it’s Branches.  These are my opinions as a person involved in the hobby – this blog is hosted on my own personal web domain, and has no “official” qualities whatsoever.  I hope that others who play in the SCA are able to read it, enjoy it, and take away ideas that can help improve the game for others.