Admonished by a Young Man

Put me in coach!

My oldest is nearly 9 going on Surly.

The upside is that he’s damn cute, and mostly reasonable.  He’s always had an adult streak of caution and perspective that runs a good 1.61 kilometers wide.  He can be stubborn, from time to time, and I have no idea where he gets that.

Possibly his mother?

Yesterday, as we were swimming at a friend’s pool, he growled at me, “Do you want to know why I’m mad at you?”

Apparently, I hadn’t recognized that he was mad, so he felt the need to point it out.  Of course, we’re all about communication in the household.  One of main rules is that if you tell us there’s been an accident, you won’t get in trouble.  It’s the lying about it that gets you into trouble.

That . . . mostly works.

The boys are still young.

But I digress.  The issue at hand was that when I tossed my youngest (at his request, mind you) up in the air to splash down in the water, my oldest had swum into the landing zone.  This was, according to my oldest, completely my fault.

I always offer to sit time out.  Forty-two minutes of quiet time with my book sounds like an apt punishment to me.  So far, they haven't taken me up on the offer.  Probably because they wouldn't meet their "Dad-I-need-something-every-five-minutes" quota.

Flame On!

Shouldn't we have shields?

Incendiaries were a thing, and they took a lot of different forms, but fire arrows were not as much as TV/Hollywood and Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves would like us to think.  Sun Tzu has an entire chapter (chapter 12 to be exact) devoted to attacking with fire in The Art of War, but very little of it talks about fire arrows, and none of it to fire arrows in open battle.  You might use fire arrows during a siege or in a similar engagement to torch buildings or tents and whatnot (as Sun Tzu and others discuss). You most likely wouldn't use them on the battlefield. Most likely. There are instances, but they are more exceptions which prove the rule. For example, a flaming arrow might be used by a couple of specific archers as a kind of tracer round, to allow the other archers to adjust their aim, or it might be used as a means of communication.

Some ballistae are bigger than others!

Remember, the greatest advantage of archers is putting enough projectiles into the air at a constant rate so that it becomes difficult to breathe. Adding a combustible, able to withstand being snuffed by the wind, would limit the range and accuracy. It would also limit the rate of fire, and penetration/killing ability of the arrow. You also would have some issues setting people or animals on fire in order to kill or maim them, which would essentially be the point of giving up the other advantages. There were better ways of delivering fire into an enemy formation, such as the various ballistae the Romans used, and which were employed throughout the Medieval era until the cannons and mortars took over the job.  Arrows were best used for the job they were designed—killing.

That’s not to say that fire arrows didn’t have a usage.  They certainly had some utilities.  As I mentioned previously, setting fire to buildings, tents or baggage would certainly be useful.  Sun Tzu talks about setting a camp on fire and following that with an immediate attack.  Fire arrows could also be used for psychological means, frightening troops at night.  I’m sure there’s nothing quite like the sight of a few hundred flaming arrows arcing out of the dark at your campsite.  In naval engagements, fire arrows would serve similar uses for setting rigging and dry timber ablaze.  If not a full fire, at least a small enough one that the enemy ship has to devote some time to dealing with the threat.  But it's useful to keep in mind that it would take a bit of doing to actually get the heavy timbers of most ships to catch on fire.  Go ahead and hold a lighter up to a 2x4, even an especially dry one, and see how fast it catches and the fire spreads.  With ample access to water and muscle (hello, sailor!) putting out the smaller flames wouldn’t be too difficult.  A constant barrage of flaming arrows would be necessary to have the desired impact.

There were a number of enterprising bowyers who set about to “solve” the issue of

I hope you're insured!

applying fire to arrows and still making them effective.  The first, easiest way is to make a thicker arrow shaft, with a longer, metal head where pitch or oil-soaked rags could be wrapped around.  We also have arrowheads with a cage, meant to hold burning coals or other incendiaries.  Some arrows were made with a hollow shaft and an open slit to carry the incendiary.  And, of course, there were arrows meant to use or deliver a load of gunpowder, but that goes beyond the scope, and represents a transition time when archery was becoming less prevalent.

Overall, the message to remember here is that flaming arrows did exist, they were totally a thing.  They look damned cool, but that doesn’t make them practical.  But they were a thing with a very specific purpose, and not nearly as common as modern media would like us to believe.

Gender/Racial Swaps—So What?

It really is based on Casablanca.  No.  Really.

Ironman is now a woman.

Should everyone be up in arms about this?

Not really.

The comics industry isn’t adjusting to fit in with “progressive” times—whatever that is meant to mean. There isn’t some agenda-toting cabal going around telling the artists and the writers that they have to adapt. There is a long, long, really long tradition of riffing and stealing the stories of other artists and cultures, and then using them as a vehicle to tell your own story. Playwrites and authors have been doing it for nearly as long as there has been paper and ink. Othello, Shakespeare’s dark moor, has been played by every spectrum of color across the board, including very white actors. Akira Kuroawa told the fantastic Seven Samurai, a decidedly Japanese movie. It was later retold as The Magnificent Seven, a decidedly American movie.  It’s true that Kurosawa sued, but not because the race of the characters has been changed to white and Mexican, but because they’d blatantly ripped off his story. Otherwise, Kurosawa loved the adaptation of his work, and presented the director, John Sturges, with a katana. If that wasn’t enough, The Guns of Navarone (first in the book then in the movie) recast the entire group as US, British and Greek allies in World War II.  Finally, Pixar picked up the exact same theme again when it used bugs to tell the exact same story in A Bug’s Life. Most audiences enjoyed the film and had no issue with Bonnie Hunt (a white woman) portraying Rosie, a black widow.

All that jazz!

There are countless other examples, so many that it makes my head hurt a little just trying to select from them for review. But I would like to point out that The Three Musketeers most recent BBC version cast a mixed-race Porthos. That’s not just an attempt to check a box on a diversity worksheet, but rather as an homage to the author himself, Alexandre Dumas. Most audience don’t know that Dumas’ father, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was the son of an enslaved African. Whatever folk think of the show itself, this was a nice little nod to the author’s origins.

But, but . . . it's in the name!

That’s really the crux of the matter. Storytellers of any stripe aren’t necessarily trying to win points on some amorphous “progressive” agenda. A lot of times we’re (myself included) just trying to give a new and interesting spin on a story that has been told many, many times before. Writing is like playing jazz—the notes are all the same, but when you’re doing it right, your particular riff on a theme will become something almost magical. Changing gender or race is like changing the setting or the time. It’s another tool in the storyteller’s “box of tricks” that allows them to explore a slightly different variation on a known theme. Ovid’s Pyramus and Thisbe of Babylon became Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet of fair Verona, Italy. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley is in fact a retelling of Shakespeare’s own King Lear, which was also adapted by Akira Kurosawa in Ran.

It’s all circles and more circles, expanding as more stories are told, but essentially harking to the same themes over and over, with variations to try to keep it entertaining. The attempt doesn’t always result in a hit knocked out of the park (see Pamela Anderson’s Barb Wire as a counterpoint to the classic Casablanca) but sometimes you get Ursula K. LeGuin’s Lavina, a retold version of Virgil’s The Aeneid.

Sure, All Lives Matter, But . . .

This sums things up better than I ever could.  Your arguments to the contrary are certainly welcome.

All Your Base

Are Belong to Us

Arms and Armor - A Quick Primer

Armor is a must for any fantasy writer.  If you’re gonna have swords and arrows and other sharp, pointy objects aimed at your characters, it pretty much goes without saying that you’re gonna want some armor to fend them off!  Of course, you don’t want too much fending off.  If your fantasy book doesn’t bleed, or at least produce a little ichor from icky, dark creatures beyond the ken of men and elves, what’s the point?

No, really?

But which armor to go with?  Well, if you’re looking for realism in your faux-Medieval setting (and who isn’t?), then first you should figure out if you’re going to adhere to a time period.  Yes, there are actually time periods during the Middle Ages.  It wasn’t just one big muddle of knights and peasants and horses.  The Middle Ages spanned roughly a thousand years, and folk weren’t sitting around waiting to get the Black Plague or misname a war.  Following is a wonderful image that shows the evolution of armor from about 650 CE to 1675 CE.

Note how the post-Roman armor doesn’t change significantly until the image of 1050.  That’s five hundred years until mail started to lengthen and cover more than just the vital bits.  Apparently, prior to this time, folk didn’t mind their arms and legs being hacked at by the bad guys.  This image, however, doesn’t tell the whole story.  Armor was part of a full-package arms race, that included an evolution of weapons.  Check out the following:

This is quite lovely because you can see that each adaptation of armor and weapons was an answer to how each was being deployed on the battlefield, and the answer came in the form or variations on the theme.  As metalcraft became more refined, and thus more in demand, swords and shields and armor also shifted as the needs required.  Note how the sword of the 1100s if vastly different from the sword of the 1400s.  This was a direct result of the advances in armor.

This happens until the late 1500s when armor practically cocoons the wearer, and then someone comes along and introduces firearms, rendering most armor ineffective.

Stupid guns anyhow!

Samurai and the Sphinx

All we need now are ninja!

There’s a story behind every photograph, but some photos, and the story behind them, are simply fascinating.  Take this Samurai posting by the Sphinx from Wikipedia:

The Second Japanese Embassy to Europe, also called the Ikeda Mission, was sent on December 29, 1863 by the Tokugawa shogunate. The head of the mission was Ikeda Nagaoki, governor of small villages of Ibara, Bitchū Province (Okayama Prefecture). The assistant head of the mission was Kawazu Sukekuni.

The objective of the mission was to obtain French agreement to the closure of the harbour of Yokohama to foreign trade. The mission was sent following the 1863 "Order to expel barbarians" enacted by Emperor Kōmei, and the Bombardment of Shimonoseki incidents, in a wish to close again the country to Western influence, and return to sakoku status. The task proved impossible, as Yokohama was the center of foreign presence in Japan since the opening of the country by Commodore Perry in 1854.

On the way to France, the mission visited Egypt, where the members of the mission were photographed posing before the Sphinx by Antonio Beato, brother of the famous photographer Felice Beato. The members of the mission were abundantly photographed in Paris by Nadar.

The mission returned to Japan in failure, on July 22, 1864.

A side note on Ikeda Nagaoki who led the failed mission—he was so impressed with French advancements that he became something of an advocate, and tried to encourage Japanese students to travel to Europe.  He is also considered the father of the Japanese wine industry.