That Post About SCA Participation
Not surprised to see that LJ still has a rotten search feature. Maybe I'm using it wrong, but it still doesn't work. I'm also not great at tagging in the right way, so that I don't have hundreds of post to scroll through to find what I want.
So, I can't find my previous post from *mumblety* years ago about the three legs of SCA participation. I'll have to just write something up again.
When I started plaing SCA in Nordskogen, I went to weekly social practice, weekly sewing night, occasional fight practice, and occasional scribal night. I also went to events about once a month. I joined the local mailing lists, thought I hadn't yet discovered LJ and FB didn't exist. I joined some yahoo groups for costuming styles that I was particularly interested in.
Ever since I've moved away from Nordskogen, I've felt that my SCA participation was somehow incomplete. Not that *I* wasn't giving enough to it, but rather, I wasn't getting enough *from* it. It wasn't so much that participation was light, it was just... unbalanced.
A few years ago I figured out why that was. For me, anyway, complete and comfortable SCA participation has three main aspects: events, local stuff, and on-line.
Events, well, that's kind of obvious. This is where we dress up and do stuff. It's the whole point.
Local stuff was what I was missing in Dun Carraig. I was 90 minutes from any fight practice, meetings were over an hour away, and most of the local group was fairly far from me. I essentially had no local game whatsoever. Local stuff is where you tend to find your close friends, the people that you go out for dinner with on a regular basis, the people that you see all of the time. Sure, I had close friends in Atlantia, but it took *years* for those friendships to develop - much longer than it took in Nordskogen or even in Hartshorn-dale, both places where I found kindred spirits pretty much right away.
And, whether we like it or not, on-line participation is part of the game. When I first wrote about this, LJ, yahoo groups, and local mailing lists were the technology in vogue. All of those have changed over largely to facebook, for better or for worse, but on-line participation very much with us. This might not be true for everybody, but I like the online connection with people all over the world with similar sub-interests, plus I know more of what's going on locally.
I think that perhaps there's a fourth aspect, especially for some people, and that's Pennsic, which is kind of a category all to itself, even beyond regular events. I sure missed it keenly this year!
In Dun Carraig, I was light on events, and VERY light on local stuff, though I did have an online aspect to participation. I really missed the local stuff. Here in Colorado Springs, activities are relatively close to us, scattered around town, but easily accessible. It's not like DC where there are several hours of each day where you really don't want to cross town. To top it all off, the house that we have under contract is right next door to the park where one of the weekly fight practices happens. :-) I think we'll have local in spades.
So, I can't find my previous post from *mumblety* years ago about the three legs of SCA participation. I'll have to just write something up again.
When I started plaing SCA in Nordskogen, I went to weekly social practice, weekly sewing night, occasional fight practice, and occasional scribal night. I also went to events about once a month. I joined the local mailing lists, thought I hadn't yet discovered LJ and FB didn't exist. I joined some yahoo groups for costuming styles that I was particularly interested in.
Ever since I've moved away from Nordskogen, I've felt that my SCA participation was somehow incomplete. Not that *I* wasn't giving enough to it, but rather, I wasn't getting enough *from* it. It wasn't so much that participation was light, it was just... unbalanced.
A few years ago I figured out why that was. For me, anyway, complete and comfortable SCA participation has three main aspects: events, local stuff, and on-line.
Events, well, that's kind of obvious. This is where we dress up and do stuff. It's the whole point.
Local stuff was what I was missing in Dun Carraig. I was 90 minutes from any fight practice, meetings were over an hour away, and most of the local group was fairly far from me. I essentially had no local game whatsoever. Local stuff is where you tend to find your close friends, the people that you go out for dinner with on a regular basis, the people that you see all of the time. Sure, I had close friends in Atlantia, but it took *years* for those friendships to develop - much longer than it took in Nordskogen or even in Hartshorn-dale, both places where I found kindred spirits pretty much right away.
And, whether we like it or not, on-line participation is part of the game. When I first wrote about this, LJ, yahoo groups, and local mailing lists were the technology in vogue. All of those have changed over largely to facebook, for better or for worse, but on-line participation very much with us. This might not be true for everybody, but I like the online connection with people all over the world with similar sub-interests, plus I know more of what's going on locally.
I think that perhaps there's a fourth aspect, especially for some people, and that's Pennsic, which is kind of a category all to itself, even beyond regular events. I sure missed it keenly this year!
In Dun Carraig, I was light on events, and VERY light on local stuff, though I did have an online aspect to participation. I really missed the local stuff. Here in Colorado Springs, activities are relatively close to us, scattered around town, but easily accessible. It's not like DC where there are several hours of each day where you really don't want to cross town. To top it all off, the house that we have under contract is right next door to the park where one of the weekly fight practices happens. :-) I think we'll have local in spades.