yet more photos

[dragonlady7]

This is me being restrained, y'all, I'm rediscovering these thousands of photos that in most cases, I not only took, but also carefully picked through, and in many cases edited, and even exported from Lightroom in post-ready format, and then just. Sometimes I posted a couple of them to Facebook, or gave them to my sister to use in her farm's website. Sometimes I printed a couple of them, to give people or to hang up on bulletin boards and such. Some got printed and laminated to be used in displays for the farmer's market booth. One got printed huge to be a banner for the farm.
But the rest of them, about two thousand of them, just sat on the goddamned hard drive and did nothing.

Listen, I've not been all that well, and I left derby in a cloud of injury and poor mental health, and there's just whole swathes of 2013 I don't remember. I straight up do not remember them. I don't know what the fuck I was doing. I sure wasn't posting photos.

So anyway. Many of these photos are from that time period.
Here are a bunch from the summer of 2013, when I went to Pennsic. I've been since, but I think that was the last time I went for more than a couple of days.










notably, the smiling woman looking sideways in the chair is my best friend, and the blurry man in the background with his wife leaning on his shoulders won the kingship of aethelmearc by right of combat twice but just lost his election bid for state assembly in november so he should have stuck to combat probably


always wondered why first aid kits had those big syringes in them, clearly it's for Rum N Hugs




that's my dude

Comments

[redstapler]

We need our own Pennsic! With blackjack! And hookers!

AND NO WHITE SUPREMACISTS.

[dragonlady7]

wait are there
oh i almost actually bothered to type the question "are there white supremacists at Pennsic??" because of fucking course there are, I just never had to notice them in the past because it used to be something you kept to your fucking self and didn't talk about around civilized people and this is just the world we live in now, where people feel free to just, say that shit openly, and people you'd assumed were civilized too are like oh but they have a right to speak their minds about how they want to commit horrible violence against everyone you love, as if that somehow made any fucking sense, OH MY GOD how had I not considered this before specifically about Pennsic, oh my god
well, I hadn't really made the mistake of worrying that I was missing much, so at least I've dodged that bullet.

[redstapler]

I mean, it's always been "Libertarian Edgelord" Whack-a-Mole.

But between the Swastika Belt and I Stand With Davius, it's like

NAH I'M FUCKIN GOOD I DON'T NEED TO DRIVE 24 GODDAMN HOURS TO CAMP NEXT TO PEOPLE WHO MIGHT BE NAZIS

[dragonlady7]

I require absolutely 0 further details. I think I vaguely overheard some of that and I just. I don't.
It's funny, I think my SCA experience has been colored more than i've realized by spending so much of it within Khalek's orbit. It really says something, I think, to have a Duke who not only frequently makes Facebook posts about like, super 101-level but sincerely woke shit, but went so far as to actually run for state office last November. Like... he's not... ambiguous about it, despite being a guy whose reign consisted mostly, both times, of nodding graciously at shit and sitting quietly and looking regal. (Honestly, I think that's what the king's really supposed to do, mostly.)
And the few remaining SCA things I've done have been in the shadow of his orbit, and I just think nobody opens their fat mouth around him because they Know Better.

I wish that influence extended farther.

ANYHOW join me in my fantasy world where i get my shit together and host a big shindig on the farm's back 40 where everybody sets up yurts and tents and we go on pony rides and look at baby pigs and drink ourselves silly out in the semi-wilderness across the creek on the land we're trying to raise funds to buy.

[redstapler]

Dude, it was a whole mess.

It was also the final nail in the coffin of us ever going back to Pennsic again without first establishing our own camp. I miss it so, so much, but like...nah.

I'm not here to parlay with Nazis.

[unicornduke]

*bangs fists on table* MORE PICTURES MORE PICTURES

I love all the pictures, feel free to post more!

[paean]

I think your pictures singlehandedly have kept me off tumblr for an extra day of boycott. (Well, and a busy work day)

[potboy]

This looks like huge fun, and makes me miss my days of campfires too :)

[dragonlady7]

It was huge fun. I haven't been back since, though, not really-- it was a lot of hassle for that much fun, and life moved on to other priorities. i miss some of the people, quite badly, but others of them i'm sort of glad to have moved on from.
i do miss the costuming, though, and the bigger-than-ourselves sense of belonging.

[potboy]

I feel the same way about re-enactment! All the packing and unpacking and the way cooking would take up the whole day because you had to be tending the fire, and somehow it was always the women who ended up doing the cooking, despite nobody ever making that a rule. It was just only the women that noticed it needed to be done and did it. Which meant that everyone else was doing interesting things and you were chopping carrots again.

I find the morris gives me the sense of belonging and that adolescent kick of "look how cool I am!" with much, much less preparation and kit involved :)

[dragonlady7]

UGH yes everything I went to, there were a group of us women who wound up making sure everyone was fed, everything was cleaned up, everything was put away-- we couldn't even reliably send the men on the provisions runs because they "wanted to enjoy their vacation" oh you want to be hungry, then? That's how you like your vacation? No, you haven't thought that far ahead, and those of us who do are the ones who are like "well we need to do it."
It was so bad that there was a woman camping with us whose father had attended the event many times over the previous 30 years, but was now dying and couldn't attend, and she had come hoping to take some photos of his favorite places, give his respects to various people, etc, and she could not get out from behind the stove long enough to do it. it was incredible. Her father was dying and the worthless assholes we were camping with couldn't give her that much-- in a two-week event. I wound up taking the photos for her.

And I didn't come back to camp with that group. The next year we had a man in charge of the cooking, at least, but the others were just as happy to treat him as a servant as they had been the rest of us (and bitch even more, because this guy was pretty draconian about portion sizes-- he'd made dinner and if it wasn't enough, you'd go somewhere else to get more food, went over like a lead balloon). You either didn't care and lived in filth and complained about being hungry, or you were chained to doing enormous amounts of work all the time to enjoy one damn thing.

[potboy]

Ugh, that's disgraceful! No wonder you didn't camp with them again. I hope eventually they drove everyone away and then had to do it themselves! Good for you for making sure she got her pictures.

Our lot weren't that bad. Everyone would pitch in to do camp clear-up, and the men would chop wood without being asked. Also they would chop veg *if someone planned what was to be made and told them what to chop.* But the problem was that there were so many men to women, and the men didn't think about food. So basically all the organization and buying and timing and cooking of meals for 20-odd people three times a day were done by the same 4 women at every event for about 10 years. Which was wearing.