Hi!

I hope the new year is treating you well. I’m jetting off to Potsdam this weekend for the Torneo di Spada: if you see me there, say hello!

At the moment I’m working full time on a huge, tedious job: a ground-up reboot of the open-access Swordschool wiki.

It has been woefully neglected over the last many years, during which time I’ve produced literally hundreds of videos that really belong on there. So, I’m adding a ton of new content, and reorganising everything along the following lines:

• Distinguishing between Interpretation and Training
• Within those categories organising the material by historical master, weapon, difficulty level, and other factors.
• The goal is to make it both comprehensive and easy to navigate.

I believe that the Art is everyone’s birthright, and does not belong behind a paywall. I am getting back to basics and getting all my interpretation work out there where people can use it. This is why my translations of Il Fior di Battaglia and De Arte Gladiatoria Dimicandi are already distributed for free, and I’ve got about 400 public videos on my vimeo account. Just getting it out there is not enough though- to be useful it needs to be organised. This is why we have the Syllabus Wiki.

But I still have to feed my children, so people who want the material organised into user-friendly books and courses are welcome to buy them.

And of course, my patrons directly support the free content financially.

I’ve also been giving a lot of thought to platforms in general. At the moment my attention is divided between Patreon, the blog, SwordPeople, the podcast, the newsletter, and a bunch of other ways to interact with my readers. I think I have things straight in my head now. What do you think of this?