Followup from the last post, then knives.

 So I guess it's every three months for a blog post these days? Oof. It might be better than nothing but I'm gonna try to be better about that.

Anyway! So on the docket list, we have:

• The remaining Book Two rules for the sword alone.
• Thoughts on the rules we've already looked at; similarities, differences, etc.
• Flashcard thoughts
• Something new! (Spoiler: knives.)

I'm not going to get to all of these today because well, everything, but I'll get to some of it!

The flashcards idea worked out pretty well. It's forcing me to learn individual guard positions on their own, rather than as part of a specific sequence. It also is cracking my brain open and making it have to get better at quickly picking up small bits of choreography, which is certainly going to be useful for exercises like play building. (Also it'll be useful to keep that muscle exercised for picking up more kung fu forms.) 

The thought process of "why would I move from here to here" is also something that's pretty great. I think that so far I've been able to come up with mostly-reasonable answers for every change. Some of them have been stretches, and some of my initial responses have been along the lines of "I can see this, and it mostly makes sense, but this would probably be a better response to what I'm imagining" but it's an interesting exercise to try and figure out situations where it would make the most sense to roll through the positions that the flash cards give me. Overall, excellent idea so far. It has especially been good lately when it's just really hard to try and figure out what I want to practice when I grab my sword. It's important to practice with intent, and not just do something like "pick up sword, do some lunges." (I mean, doing lunges for practice is good! Just do it deliberately and with mindfulness and not just on autopilot.) Even if I just shrug and default to grabbing the flash cards, the format of the practice itself forces me to have to engage my brain if it's going to work at all, which is honestly really great these days.

Despite having Things To Do already, as is my way, I'm going to add to the stack. Gotta have a good variety of things to choose from when I have the time to write in here, yeah? So here we go - knives. I want to go through the knife plays of Fiore and Marozzo and compare them to each other for any similarities and differences. It should be fun on a number of levels!

Looking at Fiore, we can see that he wrote Flower of Battle at the beginning of the 1400s. The type of dagger we see is a rondel, which is essentially an icepick. I've seen some versions of them which have a kind of edge, but they're really made for punching through the small gaps in armor. To that point, the techniques we see in Fiore's manual are intended for use on people whether or not they're wearing armor - though frankly, if it works on someone in armor then as a general rule it'll work just fine on someone out of armor.

Moving to Marozzo, his Opera Nova was written in 1536 or so. The dagger we see illustrated looks to be a more "generic" kind of bladed and double-edged dagger with a crossguard. All the plates illustrate an unarmored civilian use of arms as well. Granted, in Fiore's time we'd see duels with plate and harness and in Marozzo's time that wasn't really the common thing to do (at least according to my understanding) but there could be a little more to it as well. The stepping patterns that Fiore describes are particularly suited to a battlefield with uncertain footing and a need to change facing, and we don't see that same type of thing described in Marozzo. Barring the dagger defenses, which include unarmed defenses against a knife attack, it seems that Marozzo is really looking at civilian dueling and defense. Of course, the fact that he has an extensive treatise on duels and dueling in his book also points towards that.

The manuals differ in a couple more ways, too. Fiore's is a sparser writing style, rather than the extensive and step-by-step descriptions that Marozzo offers. The structures of each them are also really distinct. Fiore has his (as far as I know, unique to him) master -> remedy master -> scholar -> counter 'choose your own adventure' system for laying out the various attacks and defenses. Marozzo has a more common setup with individual plays that he works through. Given these differences, I suspect the easiest way to begin comparing sequences between the two of them is to begin with a play from Marozzo and seeing if Fiore offers a similar opening situation, and seeing if Marozzo's solutions are available in Fiore's selection of possible responses.

I'm really excited about this!