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Games Workshop is also run by assholes.  I expect that if any of us tried to sell plastic minis, we would realize that theirs should be 50% more expensive, but there are other issues:

- they want to keep the whole pie for themselves by talking about 'the games workshop hobby' not 'wargaming'
- they rely heavily on selling minis to children who can't really paint, and on staffers plowing their paltry wage into discount minis
- they let distributors build a local market, then when sales reach a certain level they open a franchise and cut the distributor off (again, they want the whole pie for themselves)
- when I was reading White Dwarf, I noticed that the 'less bad' army tended to win matchups, and when they talked about earlier plays which they were not writing up, the reverse tended to be true (so were the battle reports in White Dwarf kayfabe?)
- they really really want you to buy their minis and their paint, and every so often they change the rules so you have to buy new minis (or that your old army is no good compared to the newer army books)

I played their games a bit, and one friend was really in to them and worked for a store for years, but its hard that their games have nothing to do with real warfare or history, and growing up I was poor like I am now.  Since they don't want to be part of a wargaming or tabletop gaming community, maybe they should not get a privileged place in this tabletop gaming subforum?

Was that helpful at all? If you check out YouTube you can find lots of videos, and if you check your local library you will find plenty of archaeology books with cross-sections of blades, so I tried to write some things which would put all those details in context.

Cowgill's "Knives and Scabbards" is really really good but its by archaeologists not primitive smelting people or swordsmiths so it does not say so much about how the bladesmiths did their work.  And the smelters and the swordsmiths have a lot of web posts and videos rather than broad books on how the things they are copying were made.

And by 20 April the police submitted a document where "multiple witnesses" said that the accused murderer had boasted to them about having multiple firearms https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/mass-killing-nova-scotia-search-warrant-1.5575059 That often happens in Canada: information just does not jump all the hoops in the bureaucracy to trigger action.

Meanwhile Canada has announced that it will resume issuing export permits to sell Light Armoured Vehicle armoured cars to Saudi Arabia.  They have promised us that they will not use them to commit human-rights abuses and that the videos from religious minorities in their kingdom and Houthis in Yemen are fake news and anyways the factory that makes them is in a strategic riding

What Ensaf Haidar (the wife of Raif Badawi) and Rahaf Mohammed al-Qunun and other less famous Saudi refugees in Canada think about this I do not know.

Edit: Oh wow, back in 2011 they had a tip saying that he had caches of handguns and long guns at two specific locations and was talking about killing cops.  Again, murder and arson are very illegal in Canada and it was illegal for the shooter to own any firearm made after 1898, but laws are not magic spells, you have to actually set up systems to enforce them and carry those systems out.

To celebrate getting the first proofs of my first book, I gilded a chicken (baked it in egg-pepper-ginger-salt sauce).  The original recipe in the Harleian cookbook had saffron in the sauce; I served it with saffron rice instead.  The original used ginger powder, I used fresh ginger.  The original thickened the sauce with flour until it was like fritter paste, probably so it would stay on the bird while it turned on the spit, but my kitchen is not equipped with one of those (maybe if they lent me the keep of Festung Höhensalzburg ...)  I also stuffed the body cavity with some mushrooms and onion and herbs which I needed to use up.

Some of my housemates have been cooking very elabourate dinners because of Ramadan.  I may switch my big meal to lunch so I am not in the way.

The thread Traditional Armour Finishing Processes has some information on the polishing stage but none of us got a chance to write it up in a more organized way. 

A rough, generic list of steps might be as follows.  Stars mark optional steps.

• Envision the sword they want to make (it might be "make me 20 swords like this one" it might be "I want a Ruritarian-style sword for a lefty, and make it kind of small and light so its handy to ride around with" it might be the elaborate diagrams which Peter Johansson uses, this mostly happens face to face so we just don't know)
• Choose materials (either from heaps-of-iron-and-steel in the shop, or by visiting suppliers)
• *Heat up the different pieces, place them side by side, and smash them together until they become one
• Heat up the blank and hit it until it starts to cool.  Repeat until it is shaped right.
• *Heat treatment (bring the whole blade up to an even temperature, then cool it slowly in air or quickly in water or oil, sometimes gently warming it one more time) OR hammer-harden the edges (if you don't have access to pretty good steel for the edges).  The blade may need to be straightened out again after heat-treatment.
• Send it to the polisher to be ground with big wheels and small hand scrapers, bricks of emery, and emery powder until its pretty and shiny
• Send it to the cutler who will mount the guard, handle, and pommel.
• Send it to the furbisher who will make the scabbard.

But the details will vary from shop to shop and project to project, and all the different trades had their secrets.

It took moving from the lyrics on Mastodon to the music video to figure out that death roll probably has the crocodilian sense rather than the Jacksonian sense.

I've been trying to think of one or two good resources.  The best I can do is some things which focus on different aspects:

• Jane Cowgill's book "Knives and Scabbards"
• Darrell Markewitz of Wareham Forge https://warehamforgeblog.blogspot.com/search/label/swords
• Lee Sauder http://leesauder.com/
• The Nürnberg Twelve Brother Foundation https://hausbuecher.nuernberg.de/index.php?do=query&mo=4&rs=1&tt=prs-jobnorm&tm=Klingenschmied (the foundation was basically a monastery which supported 12 Nürnbergers who could no longer work, so the portraits show them in their new monk's robes)

Generally speaking, traditional crafts involve less tools but more workers and trades than you expect.  So one shop with a master, three journeymen (day labourers) and two apprentices buys a hundredweight of iron and starts making table knives, churns out a few hundred of them, sends them to another shop with a waterwheel to be ground and polished, takes them back for final inspection, sells them to a third shop in another town which puts the handles on them and pairs some of the knives with scabbards and sells most of the finished knives to a wholesaler.  Its very expensive for one shop, let alone one worker, to do all the steps. 

  And that first shop probably just has a handful of hammers and tongs and chisels, a forge, some small stakes and anvils and some small workbenches in it.  Today people use power tools and vices to replace teams of helpers, and they make specialized tools to make up for not being able to practice one task enough to get really good at it.

  Traditional iron and steel (like anything made before 1850) are really the element of earth, and you can see why they believed ore grew in the ground like trees.  No two pieces are exactly the same.  So you might have a favorite way of making a sword, but sometimes the pieces of iron you have don't cooperate, and you have to do something different that will still give you a product to sell.  In that respect, its a lot like sculpting marble.  Modern steels are a lot more predictable, so the smiths don't have to put together all those different pieces with different properties unless they want to show off.

  Traditional crafts tend to be tied up with a lot of rituals and secrets, like cooking and baking today.  So a swordsmith can probably talk to customers about what they want, and has their own way of talking through problems with people in the shop, but the customer does not get to hear the shop talk or talking through problems (and in a place with towns and shops, the swordsmith is probably fuzzy on how iron and steel are made and why different kinds behave differently).  So in fiction, that gives you a chance for characterization: you can show the swordsmith talking one way to her client and talking another way to herself or other people in the shop.

And humh, the accused murderer was banned from owning firearms for life in 2002, and a neighbour says she reported him to the police for stockpiling firearms and beating his spouse but was brushed off.  While tracking down the suspect in his RCMP disguise, one group of officers shot up a fire-hall because an officer from another unit was standing next to it and they decided that the officer was the suspect. 

The RCMP are the only police force in most parts of rural Canada, and they have long-standing issues with competence, racism, and sexism which a series of directors and governments have been unable to solve.  So again, its easier to pass a new law than to make the ones which already exist effective.

  You're welcome!  Yes, I wanted to boil down the talk and point to some more digestible webpages.

  A Voice wants me to point out that Tod's big knives are around 70 GBP and Armae in France carries Matthew Amt's classical Greek xiphos (SW 156) and kopis (SW 157) for around 115 Euros (although Deepeka in India may have started making theirs too heavy again, the two-edged sword should not weigh over 700 grams pounds plus the scabbard and I saw someone whose weighs more than 900!)

  One reason my focus right now is on getting some kind of full-time work is that with an apartment over 15 square metres/150 500 sf and disposable income my life would be a lot more healthy and fun.  There are limits to the crafts and sports I can do right now. 

   Spritelady, I would be happy to try!  These days I mostly train in parks with sticks (and carve up villainous chickens which looked at me funny after emerging from the oven).

Looking at the WHO situation report https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports/, I am seeing similar numbers of confirmed cases and deaths in the UK, Italy, and Spain despite the epidemic in the UK starting later.  And the UK government seems to have just recommended face masks on public transit which is a month later than Austria.

It also looks like it will continue to be rough for British universities, which I imagine depended quite heavily on tuition fees from international students, many of them from East Asia (and of course their EU funds have been in danger since the Brexit referendum).  Since I got a PhD at the end of 2018 and am looking for work in my field (and have friends at universities there) this makes me 

I have one friend who works at the Open University in the UK (a web-based distance learning institution) and they are probably doing better than most. 

Hey! I joined the site a couple of years ago after I met Jubal in a Tolkien group, I play forum games and sporadically post art XD
I'm not a gamer but I love dnd and other tabletop rpgs I'm technically an archaeologist (Early Medieval Europe and Pharonic Egypt), so that's what I Know Stuff About. (Also elves).

Yay for doing both medieval Europe and Ancient Near East!  I am still scared how people will respond to my dissertation monograph which cites sources from Šulgi of Ur to the English Privy Wardrobe accounts and Pipe Rolls.

My post on the theories of Vincent le Chevalier (real name, not a pseudonym) and Peter Johonsson has popped! https://bookandsword.com/2020/05/09/paradoxes-of-sword-design/

The university libraries in Innsbruck are now open for check-out for two hours a day.  I need to see if interlibrary loan is open.

The number of new cases in Austria does not seem to have risen since the loosening of restrictions in mid-April, but it is not falling either https://info.gesundheitsministerium.at/

Details continue to emerge about the spree killing in rural Nova Scotia during the stay-at-home order by a gunman disguised as a RCMP officer with a variety of vehicles disguised as RCMP vehicles.  Local journalists do not have a lot of resources.

Justin Trudeau has responded characteristically: rather than working to make our current systems for managing and tracking firearms more effective and work harder with border control and US local police to slow the trade in US handguns for Canadian weed, or even finish implementing the bill his government passed in 2019, he wants to ban more semi-automatic rifles.  At present there is not really data to say where most firearms used in assault and murder in Canada come from, but gun crime tends to be related to organized crime or domestic violence (Canada does have firearms storage regulations which reduced the rates of accidents, suicide, impulse crime, and housebreakers picking up some firearms with the video console and the jewelry box). 

And since you can import a semi-automatic handgun and a box of 50 cartridges for the price of importing a kilo or two of narcotics, and hundreds of tons of controlled substances cross the border every year ... But banning certain weapons sounds good on TV, institutional reforms take longer and are harder to explain. 

What operating systems does Steam work with?  I never switched from buying CDs to online subscriptions because I have the impression that there are some security risks around these platforms, but I loved the original Shogun, RTW, and MTW 1 and 2.