Hello and welcome!

Since “make an SCA blog” has been on my to-do list for entirely too long now, here we are! I’m not planning to follow any particular type of structure or consistent posting schedule, but I do have a number of projects I intend to put here over time.

At the moment, I expect to primarily post about SCA heraldry and historical Czech onomastics (particularly as it relates to potential use in the SCA), as those are my two main areas of interest, but I’m leaving it open-ended because (a) I have Opinions about a lot of different things, and (b) I’m still always discovering new things to be a nerd about, so I don’t want to limit myself unnecessarily.

As for who I am - hi! I'm Anéžka Liška z Kolína, currently Golden Gryphon Pursuivant (baronial herald for the Barony of Carolingia in the East Kingdom), though that's likely changing in the next few months. I've been interested in heraldry and historical onomastics for about four years at this point, and have been spending the last couple of years digging deeper and getting more involved.

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Award of Arms for Basil Clarke

Okay, first off, I have to say that this is probably the scroll I am most pleased with to date. I have criticisms of my work, as always, but overall this came out a lot closer to my intent than most of my previous work, and it’s nice to see the gap between taste and talent starting to close a little. I wasn’t planning on doing any scrolls this reign, given how busy I currently am as reign herald for Donovan and Meghanta, but I saw the AoA for this recipient come up on the list of upcoming awards, and given that (a) it wasn’t assigned yet and (b) I absolutely adore this person, I cornered Kingdom Signet at an event and made grabby hands. Given that level of busy, though, and the fact that I work a second job in December, I knew that my timeline on this would be pretty crunched, so I would need to continue using fairly simple exemplars that lean into my strengths, rather than work on expanding outside my comfort zone. So! What do we know about the recipient? Their persona is ea...

DMNES off-label use: Generating lists of names by culture

The Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources (DMNES) is one of my very favorite sources for documenting SCA names, but it can be hard to navigate, and it doesn’t have an easy built-in interface for just browsing names by culture. This is unfortunate, given that one of the ways a lot of names heralds like to handle consults is to hand your submitter a list of names to see if any of them stand out. Just because it doesn’t have an easily browsable interface, though, doesn’t mean it’s not possible to use it to generate lists of names by culture! I stumbled on this awhile back, and figured I’d write up a quick how-to. Fundamentally, this hinges on the fact that the sources for each name in the DMNES are meticulously cited, and that citation is bidirectional: not only is there a link to the source in each individual name’s citation, but each source text has links to every single name that’s listed from that source. The trick is getting the link to each source for your target cu...

On the SCA A&S community and motivational barriers

A friend of mine posted a thread today asking people about motivation in the A&S community, and how students tend to feel unmotivated when they can't reach their goal. The question posed was whether there are things in SCA A&S that people find to be motivational barriers, and if so, what is it that stops people from believing that they can do the thing — and what can we do to help. Never one to answer the question as posed, when instead I can answer the question I see as fundamentally underlying one's assumptions, I wrote a series of comments getting up on my soapbox about SCA A&S, and what the goals are, and where the barriers are, with the intention of getting other people to consider the overall framework they're working in. I saw the discussion up to that point as addressing symptoms, but not the root cause, and figured I might as well take a stab at getting to the root of it. Here's an edited version of where I went with that. tl;dr: We're not doin...

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