Portsmouth HS aims to disarm sword-wielding senior

[Cybrludite]

It doesn't?

Crap. Is there a pro-violent SCA type club I can join?

Outside of knocking each other on the head with rattan swords, the SCA doesn't promote violence. What amuses me are the ones who refuse to acknowledge a hit unless it's thrown full force, and then kvetch when folks start smacking them full force. (Not a SCAdian, but friends with several, and located conveniently with regards to attending the Gulf War.) The problem here is the "Zero Tolerance" nonsense, which saves administrators from having to defend their actions. Or even having to think. This kid with his sword or some other posing with a rifle and their first deer get treated the same as gang-bangers holding their 9mm High Points & .25 Lorcins sideways or Trench Coat Mafia wannabes brandishing more guns than your average group of Shadowrun player characters. They don't want to have to justify their decision on a case-by-case basis or be held responsible should the theroetical kid with the rifle & deer later climb a clock tower with that rifle & a sack lunch.

[Sarge]

[QUOTE=Cybrludite]Outside of knocking each other on the head with rattan swords, the SCA doesn't promote violence. What amuses me are the ones who refuse to acknowledge a hit unless it's thrown full force, and then kvetch when folks start smacking them full force. (Not a SCAdian, but friends with several, and located conveniently with regards to attending the Gulf War.)

Those guys are called rhinohides, and it's not a complimentary term. If you develop a reputation for not acknowledging a fair blow, somebody big and strong and very good at fighting, probably a knight, will smack you good and hard and tell you to quit being a rhino. If they persist, they're not going to have any friends and might even have their fighter authorization cards pulled. That's like losing your license to fight, so they might as well pack up their toys and go home.

One of these days I want to go to Gulf War, but I'm usually in the Persian Gulf War that time of year. Guess which one is more fun...

[REG]

The problem here is the "Zero Tolerance" nonsense, which saves administrators from having to defend their actions. Or even having to think. This kid with his sword or some other posing with a rifle and their first deer get treated the same as gang-bangers holding their 9mm High Points & .25 Lorcins sideways or Trench Coat Mafia wannabes brandishing more guns than your average group of Shadowrun player characters. They don't want to have to justify their decision on a case-by-case basis or be held responsible should the theroetical kid with the rifle & deer later climb a clock tower with that rifle & a sack lunch.

If they have a zero-tolerance weapons policy, how the hell they let the kid come into school [campus] with a sword for a yearbook photo shoot?

D'oh!

[Cybrludite]

If they have a zero-tolerance weapons policy, how the hell they let the kid come into school [campus] with a sword for a yearbook photo shoot?

D'oh!

I think this was one of the personal photos provided by the student, not the official one. I know my high school yearbook let the seniors provide a couple of personal candid pics in addition to the formal "official" potrait. (Of course, I went to a High School small enough that they were able to put the seniors two to a page without it rivalling the Riverside Shakespeare in bulk.)

[Cybrludite]

[QUOTE=Sarge]

Outside of knocking each other on the head with rattan swords, the SCA doesn't promote violence. What amuses me are the ones who refuse to acknowledge a hit unless it's thrown full force, and then kvetch when folks start smacking them full force. (Not a SCAdian, but friends with several, and located conveniently with regards to attending the Gulf War.)

Those guys are called rhinohides, and it's not a complimentary term. If you develop a reputation for not acknowledging a fair blow, somebody big and strong and very good at fighting, probably a knight, will smack you good and hard and tell you to quit being a rhino. If they persist, they're not going to have any friends and might even have their fighter authorization cards pulled. That's like losing your license to fight, so they might as well pack up their toys and go home.

One of these days I want to go to Gulf War, but I'm usually in the Persian Gulf War that time of year. Guess which one is more fun...

From what I heard around the campfires, there's entire baronies of Rhinos. It's not so much the Rhinoing that offends me, it's the Rhinos who complain when they start getting whacked real hard.

[spyone]

I remember this tale of a Rhino: he had been calling "light" on everything for months, and annoying his fellow combatants, so they enlisted the aid of a guy informally known as "Trog". Inelegant, but strong.
Trog had a list-legal "Axe" that was mostly made out of duct tape. In the hands of a normal human, it was plenty padded. However, in the hands of Trog ...
Reportedly, it left a significant dent in the Rhino's steel breastplate. He called out "light" just before he fell over and passed out.

Yes, Rhino's in general are a moderate pain, but then complaining about full-force hits is simply hipocracy, which is especially annoying.

Yes, it appears to me that photo was professionally done and brought to school. I seem to recall having that option when I was in High School, but none of us were pretentious enough to take advantage of it. Looking back at my yearbook, maybe we should have.

I grant that the school needs some way to exclude the 'banger who wants to be depicted with his "nine". We used to call that "judgement": if the principal thought the picture was over the line, he'd exclude it and explain to the parents why. And, since he was behaving reasonably, the parents would back him, or would realize that public opinion would be on his side if they pushed it.

However, one cannot count on parents to behave reasonably anymore. Parents will sue the school for infringing their child's First Amendment rights by refusing to run a yearbook photo that shows him in the act of committing a drive-by on a rival school. And, even if that suit will get nowhere and serve mainly to make the parents in question look stupid, it will also cost the school thousands of dollars in legal fees to defend itself against. So, the school tries to set up an unimpeachable position to be acting from, by establishing concrete guidelines for what can and can't be shown in the photos.

Somehow, those guidelines seem doomed to always be stupid, excluding things that obviously should be allowed and permitting things that obviously should be excluded.
And, as my brother is fond of saying, codifying the rules only encourages people to push right up to the line. If you decide to play a pickup game of basketball, there's an implied agreement that some contact is inevitable, but that intentional contact is a "foul". And when you bump somebody by accident, you accept that you made a mistake and he gets his free-throws.
But if you instead spell out exactly how many pounds of force you have to inflict before it becomes a foul, then you get:
A) guys who keep hitting you at 99% of the limit, because anything less is giving up stuff they're "entitled" to, and
B) arguements over exactly how hard that hit was, anyway.
I'm not saying all rules are bad, but anything beyond "Play nice, be fair" brings some negative baggage (heck, even that much brings negative baggage), and the harder you try to define exactly what is and isn't allowed, the more pushing the boundries you'll get.

That's why formal games (and RPGs) use omnipotent referees: no amount of codification can equal the simple beauty of, "No. Not today, not in my game, no. that's over the line. And I don't have to explain where the line is."
If we can ALL behave like adults, that should be enough. (The principal would only reject photos that truly were inappropriate, and we'd all trust his judgement on that.)

[REG]

If we can ALL behave like adults, that should be enough.

I assume you mean North Korean adults.

They're well-behaved and revere their leader without question nor dissension. That's my kind of subject adults.

Sighs. I missed playing Civ2.