I’m not able to release my normal Monday YouTube video for the second week, but I wanted release something today, so I went with a blog. I’ve written about what I’ve been up to the past two months, with a particular focus on the Trials of the Pacific Mane event.
The Last Two Months
The last two months have been wild. In six weeks I went to three deferent LARP campouts. Two Amtgard events, Pacific War, and Northern Light’s Fall Coronation Campout and the third was a Belegarth Event, Trials of the Pacific Mane. While I had a lot of fun at these three events, it’s also been something of a trail of endurance for me.
Then on to of that, this last weekend I made another trip up to Washington to visit with Riley. While we had a lot of fun, much like the LARP event, the weekend was also about work. We recorded two episodes of our podcast High Trek, as well as two of our mid week shows, High Tea Time. It’s always fun, but very exhausting, especially when we record back to back like that.
Trial of the Content Creation Grind
All this extra events and travel has made keeping up with my content creation goals difficult. There is such a thing as post-event blues and I’m susceptible to that too, just like anyone else. Plus I’m still dealing with what I hope is the tail end of an increased depression spike (read about that HERE) adding to the difficulty.
This has been a lot of traveling and work for me! Between the four weekends I’ve traveled at least 1,200. Then, each weekend I spent time working on recording content. Granted I also had a lot of fun, but it takes a deferent kind of energy to add work on top of the fun, which in and of itself causes exhaustion.
Even at the Northern Lights event, where I ended up not working as much as I expected, I put in work each day. Sadly there was an equipment issue and the vlog of the event I planned on doing didn’t have enough clean audio. You can read more about that weekend HERE. There will be at least one or two knighting videos though. I’ll publish those even if they have some audio issues.
Trials of the Pacific Mane
I want to take a little extra time to talk about one of the events in a little more detail, Trails of the Pacific Mane I was really exited to check out the Belegarth event. It deserves it’s own blog and it will get it, I recorded enough content I’ll be able to put together a vlog for the YouTube Channel! Still, I wanted to say a few words here about it as well.
My only other experience with a Belegarth event is Western Wars. (Check out the blog of my last visit to the event HERE.) I’ve gone there several times throughout the years, but until this year there hasn’t really been another Belegarth camping event within my driving distance.
I enjoyed seeing the differences between the two events. Unlike Western Wars, Trials had more planned events. There were several tournaments, battlegames and arts and science classes, plus planned night activities. There was even a quest board!
Western Wars is a more relaxed event and from my experience. The primary planned activities at the event were line fighting and night activities. Fun, very fun, but not the most diverse experience when it comes to events.
Unlike most events, where I sleep on site, I had an AIrbnb. I shared it with Gustav, who drove up with me and Devry. This limited my time I could spend hanging out socializing at night, but I had fun watching the fighting, I even fought a little with Gustav. I also attended a class on Belegarth war braids, it was fairly interesting. There will be more about that in the vlog.
The event runner Dwarf made a point to say hello and check in on me to see how I was doing several times through the event. He made me feel very welcome and not only that, he asked about feedback on the event. I was happy to provide some. He was very receptive and appreciated my advice and observations, which I appreciated. I like talking shop.
On top of the vlog I also recorded at least one of tournaments as well as the Real Battle (For those in Amtgard, Realms is the Belegarth version of Holdings). The tournaments were ran differently that I have experienced. In Amtgard It’s usually a bearpit or a bracketed tournament. At the event people just randomly got into a line, fought who was next to them, then the winners got back into winners only line and it was repeated, until there was one winner. It was an interesting way to organize a tournament.
The Realm Battle was pretty cool, it was two big teams and a smaller team duking it out. They did three rounds, and I think the video turned out really well. People were hyped for the battle, there was a lot pre-game battle chanting. I got some of it on video and I’m sure going to try and incorporate it into something!
Where Is The Content?
I have videos from every event attended, so when is it going to come out? I’ve already started to release it! The videos will generally come out in order of recording. I have already released one PacWar video and one NLCC video.
The rest of the videos will probably come out in order, starting with the rest of the tournament videos at PacWar, I will then the release the knighting videos from NLLC followed by the fighting videos at The Trials of the Pacific Mane and ending with the vlog from the event. This will take several weeks, but they are coming! I also recorded some ditching at my local park of Silvermoon, so that might be thrown into the mix some where.
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