There’s a Light Sabre Academy.
Seven different locations all over Italy.
Looks like you can get light-sabres you can actually fight with off ebay
They have a mega-strong LED, with a polycarbonate blade.
I’m not sure if this is cool or not – I think it depends whether or not they call kids “younglings”. If they don’t do that, then it’s probably ok. It’d be fun anyway – I can’t tell from the videos if this is proper fighting, or if it’s mainly about making swooshing patterns with lights. There seems to be a bit of both.
Still – one of my fav themes is the blurring of science-fiction and reality – everything that turns up in a sci-fi movie, at some point, someone’s going to try to make.
There’s design-fiction… which is a type of science-fiction, where people make ‘products’ without actually making them – if the design turns out to be really popular, then maybe they will… or more likely, they’ll sell the “license” for the design, which will be horse-traded around the place, and nobody will get it together to actually do anything because it’s all in the “IP”, rather than anything actually useful.
Reminds me of the house-price bubble (which is basically back where it was before the crash) – people buying and selling land, and “designs” for houses/apartments etc… changing hands several times before anything actually got built, if it did at all.
Or maybe that doesn’t happen at all with design-fiction, and I’m just making it up.
It does reek of bullshit to me though. I mean there’s nothing wrong with making cool designs – but these are being echoed round the blogosphere as though they’re actual things… when actually what they are, are concepts put together by designers (and published because they advertise the designer’s brand) and then echoed about the place as link-bait. It’s all advertising.
Maybe this is one of the characteristics of the complexity-explosion… the sci-fi singularity. The boundary between what’s real and what isn’t is (in the universal mind) dissolved. Fiction displacing science. Science becoming from the POV of most people, essentially a type of fiction.
Still… at least someone’s made an actual light-sabre academy. That’s real. Realish.
Taser Sword
On Ethical Autonomous Weapons Systems
The Drone Arms Race cont...
Patchwork Quilt of Futurism
Detecting Squirrelness
Super Laser
Agribot #1 : The Sci-Fi Demi-Singularity
Microcopter's-Eye-View of Protest
Lethal Loitering Munition
Favela Chic Meets DIY Weaponry 
On Addiction
And The Void Mooned Back...
The Spirit Of The World
A Machine to Steal Souls
More Anti Digital
Thync
Robotic Sensory Loops and Whatnot
Cartestian Robot Roundup.
Post-Scarcity Link-Dump
Servo Bender
Hmm… it’s sparking a brainstorm of ideas for fun and safe ways to swordfight…
I’ve always been more interested in the elegance of very heavy and slow weapons that don’t require twitch response-time (leave that for the young kids playing Battlefield online). Stuff like Long Swords, it’s hard to swing that stuff around, it takes planning and flow. But unfortunately the weight also means it’s very dangerous to play-fight with, even blunt impacts could smash skulls and break limbs.
Perhaps a hollow tube filled with water (and sponge for baffling) would give sufficient weight, but during an impact the pressure will pop off of cap and release the water, so althought it has weight it’ll end up being only as damaging as a water-balloon.
I wouldn’t want it to burst when hitting the ground though, not quite sure howto protect against that. Perhaps a small thumb-switch which can prevent bursting while pressed, or perhaps a mechanism which prevents bursting if the surface is completely unyeilding (ie: concrete ground).
All this complexity would end up adding danger though, coz what if it malfunctions.
Whoops, hope you don’t mind i used this as a temporary notepad.
I’ve always (well, recently) liked the idea of paint-ball spears. Instead of using water, you could use blood… or custard. That would be cool.
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Hiya – I use dreamhosts – have done for years.
http://www.dreamhost.com/
Nice people, quite green/progressive… based in the USA, so their privacy statements exist entirely at the whim of their capricious and law-breaking government, but that is not the fault of the people who live there… and they’re nice people as I say.
I’ve been with them for years – and they were (back when I was shopping around) extraordinarily good value for money. Not sure how they stack up in that regard now – but I’d still recommend them.