Toxic Lima: Roller Derby in Peru 2019
Whilst 2x4 and Sailor City have made Argentine Roller Derby more familiar to the kind of audiences who only follow Division 1, there's been Roller Derby across South America for longer than they might expect.
Since 2010, Perú has hosted Roller Derby in the form of its only league, Toxic Lima Roller Derby . We have been lucky enough to be able to talk to one of their longer-standing members, Twerkin Pony, about the history, and present, of Roller Derby in Perú.
Derby Drama: Role Playing Roller Derby
This document is licenced CC:BY-SA 4.0, the authors are Libby Horacek and Sam Skipsey
Whilst they might seem superficially different, Roller Derby and Role Playing Games have a surprising amount in common, including having experienced more than one resurgence of popular interest driven by pop cultural reference.
If Roller Derby has Whip It, and now Birds of Prey; RPGs (and especially their most famous example, Dungeons & Dragons), have appearances in E.T. (and their own cartoon) in the 80s and Stranger Things in the present day, as well as increasing popularity through “actual play”, role playing game campaigns streamed live, or recorded, on Twitch, YouTube or as podcasts.
Now, Libby Horacek has made the, perhaps obvious in retrospect, step of connecting the two, via an RPG set in the context of Roller Derby itself… a game of tactics on track and management and feelings off track, which can only have one name:
Derby Drama
Here at SRD we like both Roller Derby and RPGs, and we know that there’s a huge crossover between D&D players and skaters, so we thought it was worth catching up with Libby to talk about all things Derby, RPGs and anything else, starting with how this all started for her.
The First SRDB Awards - RESULTS
This is the AWARDS page for the first ever SRDB Awards.
The ground-rules for the Awards are covered in the launch post here .
As mentioned in that link, voting was by approval voting. This means that you could, and should, tick boxes for all of the nominees you thought would deserve to win. You could tick all the boxes, if you thought they're all deserving; you could tick no boxes if you think none were deserving.
Before we get into the winners of each award, some statistics on the voting: we let you choose which categories to vote on, so some categories were voted on more than others. In general, the categories with the longest list of nominees were the ones with the most votes, predictably; the category with the fewest votes BOOTCAMP had about 7.5% of the votes cast on the category with the most, SKATER.
The fraction of voters voting for more than one nominee varied significantly across the categories: with only two nominees, only 1 voter voted for both BOOTCAMP nominees; whilst 38% of voters voted for more than one HALL OF FAME nominee. Overall, (ignoring the RISING STAR category as it had additional voting rules), 17% of votes were cast for multiple nominees, across the categories - this is a little higher than the average for this voting scheme in other deployments.
We also let you cast a vote for no-one, if you didn't think any nominee deserved it in a category. Again, ignoring RISING STAR, only 4 such null votes were cast, around 0.2% of votes in total. This is a little lower than the average for systems which let you place null votes, which is encouraging.
With that statistical interlude out of the way, lets get on with the main matter, the winners in each category.
AWARDS
SKATER
The Skater award had the largest number of votes of any category in the awards. Despite this, the clear winner, with more than 50% of the voters, was:
ELO C RAPTOR of Harpies Roller Derby Milano!
COACH
The Coaching award was both popular (with more than 200 voters casting opinions), and very tightly contested, with the top 4 by votes all within 7 votes of each other. The winner, pipping the others to the post was:
ROSIE PEACOCK of New Wheeled Order and Power of Scotland!
REFEREE
The Referee award was also very popular, with more than 200 voters, but had a very clear margin for the winner (although still short of an overall majority)...
NICOLA'S RAGE of Crimson Vipers Roller Derby Bergamo!
NON-SKATING OFFICIAL
The NSO award was not quite as heavily voted on, with more than 100 votes cast in total. The runaway winner, just 1% short of an overall majority, and with twice the votes of the next highest placed nominee...
KEDROG of Granite City Brawlers!
ANNOUNCER
With only 3 nominees, the Announcer category had some interesting voting patterns... and a very clear winner. With a majority of the vote, the winning announcer was:
GRAEME MCPHAIL of Bairn City Rollers
PHOTOGRAPHER
The Photographer category was the second most voted on category of all in the awards, with almost 250 votes cast in total. Despite this, it was also a very tightly contested category between the top 3, who remained within 10 votes of each other for the entire voting period (and changed position more than once).
In the end, the winning photographer was:
VINCIANE PIÉRART (NSP189)
VOLUNTEER
The Volunteer category, with only 3 candidates, was another with interesting patterns of voting. The overwhelming winner, with a supermajority of votes, was:
AUDREY ... ex-Dundee Roller Derby, and sort of semi-retired volunteer.
LEAGUE
League was another popular category, with more than 200 voters casting overall. It was also a very convincingly won category, with the margin between 1st and 2nd place being larger than the total votes cast for 2nd. Despite this, winning by a plurality:
THE ANGUANAS of Vicenza, Italy
TOURNAMENT
The Tournament category saw only just shy of 200 votes cast... and the overall winner had the support of a supermajority of those! It's...
SKATE IM RING 2019 hosted by Alp'n Rockets
NON-REGULATION TOURNAMENT
The Non-Regulation Tournament category should probably have been called the "Roller Derby Sevens" category, as all three candidates used that ruleset. This was a pretty tight contest between all three, with the winner by plurality:
KRUSTFEST 2019 hosted independently, in Scotland.
BOOTCAMP
With only two candidates this category went, convincingly, to:
"LILY GASKELL AND FAIRY QUAKE'S BOOTCAMPS" hosted by Rainy City Roller Derby
MEDIA
The Media award was one of our less voted on categories, despite having a bunch of nominations, and the winning candidate changed over the course of voting... taking a win with a majority of voters when voting closed:
The MRDA EUROPEAN QUALIFIERS LIVESTREAM hosted on YouTube, run with Granite City Brawlers
HALL OF FAME
The Hall of Fame category is something of a wildcard category, and had an eclectic range of nominees. This might explain why almost two-fifths of voters voted for more than one candidate in this category! Despite this, there was a clear winner, only just shy of an overall majority...
Our first Hall of Fame member is:
5TH BLOCKER SKATES, Glasgow's own Roller Derby shop!
RISING STAR
Finally, we come to the Rising Star category, for junior skaters, or up-and-coming younger skaters in general.
Due to some anomalies in the nomination process, and also to especially encourage voters in this category to vote on the basis of deserving, rather than just popularity, this category required you to vote for 2 or more nominees. (Votes for a single nominee were considered the same as a vote for no-one.) Despite this being clearly described on both the Nominees page, and on the actual voting form (in two places on the latter), a number of voters still voted for a single candidate.
Ironically, including these single votes would not have changed the overall winner (although it would change the margin of win, and the ordering of all the other positions). The Winner, with a significant margin in terms of valid votes, was:
red OWEch (Owen Squires) of Newcastle Junior Roller Derby (Australia)
Whilst there's no official prize for winning an SRDB Award (and we consider being Nominated to be the real point), we'd be happy to work with any of the winners on a "Winners Profile" to be published later in the month or year. Please get in touch with us if you are a winner (or the nominee of a winner) if you want to work with us on this!
Weekend Highlights: 2019-2020 End of Year
We're finally in a place where the majority of festive events are dying down, so this special edition of the Weekend Highlights, like the festive Radio Times in the UK, is a bumper multi-week edition, to tide you over until the second week of the New Year.
The rules are, as usual: highlights limited to 1 event per country, with an "extra" event allowed for a different kind of fixture (so, 1 tournament and 1 bootcamp), or if they involve Scottish leagues (since we are the Scottish Roller Derby Blog). Other notability might also allow the extra event - great posters, notable teams, etc. (League birthdays may count as "special" enough, at our discretion ;) )
In a bid to make this list as useful as possible, we've avoided links to Facebook except where noted. (Links to Teams are to non-Facebook resources - Instagram, or actual team pages - we'd strongly recommend that Teams get themselves an actual webpage [we can help host one if you need help]).
Locations are roughly organised East-West (with things before the weekend out sequence at the start).
The First SRDB Awards - HUB
This is the HUB page for the first ever SRDB Awards.
The ground-rules for the Awards are covered in the launch post here .
As mentioned in that link, voting is by approval voting. This means that you can, and should, tick boxes for all of the nominees you think would deserve to win. You can tick all the boxes, if you think they're all deserving; you can tick no boxes if you think none are deserving.
Everyone gets a single submission per category (with as many boxes ticked as they want); we have enabled detection of multiple submissions on these forms, and will also be taking action against unusual voting patterns which get past this.
The individual links for each nomination are below: Each Nomination is listed along with the reasons for their nomination, as supplied by their nominator. For submissions in a language other than English, we've supplied a translation into English (errors are ours). For multiple nominations for a single nominee, we've combined the reasons together (we've edited where needed, and removed repetition that results).
Weekend Highlights: 15 Dec 2019 (SUNDAY)
This is the Sunday addendum to this weekend's highlights, covering events from Sunday through Tuesday next. There's a lot of end-of-year scrimmages up in Scotland, Finland and other places, of various kinds - but we'd like to shout out one particular event:
Raptors Derby Moscow, only the second Roller Derby league in Russia, are making history this Sunday by holding the first ever public Bout in Moscow! This was only possible due to crowdfunding to support their guest coach flying over from Portsmouth to run the attached bootcamp, and with support from St Petersburg Roller Derby, who have been tireless supporters and promoters of Derby in Russia and nearby countries.
The rules are, as usual: highlights limited to 1 event per country, with an "extra" event allowed for a different kind of fixture (so, 1 tournament and 1 bootcamp), or if they involve Scottish leagues (since we are the Scottish Roller Derby Blog). Other notability might also allow the extra event - great posters, notable teams, etc. (League birthdays may count as "special" enough, at our discretion ;) )
In a bid to make this list as useful as possible, we've avoided links to Facebook except where noted. (Links to Teams are to non-Facebook resources - Instagram, or actual team pages - we'd strongly recommend that Teams get themselves an actual webpage [we can help host one if you need help]).
Locations are roughly organised East-West (with things before the weekend out sequence at the start).
Weekend Highlights: 14 Dec 2019
It seems that as we enter December, the density of scrimmage increases unboundedly - except in France, where they simply hold a huge number of triple header fixtures instead. Apologies to France, then, this week: we had to pick a small number of the many events you have on in order to keep to our rules.
The rules are, as usual: highlights limited to 1 event per country, with an "extra" event allowed for a different kind of fixture (so, 1 tournament and 1 bootcamp), or if they involve Scottish leagues (since we are the Scottish Roller Derby Blog). Other notability might also allow the extra event - great posters, notable teams, etc. (League birthdays may count as "special" enough, at our discretion ;) )
In a bid to make this list as useful as possible, we've avoided links to Facebook except where noted. (Links to Teams are to non-Facebook resources - Instagram, or actual team pages - we'd strongly recommend that Teams get themselves an actual webpage [we can help host one if you need help]).
Locations are roughly organised East-West (with things before the weekend out sequence at the start).
Weekend Highlights: 08 Dec 2019 (SUNDAY)
This is the Sunday addendum to our weekly highlights, giving events on the 8th a bit of space to breathe!
A lot of our Sunday highlights this time are festive open scrimmages, in Australia, New Zealand, Wales, and England. But in Argentina there's a 1 day tournament using Short Track Roller Derby rules; in France a rookies bootcamp and a triple header, and in Mexico, a single bout to close the season.
The rules are, as usual: highlights limited to 1 event per country, with an "extra" event allowed for a different kind of fixture (so, 1 tournament and 1 bootcamp), or if they involve Scottish leagues (since we are the Scottish Roller Derby Blog). Other notability might also allow the extra event - great posters, notable teams, etc. (League birthdays may count as "special" enough, at our discretion ;) )
In a bid to make this list as useful as possible, we've avoided links to Facebook except where noted. (Links to Teams are to non-Facebook resources - Instagram, or actual team pages - we'd strongly recommend that Teams get themselves an actual webpage [we can help host one if you need help]).
Locations are roughly organised East-West (with things before the weekend out sequence at the start).
Weekend Highlights: 07 Dec 2019
As we approach the end of the year, there's an increasing density of festive tournaments, so once again, this weekend is so busy that we'll need a follow-up event just for the Sunday fixtures.
This Saturday and whole-weekend, though, we have a host of highlights, including Nottingham's 10th anniversary, a whole-weekend bootcamp with ShortStop in Thailand, and a quadruple header in the south of France with Roller Derby Toulouse.
The rules are, as usual: highlights limited to 1 event per country, with an "extra" event allowed for a different kind of fixture (so, 1 tournament and 1 bootcamp), or if they involve Scottish leagues (since we are the Scottish Roller Derby Blog). Other notability might also allow the extra event - great posters, notable teams, etc. (League birthdays may count as "special" enough, at our discretion ;) )
In a bid to make this list as useful as possible, we've avoided links to Facebook except where noted. (Links to Teams are to non-Facebook resources - Instagram, or actual team pages - we'd strongly recommend that Teams get themselves an actual webpage [we can help host one if you need help]).
Locations are roughly organised East-West (with things before the weekend out sequence at the start).
Weekend Highlights: 01 Dec 2019 (SUNDAY)
This is the Sunday addendum to our weekly highlights, giving events on the 1st a bit of space to breathe!
As well as action in Colombia as part of the 10th anniversary of Roller Derby in the country, there's also a bunch of open scrims in Australia and the UK, a triple header in France, action in Mexico and Argentina... and more chances to try Short Track Roller Derby in Worcester, UK.
The rules are, as usual: highlights limited to 1 event per country, with an "extra" event allowed for a different kind of fixture (so, 1 tournament and 1 bootcamp), or if they involve Scottish leagues (since we are the Scottish Roller Derby Blog). Other notability might also allow the extra event - great posters, notable teams, etc. (League birthdays may count as "special" enough, at our discretion ;) )
In a bid to make this list as useful as possible, we've avoided links to Facebook except where noted. (Links to Teams are to non-Facebook resources - Instagram, or actual team pages - we'd strongly recommend that Teams get themselves an actual webpage [we can help host one if you need help]).
Locations are roughly organised East-West (with things before the weekend out sequence at the start).
