meditation on pain

Last night at the end of my Kung Fu class, my Sifu asked everyone in the class what they learned during the sparring section of class. I replied that I tend to absorb hits so that I can get in strikes of my own. Sifu asked if that was a good thing, and I replied that I wasn't sure so he told me to meditate on the subject. Blogging is essentially a written form of meditation, musing, and mulling, so here shall I muse.

My first Sensei (really the only man I think of when I say Sensei) was a man who believed in speed. He often said, "He who hits first, hits best." That would appear to be a rather simplistic view, but there is wisdom in what he said. Two people hit each other; one man is bigger and stronger but the other man is faster. When the faster man hits, the effects on the larger man can be varied, but more often than not, the man who hits first disrupts the power of the other man's strike. Thus hitting first means the hits you have to absorb are far less dangerous.

As usual, it junt isn't that simple. If the faster man hits first but strikes a non-vital area, there is a good chance that the stronger man will be able to ignore the hit and pound his strike home. In this situation trading hits is a very bad idea. Maybe the faster man might hit two or three hits before the stronger man, but the one good hit from the strong man is the one hit that will count.

Now consider if the faster man strikes the stronger man in the solar plexus, throat, or any number of other vital areas. Consider if the faster man's punch, even if not as strong as the other man's, simply is a better punch and strikes with devastating impact. Either of those strikes will sap the stronger man's power as his body naturally reacts to those hits by flinching. When the weakened strike does hit, that punch or kick will have lost a great deal of power and may be insufficient to hurt the faster man enough to prevent follow up strikes. In this situation trading hits becomes more viable.

A fair question then becomes why would you ever trade blows in the first place? Why not just hit first or block the strike and riposte? Simple: you are going to get hit if you fight. Going into a fight with the attitude that you will not get hit is very likely going to lead to a painful reality check. This is not to say that the opposite is a better attitude! Going into a fight accepting that you are going to get hit and that there is nothing you can do about it is handing free hits to your opponent. The only mindset I think one should have going into a fight is where you accept that you are going to be hit but that you are going te try as hard as possible to either not get hit or at least that you will do your best to mitigate the effects of those hits.

Now consider this scenario: you are the slower fighter. The person you are fighting is able to get shots through your defenses a bit too readily and is fast enough to avoid most of your attacks. What do you do? This is a point where trading blows may be necessary. To hit you your opponent must be close enough to reach you; this means that you should be able to reach him. If you can manage to punish the attacking man every time he comes in to hit you, you have changed the dynamic of the fight, and likely in you favor if you've managed to make your opponent hesitant to attack you.

So do I think that it is a good or a bad thing to accept hits to get in my own? I have to say that it depends on the individual fight. There's no hard and fast rule that applies to all fights. If you're used to being hit, it may be more in your favor to take a hit or two, while conversely if you are not used to getting hit, you may want to take as few hits as possible. I don't mind getting hit and I can dish out punishment to anyone who hits me, so I am going to say that with care and appropriate application, my absorbing hits is perfectly acceptable. Unless I am fighting with my Sifus. Then I am just asking for trouble. Sadly I have trouble backing away from a challenge. I predict bruises in my future.

Ahh...

Today as I left work, I took a deep breath of truly cold air and for the first time in a while enjoyed the weather. Call me a freak but I love cold weather. Hell my favorite time of year to visit Boston is February! Even my friends who live there think I'm nuts. I don't care, I love the cold. Why? Because I can put on more layers till I am nice and toasty; because I like to drink hot chocolate by a fire; because cold encourages people to huddle together for warmth; because I love snow. You like summer? Good for you. I'll take red noses, scarves, and silly winter hats any day.

I was going to post about religion...

But this guy put it better:


http://www.beliefnet.com/story/203/story_20334_2.html

a topic bound to be unpopular...

Weighted voting. That's right, having votes count more for some people than others. I was discussing this concept with a friend and we both agreed that it had at least some merit and was worth discussing further. I will admit upfront that there's probably no way to circumvent the flaws in this system, but it certainly sounds cool.

The idea is as follows: when our lovely citizens go to vote, before they actually get to vote, they take a quick political landscape test that asks questions like: Who in the president? The vice president? The secretary of state? Follow that up with some questions about what has gone on in the world recently, e.g. Were WMDs found in Iraq(though preferably a question less likely to be viewed as partisan)?

Anyone who gets all of these questions right increases the weight of their vote. Anyone who gets about half the questions right doesn't alter their vote weight. Anyone who gets them all wrong (I'm thinking older voters who still think Carter is in office) decreases the weight of their vote. The goal here is that politically aware voters who don't blindly follow the party line will have more say in the direction the country is taking than those partisan psychos who are probably frothing at the mouth at the very idea that their political enemies could have their votes count for the same weight as their own.

The most obvious problem with this idea is the question of who will make up these tests? Rampant cheating is to be expected as was evidenced in our most recent election, so how could that be prevented? And therein lies the problem; no matter what efforts were made, partisan psychos would find a way to corrupt this system. There just is no way to make sure that the people voting who should be heard will be heard through the clamor of people voting for all the wrong reasons. This is why this style of government is the worst is the world... aside from all the rest of them,

Dvorak is hard

Though I have not been in the chattiest or bloggiest of moods lately, the most honest and humbling truth is that learning this new keyboard design is much harder than I was anticipating and it makes me not want to write. I'm still toughing it out as I never go down without a fight, but after a bit over a week of practice I am only managing around 20 wpm. Coming down from 90-100 wpm is very difficult and it is slowing me down at work a bit. I actually had to switch back to qwerty to get something done quickly today. That sucked.

I did know this would be hard, don't get me wrong, I just wasn't thinking it would be this hard. I do have little bursts of speed from time to time, so its not all frustration. I am of the opinion that as qwerty slowly begins to fade from my memory that Dvorak will take its place. The question is how long will that be? Writing takes too long like this and I can only go so long before I have to scratch that itch. If I haven't improved by about 30-40 wpm in two weeks, I'll admit defeat and switch back. Hopefully I will have good news by then.

In other news, my recent trip to Boston was one of the best times I have had in a long while. Though I did spend a lot of my drunk time talking to and hitting on some very attractive ladies (I did comment on the bride's ass, but that wasn't my fault! One of the wedding pictures actually was a great shot of the bride's ass.), really I was just having a good time seeing two of my favorite people finally stop living in sin. My closest friend's girlfriend also single handedly made me feel better about myself than I have in a long time. No, nothing taudry happened. I don't do things like that to my friends. Just some smiles at the right times, some kind words, and one spiritual boot to the head. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if anyone does anything to disrupt their relationship, my wrath will know no bounds. So I have spoken.

This took entirely too long to type, so I am going to go eat, drink, and veg out now. Tah!

Man is it good to be playing again...

Thanks to the wonder of repairing recently remiss relationships, I have landed myself in a D&D campaign. More importantly, this is an all undead characters campaign, which, considering my previous rants about how awesome necromancers are, you probably have gathered I think that's cool. And it is cool! I'm not being very creative; my character is quite similar to the last character I played in a D&D capaign. The only difference is that this time rather than my character slowly becoming more undead, I'm starting from undead and getting more evil.

Once again I am playing a NE (Neutral Evil) character, otherwise known as a sociopath. There are those that say CE (Chaotic) is the most dangerous evil, but they underestimate what that N on NE does for evil. Some would think that NE people try to balance their good and evil while staying on the side of evil... Not so! Neutral Evil people do everything out of pure self interest. They are not concerned with abiding the law, even for evil purposes, and they find that chaos is too predictable. NE kill for profit, for fun, or are kind and compassionate for no apparant reason.

As such, in game, I've already had a quite evil idea. My party mates and I were raised with the purpose of finding and returning our master's soul, as it had been parted from him somehow. We were tasked with returning it to our master and returning him to his former glory. As a spellcaster (necromancer. shocking.) I had a better idea, which I mentioned to one of the other morally ambiguous characters I'm playing with: there's this spell called Magic Jar wherein you pop out your soul and then steal another person's soul and store it in this jar. My idea was to take that spell and use it to steal our master's soul as it is apparantly without body right now. Then we either ransom the soul back to him, or find his enemies and sell to the highest bidder. Possibly even better, find a way to use his soul to become even more powerful than he. My fellow evil-doer seemed to like this idea. Given how he normally works, he'll mull over this problem and when next we meet he'll have lots of evil ideas of how to make use of this plot.

So yeah... I'm happy to be playing again. I'm just waiting for some situations wherein I can use my sociopathic tendencies for awesome. Especially when I start passing for human. Muhahahahaha!

So it begins...

Who among you is prepared for the madness? Who among you can say that you've done something so insidious so evil? That's right, I've started learning the Dvorak keyboard. So, yeah, my hands hurt. Keeping QWERTY and DVORAK straight in my mind might be a tiny smidgen difficult, but even as I am learning I can see why we uber geeky people like the other design. It might take a while to get good at it, but with luck I'll be able keep both typing styles straight in my head till I can drop QWERTY entirely.

Of course, now I have truly gone to the dark side. There's no hope for me. I am as geeky as anyone can possibly be. I have my own Linux box, I constantly extoll the greatness of open sourse software, I'm a programmer by trade, an anime nerd, and book nerd. What else can I do to be more geeky? Seriously, there's not much left to do to be geekier. I suppose you might be thinking about creepy stuff like getting way too far into Tolkien or Star Trek, but that's just not going to happen.

Sadly, if I like Dvorak enough to change to it permanently, it's going to make me hate vi even more. And it's my only option to do a lot of things at work. This will make me very unhappy, but I already hated vi, so what's the difference, really? None, that's what.

Bah. Dinner, she waits for no man.