I just found out about this: http://www.google.com/chromeframe

 

It’s an interesting idea– basically, it seems like if you have a “shitty” browser, you can run a google chrome emulator to simulate using chrome securely from within your normal browser.  It’s not very useful for my particular circumstances, so i haven’t actually tried it out, but it’s an interesting idea.

 

Linux suffers the problem that the more emulation solutions they provide, for example, by supertweawking Wine configurations, the less incentive there is for developers to actually work on native Linux support (since emulators will do the work anyhow).  In that way, emulation works like a double edged sword.  Ask any game developper if they’re working on a Linux version of their game, and you’ll probably get a shrug and a “why bother?”

 

For Google Frame though, I think that the situation is a bit different, and it could probably work in their favour…

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I think that one of the problems with studying too much in a certain way is that you get so much in the habit of emulating areas of study (and what teachers expect you to write) that you kind of lose track of what you actually think.  As in… you get so caught up in gaming the assignment that you forget who you are in the assignment, and why you even care about taking this class (or this area of study) in the first place.  Layer upon layer, framing is a cool thing because it demonstrates a robustness of our brains and personalities– we are worldly people if we can see things from other peoples’ points of views.  But at a certain point, do we stop and wonder: who am I?

When I went to judo yesterday, I was told when swiping my membership card that my subscription had expired.  I was surprised, but in counting, I guess it made sense– I’d just not noticed that 6 months of training had already passed.

 

It was the first time I went to a beginners’ class in a while.  It’s not that I consider myself advanced enough to go to the advanced classes like I normally do nowadays– it’s just that with my work and school schedule, time conflicts don’t let me go to the beginners’ classes anymore.  I’m a yellow belt now, which really, is only one step above white belt.  I’ve never really felt that good at anything– as I mentioned in my last post, about 6 months of training has basically lead to one successful genuine throw during randori, which I feel is a pretty slow rate of return.

But when I went to the beginners’ class, I was surprised.  It’s a much more crowded class now, with twice or thrice the number of people on a typical advanced night.  But most of the people can barely stand after the warmup, which I now find to be a piece of cake (even though it’s almost an hour long).  In retrospect, I remember when I first started judo, I couldn’t survive the full warmup routine either– I always felt a bit sick in the stomach from the cardiovascular exertion and more than a bit dizzy from all the rolls.  I think the more senior students of the evening, a couple of brown belts and blue belts, were appreciative of the fact that I was keeping up with them when it came to at least that part of the routine.

 

The thing that always surprises me when it comes to meeting new people in an activity is how little substance people have.  Before class started, all the white belts were standing around socializing.  [JJT], one of the other yellows who was promoted at the same time as me, were warming up on the matts for fifteen minutes before class, and a lot of the more senior judokas were also loosening up.

 

There’s a sort of pack mentality I think– when people start a new event, they don’t have the confidence to look serious about things even though that’s exactly what they should attempt to learn.  I suppose there are a lot of different reasons to do a martial art– but being social has never been one of my aims, and because I gear myself towards other goals, I suppose I look down on the people who just jabber when they could be working hard.

 

To me, a dojo, a dojang, or a training gym is a scared place– it’s like being at a blacksmith’s.  It’s not supposed to be a comfortable place to be– at best, you get used to the heat and the exertion and you find some calm and manage to focus in the sweat of the forge.  In my book, perhaps occasional laughter is permissible, but this is no sunday picnic– unless you’re on the bench, get the fuck to work.

 

I have an expectation for everyone, including myself, that there should be no complaining– there will be failure, but there should also be anger and obstination to get better.  I maintain, always, that there should be no embarassment from not doing well, so long as you have genuine want of improvement.  Above all, there should be no whining, no sense of despair, and no giving up– the body should always break before the will.

And I think that’s the difference between a white belt who joined for social reasons versus someone who really wants to learn judo because he wants to learn judo.  One of them has the judo as an means to an end, some sort of auxiliarry or secondary goal– and the other has the judo as a stepping stone to another judo goal, which is another stepping stone to another judo goal, which is a stepping stone for…. you get the idea.  It’s a question of framing.  The former practice lacks substance, which is a word I haven’t been using in a while, but which should probably come back into my posts more often.

Subtance is that special something that, if somone else is adept enough to notice it in you, they’ll either be elated to meet someone who shares a passion with them, or they’ll downright be too scared to fuck with you because you’ve got “that look” and you just have that presence about you that says that you’re not there to dick around.

 

The amount of substance can clearly be seen in performance.  It’s not necessarily about results, it’s more about method, but eventually good methodology results in good good resuts, so the two aren’t mutually exclusive either.

The easiest way to see who is serious is to see who is working before you need to work, and who only works when they need to.  Warmups are a perfect example.  Who is warming up before the warmup?  Those are the ones who are just powering through the actual routine.  The ones who were chatting around the wattering hole about traffic, the latest movies, and Angry Birds?  They’re the ones who have crawled to the side of the mat because they don’t have the willpower to do spider laps across the room anymore. 

I don’t really feel I should or shouldn’t be annoyed with people for being who they are.  I don’t think it matters, frankly.  But I do sometimes mentally feel like teaching people a lesson when they have no humility.  When someone takes an activity non-seriously, I feel like, to a certain extent, they’re shitting on something that I think is important.  I know I shouldn’t take it personally, but I don’t like it when people take lightly the way they behave around the things that I love doing.

One of the white belts, [Bastien] was a pretty good example of that.  Before warmups, he was the centre of a crowd of whitebelts– I guess he’s a decent looking guy, hipster with good charisma and a joking attitude.  Pretty similar to my weight and height, although about ten years younger than me.

Warmup time?  He couldn’t get through any of the exercises, and was constantly making excuses when the seniors were giving him tips.

When a brown takes the time to tell you “use both legs at once,” you do not answer “I know, but it’s really hard! Do we have to do it like that?”  You answer “thanks for the tip, I’ll keep trying.”  Or, if your cardio can’t spare you any energy to form words, you just shut the fuck up, nod, and keep trying.  You don’t whine about how the program is too hard– this isn’t a tea party, this is fucking martial arts.  What did you think we were going to do here, except hurt you?

Later on, Bastien got a black eye, which was further threw his morale in the gutter– because he got the black eye while doing a cartwheel.  He lost strength in his arms, and basically collapsed in mid motion, and somehow managed to knee himself in the face.

Later in the night, the seniors told us to newaza randori.  This means groundwork sparring, or basically, wrestling from grounded position, usually on your knees (as oppose to standing up and trying to throw someone down).  Every white belt was attached to a higher ranking belt, and I just happened to be assigned Bastien.  Despite that I didn’t like him, I was being a great partner, frankly.  We were similar sizes, but from a few seconds of tugging I realized that the guy was basically a “skinny-fat person.”  He was about the same volume as my body, but pound for pound, his muscles and cardiovascular system could produce maybe half the output that mine could.  Anyway, we were rolling, and I resisted realistically by matching his power, while leaving particular openings for him so that he could apply the techniques that we were learning in class that day.

Eventually, this lead to him getting me with a strangle choke that we’d been practicing.  After I tapped out, I told him he’d done a good job, and gave him some pointers about how he could make it better with certain angles and leverage here or there, etc.

And he actually said “what rank is yellow?  It doesn’t like you’re any tougher than a white belt.”

And something inside of me snapped– I was thinking to myself… jeezus, kid. I might not be the strongest guy in the room, but I’m certainly shitloads stronger than you– and if you can’t even recognise how weak you are…

 

The next roll was him basically driving straight at me.  I sprawled, caught him in a headlock sprawl.  He just kept driving forward.  I butterfly guarded, then transitioned to normal guard when he just kept insisting on driving forward.  Note that by now I had established a tight lock on his neck,  a textbook guillotine choke, and with my legs around his waiste and loocked at the feet.   And I don’t know what he was thinking, but he trapped my arm against him just kept on driving forward, trying to stack me.  Maybe he learned how to stack from watching UFC on television or something, but that’s completely the wrong time to do it. 

To put it simply, the basic result was that he basically put himself into a headlock and was forcing me to break his neck with his own weight.  I was actually a bit alarmed by this so I struggled to push him away, because of our positions, and the fact that he wouldn’t let me take my arms away, he was basically choking himself.  He pretty much tapped himself out.

“Wow, that really hurt,” he said afterwards.   “That’s never happend to me before.  Is that technique even legal?”

And I thought to myself, yeah, that’s never happened to me before either.  You are one dangerous fucking moron.  I’m actually not sure if a neck crank is a legal judo move (I learned it from jiu-jitsu), and I wasn’t exactly aiming for it– I was using it only to deter him from his drive.  He just kind of went full force into my deterance, making it a full fledged counter somehow. Which is why I suppose they pair white belts with higher grades, so that the white belts don’t just naturally select themselves out of the genepool.  If I hadn’t fought to get him off of me, he probably would have probably hurt his neck really badly before he even felt the strangle or the choke, because of the way he was driving his weight into me.  If I was better, I could probably have transitioned this into something a bit more gentle– and, I must guiltily admit, if I had a bit more mental toughness, I probably wouldn’t have been bothered by his earlier comments, and it would have made me more likely to not subconsciously want to choke the shit out of the little bugger.

 

I should say it again– There’s nothing wrong with being a beginner– I myself am still one.  But there is something wrong with having no substance, and really thinking you’re the king of the world.  It is, frankly, not only annoying, but in martial arts, it can be dangerous.  What a beginner needs, and indeed, what anyone needs, is the willpower and humility to learn.  That means not scapegoating people for your failures– it means biting down on defeats, and finding ways to learn from anything and everyone.  You cannot be dismissive of any expereinces.  There are certainly some experiences that will teach you more than others, but if you’re too quick to think you’ve covered all your bases, you miss the details that will lead to lousy foundations.

 

Personally, and this is a life lesson that I’m working on, I think I need to take it less personally when people have attitudes I don’t like.  I’ve always kind of tried to associate with people of “substance” who I feel have something in them, beyond who they try to show off to be in crowds.  But I think the prolem with this is that it makes me a bit of a sociopath– I’ve gotten so focused on only trying to associate with people based on how we work together well (either at school, work, or activities) that I’ve cut out a lot of the social small talking skills that I used to have.  I find lots of topics boring and trite, because people are talking about them without really caring about what they’re talking about– so what’s the point?

 

Why not tell me about something you’re passionate about?  Something that truly dissaopinted you? Something that really made you feel good?  Not just the “lols” and the “OMGs” and the “like, kill me now!” situations– I mean the stuff that you have really thought about and lived with?

 

Social media nowadays makes things all about friendship and shared experiences– look at the average Coke commercial.  But what are these experiences about?  What is the substance that even makes these experiences worth remembering?  Is it enough to just have fun?  Or are real experiences characterised by the trust we place to suffer together?

Today, during standup sparring at judo, I got paired succsssively with a green belt, a brown belt, and then a blue belt.  The green belt and the brown belt just threw me to death. I am not kidding when I say that I got thrown at least 40 times by them combined in about 15 or 20 minutes… if that sounds like a lot, well, it’s because I get up quickly.  It’s not easy, but if I’m good at nothing else, I get up quickly, no matter how much of a beating I take.  All of my opponents were heavier and taller than me– the green belt was probably five inches taller than me and outweighed me by about 20 pounds at least.  The brown was only a few inches taller than me, but outweighed me by about 40 pounds.  And the blue was about a foot taller than me, and outweighed me by about 20 pounds.

All three of them just had so much upper body strength.  It’s one thing to practice a throw in technical training, where the partner is compliant– but when he’s against you in randori (sparring), it’s a whole other story.  With their superior strength, all three of my opponents were able to get to their dominant positions with dominant grips and just basically do whatever they wanted to me.  It was frustrating, as it always is, to basically be thrown the same way several times in a row but not be able to do anything about it, even if you know it’s coming.  But what should I expect? Not only are they physically stronger, but their ranks are higher– they have the physique and the technique that outclasses mine, so I shouldn’t expect much without paying my dues.

The truth is, since I started judo, I’ve never really managed to pull off a single really satisfying throw– a really clean one where I really felt “Yeah, I really got him!”

 

Until tonight!

 

I was going against the blue belt.  I was pretty exhausted at this point so I was eating more mats than anything, and the instructor told me plainly– “Do you know why this is happening? You’re letting him get that dominant position all the time.  Don’t fight the throw when he’s throwing you– you already know how that turns out.  Why don’t you try and prevent that grip?”

Well, easier said than done!  Did I mention the blue belt was one freaking foot taller than me?  His sweeping range is like a foot and a half longer than mine, and when I’m in close, it’s like my legs are being chopped out by a sledgehammer.

But I took the instructor’s advice– instead of fighting the throws, I started fighting his establishment of his favourite grip.  Another blue belt was saying that I was being too passive– just being satisfied with trying to survive, rather than attacking.  I guess that’s true– so I started really trying to get in and attempt to establish grips for my ‘favourite’ throws while preventing his.

 

Which, really, opened up a whole new bunch of dimensions to my play.  It was interesting– because at some point, I managed to clear his right arm (which he normally used for a behind my collar grip, for hip throws and uchi matas).  I had his left sleeve, and before I knew it, I just went for it.  I attempted to pull him forward while spinning into him for an ippon seoi nage– a shoulder throw– but I could feel that my pull wasn’t strong enough and that even though I had caught him off guard, my momentum was wanning.  It was impossible to add more forward pull to load him on my back from that position… so I just had some sort of reflex to drop down on my knees and use the sudden downwards pull to shift him more forward.

The throw actually failed, because he didn’t go over my shoulder– but he did fall slide over my back and land in a pushup.

“Good try!” he said.  “I think in that position, that was the right move to try.”

I felt pretty good about that.  The last time I sparred with this guy last week, I never even got close to attempting an actual throw, I was so busy trying to stay on my own feet.

There was something about the way that I used that pull to make him bend over, combined wtih my getting under him that took advantage of his height.  It might’ve been an epiphany, but I still don’t know how to really apply that feeling of a bit of a window opening up, so I can’t say I really figured it out yet.

But I do know that after that, he was guarding against me getting too close, and preferred to take me with “longer range” throws where he could use his long legs and arms.   By this, I mean throws where he uses sweeps, tripping and kicking throws to really scoop or tip me over, since I think my height made it hard for him to squat under me anyway.

I decied to see if I could use this to my advantage, and with a few tweaks, I pulled it off.  I attempted the same throw that I almost landed earlier.  As I was trying to lock his arm to control his left shoulder for the throw, he wheeled around slightly clockwise around me.  I converted my seoi nage– by uncurling my spin, I turned turned his backwards resistance into a kosoto gake (“small outside hook”).  Actually– I’d only ever seen this technique done in other peoples’ randoris.  I’d never been taught this technique… but somehow, it worked!

It just so happend that the instructor was watching, and he said “Good one!”

And it did feel good.  For the rest of the night, I was thrown, choked and pinned, but at least, they could not take back that one genuine ippon.

It’s just the first. Now to work for number two.

“Is the law a suitable solution to internet piracy?”

 

That’s the midsemester essay topic that I’ve chosen from the list of choices.  It’s pretty damn broad…  But I guess it could be an interesting topic.

I never read or watched Initial D in the past.  I think I took a glance at it, and was too put off by the drawing style (of the characters) so I just wouldn’t look at it.  However, I recently gave it a second chance and started reading the manga.  If you get over the ugly ugly drawing style (I really don’t like how the characters are drawn!) all the stuff about cars and driving is actually pretty interesting.

 

I like the idea of someone driving a shit car who is beating other people with pure skills rather than equipment.  I also like that he eventually lost because, all other things being equal, having lousy equipment will make the difference.  I feel that using my old badminton shoes and my outdated MP 77 for badminton is somewhat analogous.  Yes, I’m relating Initial D to badminton– that’s because I don’t own a car, and as you may know, don’t even have a driver’s license.

 

I had a pretty big win on saturday– I had been injured in judo about a week ago.  Hurt my left heel, so that I couldn’t really put weight on it to stand or walk.  Compensating by constantly walking on the ball of my left foot started hurting the ball of my left foot, as well as my right hip.  Even today, my heel is still not 100%… but it was worse when I went to play badminton on saturday.  Basically, I played 2 on 1 against two of the guys at badminton, without really being able to use my left foot for any sudden motions. I more or less had to stay on the balls of my feet for the entire game, and it was doable, but I was always conscious that if I overdid it, my calf muscle was going to tire out and I’d risk having an accident, something along the lines of twisting my ankle or something.  Anyway, things turned out okay.  I actually won the game with a score of 21-9 or something.

 

It was rough at first, because I was playing them the way I normally would, but without running, and that wasn’t enough.  What I needed to do was start playing seriously– I started watching their positioning patterns and shot selection habits, and started testing how good they were at cutting off drives and flicks, etc.  So at first, the game was quite even for the first 10 points.  But then once I’d really gotten a groove for their playing patterns, I made my way to the match point without too much of a sweat.

 

And I’m not saying that to look down on those two guys.  The exercise actually forced me to really look at their abilities objectively, from the point of view of someone who was trying to beat them.  It’s different when I have a partner– I guess I don’t care so much about losing when I have a partner, because I could always point at my partner for messing things up.  But when i’m playing alone? There’s nobody to scapegoat.  As such, it makes me play “seriously.”

Like I said, the point isn’t to put them down.  More, the reason why I’m writing this is because it’ll be a useful comparison to someday down the road, when I face them seriously again– and we’ll see how far they’ve come.  Playing them under such handicapped conditions really made me try and test the full range of their abilities for holes in a way that I wouldn’t have noticed passively from watching them play against other people, since there are so many variables in action at once.  But if I was their only opponent? I could standardize a lot of those variables.

So here’s what I’ve figured out, in terms of things that they could do to improve.

[Jayzee] has a pretty consistent hit.  Given that he plays other sports, he has at least average stamina, but I feel that his ‘burst’ speed isn’t as strong as it could be– mostly because his stance is lazy, and his footwork is poor.  By that, I mean that his neutral receiving position doesn’t have the racket up or knees bent consistently.  As a result, I feel that he’s especially vulnerable to smashes and drives aimed at his body or face, and his ability to cut-off or intercept fast counters is really limited.  When he’s covering the rearcourt, his footwork improves and he’s willing to run left to right, but his shot selection is poor, resulting in him being on the deffensive in long rallies.  He never plays drops, which is a huge disadvantage.  He doesn’t have a fullcourt backhand to backand clear, and his neutral situation clears can reach the other baseline, but again– there’s certain detail he needs to work on.  His attack clears need to be more shallow, and his deffensive clears need to be much higher.

Positioning in the front, Jayzee has undetermined net abilities.  I’ve never seen him attempt hairpins or crosscourt drops.  He doesn’t know how to tumbling drops either.  Mostly, I think this is because the opportunity seldom arises, because his front-court coverage position is too far back– he’s about a foot or two behind the “T” when he probably should be on the T or slightly further up, considering his height.  Instead, when he’s covering the front, he tends to be placed in a singles deffensive position, which tends to hinder the movement of his partner.

The biggest thing he needs to work on his ready stance, which ties in to his need to practice front-court play.  With him always in the back, and without the threat of drops, he’s too predictable.

 

[Chwang] is not as consistent a hitter as Jayzee, but has a better theoretical understanding of shot possibilities.  So, he will actually try hairpins and crosscourt net shots– however, like Jayzee, he has the habit of backing off from the net too much when he’s in charge of front coverage.  As a result, the potential for net kills and cut-offs is very low, which is unfortunate, since Chwang is pretty tall.  He’s getting better with shot selection, learning to play straight (instead of risky cross-courts) in risky situations.  However, maybe because of a combination of his height and stance, his hitting ability is rather weak  and he ends up hitting rather awkwardly for certain shots. When he’s receiving serves to his chest for example, he tends to do a chest height underhand-backhand motion, rather then getting below it and hitting with an overhand.  The same thing happens when he takes smashes or drives to his chest– he does this strange underhand technique, when he should be getting under the bird instead.

Chwang needs to mostly work on his ready stance and his hitting footwork, because I think he relies too much on his height and reach.  As a result, it’s making him hit from odd angles with low power and control.

 

 

I guess at the end of the day, it’s really just a question of them working on basics.  THey’re both guys, so their power is much stronger than the girls that I also play with– but when they’re forced to hit on the move or forced to hit from awkward positions, there’s clear weaknesses showing up in their returns.