Jeremy Preacher

Occupy Austin

2011-10-05T19:58:00.000-07:00

I just spent 40 minutes or so at the Occupy Austin General Assembly (the official "occupation" begins tomorrow but they've been holding meetings for a week or two now.) I took notes!

There were probably thirty people there when I got there, and probably closer to 70 when I left. They were at Austin City Hall, which was built with an outdoor assembly area - stadium seating and all. They did have a mic so I didn't get to witness the human microphone thing.

The organizer-types introduced themselves, explained that running a GA was voluntary, rotating position, and then asked for a female to co-moderate because all the moderators were male. Someone volunteered. That was neat.

They started off with "report-backs" where people who had been getting shit organized took the mike, and this was was I was particularly interested in, because I haven't been able to figure out what these folks actually wanted to do. It was actually a lot more like a festival planning meeting than any sort of protest - it was all about process, logistics, and events, not rhetoric. Some things that stood out:

- They are planning to hold classes, discussions, and workshops throughout the occupation. They're getting volunteers from the community to run them - for example, tomorrow evening there will be a class on nonviolent communication.

- They've gotten people to volunteer heath care, water, childcare (that sounds like it will be hairy) and legal services. They've got a help line set up in case people get arrested, and six lawyers so far. (They were careful to emphasize that they do not expect nor intend for anyone to get arrested.)

- The people there were, demographically, sort of what you'd expect in Austin - young, bearded white men, older first-gen hippie ladies, a smattering of minorities. There is a Diversity Committee working on reaching out to more people, and a need for some Spanish-language press materials, which are good signs I guess.

- The first external action seems to be organizing a mass account closure at major banks. They're collecting information on local banks and credit unions and will be encouraging people to make the switch.

The biggest irony was that because they had a small spotlight on the speaker, the speaker couldn't see any of the elaborate hand signals from the audience, so I saw no particular evidence of a consensus process. But then, I left when they got to the point where they were accepting proposals for agenda items, so they may have resolved that - the organizers were vocally disturbed by that as it got darker.

So yeah, apparently all of those old hippies at the anti-war protests were wrong. This is what democracy looks like - it's tedious, nitpicky, self-conscious, and ultimately builds something a lot more complicated (if maybe not more politically effective) than easy-to-remember chants.

Kickathon!

2011-09-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

It's that time again! Sun Dragon is holding its annual fundraiser to pay for our scholarship fund and all of the free self-defense workshops we hold. I'm not yet planning anything quite as ambitious as my month of karate-related posts from a couple of years ago, but here are some selections if you want to get more of an idea what we're up to:

Verbal Self-Defense, or, a tiny woman knocks me down by yelling at me.

The realities of running a strip-mall dojo as a non-profit: some days you teach kata, some days you teach drywall installation

Saying no: more self-defense class stories.

I would love it if you'd donate - here's the link! And I'll probably have a few more stories to tell over the next month or so.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen, part 2

2011-09-18T12:58:00.000-07:00

This is the part that needs a bunch of warnings. Spoiler warnings, first of all - I am not going to mask them in any way. Read on at your peril. And trigger warnings - the major part of my criticism of this series concerns the handling (and amount) of rape and torture, so I will be discussing those scenes in hopefully not too much detail.

First, though, let me talk about some purely technical stuff. The series is a major accomplishment of worldbuilding, yes. However, the balance between clever worldbuilding and the structural stability of the plot is important, and I think Erikson misses the mark here. There are too many characters who are built up as "major players" who have little or nothing to do in the finale. Icarium, for example, spends eight books being touted as the uncontrollable destroyer of worlds, and spends the entire last book unconscious and chained to the ground. His role as a deus ex machina in Dust of Dreams could have been performed by literally anybody - we don't even know it's him until the last minute. Karsa Orlong, likewise - his major accomplishment takes place in Reaper's Gale, but he's dragged along for the next three books for no detectable reason. Some subplots, like the Shake/Tiste Andii/Kharkanas one, take up a big chunk of space (and are apparently going to be explored in detail in a forthcoming trilogy) but don't overall add much of anything to the actual plot arc of the series. It's possible that a lot of this stuff will seem better integrated if I read the five outrigger novels written by Erikson's writing partner, but that really emphasizes how much of this was not planned adequately (or edited all that hard, although I can hardly blame an editor for not foreseeing which subplots to cut.)

The other major technical issue I have is the heavy-handedness of the Messages. They're worse in some books than in others - for example, Midnight Tides is my least favorite of the novels partly because its full of melodrama, but mostly because it was written as a scathing indictment of modern Western capitalism (probably just American capitalism, actually.) It would have been bearable if Erikson didn't use every other scene as a soapbox to rail about debt, colonialism, the profit motive in military conquest, treatment of the poor, of veterans, etc and etc. The empire of Lether is cleverly created to illustrate these points, and it would have done so just fine without all the explicit ranting. Toll the Hounds has the same problem, one or the other of them is a little too Religion is Bunk even for me, and in Dust of Dreams the message appears to be Women are Vindictive Shrews who Hate One Another.

Which brings us to our next problem. As I said in the previous post, Erikson has a lot of female characters and generally handles them as well-rounded, fully-developed people.

Who get raped a lot.

Not all of them, sure, and some of them are handled in ways that show he's at least trying - the mid-battle rape of Stonny in Memories of Ice, and her immediate, bloody, and immensely appropriate revenge (and subsequent trauma) is probably one of the better ones, and the fate of Felisin in the mines seems realistic both in terms of sheer human behavior (young, powerless woman uses sex to secure protectors in a no-rules prison environment) and her individual reaction (serious trust and intimacy issues, a relationship with sex that even the male characters of dubious morals recognize is pretty fucked-up.) But those are the best-handled ones, and there's a long, long downslope. Seren Pedac gets really drunk after witnessing her friend's suicide and gets gang-raped, and Erikson makes a totally hamhanded effort to explain that of course this isn't her fault or anything, it was still caused by her subconscious desire to punish herself. Which is only minorly tolerable in that it's explained by the person who slaughtered her rapists, so his opinion of the excusability of their behavior is pretty clear. (And then he arranges for her to get some magical therapy, which... ok, fine. I guess.)

But then we have Karsa Orlong, who considers rape a privilege of victory in battle (he later - many books later, when Erikson is obviously trying to rehabilitate his character - explains that he only rapes people because of the drugs his tribe used to make them fearless, but this is a total retcon - the first rape scene explicitly made reference to the fact that he didn't use the drug.) We have Shurq Ellale, an undead woman who needs to feed her sorcery by having sex with men, and who incidentally rapes a guard in the house she's robbing. (This is given zero attention, explanation, or justification.) We get many, many incidental scenes, mentions, and threats of rape throughout. And then there's Hetan.

Hetan is a woman we first meet in Memories of Ice. She's a member of a barbarian tribe, the daughter of the warlord who rules all the tribes. She's clearly a sexually liberated woman - she sleeps with a number of the male characters in an aggressive way, which is totally played as consensual and for laughs, and her brother witnesses all of this and clearly thinks it's just fine. She's also clearly described as a ferocious warrior, and it's clear that in her culture women are not only fighters, but tremendously effective ones. (They're humanoid but not actually human - the genetic relationship is never fully explained but they physically differ from your garden-variety human.)

We don't see her again until Dust of Dreams, where she's married to Tool, who has taken over leadership after her father's death, and she has twins by one of the funnier earlier encounters and a son by her husband. Now her tribe as portrayed as totally patriarchal (despite offhand references to female warriors and clan leaders) and the women as totally beaten-down and oppressed. Hetan is criticized a number of times, offhandedly, as being a slut. And when Tool is killed, the "traditional" "punishment" is delivered to his family - his children are to be killed (the ten-year-old girls will be raped first so they can "carry [their killer's] seed to the gods.") And his wife will be maimed and then raped until her will is broken, then kept around to be "used" at the whim of any male of the tribe. The women carry out the maiming and then stand around and cheer as she's raped - one of them later explains that as long as there's a "hobbled" woman around, their husbands are less likely to brutalize them in bed. The book is filled, as well, with examples of women being shrewish, jealous, possessive, insecure, and horrible to one another, in the usual fashion of "Erikson tries to make a point."

So. Yeah. First of all, the idea that a tribe would allow their women extensive weapons training and combat experience, and then treat them like disposable sex toys, seems totally, ragingly implausible. And also unwise. So I tend to think that Erikson made this change in order to come up with the worst possible fate for Tool's family, so that his audience would believe that he'd lose his temper. (And he does, briefly, but he then calms down and his little tantrum doesn't seem to have any long-term consequences.) And that's where I have a problem. This isn't a natural consequence of war or a desperate scheme gone horribly wrong, this is a situation specifically crafted so he can describe a mutilation and gang-rape. And when I think of these books, that's the image I think of. Not the heartbreaking conclusion to Deadhouse Gates, not any of the well-earned rewards the survivors get at the end of the series, not any of the thrilling battles or cunning plots. It's this one deliberately shocking image. And so I don't actually recommend these books much, and I won't recommend them at all to women. It's a damned shame.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen

2011-09-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

I've spent the past five weeks rereading the Malazan Book of the Fallen so that I could read the tenth volume with everything fresh in my mind. On the one hand, I'm glad I did it, because that tenth volume wouldn't have made all that much sense without all those details handy. On the other hand, this is a really, really problematic work of fiction on a bunch of levels and I don't necessarily even like it. I've reviewed all the individual books in some detail on Goodreads, and if you've read them that may be of interest to you, but this post is going to talk about the series as a whole. It will have a bunch of spoilers, and I'm not marking them or anything. Read at your own risk.

A little background, for my non-fantasy-epic readers. The Malazan Book of the Fallen is a ten-book fantasy series that sold for a notable amount as a package deal. It's often compared to A Song of Ice and Fire (the Game of Thrones series) and that's not a bad comparison. Malazan has much, much more magic and a wider scope - less politics, many more gods, more trench fighting and fewer knightly duels - but they're definitely in the same general part of the genre. The last book was published this year. I had read the first nine more or less in a row a couple years ago, and decided to reread them to both confirm my severely mixed opinions about the series and also to be in decent shape to read the newest. (I did the same thing for the latest ASoIaF book, and will likewise do it for the last Wheel of Time novel in the spring. Yes, this is for fun.)

First, the good stuff. It's a deeply complicated series that more or less pays off in the end - it's really an impressive feat of worldbuilding. Many, if not most, of the characters are believable at least and remarkably well-rounded and deep at best. The characters are put in various dangerous situations that feel genuine and offer many, many emotionally wrenching moments throughout the series - the Chain of Dogs plotline, if it were offered as a novella, is one I would probably order everyone I'd ever met to read. And those moments generally echo throughout the series - they're not just tearjerker setpieces, they have realistic consequences, particularly to the characters who witness or endure them. While the writing is occasionally a touch overwrought, it's generally appropriate to the setting and the dialogue matches the characters well enough that in a later book a character can make a joke about "talking like a marine" that was hilarious without having to go into any detail.

Erikson also has tons of female characters, and they're generally just as well-developed as the men. (There are plenty of one-note bit characters of both genders, and the female ones grate a little more for me, but that's probably to be expected.) I've seen at least one criticism that his women are just men in a dress, but I don't think that's true - sure, his female soldiers read as soldiers first and women second, but the men do, too, and the nature of the soldier is a major theme explored throughout the books. There are plenty of female politician-types, assassins, women of various species that aren't quite human, prostitutes, scientists, witches, etc, and they are both memorably female but also just well-rounded characters.

He has a noticeably large number of queer characters and handles them well, for the most part. There are a bunch of lesbians who pass unremarked and have love lives that don't stand out - some have lovers die tragically, some have a bunch of casual sex, and at least one couple settles down to live happily ever after. The gay men don't have it quite so good - either they're so unremarked that I didn't notice them, or there's really only the nelly stereotype who can't figure out the mechanics of having sex with a woman. (This is more weird and less appalling in execution than it sounds, but it's still not exactly a positive portrayal.) There are a bunch of bi characters, too, of all sorts - the woman who likes sleeping with other women but doesn't fall in love with them, the tribal warleader who pretty much bangs everything willing, the straight woman who will happily have public sex with another woman just to watch her audience squirm. The topic is in general handled naturally, and I very much appreciate that.

There are a lot of good things going on in this series, and I would recommend fans of epic fantasy read it, except. And that except is big enough to warrant its own post.

So Close!

2011-08-12T07:52:00.000-07:00

I know I haven't been keeping up with this blog very well this summer, but since I've recorded previous Crossfit Totals here it seemed the best place. I've been using the Wendler 5-3-1 strength training program since February, and I thought I'd try a Total and see where I ended up.

Deadlift: 205

This is not quite a personal record - I've hit 215 before, and attempted it today, but didn't get it all the way up. (That I was able to break it off the ground was heartening, though!) But it's pretty respectable, since it's thirty pounds more than I could pull at the beginning of the year, and twenty more than immediately before starting the program.

Squat: 195

Respectable, since my best recorded number is 205, and I strongly suspect that was at a wildly inadequate depth. Also forty pounds up since the beginning of the year. I suspect I can get a lot more mileage out of this movement in the next couple months.

Press: 95

AAAARGH. I got 100 pounds up to my FOREHEAD and couldn't get it all the way up. I am going to add some tricep assist work to try to get this in better shape. Not that 95 isn't fifteen pounds up from the beginning of the year (and that's a significant jump for a movement involving relatively small muscles, unlike the other two) but dammit I wanted to hit triple digits.

Overall, some very satisfying progress. I'm going to continue this program through the end of the year at least, since I haven't topped out on anything yet. I'll do another Total at the new year and see where I am.

Round 2

2011-05-31T12:02:00.000-07:00

After a lovely and totally successful birthday week-to-ten-days, I am feeling the need to tighten things up a bit again. I haven't been super bad, but I have had some cheese, and some tortilla chips, and some potato chips, and rather a lot of booze. Its also about time to do another caffeine detox. So back on the wagon I go, and we'll see where that puts me. I am going to do the Whole30 again, with pretty much the same terms as last time. I will endeavor to report in a bit more often this month.

Losing

2011-05-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

Recently, I had the opportunity to spend time with a bunch of folks that I very rarely get to see. They were all at least marginally aware of my adventures in Paleo, and if they weren’t, my mom made sure they heard about it.

Of course, what everyone really wanted to hear about was not the RA remission but the weight loss. I’m totally a fan of that side effect, so I talked about my 25 pounds, and about finally discovering what being full felt like, and my mother invariably chimed in there with “It’s totally true! You should see it. She’s never eaten portions like these before!”

(A note, lest you get the wrong impression: My family is not neurotic about food. Rather the opposite - we LOVE food. We think about it, talk about it, and celebrate around it. None of us were more than average-American overweight before my little metabolic meltdown. Mom’s reaction was more surprise than approval. There was food left! Even after Dad finished! That never happens.)

And then, every time, something odd would happen. The people I was talking to would start to tell me why they couldn’t possibly do it. I’ve seen this almost every single time I’ve had this conversation. It’s not odd that people resist change. It’s not odd that people don’t want to give up beer and bread. But it’s odd that people think that this is a logical conversational gambit. I’m not a salesman. I’m not earning points for conversions. And in every case, I wasn’t the one to bring it up. (Although, to be fair, sometimes my mom was.)

So on the plane I started wondering about this. Why is “Oh I can’t do that, here’s why:” the response to “Hey I feel really good and have lost a bunch of weight with these guidelines.” And here’s my theory:

We get so many messages about eating being bad that we start to believe we can’t possibly be good

Think about it. Junk food is bad. Processed food is bad. GMO food is bad. Monoculture food is bad. Meat is bad. Carbs are bad. Fat is bad. Eggs are bad. Alcohol is bad. (And then we get to “bacon is bad” and the entire culture yells “Fuck it!” and orders more bacon.)

It’s this impossible weight to carry every time you put a bite of food in your mouth. Everything is wrong, bad, unhealthy, possibly immoral. Everyone who pays the least attention to these sorts of things (i.e. most American women) knows she’s doing the wrong thing every single time she eats. It’s almost impossible to avoid concluding that you’re just a bad person who does bad things and that’s the way it is.

And so when someone says, in effect, “Hey look, I’ve been a good person and you can see my reward!” (and yes, my jawline is totally a reward,) it would seem both unrealistic and arrogant to say “Oh wow, I’ll go be a good person too!” So they mutter and stammer and come up with excuses, because that huge weight of negativity makes it impossible to actually weigh a new diet on the merits.

I’ve spent years - most of my life, really - being interested in nutrition, educating myself, comparing claims and, recently, testing them. I don’t think about food in terms of “good” and “bad” - I just wonder what effect it will have on my body. But this is very much not a mainstream position, and I lost sight of that. So if I sound arrogant or sanctimonious about this stuff, I apologize. But I really do worry that moralizing about nutrition is making it emotionally impossible for people to try new things and find stuff that works for them.

Portal 2

2011-05-03T21:11:00.000-07:00

I've now played through it twice, found a couple easter eggs, read some reviews, and listened to the developer commentary. I thought it was worth writing a bit of a review for.

First of all, I loved it. I don't play many single-player games any more, and I whipped through this one, had lunch, then started a developer-commentary playthrough. I know it's up against some impossible expectations - the original Portal is very close to a perfect game. But my personal expectations were met.

**NOTE: SPOILERS AHEAD**

Some particularly high points:

- GlaDOS. The voice acting was absolutely dead on throughout. GlaDOS's delivery of "Oh. It's you." simultaneously made me giggle and sent chills down my spine. Her gradual humanization via not only dialogue but changes in the vocal distortions were subtle and effective. Her hilariously petty and stereotypical cattiness balanced beautifully with her very real and deeply threatening hatred. (The fat jokes, when it was established in the first two minutes that Chell is in fact emaciated, worked brilliantly - they were not funny because "hur hur fat chicks are funny" but because a computer groping for an effective insult so badly missed the mark.)

- The backstory. Many pixels have been spent praising how effectively the backstory is inserted into the game without ever distracting the player from the actual gameplay. I won't repeat the argument - I'll just establish that I agree. The carefully-crafted time warp through Aperture's history was as good or better than all the new mechanics that it introduced. Cave Johnson was a perfect fit for the founder of a company ultimately run by a monomaniacal AI, and the hints (never quite confirmation) of Chell's identity were just enough.

- The increased size and depth (pun sort of intended) of the game. Early on, I wasn't sure the mechanics would hold me through the six or eight hours of gameplay. As a pure puzzler, the original held some but not that much interest - I finished a couple of the challenge modes but eventually wandered away. But the added exploration component held my interest and provided a welcome break from the never-ending test chambers, and while I was generally terrible at the frantic escape runs, they were also a nice change of pace.

- The difficulty. I am not a shooter player (in fact, I get motion sick in most of them, and had to take both Portal games in two-hour-max chunks to avoid the same.) I have no twitch reflexes to speak of, and the fall-shoot-fall sections in the original drove me batty. There were a couple of those, but not difficult ones - all the tough puzzles were logic puzzles or tricky catwalk bits where it took a while to figure out where the live panels were. For me, this was perfect - I never got totally stuck, and made it through my first run at a pretty steady clip. I won't argue that some challenge modes would be nice, but hey, they're already promised - and for free!

- The music. Not just the ending songs, which were of course fabulous, but the music throughout. When I realized that more voices were added in as parts of the puzzle were completed, I was tickled absolutely pink.

Some "meh":

- Wheatley. While the voice acting was spot-on, he was a fairly predictable character and as such wasn't as funny as he was probably intended to be. I didn't loathe him, but nor did I really enjoy him. The "twist" was utterly foreseeable, to the point where I was looking around during the confrontation with GlaDOS looking for a less obviously bad choice. I also hated - HATED - being led around by him. I never could spot him without a false start, his flashlight made me nauseous, and twice I failed to understand him because of his accent. (Yes, I feel dumb. But I heard "Left! Left!" and took the left turn immediately available, and died, because he was saying "Lift! Lift!" but I wasn't looking for an elevator.)

- Catwalks in general. While I liked the exploration and it was nice to get out of the claustrophobic rooms, the wide-open catwalk sections both drove me crazy and exacerbated my nausea. This is probably more a personal gripe than anything, of course.

- The boss fight. I didn't hate it, and it annoyed me less than the Portal 1 boss fight, but it still failed to excite me. Partly it's because I dislike time pressure, partly because I loathe jumping puzzles (the one core swinging back and forth? HATE) and partly because I just wasn't very worked up about Wheatley in general. I mean, yeah, he was incompetent, yeah, he wasn't going to let me go of his own free will, yeah, yeah, reactor overheating and all, but I had no real personal gripe with him. He was just a fuckup.

Dislikes:

- Loading screens OMG. Probably at least partly my fault for running it on a computer that maybe came kinda close to the minimum specs, but still. OMG.

- Test chambers. Now this may be sort of a weird one. But I just found it jarring that of course the only logical way to progress from point A to point B was via test chambers. I mean, we know and see and explore all the area around and between them. There's seriously no quick route? I know, I know, if there was there wouldn't be a game, and wasn't I just bitching about the catwalk sections? But it just felt overused - and the progress screens (1/22! for the third time!) made me want to slit my wrists.

- No, that's... really kinda it. Not many dislikes.

So, overall - if you like video games at all, go get this one. (Get Portal first, if you haven't. It's $10, it's killer good, and you'll appreciate the jokes in 2 much, much more.) But seriously. Go get it.

Three Month Report

2011-05-01T08:50:00.000-07:00

The biggest success of this whole adventure, I think, is that I've gone through three months with a couple of deviations here and there but I've never actually "fallen off the wagon" as such. I've discovered that I can have a little bit of milk or cheese here and there, but not a bunch. (Which is a shame, because I always want a bunch.) Corn chips won't kill me but they make me retain water like a son of a bitch and feel vaguely lethargic, and potato chips are fine but I am inevitably starving an hour later. But in general, as long as I actually make it to the grocery store regularly I'm pretty much ok eating home-cooked, high-quality meat and veggies all the time.

I've lost around 25 pounds since Feb 1, which is great. But now the interesting part begins - I'm at the low end of what's been "normal" since I put on all this weight in a hurry five years ago, and I've never been able to stay below it for more than about a week. Will I continue to lose weight now? That's the big question. I certainly hope so.

My joints are doing well. I'm still weather-sensitive, but my day-to-day stiffness and discomfort is basically gone. I've been lifting weights with no issues, and I'm back on a pretty regular karate schedule. (It was pretty striking to see what a difference that 25 pounds made, even though the better part of it was water. Pushups are much easier now!)

Other than my ongoing caffeine addiction, I feel pretty good about my current lifestyle and I'm eager to see where it goes from here on out.

Updates

2011-04-04T09:56:00.000-07:00

So the last two weeks my diet has devolved into bacon-and-Red Bull. Which doesn't work quite as well. I'll post more soon - I mostly wanted to note this for posterity.

One Month of Paleo Eating

2011-03-01T10:40:00.000-08:00

So I followed (more or less) the Whole 30 plan throughout February. Here are some stats and observations about the month as a whole.

Weight: 14 lbs lost. Now, I wasn't actually trying to lose weight, and was actively ignoring some of the more obvious suggestions (going deliberately low-carb is the standard one.) Most of this is water loss - I look and feel much less puffy, and my pants are distinctly looser, but this all came off in the first two weeks or so and I've been holding steady since.

Sleep: I sleep pretty well in general, and since I'm not on a fixed schedule it hasn't been much of an issue. I have pretty naturally moved back to a normal sleep-at-night, wake-in-the-morning schedule, though, which I hadn't been since November.

Blood Pressure: from 120/80 to 107/69. This is just a curiosity, since I happened to be scheduled to go to the doctor this morning. I don't have blood pressure problems as such - 120/80 is unusually high for me, actually - but it was interesting for sure.

Meds: I went off the prednisone after about 10 days, and have had no symptoms of acid reflux all month so I am not continuing the Nexium now that the initial prescription is done.

RA Symptoms: gone. No noticeable morning stiffness most days, no swelling, little to no pain. I'm running/hiking regularly, attending karate 2-4 hours a week, and starting a weightlifting program this month since my hands now feel up to it.

Overall: I'm pretty much sold. I feel terrific, have lots of energy, and suffered no ill effects. My carb cravings are nonexistent, and I haven't been seriously tempted to cheat all month. I don't even miss cheese all that much.

So! Onward and upward. In March I'm going to add in a nice, sensible linear-progression weightlifting program and probably start to keep a closer eye on my carbs. I have plenty of weight to lose, and it would be nice to keep it coming off, although I'd expect to see about half of what I lost this month. I don't have any desire to try to add anything back in as of yet.

I know a lot of folks were interested in this whole thing - if you have questions or want to chat about it, I'm more than happy to do so. I've done a ton of reading/podcast listening on these topics this month, and I like talking about my current obsessions.

Sleep

2011-02-22T02:58:00.001-08:00

I've been vaguely worried about the fact that I've been waking up in "the middle of the night." This morning it occurred to me to actually check the time - 4:50am, after having gone to bed at 10:00. I'm experimenting, now - I actually got up instead of trying to fall back asleep. We're going to find out if maybe I don't actually need 10+ hours a night.

A Week of Paleo

2011-02-08T11:15:00.000-08:00

A friend asked my for an idea of what I was actually eating, and while I'm not tracking everything in detail, I was able to put together a list of stuff pretty easily. I figure I may want it for posterity, so here we go - my first week of Paleo meals, with commentary:

Breakfast: Usually eggs, scrambled with onions, mushrooms, or something green and served with salsa and/or avocado. (I get my eggs from a friend with a whole flock of backyard chickens, and they're fantastic.) Otherwise leftovers.

Lunch: Either cold roast beef or sliced turkey from CM, or leftovers.

Snack: Kale chips! Or some nuts and/or a piece of fruit. I actually haven't been snacking much - I find I'm not really hungry between reasonable meal times. Sometimes lunch turns into a series of disconnected snacks, but that's just because I can lounge on the couch and nibble on and off for three hours if I want to.

Dinners:
- Masaman curry with chicken:
I'm not 100% in love with this particular recipe, and the potatoes aren't strictly kosher. I like the dish as a whole, and I need to find a better and also more compliant version.)

- London Broil:
This was good, although I'd probably sub mushrooms and black olives for the green olives and sun-dried tomatoes. It was a little sharp-tasting for me.

- Chicken Adobo:
Again, not strictly kosher, although I use wheat-free tamari instead of regular soy sauce. It wasn't perfect - tamari has a stronger flavor, and I need to mess with the proportions to find a good balance - but it was tasty. I used drumsticks because I prefer dark meat and they were great.

- A generic crockpot beef stew with bison stew meat and sweet potatoes and a bunch of random spices.

- Chicken soup - no recipe, just broth, the HEB Caldo frozen vegetable blend minus the random chunks of corn-on-the-cob, and chopped-up chicken breast. This was perfect mid-week when I was freezing. (The veggie mix does have potatoes, which were kinda terrible - they were just mealy and not tasty.)

Upcoming: a shepherd's pie variant, Cocoa-toasted cauliflower, and something with bison liver.

All in all, I certainly can't complain. There was plenty of food, and all of it was tasty, and none of it was particularly fiddly to cook. Onward!

Lifting, take 2

2011-02-06T07:13:00.001-08:00

I'm pretty sure I miscounted the weight on my overhead press last time. There was no earthly way it was getting above my nose this morning.

Otherwise, though, pretty good - added ten pounds to my deadlift and made a valiant attempt at adding ten to my squat - a nice, from-the-hole fail. If I'm going to fail at least I want to do it with good form.

One Month

2011-02-01T10:19:00.000-08:00

I haven't been blogging much - I have found hand-writing notes more congenial - but I've got a fair bit to report on.

January

First of all, my joints have been in pretty good shape. I had a pair of spikes, both tied to sudden weather changes, and another, less-severe spike right around my last prednisone step-down. Otherwise, they've been good - not perfect, but good.

On the drug front, I'm now on an every-other-day schedule with the prednisone, and in another week or so (when the current winter storm passes over) I may try to drop it entirely. On the other hand, my doctor put me on Nexium for my recurrent acid reflux, which is apparently a common side-effect of prednisone. I'll take that for about a month and hopefully I'll be all done by March.

I haven't been to practice quite as much as I wanted - I was shooting for three days a week and hit two. But I'm reasonably satisfied with that, and I'll step it up as I continue to build stamina. Right now my feet and ankles are getting tired quicker than I'd like, and I'm trying not to push them harder than they'll take. I've also been running regularly, and until this week haven't missed a run. (Again, winter storm = unhappy joints.)

My eating habits are manifestly abysmal. Classic feast-or-famine behavior - I'll eat 1000 calories for three days running, then eat three times that. My weight stayed totally steady all month, which is excellent, but certainly not ideal. I'm not actually overeating, and I'm getting a reasonable amount of exercise, which suggests something else is going on. This brings me to this month's plan.

February

It's time to bite the bullet and go whole hog. It was the paleo folk that brought the possibility of a gluten intolerance to my attention, and that has helped a ton - now I'm going to follow the rest of their recommendations for thirty days and see what happens. It's obvious that I don't tolerate dairy well, as much as I like it, and if there's one grain sensitivity, there may well be more, so a full-bore elimination diet is not a bad idea.

Now, this isn't a weigh-and-measure diet, and I have no intention of adding that in. Like last month, I'm going to eat the way I'm naturally inclined to, with only the restrictions on type of food. I won't be avoiding the scale as recommended, though - I want to make sure I have that data. (I'm not setting weight-loss goals or anything, though - that's not at all the point.)

I'm going to continue running and going to practice, and I'm going to try to add in some body weight exercise as I feel well enough. No lifting yet - maybe next month! I also intend to do a fair bit of mobility work with the help of that excellent blog. I've got a 5k in a couple weeks, and hopefully that will go well - I have some work to do to feel confident about the full run, but I have time to do it.

That's it for now!

17 Hours Later

2011-01-09T12:25:00.000-08:00

I feel mostly caught up on sleep. I actually feel pretty good, now, so I guess it worked out in the long run. I'm pretty beat up from the unexpectedly tough practice yesterday on top of a pretty decent run, though. Today is going to be nice and quiet, and I'm going to eat a bunch to make up for the meals I slept through yesterday.

3:45. Seriously, People?

2011-01-08T17:06:00.000-08:00

3:45am, I am awakened by the inexplicable sound of water running through the pipes. (My bed is right on the outside wall next to the laundry area and building hot-water heater, so this isn't an unusual sound at less god-forsaken hours.) Then the washing machine starts up. "Seriously?" I think. "No, really, seriously?"

So I had a bunch of caffeine today.

Week One

2011-01-07T13:27:00.000-08:00

So we're seven days in to the new year. I have two pages of notes on how everything is going, but the short version is: fine. It's been a pretty steady week, pain-wise - a little higher than I'd like but not problematic. I've done all the physical activities I planned to, and they didn't seem to affect my overall pain level at all, which is fantastic. I was on a steady dose of prednisone all week, and at this point I feel ready to drop down again tomorrow.

One of the hardest parts is ratcheting my plans for the future down - I keep wanting to add all kinds of exercise and do drastic things to my diet, etc. Hopefully with concentration I can rein that in and stick to stuff that I can actually go through with.

I Keep Forgetting

2011-01-04T18:26:00.000-08:00

I just want to remark that I always forget how much better actual food tastes. I made bay scallops with garlic butter in about five minutes instead of my all-too-common post-practice Taco Bell run, and I ate them in about five seconds. So tasty! And so healthy!

Grocery Shopping

2011-01-04T12:40:00.000-08:00

Among other things, I'm trying to live on a fairly tight budget right now, so I took more than my usual care grocery shopping. I pulled a couple of recipes I wanted to try, stopped off at my local mini Asian market to get some of the more obscure items, and went to the regular HEB for the rest. Lots of vegetables, a huge package of chicken thighs (I have roasted a couple whole chickens lately but the thighs are my favorite, and damn they're cheap) and some ground beef. I really wanted to take advantage of the eighteen-pound bag of locally-grown oranges for $5, but I just can't imagine eating all of them before they go bad, so I settled for the four-pound bag for $2. What a crazy markup!

The first thing I did when I got home is make Masaman curry with the chicken thighs - it's supposed to be better the second day, so I cooked it up and then portioned it and stuck it in the fridge. Initial tastings are promising.

I'm definitely slightly stiffer than I have been. It's pretty rainy, and I expect I'm still adjusting to the lower dose, so I'm not really worried yet. This is where having a spreadsheet is really handy - I can see that last time I dropped my dose, it took about five days for the pain and stiffness to level out, and the third day was the worst. So I'm not trying to change anything else right now, because my body is behaving as expected.

Today will be my first day back at karate since the holiday break. I'm looking forward to it, although my quads are still complaining from Sunday. My quads are unduly whiny.

Recovery

2011-01-03T13:21:00.000-08:00

I'm predictably sore today, but in the good way. My joints are actually feeling pretty good - maybe a little irritated, but no big deal. I think my plan is to go to karate tomorrow and Thursday this week - going today seems like it might be a bit much, with the soreness and the run this morning.

I had a really funny moment on the scale this morning - the first reading was 10 pounds down from yesterday. I'm still not sure what happened, exactly, but, nice as that would have been, I'll have to settle for a pound and a half.

Pumping Iron

2011-01-02T12:08:00.000-08:00

Wow, I have missed lifting. My Crossfit Total trip to the gym was a complete success - I was able to lift a pretty respectable percentage of previous maxes, and while I'm sure I'll be sore tomorrow, I didn't have any pain while actually lifting. I'm going to keep an eye on my hands in particular, though. I really don't have any way to spare them stress when lifting heavy, and while it's not impact, I am not certain how they'll handle it.

Despite yesterday's pronouncement, I dropped another 5mg of prednisone today. Looking at my spreadsheet seemed to justify it. Off-the-cuff extrapolation - Tuesday will suck. Let's see what happens!

Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T12:53:00.000-08:00

I'm starting the new year feeling pretty good. I didn't overdo last night, so I got my run in at a reasonable hour and with some success. My joints seem to be tolerating the running pretty well, even if my calf muscles still resent it. The real test will be next week when I try to run and go to class a couple of times.

I did have a touch of heartburn last night. This has been cropping up lately, and it's somewhat worrying. Unfortunately, it could be caused by either of my medications, alcohol, caffeine, or a variety of foods, or any combination thereof. It's been pretty sporadic, so I just want to note it when it comes up.

Today will be a very light day, food-wise. I ate plenty of good, rich food last night, and I'm not remotely hungry yet. I think it'll probably be a soup-and-leftovers day.

I'm going to hold on at this dose for another two days at least, and see what Monday's practice does. My fingers are crossed. I'd like to be off the prednisone by the end of the month, but I need to be really better.

grumble

2010-12-31T08:31:00.000-08:00

Yesterday started off well but ended up pretty painful. I'm calling it a 5 - all joints involved, not crippling but definitely uncomfortable. I'm going to ride it out a couple more days at this dosage before I make any changes. I'm not entirely sure what to blame it on yet, but that's the point of the spreadsheet.

TMI Warning

2010-12-29T12:46:00.000-08:00

One more thing that became apparent - my digestion was definitely disturbed this morning. Too early to tell if it's related to the swelling or not, but worth a note. I'll be eating restaurant food again tonight, but from a much more reliable place.

The run went fine, although my legs are definitely tired. I'll be glad of the two days without running. It is clearly going to take a while to get me back into condition.

Slapstick

2010-12-29T06:55:00.000-08:00

Last night's post got derailed by a late-evening incident with an angry soda bottle and all of my sheets. Anyway.

I am distinctly more stiff this morning than I have been the past two days. Not quite stiff enough to lose range of motion, but it's hard to get those last joints to flex that last half-centimeter. Calling it a 3, although there's no pain to speak of.

Three possible reasons:

- Weather. I always like to blame the weather, and it's been raining all night and we're due thunderstorms today.
- Food. I ordered a (gluten-free) pizza for dinner last night, and also had root beer and ice cream. These shouldn't be triggers necessarily, but that's why I'm tracking.
- Meds. Yesterday was my first day stepping down to 20mgs. I'm going to stay there today and see what happens.

Anything else, including the Will of the Gods, could be the culprit, but those seem most likely.

I did my squats and pushups yesterday - 3x10 of each. No real trouble, although I expect my quads to be complaining by nightfall. Planning to run this morning, stiffness or no.

Day One

2010-12-27T15:22:00.000-08:00

My first day of LOG EVERYTHING is going well. I'm going to keep some notes here, and also verbalize some of my plans for the next month/quarter. (I am planning no further than end of March right now, because, realistically, I can't see that far into the future.)

Exercise: Today was a running day - the second day of Week 2 in the Couch to 5k. I'm more out-of-shape than I like to admit, but it didn't give me any trouble.

I had lunch at Guero's, which was lovely. Mexican food is nice because it doesn't automatically contain tons of flour and bread - corn tortillas make me happy. I do wonder a little about cross-contamination and non-obvious gluten, though, so I'm going to try to note when I eat out so that I can reference it if need be.

Among other things, I'm going to keep extended notes on the data in my spreadsheet here. I'm not going to post the actual sheet, although once I have a month or so of data I may post some selected charts if there are any interesting patterns.

- Pain in the morning: I'm calling it a 2. I had some noticeable stiffness but no loss of range of motion and no pain. (I'm going to try to define these until I get used to the scale, so it stays internally consistent.)
- I split the Pain column into AM and PM because how I feel first thing on waking and how I feel by the end of the day aren't necessarily connected.
- I'm going to log caffeine intake there because DailyBurn doesn't do it automatically.

Some notes on the January plan:

- I'm going to log all my food but I'm not going to change my eating patterns right now. (Not consciously, anyway.) I want to get a reasonable baseline before I try something like hardcore paleo or whatever. Of course, the act of logging will probably change my habits somewhat, because I'm much less likely to snack mindlessly when I know I have to log it after, but I won't be deliberately restricting calories or anything.

- Likewise, I'm not going to start a weightlifting program right now, either. I will be going to karate hopefully three days a week and running three days a week, and that's all I want to load up with. I am going to get a Crossfit Total at the beginning and end of the month in order to get a strength measurement, but I won't be training for it.

What I will do, instead, is do some very light, very basic bodyweight exercises a couple days a week when I'm not doing other things. Pushups, air squats, and bench dips - just a set or two a couple days a week, and only when I'm not feeling tired out from karate. Since the dojo is closed this week, I'll do some on my non-running days and hopefully be ready for the CFT on Sunday, and then just use them as filler throughout the month.

- At the end of the month, I'll take a look at the data and refine from there. I also have a doctor's appointment the first week in February, so I'll be talking to her about medication - I would love to be off prednisone completely by then, but we'll have to see.

Tracking in the New Year

2010-12-26T19:36:00.000-08:00

After a very spotty year, health- and fitness-wise, I'm trying something new for the next few months. I'm going to attempt to obsessively track everything that affects my joint health and try to use that to make intelligent choices about food, exercise, and medication - because there isn't really a better strategy available that I can find. I'm going to use this blog to take notes on my pain and stiffness, mood, the weather, and anything particularly unusual that doesn't fit in a spreadsheet. I'm also going to log my workouts here, because those also aren't always reducible to numbers.

(I'm going to start tomorrow, rather than wait for the first, because more data is better, right?)

I'm afraid it's not going to be very interesting, but this is the handiest place for me to stick this stuff. I don't intend to share my spreadsheets with the world - it'll be rather too much information - but if you have a particular reason to want to see them, drop me a line and we can chat privately.

Neighborly Games!

2010-05-15T08:11:00.000-07:00

Sorry for not updating more often - I've been very busy, and I'm happy to point you at the fruit of my labors. I've created a Facebook and web game review site called Neighborly Games. I'd love to hear what you think, either here or over there.

Amazon v. Macmillan

2010-02-01T13:18:00.001-08:00

(I tried to post this to Metafilter, but alas, it was a double. Seems a shame to let all the links go to waste, though.)

In a late-Friday surprise move, Amazon removed all "Buy Now" links to books published by Macmillan, the parent company of Tor, St. Martin's Press and many others. Macmillan released a statement making clear that this is a hardball negotiation tactic on Amazon's part. Amazon's official statement frames the disagreement a little differently.

The heart of the issue is a difference of opinion about Amazon's place in the supply chain. In addition to various parodies of Amazon's statement (provided not by the CEO or PR department, but the unspecifically-named "Amazon Kindle Team" and buried on their forums), the incident occasioned some thoughtful analysis.

While Amazon has supposedly relented, authors are still waiting for their books to become available.

This is not the first weekend surprise by Amazon (previously.)

Patterns

2010-01-26T07:17:00.000-08:00

This morning I finished the fourth week of the Couch-to-5k plan. I've been running Thursday, Sunday, and Tuesday since the first of the year - haven't missed a run. This is better than I've done in a while for non-karate-related workouts.

I've also been hitting the gym, going to karate at least 3 days a week, and eating quite a bit closer to right than normal. Plus the house is cleaner than it's been in ages. How am I pulling this off? I finally took a step back and looked at some of my patterns.

I live alone, and so must amuse myself. Sometimes I play video games; mostly I read. And since I was a little kid, I would read while I ate. This translated into eating while I read, and I could (and too frequently did) curl up with a book and any amount of food and plow through both without noticing. If all that was in the house was healthy food, I'd eat that, but I was still eating out of habit rather than hunger. And if I was hungry, I'd grab a book and end up killing an hour or two as well as having a meal.

My decision, then, was to try to focus on purposeful, rather than habitual, actions. I moved my book-in-progress from the bedside table to the breakfast bar, and now I prepare a meal, set it out, and only read until it's done. I was super-strict about this for the first couple of weeks, and I'm only easing back a hair now to make sure I don't backslide.

This has done two things: first, it's made portion control much simpler and less painful. I figure out what I want to eat, I eat it, I'm done. I'm not on any sort of super-strict diet or anything - I'm just cooking my own food and tracking it so that I know the new pattern is working. Second, I am not losing entire evenings (or days!) in a book unless I consciously decide to - and the thing is, I usually don't. I have time to do the dishes and sweep the floors and work on the novel, and I don't have to pry myself away from the book to do it. If I decide I want to read, I usually take a nice long bath and read in there. It's lovely and relaxing and there's no temptation to snack.

I grump all the time about the 50 pounds I put on just before I moved into the condo. But the thing is, yeah, I made some bad choices there, but that's not why I haven't been able to lose the weight. That is the result of years of patterns that I've set for myself while living alone, and it's finally time to toss them out and make some new ones.

Writing Elsewhere

2010-01-20T08:04:00.001-08:00

I have a short essay up at our dojo page - check it out!

Happy New Year!

2010-01-03T09:50:00.000-08:00

I've been exceedingly lax in posting since my October blast. Hopefully that will get a little bit better over the next month. I'm trying some new things with my routine and I expect them to have at least some effect.

My Life and Karate, Day Thirty-one

2009-11-06T08:51:00.000-08:00

The Kickathon is tomorrow, and I thought that today I'd do a wrap-up of the blogging experiment, because statistics are fun! Courtesy of Google Analytics, bit.ly, and Facebook.

- 28 posts
- 1,402 total pageviews
- 384 unique visitors
- 39 Facebook comments
- 31 "likes"
- 10 blog comments
- One link from a well-known women's athletics blog
- Six donors
- $125 dollars raised

Saturdays and Sundays are definitely slow times - y'all are clearly only reading these at work. The fiction got the most feedback on Facebook for sure, but didn't get anywhere near the most traffic. (That's not definitive, of course, because I can't sort out people who just read posts from the front page rather than the permalinks, but there's a large difference between the top posts and the lesser ones.)

Thanks to everyone who donated, and if you haven't, there's still time. This was a great experiment, and an excellent writing challenge for me. I still got my butt soundly kicked, fundraising-wise, by people who went with more traditional methods, but hey - we reached our overall goal, and I ain't complaining. I would love to hear feedback on what y'all who have read so regularly thought of the whole thing - too much content? Not enough? More fiction? More pictures? Kill the italicized explanatory bits?

I dunno if I'll do the same thing next year, but this year was fun! Tomorrow is the actual event, and I'll post a report with pics sometime in the next few days. Thanks for coming!

My Life and Karate, Day Thirty

2009-11-05T19:10:00.000-08:00

I have been remiss this week, but ramp-up to the actual event is eating much of my brain power. And we are less than two hundred dollars from our goal! This is awesome - I confess I was a little skeptical that we'd hit it, in this economy.

Thanks to everyone who's donated, and if you haven't yet, There's still time! Here is the link.

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-Eight

2009-11-03T12:58:00.000-08:00

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-seven

2009-11-02T19:51:00.000-08:00

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-five

2009-10-31T11:08:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-Four

2009-10-30T12:57:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-three

2009-10-29T18:27:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-Two

2009-10-28T08:48:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-One

2009-10-27T19:43:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty

2009-10-26T20:08:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Nineteen

2009-10-25T19:37:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Eighteen

2009-10-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

My dojo, Sun Dragon Martial Arts and Self Defense, is running its major yearly fundraiser. We're a nonprofit martial arts studio, which is something of a rare beast, and we raise money every year for our scholarship fund and the free self-defense classes we offer in the community. For my part, every day until the day of the Kickathon, I will write a random amusing anecdote about karate and self-defense - enjoy!

A Meditation on Zombies - Part Three

(Read Part One and Part Two)

The Ghoul Squad was on its way. But they didn't get here before the door broke.

Another reason they were called "zombies" is that they were damned hard to stop. The Ghoul Squad had specialized dart guns that injected a nano-shutoff package that would make them lie down and shut up long enough to be restrained and shipped to the White Room, but short of that the only way to knock them out was to get at their control chip. A good solid electrocution would do it, but there was no way to arrange that that wouldn't kill all of us, too - although I'd heard stories of people luring them into a pool and dropping an extension cord in. That killed the zombies rather than just containing them, of course, but even though they could stop the nanos and clean them out, getting zombified tended to be fatal anyway. At best, you'd live on with all the brain and nerve damage - I always though that being an inert, drooling bag of flesh sounded even less fun than being a mobile, hostile bag of flesh.

The control chip is implanted at the base of the skull - lacking the traditional shotguns or machetes, we'd have to hit it hard enough to shatter bone, in a target area of about two square inches. That's not really possible with bare hands, at least for most of us. The black belts had the best of it - they had five-foot-long sticks, so they could trip the things (which WAS easy,) and drive the ends down into skulls. The rest of us had no such option - Sensei thought, and she was probably right, that giving the lot of us long, unwieldy weapons that we'd never been trained with was an even worse idea than letting us go barehanded.

Fortunately, it was only a single door, so the zombies could only shuffle in one or two at a time. We had four black belts with staves, Sensei behind them with a pair of sai, and then six lower-ranked students with nothing but our fists and feet and strict orders not to get eaten. After the initial panic, we quickly settled into a rhythm - a zombie would lurch through the door, one black belt would trip it, another would smash its skull. Once we were sure it had stopped moving, two of us lower belts would dart forward, grab it by the arms, and drag it aside, where another black belt waited to make sure the dead ones stayed down.

The pile of squished zombies got too big to manage - we really didn't have that much room - so we picked our moment and darted over to set up on the other side. This proved to be a mistake. One of the last few zombies in the first pile wasn't quite dead, and I was unlucky enough to be the first thing it saw when it hauled itself upright.

No one knows why they attack people. They don't actually eat brains, or anything at all - a zombie will only keep going until the body gives out. (If it's not sterilized pretty soon after that, the nanos can do some very strange things to the remaining tissue, but they're usually harmless.) But they always do. And this one was attacking me.

They're not very fast, and not very smart. I caught it in the stomach with a side kick, and that knocked it back a step. I went for a knee next, and had to deflect its hands as they clawed at my unprotected face - from the nails, this had been a first-class suburban soccer mom. That made me feel somewhat better about the fact that my kick sent her knee bending in a way it was definitely not designed for, and she stumbled. I didn't have long to feel good about my skills before she pushed off her good leg and lunged teeth-first at my throat. I held her off as she flailed against the side of my head with her hands and snapped her teeth inches from my face. Suddenly, what remained of her face went slack and she was just a corpse sliding to the floor. Sensei pulled her sai out of its skull.

I stepped away from the corpse, assumed the formal ready stance, and bowed. Sensei rolled her eyes at me. Unflappable, I tell you.

Only a few dead zombies later, we started to hear a new sound - the thwipp-thud of gas-powered darts hitting flesh. The black belts tripped one more zombie and we backed the hell away from the door. Seconds later, figures in full body armor stormed in. Their leader raised her helmet, looked at the two neat piles of corpses, and muttered something to herself. "Everyone ok?" she said.

We all murmured something vaguely like agreement. Seven more Ghoul Squaddies stomped in, and I winced at the boots on the floor we had so recently swept. The last one was carrying a roll of bags, and with callous efficiency they loaded each corpse into a bag and hustled them out to their truck. When all the corpses were gone both inside and out, they came back in.

"Ok, everyone close your eyes."

We did. They sprayed us all with a fine mist, and then walked around and held a scanner to the backs of our heads to check our chips. They conferred, and the leader grunted. "All clear," she said. They turned to walk off, and I heard her mutter "Put us out of a job soon." I shook my head. Not if I had anything to say about it.

After they all filed out, we all turned to Sensei. She was surveying the floor - there was nano-dust, gore, brains, and muddy bootprints all over. I sighed, bowed, and went to get the mop. My fellow students followed.

You can help us save the world from zombies by by donating $5 to our fundraiser!

My Life and Karate, Day Seventeen

2009-10-23T06:22:00.000-07:00

My dojo, Sun Dragon Martial Arts and Self Defense, is running its major yearly fundraiser. We're a nonprofit martial arts studio, which is something of a rare beast, and we raise money every year for our scholarship fund and the free self-defense classes we offer in the community. For my part, every day until the day of the Kickathon, I will write a random amusing anecdote about karate and self-defense - enjoy!

A Meditation on Zombies - Part Two

(read Part One here)

"Zombies," she sighed.

These weren't the classic rotting undead of pulp fiction - they were a side effect of the wonders of nano-modification. If you neglected your recalibration, usually nothing bad happened, or at least nothing worse than your chip sending a big blinking exclamation mark across your vision once a minute until you went to the chop shop to have things double-checked. But if something bad happened, usually "something bad" involved a billion suddenly randomly-programmed molecule-sized machines hijacking your body's systems and doing whatever they felt like. The common side effects were brain damage, loss of motor control, out-of-control automimmune responses, and occasionally the nanos would decide they needed more material and they'd start chewing up important bits.

Apparently the nanos particularly liked cheeks. Why cheeks in particular, I had no idea, but there were at least three naked jawbones pressed up against the window as the zombies scrabbled at the glass. I couldn't help but shudder.

There are no brain-chemistry mods (not yet, although they swear they're working on them) but if there were, I'd swear our Sensei had one to make her unflappable. With a few short words, she sent the black belts to the equipment locker and sent the rest of us to the window to roll down the shades. Some of the white belts hesitated, but I had more faith in the glass - I'd seen a couple of people bounce off of it and I was pretty sure it would hold.

With the heavy shades down, most of the zombies couldn't see us, so they stopped trying to get in that way. They gathered behind the door instead. The door was made of two smaller panes of glass in a steel frame, and it would hold against the steady pressure of bodies for a while. The black belts emerged from the supply closet with helmets, gloves, and shin-and-foot guards. We had enough for everybody, although several people had to squash too-small helmets on to their heads or hitch up the shinguards to their knees. The big danger from zombies - aside from getting ripped limb-from-limb, of course - was contamination. Usually only open wounds were at risk, but the zombies would try to bite and claw, and no one wanted to spend three days in the White Room getting scrubbed inside and out if they could possibly avoid it. Our uniforms were heavy canvas, and the gear covered the rest - hopefully that would be enough.

Well, hopefully the Ghoul Squad - the city's anti-zombie strike force - would get here before the door gave way, but judging from the look on Sensei's face, that was a lot to hope for. She hung up the phone and we all turned to her, although the white belts kept glancing back over their shoulders at our uninvited guests.

"We're on their list," she said. "Apparently there was a big outbreak at the mall, and there are groups all over this part of town. It may be a while." She paused to count noses. "Black belts, two of you keep watch at all times - carry a bo or jo, whichever you like. Everyone else, get some water or use the bathroom now, then come back out."

One of the newer students suggested we all hide in the bathroom. Sensei shook her head. "None of the inner doors are very strong, and once they get inside, they'll be able to hear and smell us - they'll try to get through. We need space to fight properly."

I grabbed my water bottle from the changing room and came out again. Once we'd all had a drink, Sensei set us to warming up. The warmup routine almost totally failed to distract me from the moans of the zombies - and the creaking of the door.

We waited for an hour, trying to stay loose and more or less sane. A second call to the police assured us that the Ghoul Squad was on its way. But they didn't get here before the door broke.

(Part Three will go up tomorrow at 10AM Central!)

You can help us save the world from zombies by by donating $5 to our fundraiser!

My Life and Karate, Day Sixteen

2009-10-22T11:19:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Fifteen

2009-10-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

My dojo, Sun Dragon Martial Arts and Self Defense, is running its major yearly fundraiser. We're a nonprofit martial arts studio, which is something of a rare beast, and we raise money every year for our scholarship fund and the free self-defense classes we offer in the community. For my part, every day until the day of the Kickathon, I will write a random amusing anecdote about karate and self-defense - enjoy!

Our instructor Joy's teachers Shihan Nancy and Kyoshi Sarah (Shihan and Kyoshi are titles referring to their holders' sixth and fifth degree black belt ranks, respectively) came down this spring to administer the first-degree black belt test for two Sun Dragon students. We spent the weeks before their arrival practicing super-formal address to everyone and scrubbing every surface compulsively. They're really very nice people, but the mood was that of a family preparing for a visit from its revered but strict and intimidating older relatives. (A feeling I'm used to - every time Grandma visits, Mom pays for a visit from a cleaning service to prepare. Sometimes two visits.)

The first night they were there, they taught a couple classes (which were interesting and fun and just about the whole school turned out for them, which was neat) and then we went to dinner. We went to a Mexican place not far away. It was Friday night, and we had a fairly big party, so it wasn't that big a surprise that there was a wait. It was slightly annoying that we had to stand outside because there was no place to sit, but it wasn't that cold.

Ten minutes later, it was getting that cold. I had a sweatshirt in my car, so I ran to get it. A little further redistribution of outerwear later, and we were fine. We stood shoulder to shoulder in the traditional damn-it's-cold circle, and I felt very much at home. So did the visiting Chicagoans, I imagine. One big table on the patio opened up shortly thereafter, and half the group, including our guests, went with apologies to the rest of us to sit down.

Fifteen minutes after that, we sent a messenger to the hostess to find out what our place in line was. She said the table next to the other half of our party was just finishing up, so it wouldn't be long. Fair enough. We reformed the huddle.

Ten minutes later and the people at our promised table were lingering over drinks. The huddle drifted slightly closer and we started to shoot glares at them.

Another ten minutes passed with no movement. The hostess apologized profusely, but there really wasn't anything she could do. She was very nice, really, and we all tried hard not to catch her in the crossfire of glaring.

Ten minutes later, the table finally picked up the check. We cheered very quietly. They started passing it around and obviously debating it. We followed it like spectators at a tennis match. One person pulled out his wallet and then rummaged through his pockets, and we groaned. We debated offering to cover the tip for them if they'd just go away, but decided to wait.

The seated half of the party had already gotten their food. We were still waiting. We were now leaning on the porch rail about ten feet from our adversaries and making no secret of our intense interest in their leavetaking. It took another ten minutes before they actually got up. As near as we could tell, they never noticed us at all.

At this point we were cold, hungry, and cranky. When we finally sat down, our other table immediately passed us their half-finished appetizers so we wouldn't faint. They were of course done with their meals before we got ours, but they graciously waited while we ate. It didn't take long. In the end, we were grateful that the two black belt candidates had decided to go home and retire early instead of joining us, and fervently hoped that the meal wasn't as memorable for our guests as it had been for our table.

I think this incident highlights the effectiveness of Sun Dragon's violence prevention training, because without that, there surely would have been a rumble. Help us prevent more restaurant riots by donating $5 to our fundraiser!

My Life and Karate, Day Fourteen

2009-10-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Thirteen

2009-10-19T12:44:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Twelve

2009-10-18T16:45:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Eleven

2009-10-17T19:56:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Ten

2009-10-16T10:41:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Nine

2009-10-15T19:24:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Eight

2009-10-14T19:49:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Seven

2009-10-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Six

2009-10-12T09:20:00.000-07:00

Ripping a short wall-stub down with a hammer
Spending time with my dojo-mates when none of us were trying to hit anyone else.
Ghetto-texturing the strip where the wall-stub had connected to the main wall (mud and a texture roller woo! I still see that strip every time I'm in the dojo and wonder how I could have done it better.)
Hanging drywall. Lots of drywall. (We built out the office and two changing rooms, which was a lot of drywall.)
Drinking a beer. I hate beer, but after six hours of construction work, nothing else would do. It was perfect.
Laying a tongue-and-groove cork floor. Then ripping it up, putting down plywood because using the old industrial carpet as a subfloor was too squishy, and laying it again.
Painting pine boards with three coats before finally realizing they were going to be completely invisible unless you were on an eight-foot ladder.
Framing a window for the Eye of God (the head instructor's office, so she can keep an eye on us without being deafened by the constant yelling.)
Reveling in the air conditioning, the working plumbing, and the clean walls. And the parking.

Overall, it was a great experience, and we have a nice new dojo with a gorgeous, flexible floor and - best of all - air conditioning. And I have a lot of very good friends who only sometimes punch me in the head.

The move was funded in part by Kickathons of years past. In addition to our scholarship fund, this year's fundraiser will help us hang mirrors to aid our training. Help improve our facility and our community by donating $5 to our fundraiser!

My Life and Karate, Day Five

2009-10-11T19:50:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Four

2009-10-10T15:37:00.000-07:00

Housekeeping - Kickathon Donations

2009-10-09T14:58:00.000-07:00

If you'd like to make a cash or check donation, please give a valid email address at least so we can be sure you're real. We've had either a rash of very generous anonymous people and we'll be very happy when the mailman arrives in a week or so, or someone's just fooling around, which is sorta weird. We'll be keeping all anonymous cash or check donations out of the system so it doesn't skew our progress charts - until the checks arrive, of course!

You can mail checks to the following address:

Sun Dragon Martial Arts
4534 West Gate Blvd; Suite 101
Austin, TX 78745

If you'd like to make sure I get credit, you're welcome to include a note to that effect, but either way, it's fine!

My Life and Karate, Day Three

2009-10-09T06:00:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day Two

2009-10-08T09:16:00.000-07:00

My Life and Karate, Day One

2009-10-07T09:58:00.000-07:00

Training for a 5k

2009-09-28T08:03:00.000-07:00

After my last post, I've made some progress towards improving my approach towards fitness. I set the specific, achievable goal of improving my 5k time by the Race for the Cure. My friend Jo volunteered to put together a three-day-a-week training program for me, and that takes care of the regular scheduling and accountability parts. I've done four workouts so far, and plan to keep it up for the full six weeks. My latest 5k time was pretty terrible (about 37:30) so I am confident I'll be able to improve on it.

Going Both Ways

2009-09-21T10:08:00.000-07:00

There is too much I want to do with my time and energy. The three big ones: I want to finish a novel, I want to study karate, I want to get really fit. I end up not reaching any of my goals because even when they don't actively conflict, there's just only so much time, energy, and focus I can come up with.

Lately, studying karate has been winning. I think that's because of a couple of things:
- It's regularly scheduled. I am totally a creature of habit.
- There are other people involved who will notice if I slack off
- It's got regular, predictable milestones and goals.
- It's fun!

Hmm, that's sort of a useful little list. Consistency, accountability, clear progress markers, and... fun. I wonder if applying that to my other two goals will result in anything interesting.

The novel - it's been making some progress, although not nearly enough to suit me.
- Consistency: none. I write when I feel like it, which isn't all that often.
- Accountability: I have recently improved this, and that's really the only reason I've been making progress. It's harder to slack off completely when I know I have to cancel a coffee date, or sit through it knowing I haven't done my share.
- Progress: On the one hand, the work is divided neatly into chapters. On the other, I haven't really set time-based goals. So about 50% on this one.
- Fun: I enjoy the process once I get started, and I do feel really good when I finish a session.

That more closely resembles "getting really fit." (Which I am counting totally separately from karate, because if that alone got me really fit, I'd be a ninja already.)
- Consistency: None at the moment. I can be good about this for about six weeks at a stretch.
- Accountability: Posting to the blog doesn't seem to do it. Possibly because only half a dozen people (at best) read it.
- Progress: Let's face it, "getting really fit" is a crappy goal. I need to define that better.
- Fun: I do enjoy the various activities involved, when I make myself do them.

So I need to define my goals better for fitness, and figure out how to get into the habit of both sitting and writing and... doing whatever will support my fitness goals.

More to come in further posts.

Rawr

2009-09-04T06:32:00.000-07:00

I definitely need to make sure I'm eating enough during the day - I was pretty crazy by 6pm yesterday. Once I chomped through a third of a pound of roast beef I was all better, though.

As I often do, I deliberately went a bit overboard this weekend, so I was artificially bloated when I hopped on the scale Monday morning - but I am amused to report I'm six pounds down already. That might be my new record for water-weight loss.

My caffeine plan seems to be to avoid sugared sodas but go ahead with the sugar-free ones, at least for the moment. Maybe in a week or two I'll feel strong enough to give them up too.

Daily Posting

2009-09-03T07:25:00.000-07:00

The daily check-in is really helpful for me when I'm trying to do something new, hence all the posting.

Yesterday went just fine, although I realize I'm eating much less than usual. It's not precisely bad, but it's not precisely intentional, either, and it's something I'm going to need to keep an eye on to make sure I don't go overboard.

blinkblink

2009-09-02T06:17:00.000-07:00

Day one went pretty well, on the whole. I confess I cheated a little bit and ate the last few bites of a couple of desserts lying around the house, because I couldn't stand to throw out perfectly good Ben and Jerry's, but otherwise I was fine.

I need to consider my caffeine solutions - Jamba Juice is clever and all, but it's a whole meal by itself. Caffeine isn't actually on my to-avoid list, but sugar is. We'll see. I should go off it again but I can't face that while I'm quitting everything else.

Day One

2009-09-01T09:16:00.000-07:00

Started the morning with an all-fruit smoothie from Jamba Juice, and lunch will be sushi. So not a success on the "hey, this will save money!" front, but yummy all the way around.

Follow-up and Refinement

2009-08-31T12:51:00.000-07:00

This is a good short rundown of the "no" list. Tomatoes (and probably other nightshade-family stuff) is not directly related to the Paleo diet - it's a RA-trigger possibility. I will probably add them back in two weeks and see how (or if) I react.

This is going to be quite a challenge. I am still in denial about cheese.

A Challenge

2009-08-30T09:32:00.000-07:00

One month - September.

Eat purely "paleo" - no processed food, no grains, no legumes.

Also, no tomatoes.

Why? This is why.

"Another suspect lectin disease is rheumatoid arthritis. The normal human IgG molecule possesses carbohydrate side chains, which terminate with galactose. In rheumatoid arthritis much of the galactose is missing, so that the subterminal sugar---N-acetyl glucosamine---is exposed instead. These deficient IgG molecules feature strongly in the circulating immune complexes that cause fever and symptoms.12 In diet responsive rheumatoid arthritis one of the commonest trigger foods is wheat, and wheat lectin is specific for N-acetyl glucosamine---the sugar that is normally hidden but exposed in rheumatoid arthritis. This suggests that N-acetyl glucosamine oligomers such as chitotetraose (derived from the chitin that forms crustacean shells) might be an effective treatment for diet associated rheumatoid arthritis. Interestingly, the health food trade has already siezed on N-acetyl glucosamine as an antiarthritic supplement"

I'm already avoiding wheat, and it's had a profound effect on my joint issues. It's not 100% fixed, though, and I want to try to go whole hog to see if it makes any further difference. I also need to quit eating the shite I have been eating. It doesn't help my mood or focus or overall health. So, we shall see how possible this is.

A Challenge

2009-07-29T07:40:00.000-07:00

One of the things this lively debate crystallized for me is how hard it must be for people who have never questioned their sexuality to really grok the concept of "the closet".

What would it be like for a straight person to try to spend a day, or maybe a weekend, "in the closet"? Play the pronoun game! Avoid making appreciative remarks about people of your preferred gender! Avoid all lingering glances! When out in public with your partner, avoid any hint of affection! (Well, warn your partner first.) Try desperately to avoid macho/femme mannerisms! Doesn't that sound like fun?

I realized I liked girls "that way" when I was 13 or 14, so I got to go through most of adolescence trying very, very hard not to give myself away. The high school I went to was not an environment that was or is particularly gay-friendly, although lately the school itself does seem to be making a substantial effort. But in my day, you just... didn't come out. The one boy who did got himself emancipated and moved to the city because not even his parents supported him, and the one effort to set up a support group led to harassment and threats from whatever male sports team was active that season. I was on a sports team myself and... there was just no way.

That experience has left me with a couple of interesting scars. The most obvious one is that I am a complete disaster at any sort of casual physical affection. I spent so long worrying that if I touched any woman that she'd believe (or realize) that I was attracted to her that now I am almost totally incapable of initiating contact, and I'm almost as bad at accepting it without twitching and flinching and generally looking like a freak. Which annoys me, because I'd love to be one of those indiscriminately affectionate people, or at least be able to give people hugs without it being a Big Deal.

I wouldn't wish that aspect of my high school experience on anyone, but as a controlled experiment, I'd love to see some people trying to get a sense of it - consciously noting what they usually do without thinking that they'd have to change or stop doing altogether. Even without the threat of substantial social consequences for failure, it might give some folks a perspective they wouldn't find otherwise.

I Haven't Mentioned the Game's Name For a Reason

2009-07-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

Kill Ten Rats has the right idea. One of the more frustrating things about situations like this is that there's just not much any individual can do about it. I was tickled to see myself quoted in various places, and I'm glad I brought the issue to the attention of various folks, but that's not going to hit EA very hard. It's not like I was going to buy the game anyway (I don't have the right console, or a console at all, for that matter.) I also know too much about EA's internal structure to think that boycotting, say, The Sims is going to have any useful impact - the two products are so widely separated that no one's going to be able to correlate that kind of data. A media blackout, on the other hand - that, I like.

I will have to remember this particular product, though - I will be very curious to see what the sales are, and if this controversy sparks again around launch. I suspect it will - the internet has a very long memory.

Non-Apologies and Other Links

2009-07-27T13:10:00.000-07:00

Apologies like this are worth less than nothing, very literally. It annoys me more to see that the people behind it still can't see the problem even when it's explicitly pointed out to them than it would if they just went on their merry way.

A real live booth babe weighs in. She uses more caps than I did, and I applaud her for it.

I love Lum's blog, and I'm always grateful for the traffic, but his commenters are... not good with topics like this.

An unemotional social media perspective on the contest and the resulting stink. I usually prefer to write pieces like that, but every now and then it's more fun to bellow at the stars.

A really good link roundup and perhaps the most succinct summary of the issue at hand: "This contest ENCOURAGES the behavior that makes cons UNSAFE FOR WOMEN. PERIOD."

I'll probably try to do a somewhat more technical analysis of this contest once my blood pressure is a little more stable.

GAHHHHHH

2009-07-24T12:50:00.000-07:00

(Warning: Adult Language and EXCESSIVE USE OF CAPS)

I am fucking sick of working in an industry where this sort of shit makes it out into the public eye. I understand that absymally stupid ideas get floated in meetings all the time, but at a billion-dollar company like EA, you'd think SOMEONE would have the basic common sense to put a stop to a FUCKING CONTEST TO SEE WHO CAN HARASS YOUR EMPLOYEES THE MOST.

Yeah, they're booth babes, yeah, they're probably used to it. I don't care. First of all, "commit acts of lust" is NOT an acceptable way to describe "take your picture with the girl in the costume!" I've worked Comic-Con, and while there are lots of perfectly normal, well-adjusted people there, there are also a LOT of people with boundary issues, an imperfect understanding of social norms, and/or a really fucking twisted view of women. It's hard enough to maintain one's personal space - having fucking Marketing supporting the random gropage as a CONTEST does NOT HELP.

Secondly, any other women in, around, or remotely near that booth is going to have to deal with the spillover, guaranteed. I can barely imagine a more hostile work environment. I hope to hell they have an otherwise-all-male booth, or that the female employees have some good practical self-defense skills and a lawyer. *shudder*

Thirdly - Jesus, what kind of monkeys did EA hire instead of lawyers? I expect a certain casual misogyny from the Marketing department (sad to say) - sex sells, those boys know it, and they don't ever bother to think real hard about the implications of using it. But if I were anywhere near the EA booth and got my tit grabbed, I'd be on the phone to a shyster in seconds.

My God, what a stupid fucking idea. I can't decide if I'm glad I'm shut of those assholes, or if I'm sorry I no longer have a building key, because there's some nuts need kicking.

(Edited to add, apparently it's ANY booth babe, not just EA's. Lawsuit in 3, 2, 1...)

Forums, Again

2009-07-23T12:59:00.000-07:00

This is an excellent roundup of why game forums are dangerous and awful. The "Value of Forums" section is rather token, and pretty much coincides with my rant here.

My question is, if we all know this stuff, why do we keep using forums? Why play with a tiger if you don't absolutely have to?

Labels

2009-07-19T15:20:00.001-07:00

Added labels, mostly for my own convenience. If for some ungodly reason you're reading my blog and you're not my mother, I'll remind you that this is actually about four blogs merged into one, so it's very streaky.

Proving My Point

2009-07-19T07:15:00.000-07:00

I'm still kicking around the idea of how to teach (or at least define) good writing for community management. To that end, I was idly googling the friend who spurred this train of thought, and came across a completely unrelated paper. That paper contained this lovely bit:

"If you ask people for information (or compel them to provide it), you should give it back to them in some familiar form that lets them see how it is useful or interesting. They will then be less inclined to resent your asking in the first place, more inclined to be curious about the relationship of their work to others’, and more open to considering its implications"

I sent that around for various of my colleagues to admire, and Sanya used it as the nucleus of her weekly column. It's a good column - go read it.

What really interest me are the comments. The MMO players who are invested to the point where they read and comment on industry-insider process columns like Sanya's are the ones most likely to give feedback to the companies in the first place, so what they have to say is worth listening to.

"Sending your feedback to Customer Support will most likely get you a "Thanks for your feedback!" standard response while your suggestions will end up in the CRM's digital bin as a single person's opinion will most probably be regarded as rather unimportant.

You will be better off with becoming part of a focus group (if such thing is in place), or with providing feedback on the game forums where other players and maybe community representatives may discuss it." - Phall

This, I think, rather proves the point of the quote above. The feedback to CS is just as important, if not more so - it could be on any topic, and the CS folks are well-situated to spot trends and report them (although some teams are better than others in having a channel for the CS team to pass those issues along.) A focus group is usually, well, focused, and feedback that doesn't touch on the specific area in question is tossed out - but usually the focus groups have much more visibility into the process and the decisions as they're made, so their feedback feels much more influential.

"The suggestion and class-specific forums almost NEVER draw an official dev response... the ACTUAL feedback forums are viewed as the places where ideas go to die, so fewer and fewer people bother." - ArKane

That definitely matches my experience. People like to feel heard, and you can't look interested and nod meaningfully over the internet. What you can do is respond. The problem is, not every idea or thought or post is one we can respond to without causing even more trouble. The standard "Thanks for your feedback!" note rapidly becomes worthless, because it's a form response. That's why customers like it best when they have a forum they can post on, particularly one where the devs respond. They can tell they're being listened to by their peers as well as by their desired target audience. The problem with that of course being that it doesn't scale.

The weekly Q&A/Grab Bag style of response that Sanya herself pioneered is one way to handle the situation, but I can say from experience (about two years of those linked archives were my posts) that it can be a very tricky thing to pick what gets attention and what doesn't. And it's even trickier when you have weeks where there are literally no new customer issues that you can address, because there's no decision or reaction that can be made public.

So this is what I'm kicking around. There's gotta be a better way to do this that a) encourages quality customer feedback and b) scales with the size of the community without requiring ridiculous amounts of headcount. I have my own plots and schemes, but I'd love to hear other people's thoughts.

Stray Thought

2009-07-14T19:29:00.001-07:00

I like some of Stephen King's work very much. I dislike some of it quite a bit as well. Stephen King writes about upper-middle-class people sometimes (writers, artists, etc) and working-class people sometimes. Are the two related? Must go flip though bookshelf.

Community Management 101, Writing Component

2009-07-13T09:39:00.000-07:00

I had a conversation this weekend with a friend who's involved in developing writing curricula for various different disciplines, and it got me to wondering about how I'd teach the particular style of writing needed in my own job.

There are really only two key elements:

- Control of tone: Emotional content is a very big part of everything we write, because much if not most of it is targeted at individuals, rather than a general audience.

- Clarity of content: The most minor of misunderstandings can spark week-long drama fests and infinitely repeated misinformation. (Ask me sometime about the function of hunger in UO.)

The content that requires factual clarity would probably be pretty much covered by a standard technical writing curriculum. I've learned it more or less by trial and error, but I think that's the easier part to teach. (Learning to translate patch notes from programmerese is a separate art...) The question of tone is the more interesting one.

We talk a lot about "good instincts" when discussing what to look for in a new hire, and while half of this is not necessarily writing-specific - when not to respond to a situation, when to ask for backup, that sort of thing - half of it is about choosing the most effective emotional content for a particular piece of writing and being able to accurately convey it. Both parts of that are very hard.

Picking the right emotional content is hard. It's slightly easier in one-on-one communications, because you only have to predict one person's reaction - but I very seldom get the luxury of dealing with my customers one-on-one. I usually need to talk to large numbers of them at once, and walk a very narrow path that will give me the best reaction from the largest number of people. Different communities have different temperaments - a friendly, cheerful tone may give you a warm and positive reaction from one group, whereas in another it's taken as a sign of weakness. Being able to read the room is one of those things that we call "instinct" and can only be taught by experience.

I would kill, however, for a class that taught how to convey that tone - avoiding common pitfalls, learning and working around loaded words and phrases ("working as designed," "soon," etc, in the MMO industry.) It is NOT a good area in which to have to learn by doing, but that's the only way I know how to teach it.

This is My Father

2009-05-15T14:58:00.001-07:00

He's coming out of surgery yesterday, and my mom meets him as they're rolling him to his room
He says, "Piece of cake!"
Mom says, "Oh, good, it was a piece of cake?"
He says, "No, I want a piece of cake!"

Like The Back of My Hand, part 2

2009-05-07T15:03:00.000-07:00

I've always had an active fantasy life. (Not like that... well, yes, like that, too. But anyway.) In my head I've always been an athlete, a tall, competent, coordinated athlete who can dodge a bullet or take down a mugger with one punch or perform heroic leaps to catch falling babies. In reality, I'm a stocky, uncoordinated, awkward desk jockey with years of experience playing sports badly and staying out of trouble. But there was always the thought that if I won the lottery, took myself off to some mysterious island, and trained diligently for a couple of years, I could become the ass-kicking Amazon of my fantasies.

The hardest part of dealing with my joint issues is coming to terms with the fact that that is no longer true.

It's not a loss of something tangible. I'm not even all that upset about some of the nastier possible consequences of this incurable, degenerative condition. It's more like the "loss of hope" described here - I have a surprising amount of emotional energy invested in my athletic potential. Untangling that is taking a lot of time, and I find myself resisting it very strongly - it's much easier to just forge ahead and take my pills and go to my PT appointments and not think about it too hard. I don't know if that's healthy or not. It seems like something is sort of broken with my self-image, and I should probably figure out what's wrong so I can fix it, but I'm having trouble sitting still long enough.

Speaking of which, I'm going to continue musing in later posts.

Like the Back of My Hand

2009-05-05T09:19:00.000-07:00

I have had mysterious joint pain since I was about fifteen. At first I just assumed that years of spraining my fingers playing goalie had made them sensitive to weather changes. My pediatrician, after the blood tests came back negative for anything interesting, said "yeah, lots of girls get growing pains, take some Advil and don't worry about it." So I didn't. The pain got worse, and the joints in my feet started to ache, too, but it still wasn't critical.

Moving to Texas definitely seemed to help - warmer weather and less rain made the bad patches less frequent and severe. So for several years I didn't think much about it at all. I asked one doctor about it when I had a chance, but all he wanted to know was what painkiller I was looking for. I wasn't, and shrugged and let it drop. Maybe I shouldn't have, but it still wasn't bad enough for me to worry about.

A year or so after that, I had one brief really bad spell - the pain had spread to all my joints, and was severe enough that I took a few days off work to stay in bed. Finally my roommate bullied me into going to a chiropractor, and that seemed to help, but I didn't much like the doctor and I definitely couldn't afford to go as often as he wanted me to. Fortunately, the pain dropped off pretty quickly after that and I was back to normal. From there on my bad spells were no worse than before, although they would now involve all of my joints.

This winter, everything changed. I went from a little achy to unable to function in about a day. I spent the holidays in a hot bath, and had to take a month off of karate because I just couldn't make it through. It was finally bad enough that I couldn't ignore it. I started googling, and found pictures like this. I got my insurance in order and found an internist.

After all of the bloodwork, tests, x-rays, and everything, the verdict is... I am blindingly healthy. Except, of course, for my swollen and painful joints. The rheumatologist is going with a verdict of rheumatoid arthritis, which seems likely enough. I'm currently on three different medications, seeing a physical therapist, and, for the moment, cutting wheat out of my diet to see if it has any effect at all. The pain and swelling still vary pretty widely week to week, but I'm doing much better than I was in January.

So that's the backstory. Looks like this one will be a multi-post effort - stay tuned.

Quick Survey on Twitter

2009-03-18T06:59:00.001-07:00

If you use Twitter, check this out, will you? One question only!

50 Books Challenge

2009-03-13T07:26:00.001-07:00

I don't actually have a comment at the moment about what's become known on Livejoural as Racefail '09 (although I may eventually) but one thing that came out of it was the challenge to read 50 books by people of color this year. That sounds like a good one to me, and I plan to participate. More comments once I have something of substance to report.

March Challenge

2009-03-01T16:10:00.000-08:00

It's just so terribly convenient that everything is happening for me at the start of a month. I'm participating in a fitness challenge, among other things, and last summer I found it very helpful to babble in my blog about my diet and exercise challenges, so I may do more of that this month. My high school reunion is not going away just because I've had job and health issues - I really need to get back on track to achieve my goals. My plan has changed a little (see the challenge post for those details) but I have a hard date for the reunion - November 27th. It's still very much an achievable goal :)

Creators and the Internet

2009-02-23T12:32:00.000-08:00

George R.R. Martin posted a wee rant about some of his fans' behavior here, and John Scalzi expanded on the topic here. I was going to comment directly in Scalzi's blog, but it ran long.

It seems like there are two issues here - there's being discontented with the pace of production of a product you're interested in, and then there's how customers express that discontent.

The first is entirely the consumer's right. I'd be terribly curious to see the actual sales impact of longer delays vs shorter delays on publishing books in a genre series - I doubt that info is public anywhere, but I have to wonder if there's a sweet spot of building audience anticipation vs. losing the audience's interest. I suspect there is, and I suspect that publishers know about it. If the wait's too long, people probably will get frustrated and get distracted and wander off.

Now, if you're frustrated about something, isn't it your inviolate right to go bitch about it on the internet? Isn't that what the internet is for? And people often don't moderate their tone or take others' feelings into account on the internet. (This should not be news to anyone.) And I have met few if any authors, artists, game designers - anyone who produces a creative product for public consumption - who handled public, vitriolic criticism well at all. So this kerfuffle is absolutely unsurprising to me.

It seems like writing, because it's entirely a one-man job, is a little more intensely affected by this phenomenon, because there's no one else for the audience to blame. There's no production team running behind, no art contracts that fell through, no unexpected hardware failures or bugs in the code. The process takes place entirely in the black box of an author's head. This probably makes criticism a lot more personal, and it makes long delays (and make no mistake, Mr. Martin's latest book is long delayed indeed) even more frustrating, because the consumer literally can't understand what's holding up the process, and so they seize on anything handy - Livejournal posting, convention appearances, whatever.

In this particular case, though, the problem is one that's all too common, and all too avoidable - failure to correctly set expectations. I love transparency on the part of my favorite authors, and I read several of their blogs regularly. But this book was previously, publicly estimated to be released in 2006, 2007, and 2008. It has not yet been published - it is not, by the author's own admission, even completed. Now, this isn't a moral failing - no one deliberately lied. But there's a damn good reason the MMO industry customarily overuses the word "soon" when talking about... anything, really. Things change, deadlines get missed, plans get updated, and explaining all that to a bunch of furious customers is not anyone's idea of a good time.

I'm not blaming anyone here, and I will wait patiently until all of my favorite authors produce more masterpieces out of their black boxes. But guys, please don't tease me? I'd rather get a lovely surprise than another disappointment as an estimated date slips by.

Forums, part 763(a)

2009-02-16T18:40:00.000-08:00

I was talking about my forum-scaling theory (see here) today, and someone asked me "So what would you do if you had a forum with 5 million active posters?" and my immediate answer was "Shut it down." Now, this was in the context of an online game - certainly if my primary business goal was building a forum, I'd consider five million active posters a raging success. But for a game? I'm not sure that would be successful.

For that to make sense, I need to address what I see as the value of an official forum. Ryan Shwayder's post on that subject is here, and it's a good starting point.

Communication: Ryan's a little vague about exactly what communication he's talking about here, so I'll clarify what I mean by communication on official forums.
- Player to Developer: This is one players tend to think is the point of official forums - that it's a venue by which they can tell the devs what they're thinking. And it's true to a point. However, the bigger the forums, the lower the signal-to-noise ratio, and the harder it is for the developer to extract useful information out of a forum. Note that I say "information" and not "data", because you're not going to get anything remotely resembling objective numbers. CMs generally interpret forum feedback by a sort of intuition-slash-voodoo, and while I'll be the first to tell you amusing anecdotes about how useful it can be (ask me about the L2 server crash bug, sometime,) it's still a resource- and skill-intensive method of finding out what your players are thinking. This is where my earlier post about forums not scaling well really applies.

- Developer to Player: If you're communicating with your players solely - or even primarily - through forums, you're Doing It Wrong. Forums, by their nature, have a barrier to entry. They're not the landing page of your website, they may require login, and they will definitely require some sort of searching to come up with dev posts - whether that searching be on the part of the user or via some sort of Dev Tracker tool. This means that the vast majority of players will either never see what you're telling them, or they'll find some site willing to do the grunt work and go there instead. In World of Warcraft, for example, I almost never visit the official site - I use WoW Insider instead, because they'll aggregate everything I might possibly need to know.

Now, this doesn't mean that using the forums to communicate is a bad idea - doing so can foster a sense of community and give your most invested players a reward for time spent hanging out on your site - but it's not a news feed. This isn't really an issue of scale - the percentage of your players that actively read the forums may vary from product to product, but in my experience it doesn't correlate with size, or in fact with anything I've been able to pin down.

- Player-to-player: This is the subject where I get in to arguments with my colleagues who are very much in favor of forums. Forums build communities, and players who are invested in the community will stick much longer than players who aren't. Being able to shape, moderate, and direct the formation of your official forum community is a power any company should think long and hard about giving up. But again, there's a limit. That limit is related to Dunbar's number. Now that's not a fixed number, but the basic idea is that there is a limit to how many people a person can handle as being part of their community. From my observations, what generally happens on forums is that when the number of active posters gets bigger than that (150 sounds a little high, actually, although I'm not at all sure how lurkers factor in) the forum fragments. Sub-forums attract their own communities, and while people may read the "general" or "news" forums, they'll really only participate in their chosen subgroup.

Now, say that 1% of your player base actively participates on the forums. It's a nice round number, although probably a bit low. That means that you can get a solid (if pre-WoW) number of players - a hundred thousand or so - before the base starts to fragment. That's a community. Double it, and you have two weakly linked groups, or maybe a few smaller ones (depending on how your forums are set up.) Ten times - a million players - and you're looking at a minimum ten sub-communities, all with their own drama and personalities. Now, is that adding value to your product?

It's true that if you have a million subs, those communities will form whether you like it or not. They'll form on fansites, in guilds and alliances, on Facebook, wherever. The question is, does it make financial sense to try to make them form under your own aegis? Do you want to spend the money on the headcount it will take to moderate those ten or twenty subgroups, the hardware and software to keep the forums itself up, the technical staff to deal with the hiccups? Personally, I'd have to be really out of inspiration for other ways to manage that community before I'd say yes.

Ownership: This was Ryan's second item, and Moorgard's comment that "stability" is a better word is one I agree with. Any site you don't have control over, you can't depend on. Fansites can be very fly-by-night operations, and if your primary contact has a kid or develops a wicked cough syrup addiction or gets thrown in jail for flashing old ladies, the site may well disappear or simply decay. And the only thing I have to say to that is... so what?

Communities will form anyway. You'll get sub-groups that form off of any game - even Auto Assault, which was by no one's estimation a raging success, had at least one lively and successful fansite. If one falls, another will take its place. The only question is whether an official forum is going to be in the mix or not. We've even seen official forums disappear (UO had one, for a little while, and then it was taken down, and I dare you to go to Stratics' UHall and tell them that they don't count because they're not on an official forum.) This just isn't one of my primary considerations when thinking about whether or not to make a forum. If ten years playing MMOs has taught me anything, it's that people will find a place on the internet to bitch.

Integration: The third item on Ryan's list, and by far the most interesting to me. Most modern MMOs have really limited websites, with the forum usually being the most interactive aspect by far. (LOTRO being the exception - although I haven't looked at it too extensively, it's a really exciting concept.) Things like the WoW Armory are interesting, but don't have much to do with building communities as such - they're really enhancements to gameplay.

This is where I think that the weaknesses of forums (poor scaling, less-than-ideal one-to-many and one-to-one communication, lack of dynamic handling of sub-communities) can be mitigated. If my WoW guild could have its own subforum where we could assign visibility preferences to subforums and set permissions and whatnot, and if I could get a running feed of threads my guildies have posted in, and twitter-style updates whenever a dev posted, plus attach my character profiles and give me a blog and my own WoWTwitter account and a server status widget and an official news feed... well, I'd feel like part of the greater WoW community, and maybe I'd actually visit the forums every once in a while.

Yes, that's a wishlist, and yes, it'd be hard and expensive. But don't try to tell me hiring moderation staff for five million gamers all on one message board is easier or cheaper.

Library Book List

2009-02-02T08:51:00.000-08:00

I have a few things to get through around the house, but I'm starting the list for the next library trip:

- Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell
- the second Arbinger Institute book
- something on Flash/Actionscript
- Team of Rivals
- old classic fantasy that I haven't read yet
- Omnivore's Dilemma
- the new David Allen
- Q&A, Vikas Swarup (Slumdog Millionaire)

Goodreads

2009-01-29T19:18:00.000-08:00

My library is getting a little absurd, and so I'm facilitating the absurdity by cataloging it on Goodreads. Yes, the only book on there right now is The Nymphos of Rocky Flats - it's at the beginning of the alphabet! And it's actually (to my profound disappointment) not nearly as trashy as it sounds.

Angels: The Analysis

2009-01-27T13:15:00.001-08:00

A few thoughts, in no particular order.

- The tutorial was quite good, with a few minor exceptions. Once or twice a step was left out that proved to not be needed by the very end, but was definitely needed in the interim to make a feature work. Other than a few of those hiccups, though, it was a very simple task to follow along.

- The bulk of the time I spent on the project was in the art. Part of this is that I'm working in Paint.net and have no particular skill or training in computer graphics, but it's still definitely a bottleneck.

- Angels is a very bad game. The projectiles are too big, the characters are too big, and there's just not enough room to maneuver to make it at all interesting to play. This isn't precisely on purpose, but I definitely don't care enough to change it. I don't actually like shooters, and so I'm not interested in trying to refine this one.

- There's something about Adobe software that consistently baffles me. I just find it incredibly cumbersome to use.

- I'm fully aware of the fact that it makes no sense that the shield appears on the angel's sword arm.

- I think my next project will be something 8-bit RPGish. That's really my area of expertise.

While I'm not going to spend much more of my 30-day trial of this software on this particular game, I am definitely interested in bug reports. Feel free to leave them in the comments!

Angels v1.0

2009-01-27T12:51:00.001-08:00

This is my first-ever Flash game. The code is based (well, copied mostly) from the Kongregate Labs tutorial, which was excellent. I must, however, take full responsibility for the art.

Play the game here.

How to Play:

- Use the arrow keys to move up, down, and back and forth.
- Use the spacebar to shoot.
- Dodge the imps and their projectiles - without a shield, the spit will injure you, and while you can kill them with your sword, you will take damage from the acid rain.

- The floating apples will give you bonuses:
- full health
- injure all enemies on screen
- Holy shield (protects you from imp spit)
- Holy sword (allows you to use your sword safely)

- Periodically larger and more powerful enemies will appear. They will take several shots to bring down.

Analysis will follow in a subsequent post.

For Your Amusement and My Records

2009-01-13T20:06:00.000-08:00

"It probably looked like I was trying to commit seppuku with a rolling pin wearing a raincoat, but there you go."

Dr. Horrible

2008-12-29T15:38:00.000-08:00

I just watched the Dr. Horrible DVD yesterday, and I am happy to report it's definitely worth it. One traditional commentary, which was entertaining, and "Commentary: The Musical" which was hilarious. I haven't even gotten to the extras yet, but I'd recommend the DVD for anyone who liked Dr. Horrible to begin with.

Multiple Realities

2008-12-16T10:47:00.000-08:00

I read the Suze Orman book - one of her early ones, if not the earliest; The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom - and I can see why some people hate her.

For one thing, from my moderately-read layman's perspective, her advice is very conservative. Lots of emphasis on retirement planning and long-term investing, next to nothing about short-term or day-to-day planning. For someone my age, that's not all that interesting or helpful, and part of me definitely rebels against the idea of putting all of my money away somewhere safe so I can enjoy it when I'm 70. I want to enjoy it now, dammit!

The other striking thing is that she shifts back and forth between highly technical discussions of revocable living trusts and durable power of attorney and woo-woo new age talk about how money is a living thing and it responds to positive energy and how all of your money woes are caused by some Freudian childhood incident. It's not that I think she's completely off, really. Certainly lots of people have destructive relationships with money, bad or no experience with it in childhood, etc - but the language was a little too hippie for me to take seriously, and the clash between those sections and the hard-boiled estate planning sections was jarring.

I like reading about personal finance (to a degree, anyway) but I think I'll stick with the Motley Fool for actual advice.

Library Report

2008-12-06T10:55:00.000-08:00

Despite the fact that I had to dig through to-be-shelved carts for two of the three books I was looking for, this trip to the library was a success. I still need to get through the third volume of the FDR history, but I have a few treats waiting for me afterwards :)

I picked up The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Taking On the System (about the way the internet is affecting politics) and a Suze Orman book just to find out why some people hate her. Plus I came across a novel I was waiting for in paperback - that was a nice surprise.

It's really sort of funny - I never read nonfiction unless I'm in one of my go-to-the-library phases, but when I do, I read a ton of stuff on a whole variety of topics, and it's probably good for me. I just don't like actually buying them, I guess.

Rosemary Kitty

2008-12-02T10:21:00.000-08:00

Part of getting my budget in shape is cutting down on the truly absurd amount of money I spend on food, and that means actually *gasp* cooking for myself. Last night's project was beef stew, based on a random recipe off the internet that matched what I had on hand. It came together just fine but was a touch bland, so I decided to throw in some rosemary. That worked perfectly.

It also received the intense interest and apparent approval of my oldest cat, who ADORES rosemary (and likes beef just fine, too.) This is the one who, at a prior residence, used to dart out the back at every opportunity to hide behind the rosemary bush and graze. Ever watched a cat try to graze? They're really not designed for it, and it's adorable. I gave her a smidge of broth and a bite of beef and she was content, but I suspect I'm going to have to fend her off every time I open a container of this stuff. She's an odd one.

Mint.com

2008-12-01T11:25:00.000-08:00

Last night in a fit of responsibility I paid a couple bills and realized that I need to get my budget under a tight rein until I have a new income stream locked down. I used to use Microsoft Money and liked it very well, until my installation CD... um, disappeared, and one of my many hard drive disasters killed it. I bought Quicken last year but never really liked it, so I didn't really want to bother reinstalling it. So I hopped over to one of my favorite financial sites and saw a new partnership with Mint.com. I generally trust the Fool, so I checked it out - and I love it.

My financial situation isn't all that complicated, really - checking, savings, credit card, car loan, mortgage, two 401ks, employee stock account... well, ok, it is sort of complicated. What Mint.com does that I REALLY like is it pulls directly from all of my online accounts - including the investment accounts - and presents the results in an eminently simple and readable one-sheet. (The downside: this meant that I had to look at my investment accounts... ouch.) It has a very basic categorizing system and budgeting tool, and does some simple pie charts to help track spending. All I needed, really - plus it's online, so I don't have to worry about my next hard drive failure.

It's not perfect - it doesn't have access to my car loan or my nearly-forgotten gas card yet, and if it has bill notifications, I haven't found them - but I like it a lot better than Quicken, plus it's free. I'll stick with it for a month or so and see how it works out.

Library Day

2008-11-29T10:54:00.000-08:00

Actually, it wasn't a full library run, since I had to renew the second two New Deal books. I looked for a few other things off the top of my head but it seems that everyone's thinking along similar lines, and everything was out. One success, though, was finding the HBO documentary on Air America, which I commented earlier sounds like a much more interesting story than the collection of transcripts I got last time. While I was digging in that section looking for it (turns out it was mis-shelved) I picked up An Inconvenient Truth as well, which I haven't seen. So those should occupy me for a week or so, and then I'll bring my ever-growing To Read list and do it properly.

Drinking the Kool-Aid

2008-11-26T08:40:00.000-08:00

Part 2 of the Massive Gamer interview with me is up. I wanted to expand a little bit on one of the bits in it. actually.

Massive Gamer: What do you think is most important when it comes to doing good community?

Preacher: Honesty - not just in the sense of conveying true information to and from the players and the devs, although that is very important, but also not getting so caught up in the emotions of the moment - whether it's the players upset about a change or the devs excited about a patch - that you lose sight of the facts and misrepresent the situation

I talk about "drinking the kool-aid" a lot in community - internally, that is. What I mean by this is when you've bought in to a project, a feature, or the overall company line to the extent that you no longer have any perspective on it. A large part of a CM's value to their team is their ability to provide an outside perspective - not just a customer's perspective but a synthesis of all possible customer perspectives. How will the players react to this change? What should our highest bug fix priority be? Is this ad campaign going to have an effect on our existing playerbase? These are all questions a CM should be able to offer an answer to.

A problem arises when you, as a CM, have adopted the official line to the point where you begin to believe it. This patch will be great - look at all those bullet points! These bug fixes will be perfect because we say so, despite having our most junior programmer tackle the five easiest fixes regardless of severity! This ad campaign will bring in people by the thousands, and no matter that it promises things we've been promising since beta and can't deliver on!

The marketing team can say these things, because it's their job to be perky. CMs - good ones - are not perky. As a matter of fact, they tend to be the most cynical and jaded - and usually drunk - folk I've ever encountered. It's our job to see the downside as well as the upside. It's our job to anticipate criticism and plan how to react to it. Yes, we have to be upbeat and optimistic in public - hence the drinking. But to our teams, we should always be trying to make sure people see both sides and plan for them.

And in order to see both sides, we have to seek out both sides. We have to look for criticism, find the pockets of negativity, and welcome the flames. We have to get our hands on them in order to weigh them, judge them, then translate them into fluffy bunny terms for the delicate artistic temperaments on the dev team, so that next time the public has to find something different to bitch about. If your game just biffed a publish, you better know how, and why, and how many people noticed. Likewise, if your company has an image problem overall, you better have a report on who is bitching, what obscene nicknames it's been given, and how exactly the corporate logo has been photoshopped.

This is totally why we all drink so much, and why we burn out so fast. But it's still the job. And it does make it easier to live with when the company fucks up in exactly the way you predicted it would, and pisses off precisely the set of people you forecasted, and lays you off. Satisfaction in a job well done is almost as good as health insurance.

Jeremy Preacher

Occupy Austin

Kickathon!

The Malazan Book of the Fallen, part 2

The Malazan Book of the Fallen

So Close!

Round 2

Losing

Portal 2

Three Month Report

Updates

One Month of Paleo Eating

Sleep

A Week of Paleo

Lifting, take 2

One Month

17 Hours Later

3:45. Seriously, People?

Week One

I Keep Forgetting

Grocery Shopping

Recovery

Pumping Iron

Happy New Year!

*grumble*

TMI Warning

Slapstick

Day One

Tracking in the New Year

Neighborly Games!

Amazon v. Macmillan

Patterns

Writing Elsewhere

Happy New Year!

My Life and Karate, Day Thirty-one

My Life and Karate, Day Thirty

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-Eight

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-seven

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-five

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-Four

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-three

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-Two

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty-One

My Life and Karate, Day Twenty

My Life and Karate, Day Nineteen

My Life and Karate, Day Eighteen

My Life and Karate, Day Seventeen

My Life and Karate, Day Sixteen

My Life and Karate, Day Fifteen

My Life and Karate, Day Fourteen

My Life and Karate, Day Thirteen

My Life and Karate, Day Twelve

My Life and Karate, Day Eleven

My Life and Karate, Day Ten

My Life and Karate, Day Nine

My Life and Karate, Day Eight

My Life and Karate, Day Seven

My Life and Karate, Day Six

My Life and Karate, Day Five

My Life and Karate, Day Four

Housekeeping - Kickathon Donations

My Life and Karate, Day Three

My Life and Karate, Day Two

My Life and Karate, Day One

Training for a 5k

Going Both Ways

Rawr

Daily Posting

*blinkblink*

Day One

Follow-up and Refinement

A Challenge

A Challenge

I Haven't Mentioned the Game's Name For a Reason

Non-Apologies and Other Links

GAHHHHHH

Forums, Again

Labels

Proving My Point

Stray Thought

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