sarakingdom

Oh, Jackrum. One of the best.

I hear you on the rest. It's been high-stress lately, and I've been shortchanging sleep a lot, and my body's letting me know it. I need to really do rest this weekend.

I've tried other recipes, but this really is the very best. Although my preferred form of salt in step 3 is "Apply Bacon (optional)".

The sleep gremlins? The math problems that NEVER WANT YOU TO SLEEP.

Week 4: Day 3 I like the Going Postal movie. This is somewhat controversial, because it departs from the book in ways that can feel significant to fans of the book, but are necessary to make a movie from it. But it captures the book and the world and the tone brilliantly, and looks gorgeous, and has an immensely charming cast. It is splendid and made of happiness. (And, frankly, if it bothers people that some of the facts are different, well, Discworld's approach to its own continuity is the reason for the History Monks.) And it has these goofballs engaging in postal humor while (mostly) in character, in an outtake that is possibly the best thing to emerge out of the making of the movie. Of course Moist von Lipwig is a dancer. I'm more surprised about Mr. Pump. ObVetinari: That man put these clowns in charge of reopening the failed post office. There's a very dry sense of humor at work there. Fitness Points 4 hours of sleep -1 for bad life choices 5 Move Like a Snake: Some Sort of Workout (5 points available) 0 Move Like a Snake: Workout Extras 1 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: liters of water 0 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Bonus (2 points for 3 liters of water, the odd extra point for some sort of effort) Life Points 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Meditation (5 points available) 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Desk Habit Trigger (1 point available) 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Bedtime Habit Trigger (1 point available) 0 If You Can Stand the Excitement: Make a Detailed Daily Schedule (1 point available) 1 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task A (1 point available) 1 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task B (1 point available) 1 Learn the Words: Duolinguo (1 point available) 6 Productivity Bonus 0 Adulting Bonus 0 Writing Goal Bonus Total Points: 17 points

Fingers crossed for you. (And if it means you can now start earlier because you'll have time off that wasn't in your previous estimate, get your recruiter to pass along that your commitments have changed, and an earlier start is possible. It sounds like you really like that place.) Good for you for taking the risk.

I read some interesting articles a few of years after it came out, and I think I gave it a brief try when my work schedule made it a good choice. Wish the data on IF for women was better, kind of a confusing mess of anecdotal evidence. I don't recall its training advice, though. Train fasting is what I vaguely recall.

Tomorrow is soon enough, I suppose. And also, your local library will have so much Pratchett. Just sayin'. Do not let the moneys stand in your way.

Woot! I didn't know whether to rec Mort as a starting point, because I heard a BBC adaptation of it, rather than reading the book. I think it's not essential to start there, Reaper Man and Soul Music are enough to introduce the key points. So yeah, you could start with Reaper Man rather than Mort, and go back for Mort later. Guards! Guards! is just loaded with amazing characters and a lot of fun stuff, and it's a very solid start for a lot of the major Discworld stuff. There is a lot of evolution from there, each series has a lot of continuity for the characters within it, major life changes and new characters and things. Outside the series, that won't be so evident, though the characters will wander in and out of other books with the odd mention of this or that. (Like, they're major characters in their own books, and minor characters in other people's books. It's a lot of fun. You get to see most of these characters from a lot of different angles, not all flattering. One of the real joys of the series, IMO, is this slow development of a very rich and complicated world, through a lot of different people's eyes. There's a splendid realism to it. And one of the other joys of the series is the buildup of a huge amount of kindness and wisdom and humanity in the writing. In one or two books, they'd be good books. In ten, twenty, thirty books spanning decades and a massive number of characters and themes, it becomes a different experience entirely. And they're pretty cracking good irreverent adventure stories on top of that. It's very cleverly done.)

So when are you going to start reading Guards! Guards!, Kishi?

Life goals, man. Life goals. (Although this was the cause of the one serious injury I know of. Not life-threatening or anything, but it took one of them out of training for nearly a year, IIRC.) Aikijitsu, for context, is the parent art of aikido, and it's a more violent art, designed to do a lot of damage. The founder of Aikido trained under a former samurai teaching his family's art, and his first few students were actually ranked in Aikijitsu rather than Aikido. I don't know how much -do was modified away from -jitsu, but the impression I have is that it's very similar, except to a degree in philosophy and slight variations of technique. (Basically, Aikijitsu is the harder end of the spectrum that Aikido runs, so he was teaching essentially Aikijitsu when he started teaching in the 1920s-30s, and gradually it changed more and more into the art he was teaching in the 1960s. I suspect it's more of an aesthetic change, that gentleness and duty of care became increasingly prized, more than big changes in core technique.) I suspect that a lot of the basics of Aikido's controlling techniques come from what was necessary in training conditions in Aikijitsu, because you just can't send your entire class home with broken arms or shredded shoulder cartilage after every lesson. My sense is that more Aikijitsu creeps into classes at the senior levels. Not always officially, but it's part of what you need to know. It's not Aikido, but it's also a big part of Aikido. If that makes sense. (I think it comes down to people's Aikido being their own Aikido. You can practice Aikido without the parent art, or you can consider the parent art an inseparable part of what Aikido is. But this is one of those things where Mistr knows and I just guess.) It's also the parent art of hapkido (perhaps not the only parent art, but certainly the prominent one), and I think the main aikijitsu school goes by Daito-ryu now. Looking at the commonalities of those three schools would be kind of an interesting way to get a look at the art as it was practiced from 1880-1915. My dojo, being filled with scrappy young black belts who liked playing rough, tended to say that the obligation was not to injure the other person, but pain was optional. When they say aikido is the "gentle" art, they mean it's gentle on you. But that's not totally true, of course. I think basically every dojo, and from what I hear even the very hardest styles, train with the idea that every black belt should be capable of being extremely gentle with an attacker. Where they differ seems to be on how strongly they feel that's an aikidoka's obligation to every attacker.

That's how they get you.

Week 4: Day 2 Fitness Points 6 hours of sleep 5 Move Like a Snake: Some Sort of Workout (5 points available) 0 Move Like a Snake: Workout Extras 1 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: liters of water 0 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Bonus (2 points for 3 liters of water, the odd extra point for some sort of effort) Life Points 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Meditation (5 points available) 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Desk Habit Trigger (1 point available) 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Bedtime Habit Trigger (1 point available) 0 If You Can Stand the Excitement: Make a Detailed Daily Schedule (1 point available) 0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task A (1 point available) 0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task B (1 point available) 1 Learn the Words: Duolinguo (1 point available) 8 Productivity Bonus 0 Adulting Bonus 0 Writing Goal Bonus Total Points: 21 points

Yaaaay!

So hypothetically Chris and I are winning you over? Start with Guards! Guards! and from there, you can either read chronologically, dipping back for some of the earlier books, or mix and match approximately as series within the series, or some combination of the two. If you're mixing and matching, what I'd do is hit these up early, staying in order within the thematic series, but not bothering too much about the order between thematic series: City Watch Books: Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay (And you could maybe tack on The Truth, which is not a Watch book, but is a nice segue into some of the broader Ankh-Morpork books, and introduces some characters and developments you'll start seeing in later books. IMO, it's also where the tone starts changing again, and the writing and the world feel like they've hit a new stride.) Witches Books: Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad Death Books: Mort, Reaper Man, Soul Music Most of these are really, really good books, and they'll give you a sense of all the different characters and themes, and give you enough basic Discworld knowledge to read anything else you feel like in whatever order. It's honestly pretty flexible, so you can go your own way. He does a good job of keeping the books largely self-contained, despite the huge crossover. I've done some reading way out of order, and it doesn't really suffer. I'll just say, because you'll see these on a lot of "best Discworld book" lists and might be tempted to skip right to them, that Hogfather is helped by Soul Music, a certain amount of Death, and general Discworldiness, Monstrous Regiment ties in a little better after Feet of Clay and The Truth, and Night Watch is helped by at least three or four City Watch books. (Of all of those, Night Watch is the only one that's not basically self-contained. The premise relies on being somewhat familiar with the characters and the city for a real understanding of what's going on and the emotional punches of the subtext, and it doesn't hold your hand a lot.)

Huh, I missed replying to this somehow. I'll trade it for an update on your points, a Discworld quote, and a description of how damn green things are where you live. This is really going to depend on the style of aikido you train in, IMO. There's a huge range of militaristic to quasi-spiritual aikido, roughly corresponding to the year when the head of the style was a student of Ueshiba's, and they're going to approach it with a different philosophy. My understanding is that some will go for disabling in a heartbeat, others are incredibly pacifist and will teach you to simply that it's a moral responsibility to not injure. (I can't tell you what my style advises in that situation, I'm not really senior enough. And I suspect that even then, it varies by person. People's aikido is their aikido, and they deal with their own moral dilemmas.) One of the big real-world uses of aikido is by the Tokyo riot police, and by female police in Japan. I'd imagine that in the latter case, some handcuffs are involved, and in the former, I know they're taught one of the harder, more militaristic styles. It's a rough course. (A very rough course, if rumor is to be believed.) I doubt they're very squeamish about disabling. There are a lot of pins where it's tremendously easy to kill the attacker, especially if you've got hold of a knife somehow. A lot of them are basically designed to make the neck very vulnerable. It's just not very practical to do it in the modern world, because no court is going to see that as self-defense or a justifiable use of force on someone you have safely pinned. It's the other guy the law generally says you're allowed to hurt, the one who's a current threat, not the guy you've got down. That's a problem with a lot of disabling as well. Injuring someone who's not actively a threat, even if they could be one if you let them up, is legally very tricky territory, and my understanding is that generally you're not legally in the right if it isn't done in the heat of the moment, with no other options. You can punch someone in the face and knock them out when they're swinging at you, and you'll probably be okay, but you can't do it when they're on the ground. So, given aikido's pre-existing moral slant on that one and the legal role of violence in the modern world (and also how much time it tends to take a beginner to reach practical use of aikido), that's generally treated as an advanced topic. @Mistr may be able to tell you more about that, she's definitely by far the senior person here. Just an interest. While I don't have access to a dojo, I'm spending my time on research. It's definitely idealized. I doubt many people were quite as hip to the budo virtues as the documents would lead you to believe. (For one thing, you'd have wiped out half the samurai class due to suicide after every war, and that's not sustainable. For another, some percent of society is just composed of assholes.) Japan does, in the broader sense, tend to place more value on ideal practice than a lot of cultures and have a lot more people who approach the practice of their profession as an art. To me, that looks like a society where you will get a few people genuinely practicing the ideal. Not many, but I'd be surprised if they weren't there at all. And the way most traditional arts function in Japan, martial and not, they're probably the senior people. That's a feature of professionalism in a lot of Japanese arts. One of the most famous swordsmen at the time of the Meiji restoration, a really important political figure in returning the emperor to power and the head of a major swordsmanship school at the time, was said to have never killed anyone. (And he's recent enough that he's moderately well-documented. He did die kind of young, but there are photographs and a lot of accounts of him serving in court and so on.) I think that's probably true of a lot of samurai in the Edo period, mostly because a lot of them became civil servants, but this guy had the opportunity. I think it gets mentioned because it's unusual, but it's relevant because he was a teacher and in a lot of positions of authority over other samurai under Tokugawa and the emperor, and I doubt he was the only teacher at the time who felt that way. I'd be very surprised if he, and others, didn't teach ending a fight without killing. I doubt it was practical for many of his students or that it was expected to be, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't taught, in the sort of teaching culture where you drill every attack, response, and outcome to the smallest detail. Whether it gets used, well, that's a different question. You respond to the situation. But this was very far from a lawless society, it's one of the longest periods of peace in the world, and that gets pretty civilized pretty fast. If your warrior class doesn't function well as a force to preserve that peaceful society, it falls apart. Maybe I'm wrong, and it is a fairly modern thing to take traditional attacks and modify them to control rather than injure, but I don't know, my reading of the late Edo is that protection of the peace and non-lethal response were probably ideas that were already floating around, and possibly formalized in some schools. I don't think that's a chivalric ideal, but part of the actual role they'd been playing for two centuries.

Week 4: Day 1 Fitness Points 6 hours of sleep 0 Move Like a Snake: Rowing Interval Workout (5 points available) 0 Move Like a Snake: Workout Extras 1 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: liters of water 0 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Bonus (2 points for 3 liters of water, the odd extra point for some sort of effort) Life Points 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Meditation (5 points available) 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Desk Habit Trigger (1 point available) 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Bedtime Habit Trigger (1 point available) 0 If You Can Stand the Excitement: Make a Detailed Daily Schedule (1 point available) 1 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task A (1 point available) 1 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task B (1 point available) 1 Learn the Words: Duolinguo (1 point available) 8 Productivity Bonus 8 Adulting Bonus 0 Writing Goal Bonus Total Points: 26 points

That is a brilliant Vetinari book. Mostly he's just pushing pieces around the board, but then suddenly he's not. Carrot and Angua are both great characters, and I have a huge soft spot for Cuddy and Detritus. This was more of a heavy work weekend than a recovery weekend, but I made it! And kept just about ball juggled, except my workouts. Oops. I was pretty wiped from working, though, so we'll call that manual labor.

Rolling out a big change like that isn't easy, and there's usually a couple of shaky days, so congrats on a fairly smooth changeover. There was a problem with the new T&C this morning - the Privacy Policy text wasn't showing up, just the filename it was in. So to log in, I had to agree to T&C I couldn't fully read. Everything else is teething pains, but having people agree to contractual language they can't actually read first isn't great for either party.

The only thing that bugged me unreasonably was that we had to agree to new Terms & Conditions... and the Privacy Policy text was broken. Asking people to contractually agree to something they can't see is not cool. The rest, well, I'll get used to it. There's never a great time for major changes, from a user's perspective.

Week 3: Day 7 A Sunday non-Vetinary quote from Death, who's possibly the best damn character in the series who isn't Vetinari (or Vimes, or Granny Weatherwax, or maybe the Librarian... okay, top five, anyway, and I'd hate to have to rank them). Fitness Points 7 hours of sleep 0 Move Like a Snake: Rowing Interval Workout (5 points available) 2 Move Like a Snake: Workout Extras 2 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: liters of water 0 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Bonus (2 points for 3 liters of water, the odd extra point for some sort of effort) Life Points 5 All Control Starts With the Self: Meditation (5 points available) 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Desk Habit Trigger (1 point available) 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Bedtime Habit Trigger (1 point available) 1 If You Can Stand the Excitement: Make a Detailed Daily Schedule (1 point available) 1 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task A (1 point available) 1 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task B (1 point available) 1 Learn the Words: Duolinguo (1 point available) 15 Productivity Bonus 5 Adulting Bonus 0 Writing Goal Bonus Total Points: 40 points Phew. Busy weekend. Survived. And got some interesting news, which might move along those two goals I've been avoiding.

Week 3: Day 5 & 6 [Vimes] gave Vetinari a look that said: If you take this any further, I will have to lie. Vetinari returned one that said: I know. "You yourself are not too badly injured?" the Patrician said aloud. "Just a few scratches, sir," said Vimes. Vetinari gave him a look that said: Broken ribs, I'm certain of it. Vimes returned one that said: Nothing. Fitness Points 11 hours of sleep -1 for bad life choices 0 Move Like a Snake: Rowing Interval Workout (5 points available) 1 Move Like a Snake: Workout Extras 5 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: liters of water 0 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Bonus (2 points for 3 liters of water, the odd extra point for some sort of effort) Life Points 5 All Control Starts With the Self: Meditation (5 points available) 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Desk Habit Trigger (1 point available) 0 All Control Starts With the Self: Bedtime Habit Trigger (1 point available) 1 If You Can Stand the Excitement: Make a Detailed Daily Schedule (1 point available) 0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task A (1 point available) 0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task B (1 point available) 2 Learn the Words: Duolinguo (1 point available) 21 Productivity Bonus 2 Adulting Bonus 0 Writing Goal Bonus Total Points: 47 points Actual amount of sleep is going to have to be independently verified by my activity tracker later. There was so little of it that I can't tell. That was half my fault, and half not my fault. But it's going to make today tough. (Merging in Saturday, since Friday was, um, a write-off.)

A few of my time management (and sleep management) things started clicking along better. Today's on track to be pretty good, too.

Week 3: Day 4 Havelock sighed, but inwardly, because he respected his aunt. He just wished she was a bit more sensible about cats. He felt instinctively that if you were going to fondle a cat while discussing matters of intrigue, then it should be a long-haired white one. It shouldn’t be an elderly street tom with irregular bouts of flatulence. Fitness Points 6 hours of sleep0 Move Like a Snake: Rowing Interval Workout (5 points available)0 Move Like a Snake: Workout Extras 3 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: liters of water1 Merckle & Stingbat's Very Famous Brown Sauce: Bonus (2 points for 3 liters of water, the odd extra point for some sort of effort)Life Points 5 All Control Starts With the Self: Meditation (5 points available)1 All Control Starts With the Self: Desk Habit Trigger (1 point available)0 All Control Starts With the Self: Bedtime Habit Trigger (1 point available)1 If You Can Stand the Excitement: Make a Detailed Daily Schedule (1 point available)0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task A (1 point available)0 Know What's Going to Happen: Five minutes planning on Task B (1 point available)1 Learn the Words: Duolinguo (1 point available)18 Productivity Bonus-1 for bad time management life choice in the afternoon2 Adulting Bonus 0 Writing Goal Bonus​Total Points: 37 points

It's a good one. And very, very Vetinari.