sarakingdom

Yeah, it was very much using it as a way to talk about the social pressures on the working class. It was a very sharp book. There was a very small thread of the Nutt subplot I wasn't sure about, but I think it was sorted out correctly in the end.

I've heard great things about the Tiffany Aching books and about Monstrous Regiment, but I'm not sure they're where I'd recommend a guy get into the series. Greatly beloved by Pratchett fans (including the men), but I think it's a tough sell to hand a guy the spinoff YA books about a teenage witch as their first introduction. I'm guessing Action is probably a Night Watch kind of guy, followed maybe by Death or Moist von Lipwig. (I am so looking forward to Monstrous Regiment. It's not YA about a teenage witch, but what an amazing premise.)

I have Going Postal coming from the library soon, but I'm halfway through the TV movie and it is amazeballs. (It helps that I have a secret fondness for the post office and the telegraph system.) I also really enjoyed most of Unseen Academicals, which seems to be a controversial one, because not everyone can get into the soccer element. Vetinari is always a nice bonus in the Ankh-Morpork books. Just a secondary character, but a very prominent one. The books do all have some continuity, but seem to work really well as stand-alones, so you can probably dip in at will anywhere among the mid or later books. At least, that's what I'm doing.

Wow. That worked out so well for you guys. That's wonderful.

The Bowie thing is so sad. I'm listening to his last album now. It was getting some amazing reviews for being Bowie at his avant-garde peak when it came out last week, if a bit dark, but no one could understand what he was saying with it... and now it's crystal clear. In retrospect, it's very clearly a dying man saying goodbye. What a way to go out, knowing you have limited time and using it to make one last album. One last exceptionally good album. Meditation is hard, especially for the people who need it most. Maybe we should think about a Monk PvP or something. (Holy shit, I just saw the only video he made for the new album. That is very, very plainly about the experience of dying. It's very plainly a goodbye to everything he's leaving behind, his memories, the hospitals, his art, his whole life. That is raw.)

I think we have a duty to the world to make kaiju classes available.

I'm not an expert in Pratchetty things, so Chris or Girl-Meet-World or Urgan might have better answers for you, but my understanding is that Guards! Guards! is where people generally start saying he's really hit his stride and started turning out books everyone recommends. So Guards! Guards! or Men at Arms, maybe? I just read Hogfather for Christmas (it's his Christmas book), and it was amazingly good, one of the best things I've read in a few years, but I suspect it benefitted from knowing a little about the world, so I wouldn't start with it. I also wouldn't start with his very earliest books, they're acquired tastes... a lot of people, me included, never acquired a taste for them. (His first book or two are pretty shallow parodies of fantasy lit, and by the time he gets to Guards! Guards!, he's doing something a lot richer, a very convincing and well-written world built out of bits of myth and story and real-world history.)

Week 2: Day 1 "I see you're very comfortable here," said Vimes weakly. "Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself,' said the Patrician, laying out the food on the cloth. 'The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that." Fitness Points +5 hours of sleep (not a life choice fail, though, so no penalty)+2 liters of water+5 ukemi+5 meditation+1 gentle injury exerciseLife Points +X All Control Starts With the Self (morning routine)+0 If You Can Stand the Excitement (time management)+0 Know What's Going to Happen (log planning)+2 Learn the Words (Duolinguo)Total: 20 points

Two separate ones, intentionally. I'm just gonna close up here today and use the new one starting tomorrow. (I thought of doing the new one here, but I felt like a fresh start. Mopey Korra makes me feel mopey.)

Week 1: Day 7 Fitness Points +8 hours of sleep+1 liters of water+1 injury care(+5 meditation TBA)Life Points +1 duolinguo+1 not losing my shit (that's a form of adulting, right?)Total: 10 (15 TBA) That lack of water is going to hit me in the middle of the night. Annoying. I'll see if I can get some more in before bed. So that's it for this week. Imperfect, but good enough to move me a step forward on a couple of things, so what the hell. Moving on to week 2 in the other thread, to ditch this mopey Korra thread and go forward with the scheming. This was not a good week for ukemi practice, which is also next week's workout plan, so if you don't start seeing "ukemi practice" on there a bunch of times, feel free to hassle me about it.

You know, it's like... to put it in monkish metaphors, everyone's going on their own journey here, and we don't necessarily share the destinations or the routes, but the reason all of us are here is to help everyone else on their way. We don't have to share the ideas that are important to us in order to respect that they're important to the person who holds them and want people to succeed at their chosen path. That's your personal route, and this is the thread about your journey, so this is where it belongs.

You got a closet? Hanging shelves work real well, and pack up small.

Oh, I'm sorry it wasn't a good class. Sometimes the art doesn't feel right, and sometimes the school is a bad fit, or even just bad. In my experience, there's rarely one single "right" martial art for anyone, but the schools themselves are critical. They make a huge difference.

Terry Pratchett's very worth reading, and I say that as someone who took some time to get into him and is far from his qualified to be his greatest advocate. He's one of the modern fantasy greats, and an all-around very decent human being, by all accounts. He wrote very humane, very wry humorous fantasy books, all set in the same world. Some of them focus mainly on the old-fashioned wizard university in Ankh-Morpork, some on the police force and criminal underworld in Ankh-Morpork, some on a group of witches in another region, and some on the Grim Reaper and his granddaughter Susan. At their best, they're really pretty profound about the inventiveness of humanity and about human nature, the good, the bad, and the gently ridiculous. (Vetinari is going to look more openly cynical than the rest of the books, because he's the dangerous Machiavellian dictator. The joke is that he's also the most civilized, fair, incorruptible, and downright competent person around, and single-handedly keeps the city from descending into the total anarchy it richly deserves.)

Thanks! I figured NF could use a little Pratchett love, and it's a bit of fun for a challenge that was struggling for a direction.

Yeah, the strike attacks are basically weapons attacks done without weapons. You might get a loosely yokoman uchi-style strike with the hand, like if someone's going to slap you across the face, but shomen uchi is very unlikely without a weapon. (Unless you move it lower on the body, maybe, like towards the neck or collar bone.) You will do knife techniques, more often than sword techniques, probably, because they're smaller and easier to casually throw into practice. And yeah, there's an interesting transfer to knives and bats. There some good conceptual overlap there. A bat swing isn't quite the same motion as a yokoman strike, but it's similar, and a lot of where you want to move yourself to in order to avoid it is similar. (Though I've also heard that it's worth doing knife techniques with an uncapped black marker, to see where you're not being careful with the blade of the knife in training. The person who suggested it has found that it's easy to be sloppy, apparently.)

So I've decided that, at the end of this week, I'll be switching to a similar-but-rethemed challenge here. It seemed good to move on some of those things while I'm doing recovery stuff, and I'm just a little bored of doing the same as last time. Boredom is a poor life decision.

I use a bullet journal! I do use a slightly different notation, because I had one before that was really useful for tracking how much of a task was done, but it's a very handy and flexible planner format. You don't need the same format every week, I find, and it's easy to adapt when your needs change. This is a really solid challenge plan, by the way.

Really glad the Uber thing got sorted out. Super-annoying thing to deal with. Yes, yes, and yes. Yes. (Well, I guess I'm technically not supposed to endorse "committing to attack" in theory, but it's awfully nice when people commit to attacks, so close enough, right?) By the way, I just wanted to say thanks for the effort you've been putting into seeing other people's point of view on that whole kerfuffle. I know there are times when common ground is easy and times when it's not, but the change in tone definitely makes a difference, and I wanted you to know that I really do notice and appreciate your effort on that one. And don't feel you need to spoiler-cut that sort of thing, man. Part of monking is mental, be it psychological or spiritual, and that belongs here as much as anything.

Good to have you back! I like your challenge, there's some really good stuff in here to think about for my next challenge. There's a lot of scope in monkish mindset alone, I like that a lot.

Yeah, it's definitely a good complement to classical sword stuff - it's very much built around classical sword arts, even if it doesn't formally retain a lot of the sword work. It's a combination that a lot of people interested in sword arts go for.

Yeah, it seemed like the time to push through some of these little life and setup tasks I wanted to get done was now, while I was largely on a recovery challenge. So that's also partly why I pushed it up to this month - I'm hoping next month will have more physical challenge, and less, "geeze, can I even walk properly today".

I have a small cache of pretty pictures, mostly from the Going Postal TV movie. I'm rationing myself. But the quotes will do for now. (I might do Hogfather next December, too. The effects are a little dated, but it's a genius book and it's hard to go wrong with Death dressed as Santa.) I'm not reading them that quickly, because I'm using them for my bedtime reading, but I just did Unseen Academicals, Soul Music, and Hogfather in pretty quick succession. I haven't read a lot of the witches books yet, but I understand from friends that Granny Weatherwax is basically the best character ever, in anything.

Yeah, don't mess around with your hands, they're fiddly and a bitch to heal properly.

I've also been doing a lot of soaking my legs in hot water and keeping the muscles warm during the day, sort of on the chance that tenseness in the muscle was part of the problem - extra strain from being too tight. Or, worst case, just get some extra blood flow in there. I think that helped a little.