Kishi

Well, White is the Survival Belt after all. ; I suppose the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Took a week for me to figure out the one thing I want to change, and the way in which I want to change it. I've known for a while now that I need to get up earlier. I'm pretty good at starting to for a bit, but it doesn't take: eventually, something goes haywire somewhere and I wind up being up late and needing to sleep late to make up for it, and before long I've regressed to the old mean. Meaning (harrrr) that I need a new mean. Instead of getting up at 9:30 AM, I'm going to spend the next few weeks focusing on just getting up at 9:00 AM. Get myself used to what life looks like there get a feel for making happen what needs to happen when it needs to for me to hit that target consistently. I don't need to be perfect, but landing there 80% of the time should get me somewhere like where I need to be. Exciting news on the job front. I put in for a promotion last week, which I've said before I'd be a shoe-in for. Didn't have the means to put in previously as HR didn't open up any slots, but when they did this past month, I went for it. It's a decent bump in pay and apparently the extra work isn't that much harder. Other good news is that the job opened up overtime again! It's only a little bit, but it'll help the paycheck and the caseload, and that's all I really want. Also, figured out that the head cold is actually just seasonal allergies based on its responses to medication, so I'm cleared to get back to the mats. Though I still need to figure out how to honor both the job and my desires. Because the writing's going well and I'm not willing to negotiate on that. Ah well. It'll be sorted. In the meantime: Goal: 1/1.

A repository of Richards, if you will It's the thought that counts. I love it. ❤️ * Quick note here to say that things ended in a smooth landing. I write in the mornings now before work and it's everything I hoped it would be. I lost out on mat time, but not as a result of the challenge. I've had some kind of persistent head cold/allergies thing going for the past week and some change. I didn't want to chance being contagious - especially as I had a COVID exposure last Tuesday - so I stayed to myself, but I've tested negative multiple times, so it's probably safe to say that I'm just dealing with the change of the seasons and getting used to things. Ofc, the job being what it is because of things none of us can control, I wouldn't have got out anyway, so I gotta figure out how to adjust myself to that. Right now, that probably means getting up earlier in the day, which is always a challenge. Morning writing makes that easier, but I still gotta do it. I made some progress with that during this challenge that I didn't talk about, and I let it slip because the Nyquil makes sleeping entirely too easy, but the truth is I can get down earlier and I should do so. I think I'll like the world better if I do that. I'll hop over to the new challenge forums in a bit. But as always, my shoutouts and thanks to @Tanktimus the Encourager, @Scaly Freak, @Sovalis, @Everstorm, @The Most Loathed, @TimovieMan, @Mistr, @juliebarkley, @Jackdaw, @sarakingdom, @shaar, @Kalitraz, @The Shogun, and anyone I missed on the way. Y'all are the best part of my challenges, although I sure do seem to have a funny way of showing my appreciation, what with all the not showing up in y'all's threads to root you on. But I'm getting a better grip on things back here, and I can't think of a better way to demonstrate than to show up for the next challenge. Which, uh, is going on now. I, uh. Bye! See y'all quick!

Hey, sounds like things and stuff have been busy and getting better for you. If it works for you to come back, it'd be great to hear from you; if it doesn't, well, I'm just glad for what we got.

Van Leeuwen! I will fight a man for Ben & Jerry's, but I will absolutely fuck shit up win for Van Leeuwen. Which white people were these? Must have been British. Yeah, man, I'm kind of there myself. Once you've done the work of building the life you want to lead, the rest is just minor tweaks and adjustments. Although, never underestimate these. Little things get big over time, and you never know how much time it'll be.

Well, not only that, they'll have to see how they're being treated and realize that they deserve better. And they can only do that for themselves. It's tough.

Happy Friday, y'all! Second to last day of the challenge and I'm feeling pretty satisfied with how things have gone overall. I learned a lot about myself and I applied that knowledge to my betterment. I haven't perfected this whole thing yet, but I haven't allowed the perfect to be the enemy of the good, and I feel... good. That's always a good feeling. One thing that has not gone well is that I've fallen off on mat attendance because of real life/job pressures. I'm working on getting up earlier to get after job stuff earlier in the day, but the job lately is kind of being a bunch of butts (a mass of asses, if you will) in that my boss because of her boss is getting in my way a lot and dictating a lot of my work to me rather than leaving me alone to get the job done, which is how I tend to thrive. A lot of this past week has been meetings and lots of work on a low amount of cases, and I don't think it's entirely my fault that I haven't been as good about getting stuff done as they would prefer. OTOH, the only thing I control is my own rational choices, and if I'm honest with myself, I haven't made the best choices here either with the limited amount of time I have to get stuff done in the morning before going off to the mats. I am committed to a return to noontime classes, just because I could do nighttime but that choice cascades into a bunch of other choices that do not cause me to thrive and wouldn't even give me more usable things for martial arts. It's the worst of both worlds, and I want something better. It's just gonna be some growing pains between here and there. Anyway, I've done some study on scenes and sequels. Turns out there's a whole book wrote on the subject, so it's worth some honest study and gut-checking before committing to prose. A bit more today, I think, and I'll be good to go.

Yeah, this'll be me in 40+ years if I live that long. Need to figure out how to build that for myself.

I don't speak up much here, but I'm always glad to hear from you whenever we get to.

Right. If I don't force myself to take the time to do this, it's not going to get done. Like I told @Sovalis, challenges sometimes are things we do rather than things we post about. That's been me for the past week and some change. How busy am I? I sat down to type this up at the job yesterday and I got 2 sentences out before getting called away to do more job stuff. I just never got back. Life carries on, though. I've not been able to make mat time like I used to because I don't have OT available anymore to make up for lost productivity I'd get working through my lunch break. So I've set some productivity standards for myself to make sure that the job's cared for, and I haven't been able to manage both those and my writing in time for me to make it out to the mats with a good conscience. Good news is, the writing does persist. I've lost track of how many days exactly I've complied with the goal; I missed some between here and the last time I checked in, but it's still more writing than not and I just finished up my last character bible today. The only thing that's left now is scenes and sequels, I think; that's going to mean a bit of study about how to build this stuff but I'm confident that these will be written out sooner rather than later. I can't help noticing that it's October, and National Novel Writing Month is next month. I don't know if I'll be ready in time, but it's possible. And if I am... well, I dunno. Do I even want to do NaNoWriMo again? Like, given how little patience I have with it overall and with the community at large? I dunno. But, if I was ready in time, that'd be pretty fortuitous timing. Anyway, that's a problem for future Kishi to solve. Right now, I got a job to do.

FWIW, I've always said that challenges are "doing" things rather than "posting" things. If you can't make time for here because you've got stuff to do, that's honestly fine and probably as it should be. Means you're kicking ass and taking names, or alternately that you're busy surviving bad times and need that energy for yourself, and that too is fine. (not the bad times part but the part where you're taking care of yourself). So don't worry about making time for us. It'll come back when it does. We'll be here when you're ready.

Well the fear-mongering is just a thing in the previews; the film itself is actually a lot more sympathetic with its AI characters. And it's a very pretty film; something Edwards does incredibly well is creating these beautiful set pieces and using these to show the scale of the problems that his characters are trying to solve. But rather than creating a world with its issues and characters who will make the choices that he wants them to make naturally, he instead railroads the plot in a way that's really hard to ignore if that part of your brain is interacting with the film. The result, for me, is an emotionally evocative film that has a lot to say, but the moment you try to parse what it's saying is the moment it stops working. * Had to get to the office early today as one of our own is getting a sendoff. No writing to update the goal with yet. Went to Sci-Fi night last night with my friends and we decided to watch Poltergeist. It's a good film for jump scares, and for me, the sheer sense of dread is really effective. But the plot itself is kind of silly and the characters are all heart and no brains, and also whoof, there's some parts that didn't age well at all. Still, any film where the main villain is unbridled capitalism is a good time for me. Also, I never knew it was a Spielberg picture, but once I knew, I was able to find his fingerprints all over the place. Anyway, at the office today. Not sure if I'll be able to get clear of this place in time to make the mats tonight, but it'll just be a repeat of yesterday's class so if it doesn't work out, NBD.

Goal: 20/23 Push training on Saturday was remarkable for a return to doing push ups, albeit with banded assistance. I looked at the amount of eccentric work I was doing and just felt like it was enough. I probably could have done 3x5 regular push ups, but I wanted to be able to do the kind of cadence work that I've been doing, and I wasn't sure that the eccentrics I was doing would give me enough strength, since they're programmed generally to lead to regular repetitions first. Good times, though. Sunday, I got up and out to the mats and did some striking work. Got beat up in sparring, but did manage to stop myself from getting turned about, which was what I wanted. Got home, did some strength work, and then it was off to the cinema to see The Creator, by Gareth Edwards. It's fine. Very pretty. Has a Lot To Say, but doesn't say it very well. I'm definitely more thoughtful about this story than I've been about most in a while, though, so there's that. Anyway, did that and then went to hang with my folks. Stayed with them for a while. It was nice. Today, made it out to BJJ. I was pretty far ahead on the job, and I thought about staying to spar, but I chose to leave since I don't have the OT to rely on anymore and I didn't want to take the chance that I would run out of time to get the requisite amount of actions done on the requisite amount of cases. It worked out fine in the end, though. If I can keep this up, it'd be a good idea to revisit all this and see what I can do. I still have strength work to get done today. It'll be a pull day. Oh, also, didn't write any yesterday, but did write this morning, so, progress continues.

Yes, this. I've been doing something similar with horse stance lately, except that my focus has been more on "rooting" than the strength aspect. (it should start at the relevant bit. I'm sorry if it doesn't; scroll to ~8:29 or so. Or watch the whole thing. I thought it was fun).

Goal: 19/21 Slept in late and didn't make the mats. It was necessary. I'm glad for it. Ran my measurements and found that after an uptick a couple of weeks ago, they're trending back down in the right direction again. I figured out what was going on and was able to correct it, which is always good to be able to say. I was kind of afraid that adjusting my daily calories via MFP per @The Most Loathed would cause me to reverse course; instead, what's happened is a slowdown of my fat loss but in a way that's much more comfortable and, dare I say, sustainable. I've been engrossed in research all afternoon, and basically realized that I don't have a problem to solve with this character as they don't really have a set place in their pantheon, and also I realized that I would be overcommitting to a mythology/metaphysics in a way that I don't really want to. Fortunately, it turns out that the way that I've conceived of this character based on first principles appears to be very recognizably a part of the tradition they're pulled from, although I'd want a diversity reader of some kind to confirm or to tease out some subtleties I might have missed. Anyway, I feel good with the day's work and ready to go as far as resuming character bibles. Today, I shall be going on a ruck and come back to do some kind of pushing work. Last night, I replaced one core move I was doing with another which I think is going to suit me better and help me develop safely and effectively, although it's way too soon to say. Today, rucking will be core work enough.

Goal: 18/20 Goal done! I kind of hit a wall on one of my characters, but it's in a good way. I'm basically trying to figure out their social connections and realizing that I don't really understand them in their place in the pantheon that they're from. The mythology concerning that pantheon is actually kind of fluid, so I could probably get away with a lot, but I want it to feel right, so even though it's not my culture, someone from that culture could look at my work and go, "Oh. Well, he got some things wrong, but it looks... pretty... good, actually?" And there's just not that much else to report. I made it out to the mats for lunch and class was good; focused on headlock defense and then applying those movement fundamentals to the Dogfight position. Job ate up most of my afternoon, but with all the sound and fury coming from on high, I'm pretty much just checked out at this point. I'm wrapping up some last OT and looking forward to a proper couple days off. Sticking to schedule is going to be weird moving forward, since I like getting the writing done early, but then again, I won't be working late for the foreseeable future either, so maybe it's just a wash. The job shrinking back to being an 8-hour only affair is probably going to do me a lot of good.

That sounds amazing. Ever since the first time I tried naan I've thought to myself, this could be a dopeass pizza crust. Sorry to hear that your back is acting up. I've had some shadows of that myself in my lower back, especially after guard-heavy days. I hope you find a way to deal with that and feel better. Is there anything to be done for it? Also, must thank you for turning me on to MFP. I managed to get started on it and integrate my pedometer into it, and now I get to eat all this extra food while being in deficit. You have improved my life, and I thank you for it!

Good plan. A nice low dose of iron to start with. Should be a good test to see how it interacts with all your other obligations and what adjustments would be necessary from there, if any.

Goal: 17/19 Fire gif is because of the turn of the seasons finally coming to my state, and should certainly not be seen as a commentary on how the job is going. Nope. Not at all. Last night wound up being a long walk afterhours from the job, and I didn't make it out to the mats. Not too tore up about it. Monday and Wednesday striking classes are really more about exercise than actually teaching us how to use what we're given, and I got frank with myself last night and admitted that I'm really just not motivated to go. Friday's a sparring class, but I'm already going to BJJ on Fridays around lunch and the sparring class starts before the end of the work day, and while I'm using my lunch break for the one and remaining compliant, it eats enough out of the day that between that and my writing, I'm not giving the job what it needs. Although, to be clear, I don't really know what this job needs anymore. I thought I did, once upon a time, but it's failed to respond often enough to what I thought it needed that I'm willing to admit that I've had to rethink some things and make some adjustments. It remains to be seen if the changes will work, but the past couple weeks have been responsive, so I think I'm on the right track. Today, working on a character bible, I realized that I'd left some of my world-building documentation out of the Snowflake that I was making, so I had to go find that and add it on. I got the chance to see what kind of story I had tried to tell before, and walked away feeling really good about where the story has come since the last couple drafts. And hell, I feel really good about how much work I've done since then to ground these characters and their circumstances in something a bit more real, even as I have to admit that there's a degree of heightened reality that I'm just going to have to make my peace with. I think it'll be fine. It feels right, for now. Tonight should be more mat time, since my Writer Friend should be off on travels elsewhere. I'll get some ruck and upper body work done today, and then I've got some personal errands to run and see to as well. Cool.

Right? But that's apparently what's needed to warm the body up for the kind of hardening I mean to attempt. For this one in particular, yes. But Sanchin is a very unique kata for that. Karate generally prioritizes sharp, snappy movement, while also pushing for absolute precision and control of that movement. Off the top of my head, Rika Usami of Japan is, like, the best exemplar of that kind of thing. So, the way that she does kata is pretty much the gold standard, and as you can see, it's nothing like what I referenced earlier. ETA: I don't actually know if she's a gold-winner, and I don't necessarily know that the way she does it is actually the gold standard. She's a martial artist I was exposed to in my early Bullshido.net days as someone who didn't train for fighting but still accomplished something beautiful, and I kind of imprinted on her for that reason. The earlier comment about how this kata's performance is more normal/striven for vs Sanchin still stands. * Goal: 16/18 Quick one today. Job's on fire. It's not my fault, but I'm caught up in it and I have to weather it. We're at the end of our fiscal year and so we've got certain productivity goals to hit, and I've been dealing with the pressure of that whilst at the same time dealing with issues related to my phone not working like it should. So, yesterday I had to spend catching up from a position of being behind. Not fun. I probably should have worked a bunch more OT last night, but I needed mat time, and fortunately I was able to make that happen. Spent a lot of time working on attacks from diamond, which is an incomplete triangle position. I didn't spar it very well in the situationals after - pretty much every single person I went with either postured up or just stood and waited for my legs to get tired, and I couldn't force them back down. Got tapped once by a lower rank, but otherwise I was able to just out-survive folk, which was fine with me, and there was one gent I went with where my survival postures pretty much put me in places where I could just pass his guard, and I did manage to hit him with a triangle choke. Anyway, that's yesterday. Today is today. Might need to go for a long walk to go pick up some stuff at the Whole Foods, which is good for steps but bad for productivity. Don't know how I'm going to balance the load today. Guess I'll see what happens.

Yeah, flax is not fun. Flaxseed itself might be OK, but TBF I think I've lost my taste for it, if I ever had any at all.

I mean, I'm resigned to the fact that what is not a shitty rushed job is really down to people who aren't me. My work gets checked over by so many people before it clears that it's just not worth my time or my effort to be fussed about how good a job I do. Let those other people earn their paychecks. I got mine. * Goal: 15/17 Ah, man, life feels better when I write. Admittedly, it was last minute and minimal on Sunday, but it carried over into Monday and then today, so it's all good. I'm about done with another character bible at this point, and while it'd be preferable to be done sooner, this is the kind of work that, prior, might have taken weeks or months to get done. Now it's a matter of days, and while it'd be preferable to take less days, well, it's progress still. Better may be possible yet, but I'm not going to let some perfect possible be the enemy of the good I'm doing now. Training has been fine. I did parallel bar jump dips, 5x8 with slowed cadence although not the slowest possible. Takes about a minute to do a full set, and condensing all that work into 10 minutes means reduced rest, which is fine, but wow is that taxing. I approve. Superset that with some kneeling side planks, and was surprised at how much my shoulders talked to me in the midst of that. I wasn't very thoughtful about putting these together, and it may benefit me to be so going forward. Monday I went out to BJJ and worked on fundamentals of movement. Lot of attacks and sweeps from guard when the opponent is making newbie mistakes, and then we did some work on pulling/levering an arm to either take the back, attack a kimura, or get to diamond position, from whence we do more terrible things. I could stand to do more study on my own about these, but I also respect the degree to which I've got a whole lot going on, man. I refuse to castigate myself for that. I also finally heard from my brother, and I have a plan of attack going forward for body hardening. First step is to learn Sanchin, a kind of isometric/isotonic kata that's basically another flavor of hard qigong that is acceptable for the kind of work I will be doing. (the linked video, by the way, is too short to show the full thing, but it's honestly the best example I can find of the kind of tension and quality of movement I want to achieve. Frankly, she's goals to me). Anyway, today is today. Gotta go to the office. Would be good to make the mats tonight, but it'll be a duplicate/refinement of yesterday's class, so it's no biggie if I can't sneak out early. It'll be a Pull day of some kind today too; might end up rucking tonight and might not. Really hard to say. Lots of good possibilities tonight about what's gonna happen.

Yeah, well, that's capitalism for ya. Even in the public sector, we take our organizational cues from the private, meaning that we have unelected, unaccountable lords of our labor who dictate to us what we will do, how we will do it, and how we will be compensated for it. And my coworkers aren't ready or willing or really even able to fight for something better, so this is just what it is. It's a good reminder of the Stoic observation that the only thing in my control is my own rational thinking, and how little that really amounts to. I might have been angry or disappointed once, but the training has been good. I've found my way to dry resignation over the whole thing. It's an improvement, I promise. Yep! Yes, and this is good. Less time to get the job done, however, is gonna be a problem. Nobody who's above me is going to care about the effect of these limitations on my caseload, so, I'm going to have to take responsibility for it myself. Means getting up earlier to get my writing done early as opposed to later/on job time. Thanks, padre. It won't last. It's fiscal year shenanigans combined with budget shenanigans in both our state and federal governments, which is where our fundage comes from. It won't last. See, that's the thing. See my comments to Mistr. They don't think that the workload is unreasonable; they genuinely believe that we can accomplish what we need to on 40 hours a week, even though we all know now that it takes something like 55-60 hours. Hell, there are people in the chain of command who think that they're being too generous to us with our workload as it is that we should be doing more. * Goal: 12/14 No writing the past couple of days. Friday I focused on the job more and made mat time; I could have got the writing done, but I just didn't. Saturday, the folks came to visit me, and we got lunch even as the tropical storm decided to go ahead and rage outside. I never did get the writing done; instead, I heard back from my brother and kind of started down a rabbit hole of research into how to approach the body hardening based on how he explained it. I'm kind of still there, since he said to do "hard qigong," but then told me he'd find video examples to explain what he was talking about and hadn't got back to me. I've been scratching the research itch myself, and I suspect that I've found some of what he's looking for, but I need to confirm. Training's been fine. Think I'm going to go ahead and buy a 30 lb ruck plate and some magnets since I'm about at the limit of what weight I can put in my pack right now. Rucking and inversion work was Friday. Saturday was a Lunge day. Did some Kettlebell Orbit Reverse Lunges, which was fine but I didn't manage some of my transfers very well so my right shoulder's a bit upset with me. Also did some GMB Elements work, which was welcome. Today is today. Got out to the mats this morning and did some good work on striking, but there's more to do as always. I've got plenty of time today to write and exercise, and it sure would be a shame to let it pass me by with nothing done.

Do now! So, I don't do it anymore, but I was doing it once upon a time for grappling. My belief was that I was developing the ability to go without breath for long-enough periods of time that I could out survive certain positions and find my way to better positions. I was also a believer in the central claim that Hof makes, that his breath work is a way to stave off disease and to achieve certain superhuman feats. Neither of these turned out to be true for me. As to the first belief, the ability to go without breathing didn't do anything for me in terms of surviving chokes. My attackers would simply crank harder, and eventually my throat just closed up in a way that I reflexively tapped out. There may have been some other psychological benefits, as I freak out a bit whenever I can't see and I'm worried that I'm about to get hurt, and going without breath for relatively prolonged periods may have been useful as a kind of mental hardening, but so is just the repeat exposure to that position and those circumstances. As to the second belief, his central claim is apparently under enough contention for it to be an unsettled matter in the broader scientific community. Hof, to his credit, does expose himself to scientific scrutiny, but apparently there's not a lot of evidence that the exact response of his body to his training can be replicated in other populations. The studies conducted on other folk basically seem to say that there was some response, but it wasn't the same response in terms of its degree, and the response itself wasn't consistent in the test populations. There's also some medical skepticism as to whether it's even desirable in the first place; inflammation in this way of thinking is seen as a beneficial, appropriate response in the healing process, and stymying that may be inappropriate or otherwise contraindicated in normal folk. OTOH, I want to be careful here. XBlackWidowX has said that she's benefitted from this training, and who am I to come and say that her benefits aren't real or unscientific? And while there may not be enough consistency in the response to sell the method, well, that doesn't mean there's no response. It could just be that some people respond well to this kind of thing, and some people don't, and the only way to know is to give it your own try and see how it works. It's worth pointing out that the Method itself doesn't seem to be innately harmful, and while there are fatalities associated with it, they seem to be related to people attempting it under risky, inappropriate, uncontrolled circumstances which Hof himself warns against. So, you know. tl;dr I don't do it anymore, but give it a shot and see what happens.

Morning walks are a reward I'm hoping for for learning to get up early.