It's getting less amusing. I guess it was never amusing, since it started with me throwing up in bed. Or, possibly, I got sick and got better briefly, and this is the sequel; but if it is a sequel, it's a sequel like The Two Towers, and was in post-production while the first installment was in theaters.
I think there's something to the sequel theory. A lot of the plot points have changed, and the original villain has been replaced. Fatigue and coughing aren't nearly as intimidating as nausea. Which is a negative for a movie but a positive for an illness.
I might be staying home from judo if promotionals weren't next week. As it is, I've still got things to learn, so I go. Specifically, I'd really like to learn how to do this before the test:
It's hard!
If those problems aren't immediate enough, we've got some kind of Voltron hurricane aimed at the upper east coast, throwing people into a panic. I mostly expect that the impending doom is overhyped, but I did buy water and matches today.
NaNoWriMo is approaching fast. I've had some breakthroughs talking to Girlfriend about her story, but I haven't actually figured out what I'm doing. I could continue with Myrddin, although that story is getting too big to write in one-month increments at a one- or two-year interval without producing major plot holes. I could also do something in the fantasy world that spun off from the D&D campaign that everyone seemed to like, but I haven't gotten a handle on the characters yet. I've also considered a sort of Lovecraft-inspired modern thingamajig, but I don't think I could ramble well enough to NaNo if I wrote in a modern idiom.
Grumble grumble. Still sick. Just barely, but just enough. For a while now I have been vacillating over whether to compete in a judo tournament my club is holding a mile from my house. I hoped to fight, but then this flu or what-have-you happened, and I spent the two weeks ahead of the tournament convalescing instead of getting my act together. So my act is not together, which is disappointing. However, when I went down to the venue yesterday to help lay the mats out, and doing that made me dizzy, I felt justified in passing this tournament up. But, bah. I am frustrated.
At Thursday's judo practice we had some mock matches to prepare people for the upcoming tournament. The experience made me more determined to compete on some level, somewhere, because I realized that I'm awful under pressure. When my turn came up and people started watching me, the world got a little blurrier. The echoing corridors between my brain and my muscles spontaneously filled up with cotton. All this just because we were pretending for a minute that it mattered. So this is something I ought to get over, not only in judo but generally, if possible.
Projects are advancing, even if nothing got finished this week. NaNoWriMo is coming. I need to figure out what to write. (And I should finish 12 before November starts.)
I'm excited lately. I'm not sure if I have a reason. It could just be that I've changed (re: dropped some of) my medication, and a little bit of my ADHD is coming back. It could be that I'm replacing the missing stimulant with caffeine, though I'm actually hardly drinking any more than I did before. It could be, and I hope it is, that some things are going right.
I successfully extracted my health insurance from the bureaucratic barathrum that held it out of my reach for 72 days, at final count. There's a story there, but it may be the sort that diminishes in the telling. I am not Franz Kafka; this tale is outside my expertise. Suffice it to say, in brief, that I called and I called and I called, and the whole process felt like fixing a broken VCR by swatting it with a rolled-up newspaper. Eventually something went "clunk" and the mechanism moved.
The immediate upshot was that I could go to judo last night without being afraid that I could bankrupt myself by dislocating my pinky toe. I had a good time, skinned my knuckle, tore the knee of (one of) my uniform pants, and got sore. And it is wonderful to have a body capable of picking other bodies up and throwing them down again; it is wonderful to have a body capable of self-repair when the same is done to it.
I was up late the night before that working on 12 when I had a breakthrough, or an inspiration, or just a couple good ideas. I should keep this in mind in the future as evidence that you really can find a solution for a story that's stuck by sitting down and writing at it for a while. I wish I could explain exactly what I thought of, but I should just put it in the story. Anyway, sometimes, occasionally, writing actually is exhilarating, and it has been once or twice this week.
I've been talked into playing Guild Wars 2, which is also exciting. That would entail playing with friends, and it was also explained to me that the game allowed you to combine skills with other players' on the fly in a manner reminiscent of Chrono Trigger, which made my heart sing. Actually sing. I need to see someone about it.
I also finally remembered to throw some money at the Kickstarter for The Gamers 3: Hands of Fate. You should too, if you haven't (and soon--the deadline is September 7), because it's going to be good, and Bryan will be in it. They even shot some of the movie already at this year's GenCon. Here, watch this:
Now I suppose it's possible that that makes no sense to you, in which case I apologize. A little.
The last thing, I guess, is that I'm leaving tonight for New York to visit my parents. My plan for the weekend consists of visiting, taking advantage of the pool, and little else.
Summer is a crazy time. On Wednesday night I got back to Maryland from Cape Cod, by way of a layover in Philadelphia. On Sunday I'm leaving again to go on a tour of my grandmothers in the Carolinas. In all this I'm trying to find time to work--to work work, mind you--and also to write.
I didn't finish my 12 Dancing Princesses story, which I'll just call "12" for now until I come up with something better. That sort of diligence didn't really seem in the spirit of the vacation I was taking, but I'll keep at it. I actually think this story will be cool when I finish it. I like it.
Over the last six weeks I've been having a Kafkaesque experience with Maryland's state health insurance plan. It's not such a great story in the telling. The upshot is that the enrollment department's game plan is apparently to tell me my paperwork is out of date and make me fill it out again, and repeat, until (I guess) I give up or die. So I am currently, technically, uninsured.
So between being out of town and knowing that I'll have to sell my kidneys if I break my arm, I haven't done much judo lately. I can console myself by watching it on the Olympics, although that itself is a strange experience--NBC, assuming nobody in America cares about judo (I guess), has left most of the feeds raw. But I can be excited, at least, by the news that an American has finally won a judo gold medal. I can also look forward to picking through NBC's three-hour feed to watch that happen.
I have now watched The Dark Knight Rises twice since I last posted about it. It was a very good movie but did not flirt with greatness like its immediate forebear did. I am satisfied. Now I can start devoting my anticipation to The Hobbit, which I hear has now been racked out to three movies. No doubt there will be more to say on that.
This isn't what I normally do, but I've been excited about judo in this year's Olympics, especially since Kayla Harrison stands a good chance of winning the United States' first ever Olympic gold in the sport. And some of the write-ups I've seen of the sport have been sloppy or downright wrong, like the one in my hometown newspaper. Even last year's commentators seemed resigned to the idea that no one watching had any idea what was going on, and that's sad.
Judo is a deep and exciting sport, and I think the public deserves at least an attempt to explain it. Most of the information out there on martial arts generally is geared toward learning how to do it—what I hope to do in this post is to give someone who has never learned judo enough information to watch the sport and enjoy it, without having to sign up for lessons or learn Japanese.
The beauty of judo is that it has relatively few, simple rules, but the sport that grows out of them is wonderfully complex. You don’t need to know the Japanese names of all 77 throws in the Kodokan syllabus to follow what’s going on. Hopefully, you just need to read this post.
So what the heck is judo anyway?
Judo is a combat sport, like boxing or wrestling. The goal is to defeat your opponent by throwing him onto his back, pinning him down, or using a submission hold to make him give up. The techniques of judo are descended from the empty-handed fighting methods of Japan's warrior class during the country's long, long feudal period. Despite its violent origins, the essence of judo is control. It is not a bloodsport—the first thing players learn is how to avoid injury.
There is no punching or kicking in judo. Apparently this needs to be emphasized, because my local paper claimed that judo players use throwing, joint-locking, and striking. So here it is again, to be clear. There is no striking in judo. There are no shivs in boxing. There are no flamethrowers in soccer.
What the heck is going on in a judo match?
I'm going to go through the different phases of a judo match and explain what to look for in each of them. These aren't official phases, like innings in baseball, but the players will be doing different things at different times and this should help you follow along.
A Judo contest is held between two players on a padded mat. The judo uniform is a heavy cotton jacket and pants similar to traditional dress in Japan. This uniform is one of the reasons that Judo plays out so differently from wrestling or MMA fighting: it gives the players something to grab onto as they try to move their opponent.
As I said before, you win a judo match by throw, pin, or submission. A partial throw or pin—I'll explain this later—is worth 1/2 point, and 1 whole point is all you need to win.
The beginning: grip fighting.
The first thing a player needs to do is get a good grip on his opponent. A judo match can begin with a few seconds of tentative grabs, blocks, and pull-aways, as each player tries to get leverage over his opponent without letting his opponent do the same. When someone has a good grip, he'll attack.
The meat: attacks.
Now the players try to throw one another. (It is possible, but extremely difficult and rare, to catch someone in a submission hold while standing; and obviously you can't pin someone while you're both standing up.) There is a lot of movement here as the players try to get each other off balance. Generally, you can avoid being thrown a certain way by setting your weight against it, but that opens you up to another throw. The players exploit this by attacking with combinations of throws, one after the other.
Pay attention to the players’ postures. Both players want to stay mobile and upright, where they are well-balanced and able to attack. A player leaning one way or another is vulnerable to a throw. A player with legs set wide and their hips low, often keeping their opponent at arm’s length, is in an extremely defensive posture, and will have a hard time attacking.
There are at least 77 recognized judo throws, but you don't need to know them all. I certainly don't yet. All you really need is to recognize three main types of throw.
Major throws. Someone on the receiving end of a major throw can catch some serious air. These are throws where thrower turns his back on his opponent and pulls him over a part of his own body. This includes the shoulder throw, which is the classic "judo throw," e.g. the throw you've seen if you've only seen one judo throw in your entire life.
That’s throwing someone over your shoulder. Sometimes the
throw goes over the hip or the leg instead, bus the result is about the same.
It’s easiest to catch someone in a major throw as they are
moving forward, or pushing forward.
Leg reaps. These are where the thrower wraps one his his legs around one of his opponent’s legs and sweeps it out from under him. In a way, these are the opposite of the major throws, because it is easiest to catch someone in one of these when they are moving backward or pulling you. The most common reap looks like this:
Trips. Tripping is a perfectly valid attack in judo. Trips are subtle attacks that require good timing. Players often attempt trips to provoke a reaction that opens their opponent up for another throw. Honestly, you probably already know what it looks like when you trip a guy, but here's how it goes in judo:
There are a few throws that don’t fall into these three categories, but they aren’t common. If someone pulls out something interesting and esoteric, now you at least know enough to turn to the person next to you and say, "Hey, that was an interesting and esoteric throw!"
For the throw to be worth a full point (and end the match) the thrower has to throw with speed and force, and the throwee needs to land on his back. If one of these doesn't happen, the thrower gets 1/2 point (or no point, if the throw was really sloppy) and the match continues.
Going to the mat: Grappling
When one or both players are on the mat a whole other dimension opens up. Sometimes a player will try to stand back up rather than engage a formidable grappler on the mat. This is where pins and submission holds become a factor. If the action comes to a standstill on the mat, the referee will separate the players and stand them back up to continue the match.
There are two defensive positions you should recognize on the mat.
The “turtle” position is very defensive. The player “turtling” essentially curls into a ball so he can't be thrown, pinned, or put in a submission hold. The player attacking will try to turn the turtling player over, or find a way to attack his arms or neck. The referee will often halt the match when a player proves unable to break this position.
The “guard” position is where a player is on his back and has the other player between his legs. This allows the guarding player to control his opponent’s hips and provides a lot of offensive options. A player in this position isn't pinned, even if his opponent is on top.
Pins in judo are fluid; the pinning player can change position, as long as he is still holding his opponent down. The person being pinned will usually buck and roll, trying to make enough space to get free. Holding a pin for 25 seconds gets 1 point; 20 seconds gets 1/2 point, and 15 seconds gets a tiny fraction of a point that's only good for breaking ties.
There are two types of legal submission holds in judo: chokes and arm locks. The player on the receiving end of one of these can tap the mat three times to signal that he gives up.
Judo has a lot of techniques that involve choking an opponent with his own jacket. If you see a player on the ground working his hands into his opponent’s lapel, that’s what he’s trying to do. They can also choke by wrapping their arms (or legs) around their opponent’s neck.
(An interesting point about choking in judo is that the players don’t try to close off their opponents’ air supply—they try to cut off the circulation of blood to their opponents’ brains by squeezing the sides of the neck. This works faster than attacking the windpipe, and it’s also safer for the person being choked. As a result, players caught in chokes often choose to keep fighting until they pass out instead of tapping. They usually come to a few seconds after the choke is released, a bit disoriented but uninjured. But please, please, don't go strangling your friends now because you read here that it was okay. People do die from this when it's done wrong—judo players know what they are doing.)
An arm lock is a technique that will break the other player’s
elbow if applied with enough force. The elbow is the only joint that it’s legal
to attack this way in judo; elbows are pretty durable, and they have a lot of
nerves in them so a player knows when they need to tap out. Judo players—especially Olympic-level
ones—can tell when they’re caught, so arm locks hardly ever result in injuries.
When you see a player trying to get control of one of his
opponent’s arms, he is probably trying for an arm lock.
At the end.
A lot of Olympic judo matches last until time runs out. If nobody has a full point, whoever has the highest score wins. If there's a tie, the match goes into a "golden score" period, which is perhaps a more civilized name for "sudden death overtime." Essentially any score at all is enough to win the game at that point. If that ends and there's still a tie, the referee and two judges vote on the winner.
What the heck are they saying? Some Japanese phrases you'll hear the referees shouting.
The terminology of judo is in Japanese, and though I've avoided using Japanese terms so far, there are a few you'll need to recognize.
“Hajime!” means “begin.” It’s the starting bell.
“Matte!” means “stop.”
“Ippon!” means that a player has won the match.
“Waza-ari!” means a player has gotten 1/2 a point.
“Yuko!” means a player has gotten a fraction of a point for a 15-second pin or a not-very-good throw.
“Osae komi!” means that one player has pinned the other. The clock starts on the pin when the referee announces it.
“Shido!” is a penalty. If the match ends in a draw, the player with a penalty will lose. Some things that can get a player a penalty are: putting their hands in the other player’s face, retreating from the other player, trying to “fake out” the other player with attacks that aren’t serious, or grabbing the opponent’s uniform in certain very aggressive ways without trying to throw. The first penalty called is just a warning. The second a player gets gives a yuko (fractional point) to the other player. A third turns that into 1/2 point.
“Hansoku Make!” is something you shouldn’t hear. It means that a player has broken the rules and is disqualified. Some things that can disqualify a player are: grabbing straight for the opponent’s legs, attempting an illegal submission hold such as a knee lock, or using a flamethrower.
There's more, of course. There's always more. But if your eyes haven't glazed over by this point, you've learned enough to watch some judo! Pick someone and root for them.
Addendum: The scores don't make sense! What the heck do the numbers mean?
For some reason, most scoreboards don't like that an ippon is 1 point, a waza-ari is 1/2 point, and a yuko is 1/∞. The scoreboards try to show the scores using whole numbers, which makes for a hybrid solution that's confusing for everyone. So forget what you know about math. A yuko is scored as 1, a waza-ari is scored as 10, and an ippon is scored as 100. Pretend they never invented numbers without ones or zeroes in them. 1+1=1. 10+1=11. 10+10=100.
This morning was the judo test. This would be the first martial arts "test" I have had that was actually a test, and not primarily an exhibition. It is a bizarre experience.
There was a written test. It calmed my nerves before the skills demonstration to have something as comfortable and familiar as a written test to tackle. Testing is a skill I haven't been able to use in a long time, not really since high school. I was a bit frustrated to have lost sleep memorizing "seriyoku zenyo" when the test did not turn out to be quite so demanding.
After my testing was done, but while the higher belts were still going, I witnessed an amusing exchange. A woman with a tiny toddlerette on her knee was encouraging the child to "watch Daddy test."
Whump went Daddy's partner onto the mat.
"Oooh," said the little girl, "he's in big trouble."
I'm being coy about the result of the testing because I didn't find out for certain, although if you offered me even money I would put a substantial sum on my having passed.
Tonight I watched The Secret of Kells, which is a beautiful movie. You should see it. With your eyes. I wish (and wished) I had taken the opportunity to see it on a big screen in Seattle. Ever since, I had been putting off seeing it until I could pay attention.
It did cause me to exclaim, at one point, "What is this movie rated?" Girlfriend replied that it wasn't. I'm inclined to think that there is something bold in that. The movie contains vikings, and consequently it depicts them viking. Not that there is "graphic" violence in the strictest sense. Because nobody apparently pushed to get the movie rated G on the basis that all its disturbing elements happen just off screen, I respect it in much the same way that I was irked by The Dark Knight for getting a PG-13 rating instead of an R using the same trick.
Hopefully my respect will offset the sting of taking in less than $1 million at the box office. Failing that, a much-deserved nomination for best animated feature may have done some good. I hope that more money might have flowed to the creators since then.
Speaking of best animated features, I ought to watch Up all the way through, it being what took the Oscar the year The Secret of Kells was nominated. But I can't attempt it today. I think I have been ruined for computer animation until the memory has faded somewhat.
The judo club is ramping up for belt testing in a week, and I decided to go up for promotion. The sudden change in the tenor of practice ("I know this is what works, but this is what they'll look for on the test.") put me in a foul mood about standardized testing, generally. Hence, I was poised to be outraged by the news coming out of New York about their 8th-grade English test. As it turns out, its complicated. Complicated and frustrating.
The other day there was a flap in New York about a bizarre reading followed by some vague questions on the state standardized English test. The reading was a sort of postmodern fable about a race between a pineapple and a hare. While the hare won the race, most of the spectator animals assumed that the pineapple had something up its sleeve. The moral of the story: "Pineapples don't have sleeves." The passage is attributed to Daniel Pinkwater, though it hardly resembles what he turns out to have actually written.* For one thing, his story was about a rabbit and an eggplant.
Here's the story at the New York Daily News. It's worth pointing out that that is not where I read about it first. I saw this first on Gawker, where writer Max Read seems to have made some judicious edits to the reading and questions to make everything even less explicable. At any rate, the quoted material in the two articles doesn't match up. More on that later.
First of all, I find the story itself amusing. I "get" it. I'm not upset that something silly, or even a bit nonsensical, made it onto the standardized test. The questions are the problem.
About those questions. They're different, depending on where you read about it. According to the people begging Mr. Pinkwater for guidance,** the questionable questions are "Which animal was the wisest?" and "Why did the animals eat the pineapple?" Now, even for a perfectly logical reading, these are subjective judgments that aren't suited for multiple choice questions. Asked of a nonsense story, they are a bad joke. On a standardized test, on which hangs children's futures and teachers' careers, they are an affront. But.
But, those aren't the questions as reported by the New York Daily News. They quote the questions as (emphasis mine) "Which animal spoke the wisest words?" and "The animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were..." These aren't great questions, but they're better. They should be cause for indignation, but as standardized English tests go they are apparently par for the course.
Now I read the question has been discounted from students' grades. Oh, and if you were wondering, the animals ate the pineapple most likely because they were annoyed. Now, assuming that the questions are as the News related them, and not as Gawker did (and I hope I can trust a newspaper in this matter), if this brings shame on the testing regime the irony will be that there was nothing especially bad about the questions. It just took a truly absurd story to make people notice.
New York paid Pearson VUE $32 million dollars for this test, and forgive me if I get the impression that Pearson didn't try very hard.
The saddest thing, to me, was the News's quote from Tyree Furman, one of the kids taking the test. "I thought it was a little strange, but I just answered it as best as I could. You just have to give it your best answer. These are important tests."
* There's no permalink to the post in question, as far as I can tell. If it's not on the first page by the time you read this, go to April 17, 2012. Or just buy his novel, Borgel. Having read it, you'll know more about this mess than I do.
** They more or less match the questions on Gawker, but the versions there are even more vague, and because of a change to the reading, the right answer to one is almost certainly different. Apparently this reading has shown up on tests in other states before; maybe this is an older version. The worse, then, for those other states.
Yesterday and today I went ahead and did some things. Not that I hadn't been doing anything before. The contact, for example, is definitely a thing. What I mean is that I've taken some steps that involve other people. As many of you know, other people and I do not always get along, and initiating contact with other people almost always makes me incredibly nervous. This is often what holds me back at the 90% mark.
I am agreeably sore today because last night I visited the College Park Judo Club, which I had been meaning to do since I got here. It's a big club, but I got a good impression of the sensei I met and the other new guy I worked with. I swallowed my pride (because the number of years I've studied and the number of things I know more belie my skill level than attest to it) and went through the beginner paces (which I was herded into when the class started, everyone scattered to do different things, and I ended up slightly bewildered). I think I'm discovering that wherever you go to train, its a good idea to go through the beginner lesson, because everywhere has a slightly different take on the fundamentals. I didn't need to be shown how to fall, inasmuch as I definitely knew enough not to break my neck, but I got in more falling practice than I've ever done at a stretch, maybe (but likely not) excepting my first day at Fudoshin Dojo as a 12-year-old white belt. I got some pointers I hadn't heard before, so I'm glad I did it. Same with grappling and throws, when we got to those. Actually, about half the beginner batch of judo throws are new to me, or ones I could never get the hang of.
Anyway, that was last night. Today I prodded an editor or two at Cracked, because my got lost in the shuffle. (I'm not being kind to myself there. There actually was a shuffle--a huge batch of posts got moved above it on the submission forum all at once. I expect the article to get turned down,* but it looks like so far it just got missed.)
I also finally submitted my first pitch for a Pathfinder adventure to Paizo. So, we'll see how that turns out, too.
One thing that's neat about these two venues is that the operate on internet time. I actually expect feedback this or early next week on both pitches. I think the days of articles sitting on editors' desks for 60+ days are coming to an end.
Oh, I almost forgot. This will probably be the post up when I hit my 1,000th pageview. I think I've already commented on how that's cool, but also a very small number on the internet. Oh well. It can only go up.
*I rewrote that phrase after I looked at it. It originally read, "I expect to get turned down." It occurred to me that I should remember that it's my pitches, not me, getting judged.
