There are things that I should do

Feeling a bit down at the moment.  Girlfriend is back east right now, for one thing, and while that's not the proximate cause, odds are good that if she were here I would be in a significantly better mood, perhaps even a good one.

I didn't come here to complain.  There have been some logistical frustrations.  I was feeling quite off my game at jujitsu practice tonight, for a number of reasons.  The most interesting of those reasons, I think, goes back to the instructor mentioning a handful of times that a particular throw had killed people in living memory.  That rattled me a bit, to be honest.  I'm aware that jujitsu is a martial art, and so using it is definitionally an act of violence, but one aspect of it that has appealed to me is it's array of nonlethal techniques.  Rightly or wrongly, I had filed its throws in that category, and I certainly have thrown a good number of people over my shoulder, and not given so much as a large bruise.  So it's jarring, morbid, and ethically trenchant to be reminded of how differently things play out when the person being thrown doesn't know how to take the fall.

So the image of necks snapping put me off my game for the night.  If anyone else there felt that they had abruptly been asked whether they were utilitarians or deontologists, or to make a call about the limits of the just use of force, they didn't show it.

Is prolonged exposure to pacifists turning me into one, or am I simply possessed of a healthy distaste for actual violence?

That wasn't actually what I came here to talk about.  I guess another thing that made today suboptimal was that I did my taxes instead of writing--this post excepted.  I am aware that this is the very, very last minute.  I am aware.

So the real eponymous thing that I should do is, apparently, read The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss.  I have been advised in strong, almost coercive terms to do so.  One trusted beta reader has implied that I could not honorably pursue fantasy writing without reading this book.  Tycho Brahe has called me a villain--and he doesn't even know who I am.  But the challenge has been issued, and it will be met.  I just need to finish American Gods first.  (Halfway through that, by the way, and liking it.)

To some degree a person could spend his entire life simply reading the books that he must needs read to understand--to sufficiently grok--his chosen genre.  Very recently I got around to reading Ender's Game (short review: holy crap), which incidentally means that now I've read fiction by Orson Scott Card, and I'm not just acting on blind faith when I take his writing advice...

...I set this post aside and never finished it.  I may have had more to say, but I don't remember offhand. I guess it can wait until the next post.