2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. I thought is was pretty cool, as I’m normally too clueless technically to look at or understand my diagnostics. I guess most of you are checking me out via Facebook, which only makes sense, seeing how much I use it.

Happy New Year, lovely lurkers!   ~Jenn

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 710 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 12 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Warrior wisdom

If one holds a sword,
One’s spirit must be like a sword.
If one holds a staff,
One’s spirit must be like a staff.
If one holds nothing but air then
One’s spirit must be as air.

~Shoto Tanemura

The More You Holmes

From: Elementary 3.8

Line:(Sherlock)
My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my very own atmosphere. Then I can dispense with old cravings and bad habits but I abhor the dull routine of existence.

Reference: This is almost directly verbatim from A Sign of Four, and it is one of my personal favorite speeches of Holmes’ in all of the Doyle canon. In this episode of Elementary, Sherlock says this to his recovery support group. In Sign, Holmes replies with the following speech to Watson’s admonishment at his cocaine use. “Why should you,” reprimands Watson, “for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed?”

“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”

Latest Book Review

Here’s my latest book review–as usual, excerpt below and the whole shebang on Nerds in Babeland.

Highlights of this collection include: a satirical look at the lack of boys in video gaming and what we can do about it, a paralleling of Mario to a bodhisattva and the Mario games to Buddhism, how one author who didn’t like video games at all tried Portal, and a delightfully written description of how another author learned to get cutthroat in Eve Online.

An Article to Read

Please to read and enjoy the article on fellow stage combat themed blog PlayFighting called “Stunt Combat Trends.” I am interested in starting a discussion about this, as I see these trends popping up amongst my students and their requests in classes, as well as their choices in my Martial Arts Styles unit in Advanced classes. Excerpt below, and find the rest at PlayFighting.ca.

Throughout the history of cinematic fights, a variety of stunt coordinators have come to prominence, and with them their iconic styles. When a movie becomes popular and has fight scenes that are appreciated, the market is flooded with imitators.

Sometimes their style is overgeneralized to apply to every weapon. These days, if you wield two weapons, you have to do Escrima, even if those two weapons are rapiers.

Some (like me) complain about this trend, which has a long history. As I’ll show in this article, performers should be generalists, but good choreography is specific.

Word.

Not at all a posed punch. Nope.