I have been turning an interesting shade of blue lately.

Last week my kendo keikogi and hakama arrived, and I put them on for the first time Thursday. The traditional cotton hakama is dyed with indigo, and it turns out that indigo dye is not fast: it doesn't actually bond to the cloth. It's like a big blue cloth crayon. The indigo rubs off on everything, including (especially) me. My hands turned blue immediately, and I got blue streaks on my face from rubbing off the sweat. My legs were blue too at the end of class. I said it made me look like William Wallace in Braveheart but the general consensus was that I looked like a smurf.

Online there's all sort of advice about washing your hakama for the first time before you wear it. Soaking it for a day in a water/vinegar mixture is one of the most common. I tried this and hand-washing (it's not machine-safe due to the rigid back panel), which predictably didn't do much. If acid caused the dye to set they'd just do it during the dying process. "Hand"-washing actually involves puttign it in the bathtub with some Woolite and grape-stomping it. Then after it's been rinsed off, washing the tub to get the blue smudges off of the enamel.

At yesterday's class I was called on by sensei to demonstrate kiri-kaeshi, a hitting exercise. He even said "He's very new, but good." It would have felt great if I hadn't been afraid I would screw it up. I think I did all right, though in a later exercise I managed to bop myself in the face with my own shinai.

In other news, I started taking Japanese lessons last Wednesday. Evidently I remember more than I thought, because they bumped me up to Beginning 3. Apparently Beginning 1 and 2 devote a lot of their time to kana, which I still remember pretty well. Fortunately it's in the same time slot, but it does mean a review marathon through the book (which is not the one I used in college, so of course everything is in a different order. I'm gonna be a little behind when I start today, I think. So, mixed blessing.

LUDACHRIST IS THE ALPHA AND THE OMEGA

BANGFEST IS THE WAY

YOU'RE ROCKING WITH ALL CAPS POWER, BITCHES

FROM THE FRONT! FROM THE BACK! Teacher, leave those kids alone!

I've put this off way too long.

Comment "WORDS" to this entry and I will comment back with five words I associate with you. Then you post this in your journal elaborating.

Here are padparadscha’s words.

Snark — I don't know what it says that this is the first word you thought of when you thought of me! :P I come by my sarcasm honestly; my parents raised me on it. I do love a good bon mot (even though mine are often less than bon), and I don't suffer fools gladly. And when I see an opening for a good jab I tend to take it, more so online than in person, where I have the classic "great comeback ten minutes after the conversation" problem (thank goodness for the printed word!). I also used to regularly read demiurgent's excellent blog Websnark, which frequently covered...

Webcomics — I used to follow tons of webcomics, and was heavily involved in the fandom(s). I even almost started blogging reviews of webcomics. Now I'm down to just a few that I read regularly (Girl Genius, Questionable Content, Shortpacked) and a couple I catch up with occasionally (Templar, Arizona, Flaky Pastry). The list of webcomics I used to follow is long, and I'm not sure I can even remember all of the titles offhand (particularly the various short-lived Keenspace comics I read). I first got into webcomics when I discovered a collection of User Friendly in the USC college bookstore's computer science section, and was intrigued that O'Reilly had put out a book of cartoons. I hung out in the comp sci section, and knew what O'Reilly was, because I am an enormous...

Geek — To me, being a geek is less about interest in particular, stereotypically "geeky" subjects, though I do tend to be into a lot of them to some extent, but rather an approach to one's interests, mentally cataloguing trivia and finding patterns. Sort of an engineering mindset, applied to one's hobbies. My geekiness has taken many forms over the years, including an extended phase of anime fandom. Computer geekery has been a near-constant since I was a little kid who only stopped hiding under a desk on the first day of First Grade because the teacher said something about the computer in the corner (a Commodore PET). Lately I've been something of a music geek, despite not really playing an instrument (I can sorta play drums, but that doesn't count). One of the more obscure forms it has taken is an interest in creating a...

Conlang — I started building languages in high school, out of frustration with Latin class. What started as a half-assed attempt at regularizing Latin (like "fixing" it would mean I wouldn't have to learn the irregularities) started to pick up weird features from cross-reference-surfing subjects like "mood" in the home encyclopedia. "Rateni" was only an occasional dalliance, though, mostly a method of procrastination while doing Latin homework, even though it found a place in my "Lost Colony" worldbuilding project. Then one day wasting time in the computer labs at college, I ran across Pablo David Flores' How To Create A Language, a primer that opened my eyes to the possibilities beyond tweaking a "known" language. I've since worked on several conlangs, some of which have gone through many top-to-bottom revisions, none of which have gotten to a stage where they are speakable. Someday! Most are connected to Lost Colony, though my current most active project is part of a mecha space opera fantasy setting. I can't think of a good transition to...

Kendo — My most recently aquired hobby. I've done Aikido since college (with some time off due to inability to walk or stand up), and I felt like branching out. Fortunately, there is a kendo dojo in town that meets on days when Aikido doesn't. I thought kendo would be a good supplement to my Aikido for several reasons: Aikido is (to some extent) based on movements from sword work, I could use a lot more sparring experience (pacing myself, reading my opponent, playing more aggressively), and the sandan exam includes a sword kata. Plus it's just fun to smack people with sticks! I've been enjoying it so far, but it's a lot of hard work. In fact, I should make another post on recent developments...

Any questions?

When I saw the obituary for Billy Mays, my first thought was "Who says there's never any good news in the paper?"

Amazingly, doctors have pulled off a miraculous eleventh-hour resuscitation of the King of Pop. Michael Jackson is apparently not only alive, but ambulatory, as seen in ( this photo from the press conference: )

Michael Jackson, dead of a cardiac arrest. So now the real question becomes: who inherits the Elephant Man's bones? Or Macaulay Culkin?

*of Pop
**of Pop

for padparadscha, stormeteller, et al.: LoCoWriMo

(I won't be participating. None of my conlangs have enough lexicon to write a sentence, let alone a story, no matter how crude.)

mcgriddlefanfic

I do not even know anymore.

Berries or Cream by *Coelasquid on deviantART

Intro cinema to Rock Band: The Beatles

Pretty damned amazing.

Sensei complimented me on my form tonight. He said my new blisters are in the right places.

Practice proceeds apace. I learned my first kata last Thursday, a dodge and counterattack against a strike to the wrist. And yesterday I was taught two of the other basic strikes besides men (a strike to the head): kote (to the wrist/gauntlet) and dō (to the torso/breastplate). This leaves, I think, the two sayū-men strikes (left/right men, to the temples) of the basic bread-and-butter attacks. I still get corrected frequently, but my men strikes seem to be getting better. I feel like I'm making serious progress. I'll probably be buying a keikogi and hakama soon.

Now if only I could get my kiai to sound more like a battle cry and less like an imitation of The Fonz...

Oh, Japan.

Nothing makes you appreciate the skin on the soles of your feet quite like not having it anymore.

Ow.

• Kyle Urban was perfect as McCoy. Quinto did an excellent job as Spock, but Urban was dead on in that part. More than an imitation, he really seemed like a younger version of the character, a lovable-humbug-in-training. His "Dammit, Jim"s felt natural, and not like the TOS callbacks they were. Of course, Kirk gave him plenty of opportunities to say it...
  
• Kirk is the worst liar ever. He couldn't be more obvious about being responsible for the Kobayashi Maru test's "glitch" if he tried. And his "Huh. Strange." reaction to the future ship's greeting "Ambassador" Spock is like holding up a flashing sign saying "I know more than I'm willing to say".
  
• Gaila was hot and I liked her. And Kirk's response to her saying she loved him was hilarious. I hope she lived.
  
• I wish they'd given John Cho more to do as Sulu. After his big action scene on the drilling platform (which was cool), that's pretty much it for him. I think they should have had him try to pry Spock off of Kirk (after all, Kirk did jump off of the platform to save him), but that's fanwank territory. Cho did a good job with what he had.
  
• Enterprise seems to have been retconned out completely. Good riddance.
  
• Star Trek IV: Save the Whales The Voyage Home, though, is still in continuity, because the point of divergence for the new Trek timeline is well after the Enterprise crew prime visited San Francisco. Spock Prime still totally gave some punk on a Muni bus the Vulcan neck pinch, ha!
  
• On the other hand, I'm not even going to try to reconcile the semi-elastic timeline of ST4 with the strictly diverging one from this movie. That way lies madness.
  
• Simon Pegg's Scotty is pretty far from the original. I'll chalk that up to being exiled to an ice planet (which I assume never happened to the original) and going a little stir-crazy.
  
• The joyride scene was pretty pointless. Sure, it was a parallel scene to Spock's academic childhood, but it didn't really add much to Kirk's characterization. And it went on too long. I'm nitpicking though.
  
• Making Spock the Acting Captain made perfect sense. But why off Earth did Captain Pike promote Kirk to First Officer at the same time, when he was just this side of being a stowaway?
  
• In hindsight, Nero was kind of a weird villain. I mean, he was just a miner. Yet somehow his future mining vessel is loaded for bear and fully capable of taking on Starfleet. Sure, he got the drop on them, but still.
  
• I totally didn't recognize Winona Ryder.

I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. It was a great, fun adventure flick. But one major element doesn't work for me: I just can't believe that new-timeline Kirk and Spock could really trust each other, despite Spock Prime's optimism. They just don't seem to be heading in that direction. Particularly from Spock's POV, Kirk has done almost nothing but antagonize him (to the point of making him actually lose his cool). Even after they beam onto Nero's ship together, Kirk is still obviously keeping things from Spock. Spock Prime's insistence that "oh, you're going to be bestest buds, I promise" seems pretty weak, especially when you consider that they're not really the same people as the originals: their life experiences are different and so is their behavior. I guess we have to trust in the power of nostalgia-fueled destiny.

Brief thoughts on trailers:

• That caveman thing with Jack Black looks like an utter turd. Pass.
  
• Transformers 2 looks like the action will be just as hard to follow as in the first one, and I don't care. CONSTRUCTICONS, mother fuckers! And it looks like they may be combiners! As long as a sufficient quantity of shit blows up while Shia LeBouf runs around in a panic, I will be happy.
  
• I will only go see the movie of Land of the Lost if they have Dr. Steel's title song on the soundtrack. Nothing else will get me to sit through that much Will Ferrell and that many obvious jokes.

Finally, I leave you with a video on how to talk like William Shatner:

Yesterday was my first kendo practice as a participant rather than an observer.

I got to practice late, due to stopping at home and voting in the stupid special election. Got chewed out a bit for that. The head instructor assigned one of the senior students to take me into another room and get me started. He showed me the proper way to bow (actually, it's basically the same in aikido), the basic stance, and how to move around in that stance.

While a lot of aikido movements are derived from sword work, there are very significant differences, which translates to a whole lot of habits I need to learn to break. For example, the stance is much narrower in kendo than in aikido (since there's no threat of being thrown): feet about one foot's length apart rather than shoulder width. Also, while the weight is supposed to be on the balls of the feet in both, in aikido the heels should be barely touching the ground ("just enough to slide a sheet of rice paper underneath" as one of my instructors likes to say), while in kendo it should be more pronounced. Aikido stance has the knees bent far enough that you can't see your toes, while kendo has the knees straight but not locked; along with the raised heel this made me feel like I was standing almost on tiptoe the whole time.

The instructor who was assigned to me said I was picking it up really quickly (it sure didn't feel like it!), so he also showed me how to hold the shinai—the bamboo sword—properly and had me practice the footwork while holding it, which makes it even harder since you have to have proper form in the arms as well as the legs and trunk, and you have to keep the sword from wobbling as you move. Apparently they usually don't have people start even holding the shinai on the first day, but I got accelerated a bit. Having some body awareness from previous martial arts experience helps a lot.

A ways in the head instructor called us both back into the main gym so the senior student could practice with the others. He had me continue to practice the footwork for the rest of class.

Class is two hours long. I was carrying my body weight on the balls of my feet for about an hour and a half straight with only brief breaks to check and adjust my posture, and sliding around like that with straight knees is the equivalent of doing a ton of calf raises. My feet and Achilles' tendons are not happy with me.

This group is a lot more formal than my aikido club. It's quite traditional. Which is good, because it's kind of a cultural lesson as well (and a change of pace). But it also means that if your form isn't good, sensei hits you in the offending limb with a shinai to make you shape up! "Straighten those knees!" *SMACK* "HAI, SENSEI". Also, bowing out at the end of class involves sitting in seiza, the traditional Japanese kneeling posture with the feet tucked under the butt, on a hardwood gym floor for what seems like ages. I'm used to seiza on mats, but a floor with no give is something else entirely, and my feet have lumps on top that don't straighten out completely. That hurt a lot.

So, to sum up: I got smacked around with a wooden sword, made the balls of my feet sore, wore out my calves, and crushed the tops of my feet.

I'm going back tomorrow.

I start Kendo next Tuesday.

PLUS BONUS KAGOMATION