/var/log/orava

Well, since Ilkka asked people to write something about last weekend’s Bolognese sidesword seminar, I’ll try to do that (though others have already done so much better than I can).

The seminar had the usual length of our one-day seminars, running from 10am to 5pm with an hour of lunch break in between. The difference to a usual weekend seminar this time was the fact that it was the first assistant instructor test we’ve had. As noted before and elsewhere, Ilkka did very well despite Guy throwing various curve balls in his direction, and passed easily. When he didn’t know the answer to something he didn’t get flustered and just said he didn’t know (with the implication of a “yet” in there). His teaching was straightforward and effective… he talked a lot, but that’s normal and required when teaching the basics of a new weapon system. The pace was pretty good; while it seemed fast in the beginning, in actuality it turned out to be just right, I never felt we were really going too fast. I would assume the pace would be lighter when teaching a room full of beginners, instead of the semi-intermediates the class mostly consisted of this time.

The system he was teaching was based on the teachings of some-random-Italian-dude (sorry, my memory for names is as lousy as ever), with some examples from other-random-Italian-dudes. The style emphasised a natural posture, and for once “natural” here actually meant something close to actually natural. I love the rapier as a weapon, but that stance in that (well, at least in Capo Ferro) is a leg-killer. None of that here, the guards were quite relaxed ones. The way the sword moved was a mixture of the natural and the unnatural (for me, that is). Some basic techniques felt easy and fluid, while others felt very, very hard to do correctly – one specific false-edge blade deflection in particular. One technique was extremely close to a rapier technique, and it was no surprise that it felt easy and natural – I guess rapier training has had some impact, since it wasn’t easy and natural to a lot of my training partners. So it goes.

I really like the sidesword as a weapon and this style of using it seems to suit me pretty well; the techniques either feel kinda sorta natural or feel like something that I can get to feel natural, with practice. Of course, the same could be said of any style, but some are easier than others. I get the feeling that the real difficult part is yet to come with this weapon, here we just focused on the basic moves – tactics are a different kettle of fish entirely. This feels like a weapon and style I’d like to learn better, here’s hoping we’ll see some more seminars etc on it in the future. Many of the moves still felt very clumsy and… well, unpolished, when I did them. Can’t find the proper word to use here… there’s a very specific feeling I get when I do a physical tehcnique and what I do is sort of right but not quite right, my body and muscle memory are still working on the details. It’s like rapier in the beginning, you do things but they don’t feel natural, your body doesn’t snap into them on autopilot. That’s what you aim for, of course, in the long run. It’s a nice feeling when you get there, even part of the way.

Ilkka has matured as a teacher. I remember when I first met him he was a nice guy (as he is still) but very gung-ho and pretty extreme in the physical training department; his warmups got a semi-legendary reputation of being killers. That has shifted into an emphasis on smart use of excercise, on doing warmups that are useful for the specific thing you’re training instead of going for raw power all the time. He has also gotten a lot better at explaining concepts and in figuring out why something isn’t working out for someone else – an essential martial arts instructor skill.

The day was made a slight bit more difficult for me because I had a pretty serious ache in my lower back (started some days back), which hurt my concentration and technique at times. I ate some painkillers to handle that but it was still a bit of a bitch. It’s mostly gone now; no idea what I did (wrong) to cause it, but I think I’ll go to swords training next week. Maybe (or actually: more than likely) I just need more/better muscles in my lower back and abdomen regions. That’s a nicer thought than “I’m getting old” :)

Nice weekend. Leonard Cohen was fantastic, managing to be even better than expected. Somehow he made the huge Hartwall Arena seem intimate, which is quite a feat. The backing band was also superb. Janka writes some more on the subject.

Sunday was mostly spent at the salle, we did six hours of Bolognese sidesword. Fun, and a weird mix of easy and quite difficult; some moves felt quite natural, while some were a total bitch to get even remotely right. Normal thing when learning a new weapon, or course. The seminar was also Ilkka’s Assistant Instructor exam, so we did some things (as told to by Guy) to make his life more difficult. He did splendidly and gave us an excellent day of learning the fundamentals of a new(ish) weapon… and easily passed the exam too. Over the years Ilkka has become a good martial arts teacher, it’s been interesting watching him develop both as a swordsman and as a teacher. I do like the sidesword, it’s a fun weapon which combines techniques from various other sword styles I’m familiar with; I’d like to learn more.

Only negative for the day was the fact that my back was killing me, I had picked up a nasty pain in my lower back from somewhere and had to eat some tabs to keep it in check. Those mostly helped, though some parts of the day were painful, literally. Good thing is that the pain is a lot less now, on Monday. Exercise helps (except when it doesn’t, of course).

Two weeks ago we had reporters from Helsingin Sanomat (the biggest Finnish newspaper) at our swords salle, and this Saturday’s paper featured the resulting story (in Finnish, naturally). There’s also a short but pretty good video available, in which Guy explains some basic background while the camera shows us doing drills; me and another guy were doing rapier that day, the others were doing longsword.

We finally managed to run a session of Exalted last Sunday, after some scheduling difficulties. The characters, now in the Northern trapper town of Wangler’s Knob, did some expected things (talk with the locals, set out for the even-farther North) and some slightly unexpected ones (ambushed a Dragonblood expedition in the middle of the snowy wilderness). It was a logical (if ruthless) thing to do, and it was great – the fight was the biggest one we’ve had yet, and Khamyn met the limits of his invulnerability for the first time; I was pretty sure he was a goner for a small while there. It was tight, they were facing 9 skilled Wood Aspects plus their retinue. It was also great because of the moral problems it caused and will cause – since they were the ones attacking without warning in the middle of the night, supported by a demon horde (yes, really)… who exactly are the bad guys here? The fact that the target Dragonbloods had actually been quite pleasant to the characters previously adds some fuel to that fire. While it was a bit unexpected (I expected potential violence, but at a different time and place), storywise this was good. The massive fight ate up much of the playtime, but it also gave us a chance to practice the combat mechanics.

Outside that version of Creation, real-life swordplay has involved a lot less flashy gymnastics and a lot more old-fashioned sweat and repetition of basic moves. My heel, which was giving me serious problems last Wednesday and Thursday, has apparently healed; good, since tendon/joint pains are something that I’m extremely wary of. Tuesday’s basic training went well, and yesterday’s rapier also. While tiring and sweaty, rapier didn’t kill my arm too badly this time round. Maybe some little strength is returning, an iota at a time.

This week I’ve been coding quite a bit on my free time, for a change. I’ve been following Ruby on Rails since it was at version 1.0 and have done some small toy test apps, but to date I haven’t really built anything biggger with it. I’ve had plans, sure, but somehow just never got started – part of that is just an overabundance of stuff I’d like to code, I could never decide what to do. I’d like a wiki that works just like I want, I’d want a nice simple photo gallery, I’d like lots of tools to help with rpg gamemastering, I’d like a pony… well, scratch the pony, but you get the drift.

Rails is (really!) great, and it allows you to develop more or less as fast as with PHP without needing to touch the Mindshatteringly Horrid Piece of Shit(tm) that is PHP. You can write web apps in an “agile” fashion while keeping the architecture clean, with a level of abstraction that I like. It’s somewhere between the over-engineered N-levels-of-cumbersome-abstraction maze of J2EE and the “easy web apps for people who don’t know how to code” of PHP. Me likes.

…but naturally there’s some setup involved when you want a system with user management and authentication, deployment with Mongrel & Capistrano, and all that stuff. The restful authentication plugin makes building a user auth system a bit less painful, but it’s still quite a bit of work (I’ve been following hints from various sources). So there’s quite a bit of startup intertia involved whenever you want to write a non-toy app. It’s a whole lot less intertia than with most other system, but it’s there, still.

Anyway, I realized that I don’t need to write N separate web apps, each duplicating a large part of this functionality – I can just write one app, with lots of subsystems, expanding them as needed and using one user auth system for all. Since this will be mostly for my own use and I don’t need to worry about it being modular and useful for others, keeping the apps separate would just involve (a lot) more work for me and bring no real benefit.

So I’ve been coding during evenings, using a snapshot of the new Rails 2.1 and using all the new conventions and toys (REST, named paths, named scopes, etc). It’s been fun, it’s been a while since I had a coding project, and I’ve been learning a lot of practical Rails stuff at the same time.

To date, I have a working (if simplistic) wiki, a user authentication system with email confirmation, and the beginnings of an Exalted character builder/manager tool for my Exalted game. Deployment is handled by Capistrano, and the thing runs on a (currenly single) Mongrel instance with Apache proxying. The intention is to expand it with a blog engine at some point, and maybe move this blog over – but that’s (far) in the future. That would also need some sort of image upload capability, which overlaps with the photo gallery I’d also like to have one of these days. Work work.

In any case, it’s a fun project.

Otherwise it’s been pretty quiet. Went to basic swords training on Tuesday, was fun – but somehow managed to do something bad to my heel. Didn’t notice anything that evening, but the next day it was very sore and I had to limp along. Janka thinks I may have inadvertently over-stretched my Achilles tendon (or some such) before it was warmed up properly, but that’s just a theory. In any case, it seems to be getting better now and it hardly hurts at all even if I stretch the sore spot… so should be able to go to training next week without problem. It might have been ok to go yesterday, but I tend to be very careful when it comes to foot/joint/tendon problems. I’d much rather miss out one week than to really aggravate some spot, that an easy recipe for getting problems that will need weeks or months to heal. Sore muscles, no problem. Seriously hurting tendons or joints? Danger sign. For me, at least.

I’m still a bit mystified by what caused the thing, but sometimes these things happen. My body is telling me that something is (or was) wrong, so that’s that.

Looks to be a busy weekend, a party on Saturday and an Exalted game to run on Sunday. Need to squeeze in some game prep today and Saturday, even though I’m mostly ready… some details still need fleshing out.

Every time I start exercising again after a lapse, I’m (newly) amazed by what a difference it makes. Even though objectively the physical changes are slow, immediately I start feeling… different. Better. More aware of my body, of being in control of all my movements (part of that is just sore muscles, of course :), and a general feeling of being focused and less stressed-out.

The thing is, there are no shortcuts to that, even though millions of drug & nutrition advertisers (and spammers) may try to convince you otherwise. You have to get out there and do exhausting stuff, and keep doing it. There is no easy something that you can take once per day to improve everything, or a nice course where you can exchange a pile of cash for general “physical improvement”. It doesn’t work like that – and maybe that’s the reason why most people nowadays tend to be in crappy shape. Regular exercise is hard, and requires both time and enough strength of will to go to classes (or the gym, or running, or…) even when you’d much rather just stay home and rest, when you’re having a bad, exhausting day and just don’t feel like it.

The “I’ll skip it today, and do it tomorrow” thing is bad, since “tomorrow” so easily becomes “next week”, and that morphs into “next month”, and suddenly you’re a stressed-out, depressed couch potato (again). The good thing about that is that you’ll get a lot on company on IRC when you complain about how depressed and stressed you are, how your body is acting up, yadda yadda. The bad thing is that it’s a downward spiral, and nobody’s going to break it except you, yourself. That’s a hard lesson in these often so soft times.

I say the above with a “been there, done that” viewpoint. Got the t-shirt, too.

Let’s see how it goes this time. Uimastadion, the best place to swim in Helsinki, is open again (yay!). Went there last Sunday and it was great, despite the place being pretty full. Being able to swim outside, in a proper-size pool, is wonderful.

On the more regular side, I’ve started swords training again. The longsword basic course started up last Tuesday, and I’m attending that with a “let’s see how this thing works, again” mentality. Janka also decided to return to swords after some years of doing other stuff, so she’s there, too – and it seems that half the city is, also. Last Tuesday saw the salle full of oldtimers, the “beginner course” seems to be half-full of returning people. In addition, a few old friends with no prior swords experience turned up as well. So we have a somewhat weird (but fun) “beginner” course crowd.

In addition to Tuesday’s longsword basics, I’m aiming at doing (at least) one rapier class per week. The rapier is a great weapon (it’s a big reason Janka decided to come back, also), but it needs a lot of body strength and I’m not quite there yet. It’s returning, slowly.

So… if I manage to keep to a minimum 2 x 2h swords training per week regimen, plus some swimming etc on the side, I should be back in reasonable shape at some point.

Hmm. Should either fix my ancient bike or get a new one. Biking to work (10km or so) would be a good idea, and besides it’s fun.

After a long pause, I’ve started training swordsmanship again. Some things seem to “come back” quite fast, other things (like proper physical fitness and details of various techniques) take longer. My body isn’t quite used to this thing yet, but that’s how it always goes. A (Capo Ferro) rapier semester is starting up, and this weekend will consists of 12 solid hours of training for that (6h per day). I expect to be fairly dead afterwards.

The school now has a spiffy new salle (same location, but other side of building). It’s a lot bigger, with more fresh air, storage space, and room to train. Guy is still constructing parts of it, but overall it’s really nice and roomy. The webpages have also been renewed, Ilkka has done an excellent job there – I really like the look and feel.

Up to now, the school hasn’t really needed to advertise; the smallish older salle was usually quite full of students, and word-of-mouth was enough. Now it’s starting to not be enough any more, and there is more room at the salle than there are new (or old) students.

…so consider this an advertisement. If you’re interested in learning historically accurate swordfighting as a martial art (as opposed to sport) and you live in the general Helsinki/Espoo/Vantaa area, this would be a great time to try it out – there is a beginners’ class starting up on May 6th. No previous martial arts experience needed, all you need is a willingness to learn and to do physical exercise. Guy is a (really!) good teacher, and the students tend to be a fun bunch of people. Besides being fun and interesting, it’s also great exercise – if you aren’t in noticably better physical shape at the end of the beginners’ course, you probably already were in pretty good general shape. Getting in shape for the summer is always a good motivator, I’ve found…

I’ll be happy to answer any questions about the school and about training there, and the contact page has the relevant official contact info.

End of the week nearing, which is nice – except that it doesn’t look like a weekend full of rest. Hopefully some fun, though. Teemu is running some VTES tournaments on Saturday, a quick Duffin Draft starting at 10am, followed by a normal constructed tournament at 12am. I still don’t have a deck ready, looks like I’ll have to play with an untested deck yet again. Defeat is always an option!

Sunday will have me doing cutting practice with sharp swords. Never done that before, should be interesting.

A funny thing with exercise: I’ve been feeling less dead after the 3h sword practice sessions lately. Very tired, yes, and often aching in various places, but less physically wiped out. Which is nice. Yesterday was mentally a catastrophe, though, the first 2 hours of longsword was no problem but the last hour of backsword just totally overwhelmed me, I probably got whacked on the mask more that I managed to parry anything. Somehow I just could not process the (simple) stuff at the pace we were going, and was just perpetually confused. It happens, sometimes. Not sure why, since on other days the same things flow by with no problems.

I’ve been playing around with Rails again a bit, I have a small project going on which might even end up being useful but is mainly intended as a exercise in trying out all sorts of cool Rails stuff. I’m still waiting for my physical copy of the 2nd edition of Agile Web Development With Rails to get here, in the meantime I’m making do with the PDF edition. Yesterday I noticed that O’Reilly has a “buy 2 books, get 3” deal that also applies to PDFs, so I bought myself PDF copies of Rails Cookbook, Ajax on Rails and CSS Cookbook, 2nd ed, for a total of a bit over $40. Not bad. Haven’t had time to read them yet (obviously), but a quick browse leaves me happy with what I bought, they look like good additions to my tech bookshelf.

I should probably also mention dokuwiki. I’ve played around with various Wiki engines so far, some have been horrible, some have been ok, and some have been very good. Up to now I’ve preferred mediawiki, since it has a nice layout and features, but I’ve always found the setup and configuration of it to be more cumbersome and complicated than I like. Enter dokuwiki, which is ultra-simple to set up; it doesn’t even use a database, just flat files. In spite of the simplicity, it offers a nice selection of features and nice, clean default layout. All in all, it looks like just the right balance of features vs setup/config complexity for me, and I set up an instance for a personal wiki. I also have a private instance for (duh) private stuff, the fast and simple setup makes creating a new wiki a breeze. Me likes. Sure, the thing probably doesn’t scale all that well with no database, but who cares; I’m not running wikipedia here. Also, it’s PHP which I normally avoid like a plague due to security concerns, but this app is just so good I’m willling to ignore the evil of PHP.

A fact of life, which I’ve discovered, is that most people are absolutely horrible programmers. Even the ones who make their living as one. Especially some of them. If I had a dollar for each utterly horrible piece of code I’ve had to see (or fix), I’d be somewhere warm with a drink in my hand and “should I buy a Jaguar?” as my main concern. Take that into account, and enter PHP into the equation. PHP, which lets people who have no business writing anything more complicated than Excel macroes suddenly become “web developers”, with naturally no idea of what a “web exploit” even means let alone how to protect against one. Stir into that pot the fact that the PHP development team has a Microsoft-like attitude about security, i.e. features and ease of use are always seen as more important… and voila!, you have a framework which is singlehandedly responsible for a massive amount of server compromises. Sure, a competent person can use PHP responsibly and write a secure app, just like a competent person can write a massive transaction processing system in Visual Basic. Doesn’t make either of them into good tools, or change the fact that PHP is what is technically known as a ”massive piece of shit”.

Ahem. Anyway… Rails good. Dokuwiki good. PHP bad. Beer good. Wife cute.

I didn’t make any sort of New Year’s promises as such, but I did decide that I was tired of being in worse physical shape than I like to be. Somehow, the last few years have seen a marked drop in the amount of exercise I’ve done – sure, I’ve done some, but nowhere enough. I have excuses galore, but in the end it does not matter; it has left me in not-that-hot shape and with a few extra kilos around the waist I would like to either get rid of or convert to muscle.

It’s a vicious circle: you feel tired and/or stressed out at work, so you skip exercise, thinking “I’ll do it tomorrow”. As a result, you just get more stressed out, you sleep poorly, and that “tomorrow” becomes “next week”, then “next month”, then… well, a long time. It’s an easy trap to fall into.

Well, no more. I’ve started up swords training again, and I’m continuing the 1-hour-per-week acrobatics on the side. I’m aiming for 5-7 hours of serious exercise per week, ideally something like this: Monday swords (3 hours), Wednesday swords (3 hours), Friday acrobatics (1 hour). That results in 7 hours per week, and leaves rest days in between (which are pretty important both physically and mentally). Of course, real life throws various obstacles in the calendar and that plan won’t work every week – there will be other stuff I need/want to do, and sometimes I just can’t make it to swords (the Kehä I ringroad can jam up badly sometimes). I don’t intend to be stupid about this, just do my best and substitute swimming etc where needed.

I don’t want to go overboard, that’s a sure recipe for burning out. I think this 5-7 hours per week is something I can keep up in the long run – sure, there will be weeks when I’ll have to compromise on it, but that’s not a problem. The long-term, regular exercise is the key here, not individual acts. It’s not an easy schedule for me, by any means; when it gets late in the afternoon and you could either go home and lounge on the sofa or go do 3 hours of mentally and physically exhausting training… well, the temptation to wuss out is huge. It takes effort to get moving, every time. That effort does get a bit less every time, though, as routine sets in. Hooray for routine!

I’ve been on this schedule for over a month now, and it’s beginning to have an effect. Mostly good. I feel… well, stronger, and more alert. I sleep better. My stress levels are lower, even though I have a bit less free time. I have small muscles all over my body which are trying to tell me that they exist (mostly by being sore). Of course, there’s a price: the amount of free time I have *is* a bit less, and at least for now I seem to need a bit more sleep than usual.

I’ve started keeping an exercise log, too, to keep myself honest and for general interest.

When I was younger I could eat as much as I wanted, whatever I wanted, and my body just got rid of that excess energy. That doesn’t happen any more, so unless I pay some attention to how much and what I eat, and how much I exercise, things will slowly fall apart. It’s the “industrial disease” of our age, I guess, it’s just so easy to let yourself slide. It takes willpower to not let that happen.

Last week ha me doing a lot of physical stuff, since we had Mr. Jared Kirby (from the U.S.) over here teaching a 2-day weekend workshop on Capo Ferro rapier. It was exhausting (the swordschool 12-hour weekend seminars are killers), but excellent. Mr. Kirby went through the basics of Capo Ferro according to the treatise, with an exacting precision that would put many ballet teachers to shame. For example, we spent the first three hours just working on the basic guardia body position, without touching swords at all. If that sounds relaxing to you… well, you’ve obviously never done sixteenth-century rapier. That body stance is utterly exhausting and requires static leg strength that most normal people lack.

Anyway, it was a very valuable weekend in the learning sense. I liked Mr. Kirby’s no-nonsense precision approach and learned a lot of pointers about Capo Ferro. It’s still not my favorite rapier style, but it does have some very cool elements. Apparently, Mr. Kirby was also happy, and had told Guy that it was nice to teach a class that actually did stuff (properly) all the time instead of just standing around talking – funny, because I think we did quite a bit of that, if only to rest out our dead leg muscles. I guess it’s all relative.

I also got a lot of fun quotes from Mr. Kirby. For instance:

“I’m not into easy. I’m into correct.”

and

“You know how you’ve been told ‘practice makes perfect’ all your life? Well, that’s utterly wrong. Perfect practice makes perfect. Practice just makes permanent.”

I read rpg.net (Tabletop Roleplaying Open) quite a lot; it’s one of the best web forums I know, partly because of the semi-demented regulars, partly because a lot of RPG writers and industry people also take part, and partly because it has pretty much the best forum moderation I know – the mods are strict about personal and group attacks, but otherwise allow (civilized) flamewars and you can say “fuck” whenever you want, if you want.

Anyway, recently rpg.net had a thread that was among the more interesting ones in recent memory, titled ”I have never been in a fight. What’s it like?”. So far (page 12) is has stayed on topic and provided a lot of input on what real fights are like. What I’ve read matches my experiences, for what little that is worth.

I’ve never been in a real fight, not even as a kid (I don’t count the occasional playgroup flailing and shoving as a “fight”). There have been a couple of situations that might have escalated, but didn’t. If I never get into an actual fight during my whole life, I’ll be perfectly happy.

On the other hand, I’m interested in (and train / have trained) various martial arts, from unarmed to swords to knives to whatever. Maybe that’s a paradox, but I don’t think it is – I’m not really a very pacifist person; I don’t go around looking for fights and I consider violence a pretty much last resort, but I also think there are times when it is justified. And besides, humanity has never been so inventive as when it tries to figure out ways to kill other people.

Based on my sparring experiences (which I fully know is nothing like a real fight), I agree with many of the people on that thread. Most people simply don’t know how to cope with violence, they freeze up or panic. What training gives you is potentially some little control, some little ability to analyze what’s going on instead of going deer-in-the-headlights, and some muscle memory that might help you react at the critical point without actually thinking about it much – because in a real fight, or even in a freeform sparring match, you don’t have that much time to think. Time behaves in a strange fashion, and adrenaline does even stranger things to you. In addition, most of your automatic reactions are just wrong, especially with swords or knives.

I still remember the first time I did any sort of martial arts training. It was at Niiniketo’s Jiu-Jitsu school in Helsinki, which was a pretty brutal introduction. Niiniketo is an ex-(kick?)boxer and it shows, he’s a big powerful man and and has a boxer mentality about things. “Pain is good”, etc. Not a place I’d recommend for anyone to train at, but I didn’t know better at the time and that school did teach me some straightforward fight stuff that are probably still somewhere in my muscle memory. It taught me how to hit people so I’d actually generate some power, and how to cushion blows – kickboxer stuff, basically. Luckily I’m so crap at kicks that I stopped that school after a bit over a year and moved on to saner teachers and martial art styles.

Anyway, the first time I did any sparring (not quite full-contact, but not lightweight either) I almost froze up. I was just so totally unused to someone attacking me, trying to actually kick and hit me. It went away quite fast and it was excellent learning material – but I still remember that feeling of utter confusion about being confronted with violence, even in a fairly safe environment like that.

I suspect that mental “getting used to it” is the main advantage people would get from formal martial arts classes with regards to a real fight. 99% of the fancy techniques will probably vanish from your paniced brain, but if you manage to not freeze and potentially get away as a result, it’s a win.

Not that I do or ever have done any sort of martial arts training from a “this will help me in fights” motive, I think that would be stupid. I do it from the need for excercise, and general interest in the subject. Most competent martial arts people I know are actually people who would generally avoid fights, maybe because they know full well how easy it is to seriously injure or even kill someone in a fight. The occasional “budo idiot” is the exception that proves that rule.

Violence is a weird (but understandable) taboo in our culture. Maybe that’s one of the many reasons I found Fight Club to be such a brilliant film.