Krav Maga was the hand-to-hand combat technique I learned in the 82nd.

I spent nearly two years training on that, twice a week. It’s incredibly effective and I enjoyed it a great deal.

I usually don’t mention it to anyone because it causes all kinds of stupid ideas to form in people’s heads.

Krav Maga is great for overriding the human natural instinct to fight fair. Humans don’t naturally try to irreparably damage one another in hand-to-hand combat. Going for the head and the ribcage with a fist is not terribly effective, but that’s what untrained people tend to do. Hell, it’s what I did when I was bold and fearless but not that well-trained. It’s why I have two scars on my ring finger and pinky from punching some kid in the teeth (who had tried to make me eat a piece of paper).

Krav Maga is also great for women to learn as 99.9% of people attacking you will have no training. Size does matter, no doubt. In equally-trained opponents, the larger person wins 90% of the time. That’s just life.

However, I watched one of my 5’ 3” 140-pound female Krav Maga instructors absolutely destroy 200 pound military men who were giving it everything they had to take her down but who had no training. She was fast, relentless and incredibly strong.

Eventually, after two years of training, a few of them managed to sort-of win a fight with her (I never did).

That’s what training can do.

Krav uses short, powerful strikes and is like applied karate (which is mostly ornamental and not useful in a no-holds-barred fight). It doesn’t guarantee that you’ll win a fight if you are attacked unexpectedly, but it does a heck of a lot to even up the odds.

As anyone sane knows, the real use of Krav and any fighting technique shouldn’t be to punish your opponent or to kill them, but to disable and incapacitate them enough for you to get away.

I wish every woman got the chance to learn some Krav, but I also wish we didn’t live in a world where that wish made any sort of sense.

This is terrible news.

As for Windows 10, WZOR says it will be a cloud OS.

NOPE. Fucking double nope.

Looks like I will be stuck on Windows 7 until it is completely unusable, as the interface apocalypse that all other OSes have become makes them unsuitable for anyone who does more than look at LOLcats and click on the “Like” button through the drool slavered all over their keyboards.

I will sooner give up my computer and all internet access altogether than use a cloud OS. Truly.

If you think Ben Affleck is going to be bad as Batman, just wait until Larry Summers is the next Fed chair.

Shows how truly corrupt our system is, and that nearly anything good is the result of inertia and past investment more than anything else.

But now we are in the extractive phase, and that will have consequences. Most people are too self-deluded now to realize what’s happening. I call this the “bad news won’t affect me” cognitive flaw, in that they assume because their life now is good, society-altering consequences can’t reach them because they haven’t yet.

Hardly anyone ever comments anyway, but I’ve disabled comments on this blog. Anyone who knows me can email me. That I value. The rest I don’t really care about.

And it’s not that I don’t value other people’s thoughts and opinions in the abstract at least, but drive-by comments on blogs by people who know very little about me or typically about the subject at hand are almost always a waste of time. That’s just my personal opinion on the matter – others find much value in their blog’s comment section and I can understand and respect that.

For most people comments are usually enabled as social validation and to the extent that I need that, the blog itself suits the purpose. Truth is I’d probably write it anyway even if no one read it (which is nearly the case as it is!).

My thoughts formerly were the diametrical opposite, but as the internet has changed and has become less valuable and less useful to people like me, my thoughts have changed as well.

I’d add to this list “don’t buy ornamental hiking shoes.”

I have a pair of them. Of course I didn’t know that until I tried to walk on something slick. These shoes – which straddle the line between shoes and boots – resemble hiking shoes. A perfect imitation. They were even well-reviewed. And they do really well until you get them near anything wet and/or mildly slippery.

One time my partner and I were on a boardwalk with some moss on its surface and she was walking fine and I looked like I was starring in the Ice Capades.

Have to get better ones soon.

Can you believe there is actually a quite good French TV show now?

Yeah, neither can I. But it is good.

Anyone who has ever seen French TV before knows how unusual this is. All French TV except some of their live music shows is absolutely atrocious, seeming produced by blind wombats and written by aphasic automatons.

Also, Jenna Thiam’s amazing hair is a character all by itself. It doesn’t actually look like that in the show, but even there it is very noticeable.

It’s worth watching despite having the special effects budget of a high school musical.

Reading this, it reminds that over the past year the fiction I’ve read has been 90%+ YA.

This is for a few reasons:

1) No ridiculous literary pretensions that make many books so incredibly boring.

2) The writing is usually better. Lit-fic just tries too hard for me. Most of those writers aren’t nearly as clever as they think they are, and rely on wordplay and metaphors I thought of and rejected when I was 9.

3) YA is thus more fun.

4) And one of the most important reasons for me is that YA almost always has well-rounded, interesting female characters even if they are not the actual protagonist(s) or antagonist(s).

5) And relatedly, YA almost never features 45-year-old men from Brooklyn having mid-life crises. This has been done to death, and I have no interest in reading it.

If you aren’t reading YA right now, you are doing yourself a huge literary disservice, very similar to the self-slight of not watching all the great television shows of the last 10+ years.

“I don’t have brainstorms. I have brain lasers.”

-Me, about two minutes ago.

This is why I hate telling people that I am American when I go overseas.

Well, that and our obscene wars, drone murders and spying on the entire world.

There’s that, too.

About Twilight, I have no interest in it and will never read it – not because it is aimed at women, but because it is badly written (I have read enough of it to know this – it could’ve been written by Dan Brown) and because the relationship dynamics in it are terrible and un-feminist.

However, I am glad it exists. Without Twilight, many many other books I’ve read and enjoyed over the past few years probably would’ve not been published.

So, thanks Stephenie Meyer for publishing a poorly-written series of novels that somehow got massively popular despite being as retrogressive as drawing and quartering.

Without you and your tin ear and 16th-century worldview, books like The Hunger Games series, Viral Nation, Ex-Heroes and many others might never have made it to print.

And a good portion of those (mostly) female readers who enjoy Twilight will grow up and branch out and make it more likely that more fiction with interesting female protagonists gets written.

Like a herd of cows shitting all over a field, Stephenie Meyer has provided the fertilizer that is producing and will produce many good things.

I don’t really care that much one way or the other, but I think Ben Affleck is actually pretty perfect to play Batman if you think about the role.

Seem somewhat innocuous and uncomfortable when not in the suit, but who can still be charming at need? Affleck has that.

Be intimidating and gruff when in the suit? Affleck can do that.

Batman is not a difficult role. Who really gives a crap who plays him.

What would’ve been really fun is if they’d cast a woman in the role.

Agreed, completely.

And nothing disrupts thought the way noise does, Schopenhauer declared, adding that even people who are not philosophers lose whatever ideas their brains can carry in consequence of brutish jolts of sound.

I think so much better, so much more fluidly and quickly, when I am out in the countryside away from city noises. Really it’s like I become whole different person mentally. In a city, I am stultified, dull and far dumber. And I am just the opposite away from urban noise.

One of the best things my partner and I have ever done in our home is to spend quite a bit of extra money building our very own whisper-silent computers. I now have to get within a foot of my machine tell if it’s switched on or not.

Our next living arrangement is likely to be far more rural than where we live now, mainly (for me) due to noise.

I’ve never been an overachiever, so luckily I’ve never had to face dilemmas like this.

In my early life, I figured I’d be dead in a bank robbery gone wrong or similar before I was 25, so everything now feels like gravy.

If that sounds ridiculous or uncharacteristic of who I am now, consider this: right after I left for the army, a large group of my friends went to jail for a long time. If I’d still been hanging out with that crew, it’s pretty likely I would’ve gone to jail with them, too.

Every day when I wake up next to my amazing partner and get to do the things I want to do and am still alive – to me, that’s a really good day considering the future I could’ve had, and thought I was bound for.

It’s a long story how all this happened, but years ago an unhinged brother of a former co-worker threatened me and another former co-worker’s kids with bodily harm.

Shit, threatening me I am used to. I’ve been in more fistfights (mostly in grade school and high school, but some as an adult) than most people been in arguments.

But threatening my co-worker’s kids? What the hell.

I told the guy that it was it, I was done, and I was – more than he realized at first. It’s always mystified me that people don’t take me seriously when I say I am going to do something. I don’t make threats. Threats are cheap and worthless and only make you look weak. Where I grew up, threats got you nowhere but on your ass crying.

Anyway thanks to me, two days later, he was fired from his high-paying job at Microsoft, his car was towed to some unknown repair shop (hehe) to have expensive repairs done, his cable was disconnected and the police showed up at his house questioning him about why he had threatened to kill a four-year-old and a two-year-old.

I believe all this happened on the same day, but it definitely happened within two days of one another.

I could’ve done a lot more. I only stopped when he and his sister (who was instigating all this) begged me to. He’d had enough, and I was barely getting started.

But to paraphrase The Game, I do believe that when someone begs for mercy, the beef is over.

I stopped then. Enemy defeated. Mission completed.

What I did wasn’t quite an act of revenge. I needed that idiot to stop terrifying my friend and her kids. And he did stop.

Probably calling the cops would’ve been enough. But doing what I did taught a life lesson that simply calling the cops would never match.

No matter how much I think about it, I don’t think I will ever understand the desire some men have to keep women out of so-called geek communities.

Who cares if a woman shows up at an sf convention cosplaying as the Scarlet Witch just because she read half of one comic and liked the costume?

And just looking, there is no way to tell, anyway.

Besides, do you think that anyone was born knowing all the history and trivia of geekdom? People have to start somewhere.

Funny, I’ve never read an entire comic book. Never will. My brain – not being visual at all – just can’t process them. Yet if I showed up at a convention dressed as The Joker, no one would question it one bit even though I’ve never even held in my hand a single Batman comic book.

And the aforementioned cosplaying Scarlet Witch might teach you something you don’t know – about rock climbing, or nin jitsu, or cooking, or a non-geek movie you’d never considered watching. Or she might be the biggest comic book or sf nerd in the world and tell you about some Romanian sf translations you’d never even heard of.

I just don’t understand the purity urge, especially when it is so senseless.

Here’s a particularly funny example of gatekeeping gone wrong.