Everyone is probably well aware of my geekiness. I play a lot of video games, I have near encyclopaedic knowledge of various cartoons, I’ve been a tabletop gamer for who knows how long now(and still have 5 armies on the go) and I even played WoW for quite a while. I don’t really bother trying to hide it cos hell its what I love.

On Saturday, I went to the Supanova Convention in Perth, where I met Sean Schemmel, the voice of Goku from Dragonball Z. He is the one that does the dubbed version, the original is actually a female, but having been brought up on the dubbed versions, this is the guy I associate with the Super Saiyan. To be honest, I got a little star-struck, not a feeling I’ve ever really experienced in my life, but this was Goku. GOKU god dammit. I own every Dragonball, Dragonball Z and Dragonball GT dvd there is(okay not the movies), and I have a huge collection of toys. Like many of my friends I have trouble with collecting things. A few friends know and deliberately buy me 1 DVD in a series or 1 toy from a series so see if I bite. The DVDs have been as presents or my own purchases from when Gem got me the boxed set that was chronologically directly in the middle of the entire saga.

I tend to watch these DVDs start to finish once or twice a year just cos I think it’s that awesome. It has influenced my own training and got me into martial arts and I am a better man for it. One day I might take a pic of all of them and all the toys I have just to have a look, but I think it would be borderline sickening. Anyway, on Saturday I had one of the coolest moments of my life and one I will not forget too easily, he was hilarious and I actually had a conversation with him and he seemed to genuinely like talking to fans(or at least feigned it very well).

Now that it’s over, I can revert to my current age and continue as planned. Little Al is happy and now back in his mint condition box and original packaging.

Recently I’ve been flickr-ing a lot of foody pics. I used to get a lot of comments about how a ‘guy like me’ got into cooking, so I thought I’d do a bit of a post on it. For starters, I know a lot of guys like me that enjoy cooking and the web industry seems to have a few pretty passionate people that love it too. I’ve loved to make food since I was in year 4 of primary school and I was told ‘if you dont want to eat what we are having, then you can make your own dinner’. Although I couldn’t really cook a lot, Mum is a phenomenal cook and was happy to show me the ropes. I also recorded a tv show called Yan Can Cook every day and watched it. He does a lot of delicious asian cooking and I used to try to imitate him. Unfortunately, not realising how sharp his knives were, I would make an ass of myself trying to replicate his speed. He had a really cool way to crush garlic too, he would get the clove on the chopping board and slap it with the flat of his knife. Of course, having done it a lot of times he smashed it into nothing and chopped a bit and it was perfectly crushed garlic. The chopping board we have at home is uneven so I developed a similar-ish technique, and it lets me know my Iron Palm training is still working(normally I wouldn’t cut it this much after but I didnt want it to look stupid if I showed a big chunk I missed):

I guess there are better things I could have done with my spare time as a kid but I tend to have always had an excessive amount of interests(and still do). I still watch cooking shows and I have particular chefs that I like to watch. Luckily for me, I’m not alone here, I started taking the occassional food pic after being inspired by Vicki and her photos of what can only be described as food porn. The more recent photos have been for a flickr group created by Lachlan where people are sharing some awesome recipes and pics. I’ve got a hand-written recipe book of my own thats constantly being updated, scrawled on and gets food spilt on it, but it’s everything that I can cook that’s not in a published book.

I’ve also got a bit of a thing going with my mates where I will experiment on them using strange recipes I haven’t done before. So far there’s no complaints, but everyone’s too nice I reckon. As for my references to Iron Chef Burmese, I don’t think my skills are remotely good enough to call myself a chef, let alone an Iron one. I also don’t really set a theme ingredient either, I just pick 2 meals I think will compliment each other and seeing as I mostly cook asian food, they cross over anyway.

So there we go, the brief history of one of my many interests. Eat hearty, for tonight we dine…..

AT HOME!

Every now and then something makes me tilt my chair backwards and clap my hands in childish glee. Well, okay, it’s pretty damn often, but today I was shown (via Twitter) a Man in Blue experiment called Cubescape. Its an amazing experiment and the animation looks very cool. Not only is it an epic showing of code, it’s pretty fun.

Without taking too much time, I put this together:

Click to watch the animation, I screwed up the second guy so blew him up in frustration. Like I said, pretty fun

Why don’t you see what you can come up with?

Okay, I don’t really have a reason for posting this other than to whinge and have an excuse to use my new camera(the scan is a pic I took of it…). Any Perthians may have noticed its getting a little cold these last few days. I don’t usually complain about cold weather, I actually kinda like it. Maybe it cools the rest of my body to to match my icy heart, maybe it cools my fiery temper, or maybe I just don’t like sitting in a pool of my own sweat when I’m not moving at all in summer. What ever is it, with the storms and rain, I just think winter is cool(HAW HAW HAW), but not this time my friends. This time it’s annoying.

As I’m sure everyone has heard me complain about, I had a rather expensive shoulder operation last year. It has been 1 year, 1 month and 22 days, roughly, since I went under the knife. If you have a look at the scan on the right, you can see the shoulder and a white dye flowing around the joint. To give you an idea of what exactly was wrong, that dye shouldn’t have flowed anywhere. The muscles around the joint connect and its meant to have a pocket type effect. So yes, I did in fact, tear myself a new hole. The operation(shoulder stabilisation) involved cutting back muscle and bone, pulling it back together and drilling screws and ties in so it healed in the right spot. I even have the whole thing on DVD(available on request within Perth metro area). The rehab which takes a year started with me learning how to move my arm again. I could lift my arm about 6 inches from my body using its own power in about 2 weeks, which was 2 weeks ahead of schedule. The process got a bit stalled due to my inability to sit around spinning in my chair without getting bored and wanting to go and do stuff. I managed to jump on a cross trainer for around 4 months straight for half an hour a day and dropped roughly 8 kilos off my podgy frame.

The last few days I’ve really noticed the joint hurting in around the range of a metric assload(*cough*). As much as it may surprise some people that I feel pain, it probably surprises more to know that I don’t really like to, you weirdos…. I’m putting it down to the weather. I’ve noticed that when I am wearing a jumper, its fine and/or dandy. Straight tshirt and its aching. So, do I invent a half-vest for the right side? Take some tablets(although im not a fan) or start wearing shoulder armour.

Thoughts?

Okay, pretty much everyone knows I have a gamey-site. I also designed it myself. Even when I hadn’t broken the layout it still looked crappy, but I have been on a bit of a gaming rampage lately and have been blogging on it more. The next step is to give it a new image, I want it to be less…. whats that word the designers use…. “shit” and more “awse”. To do this I have to either do a design myself(hahahahahaha) or download a theme for wordpress.

Wordpress themes aren’t as easy as I was hoping. Trying to find something I am happy with is hard enough, let alone having to put up with someone elses dodgy CSS and mods that break everything. On top of that, all sites pretty much have the same free ones. For easier blogs I’m sure this will be pretty easy to manage, but of course, I like being difficult. Having said that, the site isnt particularly difficult. There are some simple CSS and layout errors that can be fixed but there appears to be code that is extremely hard to track down. The only time I remember to try to reskin the site is either late at night or on a Sunday. Both times, my attention span for this kind of thing is that of a newt. I’m not really sure where to go from here, as I’m not too keen on leaving the site in limbo, but I won’t spend a few hours hacking up a theme I don’t think much of to begin with.

Last year I stumbled across a band called Powerglove. They are an instrumental band that play songs based on old video game themes in the style of power metal. Older video games will always be something that makes me pretty warm and happy inside. Its one of the few things I can remember perfectly from my childhood. For example, The Legend of Zelda came out on a unique gold cartridge in 1987 when I got it(5 years old). I played it as a kid and had the game beaten after a while(not literally, I mean completed). I had probably played it through a few times before I gave up. I bought a Nintendo gameboy for the sole purpose of having that game as a Nintendo Classic about 2-3 years ago and I can remember every secret location, where the labrynths are, how to beat all the enemies and how to go about finishing the game in no time at all. All that and I often forget what day of the week it is and my age.

Anyway, point is, the theme tunes remind me of games, games make me happy. Metal also makes me happy so combining the two was just my equivalent of putting Iced Magic on ice-cream, which I was never allowed to have back then. I thought, okay, these are just a few guys screwing around till I heard from Kay that they were hand picked by Herman Li of Dragonforce. You might already know, I fucking love Dragonforce. I dont know another more epic sounding band that can play guitars that fast. Their last show pretty much blew my mind and I haven’t been the same since. To be chosen by a pretty big band like Dragonforce is damn impressive. Herman Li is also known for a few of the video game effects used in his songs so to see them both signing on together is great.

Now all I need to do is get them to Perth.

PS - There is another game-metal band I am aware of called Megadriver but I haven’t heard much.

Okay, my first jQuery example was very noob, and anyone that might know what they were doing(or paid more attention than I did) might have noticed there was an infinite amount of JS errors on the slide. I have no idea why. I was working on a submenu sliding in from the left. I tried to use interface again but got the infinite error problem again.

Having a look around I was playing around with the animate effect. From what I gather you can just move things wherever, and animate will make it look slidey. So all I had to do was have it off screen via a margin and animate to add a margin left, then it slides out with no problems. Here's what I mean:

$('#akuma').click(function() {
$('#akuma').removeClass("ready");
$('#akuma').addClass("active");

$('#hadouken').animate({ marginLeft: 300, opacity: 'show'}, "slow", function(){

$('#akuma').removeClass("active");
$('#akuma').addClass("ready"); $('#hadouken').hide();
$('#hadouken').animate({ marginLeft: 0});

});
return false;
});
})

Its that easy. On clicking, the first animate it starts to pull the hadouken id back to position 0. It then hides, so we dont see it sliding back. Because it’s a split second it just looks like its disappearing. When it’s back, it ‘fires’ again 300 pixels. And it slides out using the animate function. There is a callback function to reset Akuma properly, thanks to Ben Kroll.

Like before, I have put this all into a video game based example.

Seriously…

PS this is not a cheap shot at my lovely gf

Okay, I just wanted to get back to this. Even though I am back on the CLF wagon it won’t diminish my interest in other arts. Submission grappling isn’t a specific term for an art, its more encompassing moves and styles. Submissions can range from grabbing a limb, pulling it or the joint the way it shouldn’t be going, but only using enough force to cause unbelievable pain, not to snap the limb. It can go that far, but it’s not the point of it in competitions. Submissions are used extensively in Aikido, Jiu Jitsu and Brazillian Jiu Jitsu and can be seen all the time in competitions such as the UFC.

Submission fighting can also involve pressure point fighting or chokes. Pressure point fighting is usually thrown in with Dim Mak and Chin Na which isn’t exactly true as pressure point fighting is more of an aspect of the 2 styles. Choke submissions are just designed to restrict the oxygen and blood to the brain, causing you to pass out. It is a ’somewhat’ safe method to subdue people and is the preferred method of law enforcement due to there being no physical damage or risks(unless you count the change of the chokee wetting their pants a risk).

Personally, I believe that it’s always handy to know a few joint locks and choke holds because ‘fixing’ a situation via brawling can land all martial artists into a hurt amount of legal pain. I can say that I can vouch for the effectiveness of chokes and locks, having being shown a few things by various teachers and having been ‘put to sleep’ on more than one occasion. As for training it can be very dangerous when trying with another novice, hyper-extensions and passing out can occur, the basic idea is the moment it starts to hurt, don’t be a hero and try to tough it out, you just tap on your opponent or the floor and thats it. People will often train to get in these holds and reverse them into others, but it takes a high level of skill, and a careful opponent to pull these off safely.

Sleeper Holds

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