Kicking my own ass and then getting it kicked as well

2012-04-18 10:34:00

Over the past few days my mood had been getting increasingly bad. I was on edge, tired and just not relaxing. I think that a lot of that can be attributed to my recent interest in CC:TA. In my earlier blog post I wrote the game was addictive and it is: it'd become too easy to just waste a whole evening staring at that screen. "Let's raid a camp or two. Okay, I'm through my CP, so let's do base maintenance. Okay, now what? 45 minutes before I can anything else. Okay, let's read the forum and do some diplomacy!" And so on. All the reasons why I never got into WoW.

Then, last night I was this -> <- close to skipping kendo practice again, because of my foul mood. And as I sat there, watching the CC:TA screen, already five minutes late for leaving, I decided to quit the game. I'll set up my base so my alliance mates can raid it and then I'm out. Fsck that, I've got plenty of better things to do.It's a fun game, but nothing more than that.

Marli helped me greatly! "Do I need to push you to go?" And so she did. She quickly helped me pack all my gear and sent me on my way to Amstelveen. Gotta love that girl! ( ^_^)

Luckily I was only a few minutes late and I was just in time to join in with the warming up. After that followed kihon, followed by geiko and more geiko. The group was smaller than usual, but there were many high-level kendoka, including three from the dutch national team! I bowed out from the second round of geiko (the last twenty minutes of class) as I was feeling exhausted and was afraid I wouldn't make it back home.

Pointers I received from several of my sempai:

• RELAX! I may think my body is relaxed, but it's still tense. And because I'm so tense I'm wearing out my body too quickly, which leads to my early exhaustion. 
• When doing tsuki, step in slightly, then move forward a lot from the hips and only at the last point do a thrust to the throat.
• When sliding in for seme, I push my shinai way to much to the left or right. It's enough to keep my own kensen aimed at my opponent's throat. That alone will push his/her shinai out of center enough for me to strike. 
• When receiving practice strikes to kote and kote-men, do not move my shinai to the lower left. It should aim slightly upwards, else my opponent cannot properly strike kote. 

Thanks to Chung-sempai I now also know what a mouse feels like, when toyed with by a cat. During geiko, with every strike of mine, she darted aside and retaliated with two quick strikes and a giggle. I couldn't help but smile, while getting my ass handed to me.

Also, I don't think we've ever introduced ourselves so I don't know his name. One of the young guys who started in bogu only three weeks ago. He clocked me on my elbow with his tsuba. Twice. Hard. Man that hurt! ( ^_^) Arm's fine today, no worries.

kilala.nl tags: kendo, life, sports, meh, games,

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My switch to Apple and other updates

2003-11-11 21:32:00

Another day, another update :)

Last week I went out and bought my lovely Apple G5 tower... It's the basic single 1.6 GHz processor model and I've gone for all of the vanilla options. Later on, when/if I get more money, I'll upgrade the RAM with 512 MB extra and I'll add a second S-ATA hard drive for all of our home videos (which as of yet we still have to start making :P).

Anyway: I'm quite pleased with the comuter! It simply oozes sex and the OS, while it takes getting used to, is quite pleasent in daily use. Right now I'm waiting for my back order on Final Cut Express (w00t on the e250+ discount when buying an Apple) and on OS X 10.3 (aka Panther). The only thing missing right now is the GIMP, which is my favourite imaging tool. For all of you fellow amateurs out there who'd like a cheap/free alternative to Photoshop, check out http://www.gimp.org.

Work's still interesting/fun, although quite busy: currently I'm juggling about seven projects, trying to spread them all out evenly over my four day work weak (don't you just love working at a bank?!) which is quite a hassle, since oftentimes people'll jump in with extra work that needs to be done yesterday. Anyway, eventhough I may sometimes complain or bitch a little, I'm still quite happy at ${Customer}. ^_^

On a final note, about two weeks ago Marli and me visited 'het Spellen Spektakel', which is the Netherlands' largest game show. Once a year the city of Eindhoven is flooded by kids, parents and gaming geeks who all trud into the trade show building. Now, when I say "game" in this case I mean "board games" and "table top games" etc. We bought a _lot_ of stuff over there (among others over five booster displays for the Harry Potter CCG and two displays of Card Captor Sakura CCG), but overall we found the show to be a bit boring so we left quite early.

The two days after buying my new computer were filled with ups and downs, making for a couple of very hectic days with mood swings that quite contrasted each other. Not too good as you can image -_-' Anyway: check out the comic!

As you can see I've switched to another form of layout and story telling. I'm still getting used to it and might switch back to my original form in the future, but right now I'm quite pleased with how much this layout lets me tell. :)

kilala.nl tags: apple, work, games,

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