RealFolkBlues

On a side note, I rescind my ignoble cooties remark.

Rofl. I haven't shaved since like May. I have an enormous red beard, good sir Snappleman. You might remember my homeboy Josh from M5; he was the fat metalhead kid with his arm in a sling. He retains his fairly mighty beard.

girls have cooties

Damnit, the PSP just keeps getting better and better. And that's coming from a die hard Sony-hater.

Aren't the statistics like 70-80 percent? Very true. It's not going to work with every situation, but criminals are still human beings, and therefore subject to the various patterns that humanity follows. There are leaders and followers, born warriors and cowards, and so forth. Above all, though, noone wants to be hurt, injured or killed. If you show within a few seconds that you aren't just a hopeless victim, every situation becomes better for you. I lol'ed. Good post overall Kai. Chaser, dude, you messed the joke up man. That hurts me inside.

Depends on the school. Also, do you mean 4 classes a month? That sounds kind of pricey, but if the school's good and there aren't a lot of hidden charges, I say give it a shot if you have the time. Good man. Any art should work well for you then, especially if they have belt testing. One thing that can very much be said for ranks is that few things feel quite as good as advancing after a tough test. I think we're talking about the same thing here, Mr. Pesner. At the very least, one form of confidence often leads to the other. Haganegiri; a double post? Poor technique, sir. Good points, though. As much as I love the philosophy of o-sensei, at the end of the day, you can still throw somebody into a ikkyo without being a deep thinker. An adage my teacher often uses (and this is from a master instructor in the Spiritual Martial Arts association) is that the first ten years of practice are physical, the second decade mental, and from then it's spiritual. Therefore, at the very least, to begin with, you learn about how to act in the material. Also, jujitsu is badass, but yeah, grappling is hard against people much bigger than you and often not really an option when confronting multiple attackers. That's not always true, though; if you can control a ring leader of a group, you may have a quicker way out of a fight than handling each assailant individually. All that being said, Kai did say GJJ supplemented with a striking art. That's pretty solid.

Well, there's a few good indicators. Probably first is the rate at which most students advance through their belts. If a school gives any sort of guarantee about how fast you can make black belt, or if testing is rigidly done on a monthly interval and it looks like nobody ever gets held back from their next rank, the place is probably what you would call a black belt mill. These schools are pretty much just businesses, thus the colorful moniker "McDojo." Secondly, and you already said you're not interested in competition, if a school is competitive, they may focus almost exclusively on tournament training. Competition has its place, but sometimes competitive schools will forget or neglect the other aspects of an art such as self defense or traditional practice. Finally, if you can, try to check the descent of the masters of the school. If a master is just a couple masters descended from the founder of a style (I have had the good fortune to be able to say that I have trained under these conditions in a couple different arts,) it's a pretty safe bet his or her school is pretty damn solid. The fitness concern is self-explanatory, but as for confidence, did you mean that you wanted that in an overall sense, or that you wanted to feel more physically secure? Either way, really, it sounds like that ninjitsu dojo you mentioned could be a winner.

You had said that Kung Fu lost pretty hard in that National Geographic special, and then BlueMage asked what style of Kung Fu. Basically, I was bringing up old shit. My apologies for the confusion, sir. May I say it's awesome to see a few serious ninjitsu practitioners in here. God I want to learn that stuff but bad. What do you guys thing of Stephen Hayes?

Ninjitsu doesn't play, simply because ninjas could not in fact play around. They were facing samurai, possibly the most dangerous warriors in mankind's history (Spartans, the Hwarang, and certain other fighters trained from birth spring to mind,) and had no or at least very little margin for error. Therefore, the vast majority of their techniques kill or disable, or at the very least allow the ninja to easily escape within a move or two. Saying Kung Fu is something is like saying Karate is something. There is so much variety within the single larger framework. Longfist is as different from Mantis as Isshinryu is from Shorinryu, or Muay Thai from Savate. There are similarities (like there are between all styles at some point,) but there's plenty of differences. I've known some Kung Fu practitioners who were fairly badass, and some who could mainly do just flowery, beautiful techniques with little application.

It's been a while since we've had a martial arts thread, and I gotta say this one's pretty good thus far. There's a lot more actual discussion as opposed to the usual grandstanding. I myself am a 4th gup (advanced green belt) in Tang Soo Do, and will have been practicing open hand with my school for two years this month. I actually started with Kobudo (traditional Okinawan weapons; jo staff, bo staff, boken mainly,) and will have been doing that with the school for three years in April. I've done a year of kenjitsu (actually a smattering of different styles, all one sword though and very little iaido unfortunately)couple months of Capoeira Angola, a bit of Escrima, some Aikido, and a host of other stuff throughout the years. Our school has a heavy lean towards self defense, even though we practice a lot of traditional stuff as well. Someone here had said they did TKD with the Moo Duk Kwan. You guys do Yul Gok and Chung Mu, right? I just learned Yul Gok a couple of months ago. Tough form. Great exercise. A couple things to throw in here; Linearity, as I said a second ago, I've done some kenjitsu. Never have had a chance to get on gear and go at it with shinai, but it seems all kinds of awesome. As it stands, I've been missing my weekly swordwork. We only use boken now and again, as of late. Flare4War; Jeet Kune Do is awesome, for sure, but remember, Bruce Lee himself (who is one of my biggest heroes,) rejected his own style for the "way of no way." More to the point, in the Tao of Jeet Kune Do, he wrote that you should always use anything that's useful, be it from a style or not. Granted, he took a vast amount of useful techniques from other arts, but there's always more to learn, and plenty of places and ways to learn it.

Does it even matter? I could die a happy man if I knew I had simultaneously ruined someone's MAGFest and bagged an OCR mom. A month away, guys. Hells yeah. I'm pumped. Thank god I'm getting a fat paycheck that weekend. Between the holidays and MAGFest, I'm gonna be brok. No, that's not a misspelling, I just know I'll be too poor to afford any silent e's.

Does playing as Luigi remind anyone else of Doom? That cracked me up when I thought of the comparison. I think I'm going to give it some time before I do another playthrough. I don't want my glowing memories of my first playthrough tainted in any way, shape or form.

Yeahhhhh, fixed handicaps in games are silly. Two examples of how they can be done pop up in my mind; Blitz and Mario Kart. I don't know about you guys, but when I'm winning a long ass race by a bit the entire way through and then get hit with a blue shell at the last second, it never fails to piss me off. Even when I fire a blue shell, I feel like a complete douchebag. On the other hand, Blitz is just retarded fun, and very hard to take seriously. Thus the handicap, which could get ridiculous, was mainly just amusing. That having been said, it was still irritating to lose a close game by a last minute fumble return. Suffice it to say, I'm sure you'll be able to mess with the pity settings.

Definitely. Great books, and Pullman's a damn good author for world building, up there in my mind with the likes of Frank Herbert and Orson Scott Card. That is fairly wack, but I don't think that will kill the first movie. Hinder it greatly, yes, but not kill it. Pretty much rules out doing the whole trilogy, though. Meh. It'll be worth it enough for me to see Ioric being a badass on film.

Finally got a chance to dig into this one a little bit (I know, didn't I start this thread?) and damn it's fairly badass. Repeating songs is lamish, but it don't matter. Laughing my ass off while ripping apart "Wanted Dead or Alive" was well worth the price of admission. Also, faulty controllers are lame. My homeboy managed to fix his strum bar through a bit of labor on both our parts, and a couple hours later it was malfunctioning again. Makes me glad I'm not an early adapter (i.e. too damn poor.)

I don't think this is really aimed at us, guys; it will probably be the standard fare for Discovery, in that it will give a great overview of the industry's history and some cool minutiae, but probably nothing new for those in the know. Nonetheless, good stuff for those who might be a little curious (new gamers, casuals, parents) about video games. Did anybody else get thrown by the fact that the pictures for voting were of New Super Mario Bros and Doom 3?

Reuben sounds like an amazing young man, and I've always enjoyed his beautiful music. I say sounds in the present tense because even though he may be gone from this material world, his memory lives on in his family, friends, and fans, both here on OCR and elsewhere. Deepest condolences to the Kee family and please know that you don't mourn alone for this terrible tragedy.

Likewise, good sirs and ladies. Hopefully I'll be able to parley my way into three Thanksgiving dinners this year. I got at least two.

That's strange. I didn't notice any delay on the demo they had in Best Buy. That sucks if there is one. I'll bet that will be patched. Yeah, me too. That's a motherfucker. As I said in my first post, the new strum bar is kind of lamish, and that's pretty frickin' important. Granted, the solo buttons and effects switch are sweet, but I'd rather have tight main controls, especially since Rock Band is at best as forgiving as Guitar Hero 2. Still, I'm anxious to start digging into this one.

Bonefin galaxy is terrifying. And pretty epic. 77 stars in, beat final Bowser, and still loving this game but good. Best game of all time? Maybe. Definitely the best Mario, IMHO.

I'm impressed with the maturity that's being demonstrated in this thread. Like djp said, the internet and driving make for some ugly situations, and fortunately, this thread is an example of the positive side of the web. Speaking of positive things, my suggestion would be to think of the better aspects of this accident, which admittedly are few and feel small when compared to such senseless death. That having been said, this could have been worse. Two fatalities, and only one innocent dead. I know that kind of moral arithmetic can feel a little hollow when you consider how much pain even one death can engender (as exemplified by BeleaguredandBeset's eloquent and powerful first post,) but this accident could have easily been more than two cars and two dead. Like others have said, you did the best you could with what little there was to be done, and there's no possibility that the criminal driver will go unpunished. Still, everyone involved has my sympathy. Life feels so sturdy until it's proven to be so fragile.

Here's a question that just occurred to me; how are we on microphones? I'll have one here in the next month, so I can bring that. I know we have a recorder, but multiple mics would be great.

Wii: Metroid Prime 3 Super Mario Galaxy Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games Super Paper Mario Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock Tomb Raider: Anniversary Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 Geometry Wars: Galaxies LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga That's per Eurogamer, but pretty solid, all things considered.

Kind of. I would say it's more iconic. Metallica and Black Sabbath have songs that have broken into the mainstream, despite being solid metal in and of themselves. Even stuff like Killswitch Engage and Avenged Sevenfold are probably not going to have the staying power that warrants an album download. Likewise, as much as I love the monsters of metal out there, I don't think Rock Band can support stuff like Amon Amarth and In Flames. See the previous comments about double bass. Add to that the various other problems (vocals=ouch for most people,) and as badass as it would be, that kind of stuff probably isn't coming real soon. That having been said, please don't ban me, Wes.

You should certainly be able to do some simple pop rock stuff. There are a few differences, and it would obviously depend on the style of kit you want to play (metal, for instance, pretty much needs some powerful double bass skills,) but playing the Rock Band drums is pretty much the same thing as playing an electronic drum pad, which is usually a good start towards learning the drum kit. A couple things about that. Apparently Activision announced that they're going to add in other instruments in future packages, a la Rock Band. Yeah, and I'm sure they were fans of the Sixaxis, too. Second, they have announced some hot DLC packs for Rock Band. Sabbath and Metallica for your metal, The Who and Grateful Dead for some classic rock, and apparently downloadable content every week. Yeah, I'm pretty pumped.