In 2021 I mentioned how the availability of sparring gear was impacting our training at Tres Espadas. Since then we have done a lot of experimentation on making our own free sparring weapons. Our conclusion is you want a light, thin, ratan arnis-stick core with boffer-style padding, but where we have gotten stuck is what to use as a skin, something that will work against a fencing helmet. The closest thing we have found is gaff tape:
But gaff tape, long term, doesn't stay in place, and additional glue adds too much rigidity and weight to be safe. This means the only reliable weapon in the "padded stick" category that meets our standards is the Nihonzashi Padded Wakizashi (their padded Katana is also nice.) This means that our stick sparring in the future is likely to be done with non-padded ratan arnis sticks. THAT means that our stick cirriculum needs to be the last and most optional stage of training, because it will be the most risky and painful stage of training.
Historically we have been hard rubber knife first, then padded flexible stick, then larger and more rigid weapons. What is happening now is we are still knife first, but then we are going straight to the Nihonzashi padded weapons, and then Stick will be optional at the end for those who want to get into stick fighting specifically, just as our unarmed fighting is optional and late stage.
Since our saber fighting is Tai Chi based, this will be the first time we returned closer to our training roots with Doc Fai Wong's system since we officially started Tres Espadas. That said Tai Chi saber is very late stage training in most Tai Chi systems including Doc Fai Wong's system, were as with Tres Espadas we only have two Tai Chi forms, and the first one is Saber (the 2nd one is open hand.)
Tres Espadas officially has no curriculum besides the Knife Badge, but inevitably people seek training from other members to become better weapon fighters. I expect this Tai Chi orientation at our Bremerton club to be local to Bremerton, I do not expect this to catch on at other Tres Espadas clubs as they arise. Keep in mind our Tai Chi is sparring oriented, for example here is some Tai Chi open hand free sparring for palm strikes and eye gouges that we were doing recently:
Famous shrink Carl Rogers came up with a skill called "unconditional positive regard" which helps someone do "active listening." It means if you decide to genuinely enjoy listening to the person talking, you can get a lot more out of whatever type of interviewing you are doing. I have some kind of mental health issue which I call "universal positive regard", which is where I like EVERYONE. I could have a lot of fun being with a very rude mass murderer for a few hours, enjoying their company and listening to their unique views on life.
My condition not a good thing. Several weeks ago I found myself halfway through giving a stranger who was much larger than myself a ride home, when he started explaining that he thought I was bisexual and that he and I should experiment together. It was really awkward and a little intimidating until I finally got him out o my car. A week later I found out that he was a violent sex offender and that I had probably been in real danger.
Whether or not "attachment disorder" actually exists, the best explanation I have for my condition is that for the first eight days of my life I was isolated from bonding with any adults because of a health condition I had at birth. My childhood was normal there after with breast feeding etc, so presumably I had attachment disorder as an infant but I have had the treatment for attachment disorder (being forcefully bonded to an adult) as an infant as well. So I may have whatever it is people who have attachment disorder have after they have been cured, maybe "post-attachment-disorder?"
Part of this post-attachment-disorder isn't just enjoying the company of people who I should not, but also sometimes getting into a habit of bully hunting. Back in the 1970's people had different ideas about raising kids, and an adult who wasn't blood related to me held me out of a 30 story window at age 3 and joked about accidentally dropping me. On the third day he did this, I snapped and bit his hand so hard he had to go to the hospital for stitches. I have had to watch myself carefully that I am not hunting bullies for sport ever since. So on one hand I find everyone such amazing and entertaining specimens to enjoy, but on the other hand if I identify you as a dangerous threat who is coming after me, I will also enjoy hunting you in return.
If you read this blog often you know I have been anti-MLM since the 1990s. Part of that is I study other scams and exploitation, to keep myself and anyone who will listen to me from getting involved. I am recently divorced and said so on Facebook, and overnight a whole new type of account was interested in me, mostly with East Asian profiles with portraits that looked like they were generated by AI. Soon one that was more convincingly human started talking Bitcoin, and I knew I had a new bully to hunt!
She went by the alias "Sophie Martin." She sent me a digital image of a convincing California state driver's license for an address in Beverly Hills. When I was interacting with her she had 5.6 million in USDT (probably stolen from divorcees by way of a fake bitcoin exchange website.) She went so far as to have a video conversation with me to prove she was a real person, and she presented as a Mongolian woman with a Russian accent, and she claimed to be from Kazakhstan living in Portland Oregon working for a Crypto exchange company.
She never got a dime from me, but we were supposedly exclusive for about 72 hours, at her request. For the first 18 hours and last 18 hours I knew it was a scam, but I really didn't know for the middle 36 hours. Her replies were on point, her story about her x-boyfriend having a gambling problem was really convincing, and she came up with this date for us to go on in Portland that was clearly a bunch of things that SHE wanted to do, that had nothing to do with what I wanted to do (go dancing at night clubs.)
The reason why I never put my guard down around her completely is she kept trying to shame me for not being wealthy enough. I thought it was a personality or character flaw she had. I am not well off, but I am not destitute either, I live the lifestyle I want, and if I made a million dollars a year my lifestyle would be just about exactly the same as it is now. But eventually I had to follow through with the Bitcoin side of what she was about, because this could have all been an elaborate scheme... and when we went down that road it was this crazy fever-pitch two hour crazy rabbit hole of me sending her screen shots from my phone logging into various crypto exchanges and websites...
And then I saw it: a website designed for cell phones that was repeating information that was already on the crypto app. I made an excuse and broke off the conversation and hit the books for the next 12 hours figuring out who Sophie really was and how her scam really worked. Also how the hell did she fool ME of all people?
The game she is playing is that she is both simultaneously scamming and dating at the same time. In my case I think she was planning to sleep with me (she had no real chance as I am an LDS Sunday school teacher, but she wouldn't have understood that very well,) and I suspect she has slept with some of her victims. I think she sexually gets of on having relations with dudes she is victimizing, some kind of twisted power fetish. I further suspect that scammers like her have a chip on their shoulder against male divorcees... law enforcement thinks it's because male divorcees are lonely and alone and easily victimized, but the fact is we are all a gym membership and 6 months from being the most eligible bachelors we have ever been, it's physically impossible for us to be cat ladies. I think these scammers are targeting divorcees because these scammers are getting revenge on an ex-husband by going after all x-husbands (or their divorced dad by going after all divorced dads.)
This was really a dangerous situation, and probably came within 30 minutes of losing $200 to her and within weeks of losing many thousands of dollars to her. Who knows what else she was capable of. It was time to have a fake break up with her for our supposedly-exclusive relationship. I don't have the resources to stalk international criminals and I had learned how her scam worked. (Fake website imitates real crypto exchange, fake website takes your bitcoin and tells says you are getting daily compound interest which is of course impossible, and they come up with an excuse as to why you can't withdraw bitcoin but keep encouraging you to send more to them.)
I told her it was not practical for us to have a relationship if she was in Portland while I was in the greater Seattle area. We don't have the same values, I don't believe you can buy happiness and that's all she's trying to do with her life. This was evident in the date she had planned that ignored dancing. At the end she slipped up and said "I don't like night clubs... but I was hoping you would see me and make me enjoy dancing at one."
Cut back to the Saturday night before. I was at The Forum in Bellevue when as I was waiting in line to get into the club, four tall muscular East-Asian women (aka Mongolians,) one of whom looked like Sophie in our video call, got into line right behind me. All night the Sophie look alike was acting strange near me, smiling at her friends with this huge wolf-like grin, but doing a wall flower type of thing near whatever direction I was facing. THAT WAS NO LOOK-ALIKE!
I have recently been stalked by an international criminal I was online dating. This is what men are dealing with in today's dating world. Understand that when you get on a man's case for not meeting your financial expectations, you are by definition engaged in exploiting him emotionally if not also financially, regardless of your intentions. I will leave you with my last words to Sophie, followed by an inspirational video. "I am looking for dance partners, and maybe a friend I can share the rest of my life with. I am not a communally owned dildo to be passed up and down the I-5 corridor by entitled mean-girl women who should know better."
I recently made SoberClubbing.com which just goes to my Facebook group. Why? It's basically for two reasons, a health/social reason, and then a reason specific to LDS culture.
The health/social reason is: 1) dancing is fun + 2) Dancing is healthy = people SHOULD go dancing a lot more often. Because drinking is 100% heinous, people should be doing this dancing WITHOUT alcohol. Sober Clubbing is one of those things that could make the world a much better place for everyone.
Personally what is happening on my various dance adventures is I am not getting to know not the other regular dancers at the dance clubs, but instead I am getting to know DJs, rappers, bar tenders and club staff, because THEY are the ones who can REMEMBER me. What about the regular attendee dancers? Well they drink, so their memories of previous adventures are spotty at best, and they often have zero recollection of my legendary antics.
In the LDS community we get high school age kids going to Church dances at least once per month. We show them how fun it is to have a sober dance. Up until around the time of 2020 the Young Single Adults used to continue that tradition in this area every single weekend, which is where I accumulated most of my dance experience in the 90's. But now the older-single-adults are having dances more frequently than the Young Single adults, and it's only about once per month like with the Youth/high-school-age.
Here's the problem: if dancing is good for you, and dancing is fun, what are the married couples supposed to do? I have interviewed the elderly on this topic and discovered that in ancient times the LDS Church had all ages dances. Furthermore it appears this tradition may still persist to this day in some parts of Latin America. However I live in the USA, so what gives?
There are various possible solutions, but ultimately if the Seattle Area LDS community is not going to set up some kind of every-weekend 18+ or all ages dance night for all members regardless of relationship status, there is a huge social void in the LDS community. We were all raised to dance, and that was a great way to be raised.
LDS or not, we all need to continue dancing, for both our health and our entertainment. My plan is to get a group of like minded individuals together and go enjoy night clubs without drinking, and it's a plan that is starting to work:
I don't get rejected often, so when it happens it stings a little. One thing I have told others over the years is that they should view rejection as a gift. Lately I have to be swallowing a taste of my own medicine.
Back when I was working for Antioch University Seattle in 2007, a job opened up that I wanted to have in an academic department I admired. I was rejected for the job and it stung. However I had the strange opportunity to observe what happened with the person who DID get the job I wanted: it was one of those positions where you spend a lot of time listening to others complaints and while being a scapegoat simultaneously, it wasn't a position I (or the person who was hired for it) could enjoy. I was very lucky the people who did the job selection understood both me and the job duties to realize I was a poor match!
Note however that rejection can be good for another reason: if you are getting rejected often, it means you are aiming high. In the case of employment, do you want a position that you only have a 50% chance of getting, or do you want the position you have a 90% chance of getting? Most likely the 50% chance job is the one you want, so it's worth getting rejected more often in order to end up with the better job in the long run.
Keep this in mind for romantic rejection as well. No matter how bad the disappointment, understand that when you are rejected this means that the person rejecting you has information that you do not have.
From my perspective there are two rival theories for free style casual dance:
It's about self expression.
It's about staying on beat.
In my experience everyone's dance skill is divided by these two separate dance floor theories. I myself prescribe to staying on rhythm, for me I care little for self expression & like pulling off whatever moves I can while staying on beat:
Therefore core to my strategy is being able to move to the beat, often exhibiting a "bounce." Bounce direction is what I have worked on the most since I started getting back into dance in earnest on New Years. Most people if they can stay on beat will stay on beat by bouncing down on each beat. However, you can also go upwards instead, on beat. This also means you can go left, right, forwards or backwards on beat, 6 directions all together.
The secret to more difficult hip hop steps like the running man, in my opinion, is that your feet do not slide along the floor but instead actually have a minute amount of air between the sole of the shoe and the floor.
Since the 90's I have also worked on techniques that do not bounce at all but otherwise manage to stay on rhythm.
However my technique come shy of the most self-expressive form of dance, which is Voguing, brought to you by the LGBT community (I myself am heterosexual, contrary to some people's assumptions, nor is this me in the following video):
So there you have it, you can do dance the more sexually diverse way where you focus on self expression, or you can do it my way.
I am a huge likert scale fan, and I have found that there are 5 levels of expertise in martial arts, and that this also goes for other subjects, and it applies to the difference in my personal skill levels when it comes to fighting vs. dancing. So let's apply it to fighters first:
A one star martial artist is someone who's fighting skills are a result of being athletic, naturally tough, or having taken a few hours of self defense training. There are life long martial artists who are only at this level because the way they train martial arts has little application for fighting.
A two star fighter is someone who has trained to fight specifically in the past casually but on a regular basis, or someone who has multiple elements from one star (a weightlifter who has taken a self defense class for example.) It could also be someone who on the job uses a system for manhandling opponents such as police, bouncers, or hospital security.
A three star fighter is what popular language calls a "black belt," in other words someone who has studied enough fighting to teach classes on how to fight. People who have trained martial arts in a way that is good for training to fight for multiple years usually fit into this category. This is the category most combat sports coaches fall under.
A four star fighter can be identified one of two ways. First they are the best student of a three star fighter/martial arts instructor, identified as being formidable enough to defeat their own instructor in a fight. (If an instructor can NOT produce this kind of fighter, than what kind of fighting instructor are they?) Second, this could be a fighter who fights in higher level tournament competition, or a fighter who fights in public matches.
I didn't know 5 star fighters existed until I found myself on the mat with one in a knife fight. People had warned me that there are these really dangerous people out there you will rarely see in competition, but which are feared by 3 and 4 star fighters. Ramsey Dewey describes a Tai Chi fighter like this who the high level Sanda fighters in China sometimes train with. Things I have noticed about them as I have encountered them myself: A. Most of their training time is spent on developing their own skills, not teaching others. B. They are NOT into publicizing their abilities, their skill level is a legal liability to them if they have to use it in a real situation, and since they aren't pro fighters or instructors they are not making money from people knowing what they can do. C. They are all into free sparring, but they don't want to take the injury risk of training in fight camps to prep for matches or tournaments, least bit participating in those fights. As a result, they do NOT accumulate the same career ending combat sports injuries pro fighters do, which allows them to train longer and accumulate more skill than what you would seen in say the UFC.
How can I say there's a higher level of fighter beyond a UFC champ? There are two factors: 1. UFC fighters are train for the highly specialized rule set of the cage. 2. UFC fighters train for long extended matches, relative to real fights that typically end in less than 30 seconds, they are literally training for a specialized type of fighting that is not most fights. UFC champ BJ Penn learned this the hard way:
Now that was a VERTICAL left hook that knocked out BJ Penn, a highly specialized technique that requires a significant amount of training, but this is not to show that guy BJ Penn was up against was some 5 star fighter (though it's possible,) only that UFC is not the ultimate standard for what constitutes "good fighting" as that skill set can be inadequate for most types of fights.
I classify myself as a 3 star fighter. Most of the keyboard warriors who criticize me would not last 30 seconds against me, that's just the reality. I am however fully aware that an average MMA fighter going at it at a Casino every couple of months, is a level of fighting skill entirely beyond me. I am highly specialized in knife fighting and practical strategy for self defense and in that one area I might be 4 stars, but over all I am very typical 3 star fighter.
What I have come to realize as I have started dancing and exploring different venues and dance cultures, is that I am a 5 star dancer. I show up at clubs where there's something going on I find entertaining, and my biggest concern is that the other good dancers will stop dancing just to observe me. But I don't teach, I am there for my own personal entertainment and frankly to steal other people's dance moves I like and modify them to make them my own.
Why?
When most people go to a dance, they dance a few songs. I dance all night. If 50 songs are played and they dance 5 songs and I dance 50, I got 10x as much practice that evening. Most people who enjoy going to dance venues maybe around twice per month. I prefer to go twice a week. This means I get 50 x 4 (200 times) more experience dancing than most other dancers. The other issue is though I took a very long hiatus from dancing for 25 years, before that I had been to hundreds of dances, always with the intent of getting better at dancing. Then I do something others don't: train at home on my own time. In my senior year of high school, I would practice dance moves to a metronome with a mirror alone in the basement. Then there's the formal training: a year of ballet in grade school, and a year on a ballroom team in High School. And then yes, there's the martial arts thing on top of all that, adding to my over all physical coordination. Finally, I study all forms of dance whenever I can (with a few exceptions for safety reasons (such as daggering or break dancing,) though I enjoy observing those more physically dangerous forms of dance.) I have recently added salsa footwork and some sort of mambo footwork into my repertoire, and I have taken a local Zumba instructor (who was rumored to be an excellent dancer before she got into Zumba) seriously as a dance floor rival. I've been to Country events, Islander events, etc. etc. even thought he main scene in my area right now is really EDM.
So... I don't even know how to teach my moves to others... I tried to show one young lady at a club a few weeks ago for a move I had done, "it's just a crip walk with a knee roll from Jazz dancing..." and she was just left looking at me wondering what any of those words meant. I think back on the price I paid to learn each element of that technique and realize there's no place she is going to learn it, and as a 5 star dancer I have no incentive to teach it.
I am not the best dancer in the world, I suspect that for example Flint Flossy is probably a better dancer than me. However you have to be at a fairly elite level far beyond the average dance instructor or professional dancer to adequately challenge me on the dance floor.
I admit I watched the first 4 seasons of Love is Blind more or less as they came out. It really got me thinking in a more nuanced way about romantic relationships. However my big take away was a lot stranger: Men don't like makeup.
There are a few different situations in Love is Blind where the relationship is going well until the man sees the woman and then something strange happens: though he's happy with her physical appearance, he suddenly stops trusting her. In a few cases towards the end of the relationship (mid seasons) she stops putting on make up and the man suddenly warms up to her, and in at least one case actually says it was the make up putting him off.
When a man sees a woman's face that has a lot of makeup on it, he doesn't know if he likes her face or not, what he does know is he is looking at a woman who feels like she needs to wear makeup. It is at least in my opinion ALWAYS more attractive to see a woman's face without makeup on than with makeup on. A lot of the subtle intricacies of a woman's face that can make her unique and stand out from others are covered up by makeup. A whole bunch of laddies standing around with faces that look almost exactly the same because of the latest trend in makeup is very off putting. A woman standing near that crowd who used NO makeup (all other factors being equal) instantly stands out as far more attractive than the ones with the painted masks on their face.
Of particular alarm to me was a recent trend with long fake eyelashes. They were hideous and universal. It was almost like someone in the makeup industry wanted women to be less attractive to men. In the show "Too Hot to Handle" on Netflix where the show's producers attempt to reign in notorious sexual behavior with their contestants, we frequently see these attractive women with and without their makeup on, with the gigantic eyelash thing being a big part of their makeup routine. In every scene the women are always far more attractive without their makeup than with their makeup.
So what's with all the makeup? I am reminded of scams like Mary Kay that are pyramid scheme style companies who sell makeup. When a woman attempts covers up her faces it is inherently deceptive regarding what her real face looks like, and this deception is expensive to her because makeup is not free. In an MLM makeup scam, that deception is then used on the woman to drag her into the scam, leading her to think makeup is more normal and valuable than it actually is.
Now don't get me wrong I get that little makeup used with careful moderation is not some great evil. However it's clear to me that it has gone way too far in recent history, now having the opposite effect of what it was originally intended to have, making women look like clowns instead of looking good.
