Fun if you like watching really, really short fights.
I'm perfectly happy to crowd into a sports bar for eons of undercard and a few seconds of a Rousey fight. The undercard was at least fairly interesting this time out and those few seconds of Rousey are dynamic as all hell. Easily worth three solid minutes of any lesser fighter's action. You're watching History, it's freaking brilliant.
1: in the internet era, shorter is better. Even very interesting 3-minute videos would usually be better if they were 60 seconds, and most 60-second videos would be better at 30 seconds. Rousey fights don't have a whole lot of dead time that you'd need to edit out if you were producing a highlight reel. The fights are the highlight reel. Perfect.
Watching actual attempts at making highlight videos out of Rousey fights it pretty funny. It's a highlight video, can't show the whole thing! But which second or half second to edit out?
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/ronda-rousey-fights-like-an-outlier/
I am having lunch in a restaurant because I
Decadent and trying to be out of the house and the server recognized me because she went to school with one of my brothers. She asked what I've been up to and volunteered that she did three years of cage fighting around the time she started college (9 fights) and that she teaches no-contact youth MMA classes, which means maybe Mara's dreams of becoming a child fighter could come true. Weird!
She's also one who thinks all women should learn MMA or jujitsu (unclear from context, so ambiguity fine) for self-defense but I find being a pacifist easier and much less effort.
No-contact MMA classes? How does that work?
I think it's just exercise? A lot of martial arts for little kids seems to not allow them to actually fight each other. I think Mara would quickly get tired of not punching people and I also want to make sure she's not going to have violent tantrums about the breakup before I let her do anything, because her attack instincts are strong. She knows how to use her body as a lever and to jump to move faster when going after a bigger person and so on, which I don't really want to encourage if I'm going to be her prime target.
That... actually sounds like a martial arts school (the sane, respectable, kind) might be a good thing for her. If you're worried about her being inappropriately physically aggressive, a context for being appropriately physically aggressive in a highly controlled manner might be useful for keeping it in context.
I'm skeptical that spending a significant time rehearsing how to fight people makes you less aggressive. Maybe you could enroll her in a really ineffectual martial art?
I could be wrong. I just remember shutting down fighting when the kids were doing TKD with 'keep it in the dojo', and it kind of worked. Punching each other was kind of redefined as sports.
They're mostly good about not hurting each other, which is a good thing. Violent tantrums in general are vanishingly rare but I'm typically the target because I'm safe and can handle it.
a really ineffectual martial art
Capo-unaware-a.
14 et seq: Gold. Solid gold.
Protestantjitsu
https://twitter.com/FunnyPicsDepot/status/627896025722716160
Twitter asked me if I was really sure I wanted to see sideboob.
Mara would quickly get tired of not punching people
I have days like this.
23: Be true to yourself, Moby. Follow that star.
Sloppy Drunk Boxing
Barbie and Kendo
Shaolin Cheney Kung fu
Tai Chi.
(Nope, no clever pun: Tai Chi schools really do advertise themselves as martial arts schools. I'm an intermediate practitioner and couldn't harm a fly if I wanted to. It's perfect. If karate is the Dane Cook of martial arts, Tai Chi is its Guy Fieri.)
Sport fighting has so many rules.
Though, 'nobody talk about sport fighting' is not the first rule.
Systamea
Canneloni de combat
Jewdo
Kendoll
These are great.
28.2 I've studied Tai Chi along with Chin Na joint lock techniques and could definitely hurt someone with it. Chen style in particular I found to be much more martial arts oriented.
Oops I missed the "barbie and Ken doll" one above.
Richard Grieco-Roman?
A lot of martial arts for little kids seems to not allow them to actually fight each other.
That's kind of crap. They need to learn how to control themselves and that's a good environment in which to do it. If you were in my city I'd tell you to send her to the same gym my daughters and I go to.
re: 33
I've done some tai chi, with a guy who was quite 'martial' in his orientation. I've also done some traditional japanese martial arts, and, obviously, the Frog-boxing. I'm still pretty confident that someone of decent physical fitness with 6 months of boxing, Thai boxing, Frog-boxing, or judo, would clean the average tai chi master's clock.*
In savate, kids spar. It's all light contact, and because they are kids, they love doing all the flashy moves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJZ6mGjk2lc
Contact would be lighter with smaller kids.
* that's not to disparage traditional martial arts in general, but most people who train 'em just don't spar enough in terms of hours put in, in a realistic** manner.
** i.e. with someone who isn't co-operating, and is trying to beat you.***
*** which is still compatible with controlled contact, and doesn't have to mean getting the crap knocked out of you.
Or, some more evenly matched kids:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UTdNbsnpkE
I don't know if self-control exactly is her problem. She won't play team sports because it's too much being told what to do. She excels at track & field but that's the one day of Junior Olympics over the summer. Other than that at 7.75 she's still just running around being a kid, riding her bike and drawing for hours and so on. I should probably be working harder to get them in organized activities, but it's not my priority especially right now. (Nia wants to do cheerleading again and noooooo, please, no!)
I finally looked up info on Rousey and there was a CNN clip where it took her only 30 seconds to slam the Trump campaign.
Her entire fight can be found in gif form. As powerful as it's become, her striking still is pretty raw and her defense porous, so hopefully as she continues to improve she can get it down to vine length.
I honestly can't tell if 40 is a joke. It's funny either way. Sadly, Rousey has some fairly silly views on politics.
http://www.cnn.com/videos/sports/2015/07/30/ronda-rousey-ifc-trump-intv.cnn
What I like most about this fight is that, when the referee (Big John McCarthy) throws her away, she casually, without paying any attention, avoids tangling her legs with Correia and rights her balance, all the while smiling and removing her mouthpiece. Those are some heavily trained reflexes.
Every little thing the reflex does leaves me answered with a question mark.
Her entire fight can be found in gif form.
Ending with her turning back to Correia and telling her, "Don't cry."
That was a thing of beauty. Rarely has a trash-talker more richly deserved a beating-down than Correia. The last couple of people she fought, I actually felt sympathy for them.
36: Can you tell me about the place? A loves to fight and we'll be enrolling her in a fighting activity as soon as she's old enough. A was wrestling her stuffed gorilla before she was even a year old. I can email you if you don't want to put the name of the gym up here.
48: No knees to the head of a grounded opponent! Your daughter is disqualified.
48: It's the Bernales gym down on State next to the bowling alley, about 2200 S or so. This is one of the kids classes. There's like three different kids classes based off of age as well as one for teens. The youngest group starts at age 5.
Somebody used an unmanned drone to find Eagle's fans.
51: Thanks! That place looks fantastic! Now I need to figure out where to put her from ages 2-5. Does anyone want to fight a two-year old? She's not afraid to use toys as weapons.
Does anyone want to fight a two-year old?
Or a duck the size of an elephant?
She's not afraid to use toys as weapons
MyGymKata
Does anyone want to fight a two-year old?
How many two year old are we talking? Just the one or 20-30 of them at once?
You people are worse than Hitler that time he left me with hardly anybody to talk to but my co-workers. Better than Hitler that time with the genocide, but not by enough.
Talking to one's coworkers really is pretty awful, isn't it.
I mean, that may be just mine this week, but pretty much I'd rather make out with a cheese grater.
OK, I'll ask: How mean can you be in a book review that is generally positive? Like, I like the book. It's good, and I say so. But there are substantive things that annoy me about it, and I say so. I can imagine being the author and spending the next ten years grinding my teeth over this or that sentence, OR I can imagine being the author and thinking, oh yeah, that's fair, but she did recommend the book very highly, so that's cool. Ought one not worry about these things (we live in different countries)?
Having just listened to a half-hour tirade on how disrespected a coworker feels after being told that a piece of writing, while generally convincing, has a point I disagree with, I would say that any criticism at all will be badly taken, and if you don't want to make the author unhappy you should say nothing other than that the reviewed book is made of rainbows and cotton candy.
I'd like to make out with a cheese grater, just so I could feel something.
I'm inclined to think that 62 is generally true, having spent the past 15 years making undergraduates cry in precisely this fashion. But I think the few quibbles I have are fairly important and suggestive of things other writers could do in response. I don't think I'll get hate mail, but the author could plausibly be up a few nights with my name on her tongue in curses.
What's the review for? Is it academic professional writing, or generalist? If it's generalist I think you can say one negative thing and that's ok, and if it's academic you can say maybe two or three provided everything else is pretty glowing. (If you think the book is good-but-has-issues, I mean.)
The author has a 75% chance of getting pissed off no matter what if you say anything at all slightly negative, so I think you kinda have to make "annoyed author" the base case. It's more "other people let the author feel they might be being a bit oversensitive and encourage them to process their anger quickly" vs "other people agree with the author the reviewer was a total monster and encourage them to keep the hate burning".
Academic professional, top-tier journal. Like, I don't think I'm being asked to give a handjob.
Negative comments about style should be withheld entirely or reduced in length and severity. Where you disagree about substance, do so in ways that open up further discussion.
I didn't include any criticism of style at all, despite disliking that about the book. It's all about evidence/argument.
I don't think you need to be mean to note substantive annoyances with a book you overall liked in an academic review for fellow specialists.
New Zealand reviewing culture is pretty non-confrontational and generally avoids explicit negative remarks like the plague, so everything is just codewords and hints. So I may be a bit off on my views about how blunt you can be, but I think as long as you are considering that the author might get pissed off you're unlikely to write anything unfair?
You should look at Krugman's rip of Piketty in the NYT. That's gonna smart.
Talking to one's coworkers really is pretty awful, isn't it.
I mean, that may be just mine this week, but pretty much I'd rather make out with a cheese grater.
It seem like just talking to the cheese grater might be a happy medium.
Do academical types really get pissed about negative reviews (or negative substantive comments in overall positive reviews)? I mean, comes with the territory, right? Dialectic and all that?
I am just a humble country lad who knows nothing of the ways of academics.
73: They seem a bit more sensitive than my novelist/poet friends.
Just pick the one thing that you think is worst in the book and gently explain why you think it's mistaken or how it could be improved. That's part of the job.
If you could find a reasonably reliable way to rate how negative a review is, you could give carefully calibrated offense to novelists/poets and to academics. If you compare the two in a journal article, you'll get promoted from the humanities to social science.
Oh, and is it OK to mention that the book has been very shittily proofread? (That's a technical term, I think.) I don't blame the author as much as the slovenly habits of today's cut-rate acad presses.
Come out swinging with your criticism, then tell the author "don't cry". Then talk about the positive stuff.
Oh, and is it OK to mention that the book has been very shittily proofread?
The press won't care and the author will be embarrassed.
Is there a way to make presses care? It's so intensely annoying.
Something must be done about the proofreading crisis. Academic books are teeth-grindingly misspelled.
Eventually computers will get better at proofreading.
That's like #1 on the list of what computers can't do.
73, that works if your book is going to be reviewed more than once.
It is interesting! Too bad about the proofreading!
Yeah, stupid typos. I just bought a book by an established radical writer, but out by an established radical press, and there were like 5 really obvious typos in the first 20 pages. Tsk. Standards are slipping.
"put out" obviously. Was that a Freudian slip of some kind?
On the other hand, I really treasured the typos in my old Omnium Press edition of You Can't Win. Sigh. There was something very pure about the loneliness of my youth.
I've read reviews where the reviewer has said things along the lines of: "the publisher has done the author a disservice by not providing better proofreading." The author probably had to do their own proofreading, and took the comment as an insult.
If I had any pull, I'd be tempted to make an aside asking if maybe we should take up a collection so this press can hire a fucking proofreader. They're the only press publishing work on this sort of topic, so I end up buying their books a lot, but holy shit their books are practically unreadable.
Is it a first book? If so, your review is going to be part of a tenure file, to be read by administrators who may be less interested in spirited debates about evidence and argument than in finding excuses to gut the humanities. (So, one criticism developed in the penultimate paragraph; no more). Second book or beyond? Say what needs to be said for the continued health of your field. You'll be doing the Lord's work.
Reviews of second books don't go in tenure files?
I think the assumption is that you have tenure by the time it's reviewed.
In the humanities, most second books are post-tenure. So, maybe the review would interfere with someone's promotion to full professor, but that's not enough to stop AWB from saying what's true.
Huh. I wonder how much reviewing conventions differ by discipline. I haven't read a whole lot of academic book reviews, but those I have read have not tended to pull punches. Maybe those authors just hated each other.
You can't explain a variable with a constant.
I read a lot of academic reviews and some academic books for a while and came away thinking there wasn't enough criticism of the type that's fair and pushes some kind of dialogue forward.* I get that there are a lot of structural reasons for that, ranging from tenure considerations to the length allotted to reviews in many venues**, but it was disappointing.
*I'd say "constructive criticism" but that sounds so bland.
**Main exceptions: review essay journals, like Reviews in American History (in my former field); occasional review essays in journals where most books are reviewed fairly briefly; special forums on particular books, which tended to be pretty uneven and not necessarily better than standalone, sole-author review essays.
Merle, I'm pretty sure the author is early career, and my comments are taking that precarity into account. It's obvious I'm really really glad it exists and raises issues that needed to be raised, but perhaps I'll make that even more clear before submitting it.
Maybe I can OT over here for a sec:
Ever since I was hired for my new career-making job that I've been trying to get for four long horrible years, I've gotten the sneaking suspicion that they didn't intend to hire me. Every conversation I have with the people who interviewed me has some weird reference to a course they are really excited for me to teach that has nothing whatsoever to do with my work, and then they say, "Oh nevermind, that was another candidate." Or they say how perfect it is that I've done so much teaching in X area, which I've never taught. "Well, you'll have to learn how to teach it now. I must have mixed you up with another candidate." And now I just got my moving expense reimbursement form, which says I moved from a town I've never been to. "Sorry," I say, "but I had to change the form to my actual previous residence." Right, they say, they had me mixed up with another candidate by mistake.
According to everyone I've talked to, I was the unanimous first choice for the job. My offer was followed by several emails from people saying how excited they were about me. But ever since I've actually shown up, not one of the many things they've said they're excited about regarding my new position are actually about me at all. I know that academics are famously the worst at remembering who human beings are and what they do, but after months and months of investment in finding someone to join a really small department, you'd think they'd remember maybe one thing that's true about me. Right? Am I getting negged/gaslighted? Are my new colleagues mean or just thoughtless, or does it not matter?
102: If they think you're someone else, maintain the pretense and keep them fooled until you get tenure.
The day you get the official signed letter, you can rip of your mask and declare "I'm actually AWB!" and laugh maniacally.
mwa ha ha i made you think i cared about digital humaniteeeez!
...but after months and months of investment in finding someone to join a really small department, you'd think they'd remember maybe one thing that's true about me. Right?
I doubt it. I can't even remember the name of the person who has had the office next door to me for six months. If you aren't going to write your name on your door, how am I supposed to learn who you are?
102 sounds like a Twilight Zone episode.
It's not like I was a candidate for an entry-level job and they're like, oh, you're from Poughkeepsie, right?--oh, Scranton, sorry. These are people who vetted me for four months.
And they're way, way, way off on what I work on and really insistent that they're right about my super-interesting work on, oh, let's say, non-pet animal metaphors. When I remind them of what I do, they're like, oh, is that... what you do? Like that's so obviously not interesting.
That is weird. I dunno, maybe keep track of the confused information (town, specialty, whatever), and then in a month or two, when you've met insiders enough to feel like you've got someone who'd give you a straight story, ask if they know who you might have been confused with and why?
I doubt it's purposeful gaslighting, but it does sound like people are thinking about someone else.
I doubt it's purposeful gaslighting, but it does sound like people are thinking about someone else.
I agree with this. I doubt they're being intentionally jerks, but are being super lazy borderline-assholes about keeping track of which candidate actually got hired. You might have been the unanimous first choice because this other person withdrew after their campus visit.
They're thinking of two to four someone elses, namely, the other short list contenders they haggled over (and whose CVs were given the Cleanth Brooks treatment). It's disturbingly easy to misremember which candidate said what, maybe because interviews have the same formal structure and a lot of the same stock conversations.
102: 80% tactless, 20% "Fuck you and fuck your preferred candidate, Jerry/Susan/Maurice/Lamont/etc. I'll see you at the next budget meeting, motherfucker!"
AWB, ugh. Your situation is extreme, to be sure, but that period of being integrated into a new department is always, always awkward and full of rudeness that feels deeply significant, but actually turns out to be meaningless. It'll be fine in the end, and, if you're like me, you'll catch yourself, a few years from now, being similarly careless with the feelings of the latest arrival. It's really fascinating/ horrifying to watch this ritual repeat itself.
(I think you had a different introduction to your last place, but then they turned out to be terrible and crazy, with proves my point, I think).
Sorry if I'm seeming overly advice-y these past few days--I'm just enjoying the chance to talk about these things pseudonomynously.
102: William Goldman, whenever he is complemented for writing Lord of the Flies, just graciously accepts the complement. Perhaps you could do the same.
AWB's new colleagues: "OMG! You did such a great job with Lord of the Flies!"
AWB: "Yes I did. Thank you." [Internally: "Someday I will steal your glasses and put a pig's head on a stake in the dean's office."]
Yes, but I could accidentally end up having to teach, e.g. non-pet animal metaphors in early American lit, or something.
