Free Candy For Everyone

I haven’t really talked much about this on the blog, but I’ve been studying Kung Fu for over three years. The school I train at is a branch of YMAA, here’s a description of the program. Scroll down to the adult program, that’s what I’m doing. Most popular question asked by people when I say I do Kung Fu is “What belt are you?”. There are no belts. Karate has belts. And Kung Fu is not Karate.

What’s the difference, you ask? Kung Fu is a Chinese martial art. Karate is a Japanese martial art, derived in part from Kung Fu. If you’re an expert on this topic and I’ve got it not quite right, blame my teacher. I’m no expert.

Anyway, we have a system of stripes to mark our rank. As you can see on the YMAA site, the system has 15 stripes, and at 6 you can be an instructor. To put it in perspective, at my school, the instructor has 6 stripes, one guy has 5, one has 4, about 6 have 2, and everyone else has less. It’s hard hard hard to get more than 1 stripe.

I have one stripe, and I’m working towards my second. Tonight I passed my Long Fist barehand sequence, Gong Li Quan. I’ve been working on it for probably 2+ years, so this was a big event. I’m very happy to be able to focus on something else. I have now passed 3 of the 5 things needed to get my 2nd stripe. My goal is to get that 2nd stripe by the end of the year.

I know it’s pretty early in the year, but it’ll still be a challenge. I have Short Defense, which are 10 techniques use to throw your opponent into the floor. Yeah! Those are fun. I’m sure I’ll be able to pass those by year end. The challenge is Qi Mei Gun, which is a staff sequence. Yes, they’re giving me a weapon. Everyone look out! I’ve used the staff a bit before, but now I’m focused! There will be lots of Tara-swinging-staff events. The staff should reach your eyes, so it’s over 5 feet long. It’s great.

Anyway, that’s enough of these ramblings. You may hear more of my real-life Kung Fu adventures, which is the main thing I do when I’m not playing World of Warcraft, working, or blogging. Like that ordering? Where are my priorities!

I’m speaking on a panel next week about women and video games. Here’s the official info on the event. I’m not quite sure what it’s going to be about, but reading that web page, it sounds kinda interesting. Seeing as I started this blog in part to discuss the role of women in the game industry, I thought I’d point out the event.

If you’re in the area, stop on by. It’s in Waltham, MA this coming Monday night, Feb 6.

And if you can’t make it, don’t worry, I’ll try to post a bit about what happens sometime next week.

My guild Crazy Cattle now has its very own guild website. Its look is still very much not final, but the content is there. So if you’re looking for the weekly report of what we did in World of Warcraft today, check it out here. We visited Uldaman today, and I died a whole lot. Good times, good times.

A few months ago, my mom got me into Sudoku. For those who haven’t heard about the “puzzle sensation that’s sweeping the nation” (as one of my puzzle books calls it), it’s a logic problem involving numbers. It’s not a math puzzle though. I’ve always done crossword puzzles before bed when I wanted to just do something quick before sleep (i.e. not read a book since I can’t put those down and might end up staying awake for hours more). But the last few months have involved mostly Sudoku puzzles.

Unfortunately, it involves this annoyance of penciling things in and erasing them, thus piling up little eraser shreds all over my bed. Ew. Also, books full of the puzzles aren’t that cheap. I was looking on Amazon and $7 seems like a lot of money for 100 puzzles. So I looked for free web puzzles and found Web Sudoku, which seems quite nice. Only problem is it’s mighty inconvenient to click around with the mouse and enter the numbers using the keyboard.

As I thought about this, I realized, hey, I have a Tablet PC
- that means I can flip my screen around, turn it flat and write on the screen with a stylus (I’m talking about my laptop, not somehow my home machine with the giant Dell 2405 monitor). Now that would be perfect, playing on my computer, so no nasty eraser woes, but still being able to write the numbers in.

One web search later and I found Inkudoku, which sounds like exactly what I want. Of course, it’s just a website and a description, the product isn’t available yet! But I thought I’d talk about it anyway, just in case anyone was curious.

There’s a post up on WOW Insider about dueling, and one line rang true with me, “there’s little that can be done for those players who cry unfairness at a Priest using a heal in battle.” Yeah, what’s up with that? I’ve duel with my priest and my druid and had people say stuff when I won like “but you healed like 5 times, lol”. Um. Yeah. So the classes are balanced out so that you use the skills you’re given. My priest is mostly Holy spec, which means she heals real good and doesn’t do much damage. Use what ya got!

If I didn’t heal, I wouldn’t be using the majority of my arsenal. That’s just such a silly thing to say. As though it’s cheating to use the talents you’re given. Should I cry foul on a rogue that uses poison in PvP? Or a mage that uses fireball? Come on, people!

end rant.