Friday, January 20, 2012

defensive actions

doing brainstorming on all possible defensive... energies, maybe?

Contact Angles:
Block- Defensive action where the contact is perpendicular to the attack, with the intent that it will stop and not slide on contact
Parry- Defensive action where the contact is angled such that the attack will be directed towards the guard
Deflection- Defensive action where the contact is angled such that the attack will be directed towards the tip

active forms:
Jam- Closing distance with a block in order to stop the attack closer to its starting position
Circular- moving the tip and guard in a circular motion to pick up the attack and direct it into the guard
Redirect- Pushing the blade to deflect it away from the body

Stop-cut/stop-thrust

Swings:
Counter- Swinging in the opposing direction of an attack
Follow- Swinging in the same direction as an attack
Opposition- Pushing against the attack in a line towards the opponent.

Attacks on the blade:
Beat- Sharp, brief contact intended to displace the opponent's blade
Press- Sustained contact intended to hold or push the opponent
Expulsion- Accelerating contact, from strong-on-weak all the way to weak-on-strong

Positional:
Transfer- Moving the opponent's blade from one position to another
Yield- Allowing the opponent to move your blade from one position to another

Resistance:
Structural- Body alignment allowing the defensive action to draw on the entire combined body weight and resistance
Muscular tension- Holding the defensive action with muscles tensed
Leverage- Using leverage principles (strong on weak, deflection, redirection) to bolster a defensive action
Pulse- Twitching muscles at the moment of contact to create a short-distance power generation effect
Catch- Making contact with the attack and decelerating it with a continuing force
Loose- Minimal muscular tension, relying heavily on structural and leverage resistance or yielding.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

attention and time

Our attention works linearly. That is, we can perceive one thing at a time. To create the world around us, our attention whirls around and creates a simulation in our brain. This simulation seems flawless because it is all we know, but in fact it is full of holes and can be spoofed and tricked in various ways. We have a limited amount of input bandwidth, and there are gatekeeper functions that determine what makes it into our perception. Easy example: if you're sitting at a desk right now, your body makes contact with a lot of things. The chair, desk, keyboard, etc. But you're not actively feeling those things. If you think about it, though, you can focus on a specific body part and feel that contact. However, you can't feel everything at the same time. Also, pain will usually be selected, despite wishing otherwise. The gatekeeper can be influenced, but not totally controlled.

Alright, so your attention can only be on one thing at a time, but it's constantly cycling through everything, and the cycles are fast enough that they seem almost simultaneous, and the simulation makes everything seem smooth and continuous. But... they aren't, and the way those cycles get spent make a difference. Cycles aren't just spent on your senses- your thoughts and memories and feelings also cost cycles. And remember, you're not fully in control, so cycles automatically get spent on basic body awareness and sensory input.

The more cycles per second you spend on something, the slower it seems to go. Generally speaking, you can split it up into external and internal attention. The more attention you pay externally, the slower the world seems to go.

Example: driving trance. If you have a familiar route you drive on, you pay less attention externally, and more on your internal thoughts. And so, bam, you're home before you know it.

The number of cycles you get is basically fixed. You can't pay attention to multiple things simultaneously, so when you split your attention, the world gets faster. This is why talking on a cell phone while driving causes problems. It's especially tricky because the simulation seems smooth and flawless- you never feel like you miss things. People driving through parking lots while talking on cell phones are particularly good examples of this. They go really slow but move continuously- from their perspective, they're driving normally and luckily finding spaces to move into, whereas focused drivers will be moving faster and have to stop to let other people go.

Being drunk decreases the number of cycles. This is the correlation between cell phone talking and drunk driving- both remove attention cycles from the driving.

My explanation for the combat/adrenaline effect of the world slowing down is that the gatekeeper function for attention suddenly allows for different uses of cycles, NOT more cycles. Those cycles normally automatically spent on things like body awareness get dropped, and you suddenly have a lot more cycles at your disposal. The world slows down, but if you're not used to it, you can spend them erratically, suddenly picking up a bunch of little details, and your coordination goes to hell because you've lost things like body awareness you usually have without paying attention to.

okay. I think that's enough basics to tie it into fighting theory next.