Blog Entries

Wow, it's been about five years since I first made the switch to static sites and made the switch to having all of mine built with Hugo. The upsides were so good, the lack of need to keep on top of them updates wise for them to continue to live (worry free) on the internet that once I wasn't regularly writing new articles to them I was able to forget about them until the next time I needed to make changes. With significant shifts in my career since that time I'd spent much less time updating the sites, just keeping in mind a long-term idea to maybe add some nice front-end functionality via Vue.js—mostly an excuse to keep my skills sharp.

Fast forward to last year and I had found a nice Vue framework, Gridsome that I had begun to use for a more complex internal project and was gradually tinkering with it. Around that time it finally reached the point where I needed to make some changes to the live Hugo sites, and as part of that process also update Hugo to the latest version. Unfortunately the updates had made some changes to template language and other areas that were silently failing in the build, and after a few days of frustration there I decided that I may as well try Gridsome with at least one and see how it goes. I was particularly drawn to the GraphQL based queries that it used to make the Vue templates work, which I thought would make creating a nice, non-Google based, site search work beautifully. Plus, keeping my learning-orientation going I saw that Gridsome gave you more control over the site, because in creating Vue templates you also had the ability to write the front-end logic and share data between components as you would with any front-end application, and of course I would be working in Javascript (and Vue) instead of just a template-only use of Go.

The downside? It taking more work. I still strongly recommend Hugo as it works well without significant setup, and is probably still able to build large sites faster. Hugo just had a lot of developer effort, even in the early stages, for creating internal tools like pagination, various media embeds (Youtube, Instagram, etc.), and metadata handling that you didn't need to do as much work up front, sure, if you were like me it still required writing the HTML templates, configure the toolchain for postCSS to handle styling, and then write the necessary CSS code, but beyond that you put markdown files in directories with some basic metadata and it generally just worked. Which isn't to say Gridsome doesn't mind you, it does just require initial configuration, unless you pick a starter project you like and just use that without modification, in which case it also just works.

In my case I started from scratch. Getting a basic blog setup with a list of posts and individual entries to view is simple on its own. The combination of being able to use GraphQL to handle the specific queries, and much of the metadata, and still use markdown files as the source means structurally it's similar: make a markdown folder for the specific content type, add things there, and have a corresponding template for it to work with. I do really really like Vue's use of single-file components however, I love having the template's layout, scripts, style, and in this specific case GraphQL query visible in one place as it's wonderful for understanding what each component is doing at a glance.

The upside of more configuration required up front is overall more flexibilty, especially as there is already a solid Gridsome plugin ecosystem, which itself can rely on the larger library of Vue plugins for additional functionality. Plus in having to handle the configuration plus writing the code for template logic and behavior I'm more aware of and in control of what the site can do. The practical example here is the per article navigation. There is already a built in paginator component for handling the list, which I'm using, but for individual pages there wasn't a built-in way to do it. To make it work I wrote (with liberal borrowing of another site's working implementation) a few computed functions that used the GraphQL query to determine the next and previous blog post paths. That same method could be used to create more situation specific setups like post series links, related content based on tags, or for more commercially oriented sites having calls-to-action for specific products. For a server-side app this wouldn't be that special, but keep in mind this is a 100% static site, which has the ability to display dynamic data (see the search comment above).

Okay, I'll leave it there for now, I don't want to write-up anything exceptionally technical about it for the moment. I have two of my three main sites done to a basic level with this build now, and made a starter project from it which sped the second design up significantly. The third will likely take a similar amount of time, though I'll get to test a non-blog style page layout for handling a content portfolio which I haven't done for either of these (here or seanedevane.com).

And most importantly, now that these are done and I don't feel that I need to fix fundamental build issues with old sites I have the one big roadblock to writing and publishing new posts out of the way, not to mention other major projects I've been thinking about. This has been a very important first step.

Tennis balls, so versatile. I almost never play tennis, but they remain useful as mobility tools, for drills like the one above (and others), and behind-the-scenes to protect floors or faces from damage from pointy metal bits. This is one of many drills and games I've found via Ido Portal. Since this video I found better, AKA flat, surfaces to practice it on which made for a more consistent improvement. Compared to traditional (whole hand) wall ball this version is fiendishly difficult to maintain a rally. However that's because you've got to keep many variables consistent on each strike: straight wrist, contact with the ball on particular knuckles (top two for me), measured force on each strike, precise footwork, among others. I like it a lot, recommended for any martial artist and it'd be beneficial for anyone looking to challenge hand-eye and total body coordination.

A few days ago I was practicing swinging around on bars, the no-frills unpainted steel kind, for the first time in a long while. Within fifteen minutes of beginning I had ripped a patch of skin off my left hand from that the area below the knuckles where the skin folds together when you're pinching your fingers and thumb towards each other (AKA pinch grip). After a few more minutes I had torn two calluses from just below the fingers on the same hand, and a callus on the right hand was threatening to go as well. This sort of thing happens a lot when you're new (or newly returned) to swinging around on bars. But the old Instagram post (above) reminded me that there's a long-term method to preventing calluses ripping too often: developing a whole hand callus. All credit for this idea goes to Katy Bowman, who has covered the topic a bunch of times on her site and podcast, including the science behind it.

The challenge to building a whole hand (or foot, or both!) callus is that it requires exposure to a variety of surfaces, loading patterns, and intensities. I know why I ripped this set of calluses so quickly: I had only been hanging and doing simple uni-directional movements on smooth and predictable surfaces, predominately olympic rings, for a while, and had definitely not done any dynamic swinging movements on any surface for some time too. The smooth metal and wood surfaces you find in urban areas, parks, or in the gym are a good place to start, but as with me, if that's the only kind of surface you hang and swing from odds are you'll keep ripping calluses on the regular. The fix to that, as Katy articulates better than I will, is to more surfaces into the mix. Practically speaking that's going to be natural surfaces, trees and rocks, and different textures of the urban landscape—concrete walls, brick walls, rock walls, or finding those terribly uncomfortable square bars and railings. For the purposes of the big monkey-like swings though it's not just the surface, but also the force of that movement that needs to be replicated with these different surfaces. Personally that's the greatest challenge, as suitable trees for those big moves are hard to come by in the forests of North Carolina, which are dominated by pine trees with no sturdy branches anywhere near the ground.

All this is to say is for me this remains an unproven theory and a reminder to continue working on developing a more uniform callus across both my hands and feet; I'm doing way better in that regard with the feet, but it's easier to get that variety of exposure for your feet if you're walking barefoot, though the arch needs improvement for specific types of climbing techniques.

Retrogram: I realized that although my practice of publishing essays on this site has been on pause, I was still writing off-the-cuff riffs on Instagram to accompany the videos that I share there. That wasn't the case for all my Instagram posts, but for those that have thoughts worth expanding, I'm bringing them back home. In part, this is pragmatic: one shouldn't lean overmuch on a platform you don't control to showcase your art(work) or rely on income—the platform may shut down someday; a change in the developer's priorities will make it effectively obsolete for your uses; or you could be banned or barred from use, whether that banning would be justified or not. On the creative side, it's an opportunity to take the often rough thoughts written for the medium of Instagram, and improve and/or expand upon them. After I've mined my old posts this series will continue, sometimes with the same process, but also flipped to write here first before distilling for sharing on social sites.

Further update:in thinking further on this, and with Instagram/Facebook changing some of its API policies to make embedding these take more work on my current site's framework I've decided to just port these to Youtube. I like the community on Instagram and all, but I find Instagram's walled garden approach to search to be problematic, to say the least.

Now that the prelude is out of the way, let's get started.

With the bulk of my movement practice revolving around martial arts and Parkour, I fall a lot. If I didn’t pay attention to falling well, I would undoubtedly already have hurt myself much more seriously than the occasional scrapes or bruises I do get. All that repetition has built a solid foundation of habits for avoiding or minimizing injuries when falling, especially considering the hard surfaces I choose to train on or lack of total control when being thrown by an opponent/partner. These falling techniques are all practical and efficient, which sounds fine. However, my practice in the past year has expanded to include stunt and stage combat skills, for which the aspect of convincing storytelling is paramount. In these contexts, falling is a performance, and more often than not the falls called for by a story must look painful or even deadly. There’s much less room for the graceful recovery movements that my engrained falling and rolling habits exhibit by default. There's a catch though: however frightening or painful the fall needs to look, it must still be safe.

At ground level with minimal padding, the stunt falling techniques are similar enough to what I already know that little modification has been necessary to change them from safe and efficient to still safe but nasty-looking. I've found that if you're able to include a roll in the fall, it's relatively simple to keep yourself safe and still sell the movement as painful. But there's a whole category of stunt falls that require you to land deliberately on your back, and the physics of the fall limits the amount that you can mitigate the impact, so on-body padding and crash pads become necessary to make it a safely repeatable move. These are the falls where some good-in-other-contexts habits start to interfere with safety, especially as these types of falls are often done from considerable heights where minor technical errors are amplified by momentum (here's an extreme example).

Now for specifics

Now we can get technical. Here are the habits I'm working on changing and the reasons why they need to be changed in the context of these particular falls. Which falls? The ones I'm practicing in this video. Other videos on this sort of practice will show up soon with further examples.

1. Introducing rotation during takeoff: useful for acrobatics and rolls, but a really really bad variable to add in when the fall is over 5ft without a roll to buffer the impact. Unrehearsed rotation will change where you need to land, creating the possibility that the pad/bag that you're supposed to land on will be out of position. In the Instagram video, I was trying to remove this habit on very small falls, but in retrospect I think that it's far more difficult to clear this particular habit on low falls. As I move forward, I’ll continue this practice the way I first learned it: with higher falls that leave enough time in air to experience a longer moment of falling before rotating into the landing position.
2. Knees tucking up on back falls: useful when grappling for keeping your opponent from gaining either a side or top mount on you after being thrown, but liable to make you knee yourself in the jaw with the momentum from a bigger fall. This one I'm already making good progress on. It's a simpler fix because instead of attempting to remove an automatic response that has historically kept me safe while falling, I instead change/add a movement. In this case, that’s straightening my legs out once I feel that my hips and shoulders are parallel to the ground after the takeoff.
3. Dipping the hips backward as a back fall begins: when the fall can transition into a back roll, the action of rocking back from foot to head smoothes out the movement, but it's not great if your goal is to land with your hips and back at the same time to spread the impact out to the largest surface area possible. Instead, I’m keeping my body line straight as I fall.

That'll conclude the brief ramble on the technical aspects of falling. It's a fascination of mine that's only growing further as I expand my skillset further into using falling as a performance tool. Before you go, if you also enjoy being more adept at falling safely, Amos Rendao currently has pre-orders for his course The Art of Falling up now. There's no sponsorship or affiliate deal here; I'm just a big fan of Amos's work on falling and am excited to see what he's developed in the years since I briefly trained with him in Boulder.

I'm late to posting this, but my friend Denver Carlstrom and I created a short film. I'd intended to get a write-up of the behind-the-scenes or something similar, but alas, I've been busier than expected and haven't gotten around to it.

In lieu of that, here's the more important bit anyway, the film itself:

“Resistance is information.”

I said this during a class I was leading, applying martial arts concepts to dance improvisation. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but the leader of the group brought it to my attention the next time we met; the concept had resonated with her. Her mention of the phrase’s particular usefulness got me pondering it more.

Resistance is a feeling or sensation that is often seen as negative, and something to avoid at all costs. Having someone resist our ideas is frustrating; fighting against an opponent’s strength without success or feeling our partner actively resist a movement we're suggesting in a dance can be even more so.

But what I've learned from the martial arts is that resistance can be—and is perhaps always—useful and good. Resistance gives us tactile information about where the other person is. The more resistance and tension I feel through my sparring partner's body in a given moment, the surer I can be of where they are now and where they are likely to move next. I can instinctively feel the areas they’re taking special care to hold strong, which in turn allows me to feel weaknesses elsewhere.

The dangerous opponents are the ones who are relaxed. Testing their structure yields no resistance, so you have a more difficult time determining where they are, and where they will move. They are fluid, ready to shift and give ground as you attack and then to surge back with their own offensive move without warning. In the martial arts, where you want to trick or otherwise limit your opponent's ability to predict your next move, any resistance will telegraph your intentions about your own movement and your fears. Relaxation, by contrast, makes you opaque and difficult to read.

In dance—perhaps in any cooperative endeavor—resistance behaves in reverse. Resistance creates structure and a clarity of direction. If I'm sending tension into my palms and my partner is pushing back, any shift in direction or pressure is clearly communicated so that the other can respond. If one of us is too loose, that same signal is lost or delayed. Resistance here gives us the confidence to follow each other and take the risk of sacrificing our individual centers of gravity to the one shared between us.

Of course, the challenge in either case is that there's an ideal level of tension at any given moment, and that ideal level shifts depending upon the situation at hand. A complete lack of tension would have us in a heap on the floor, unable to move, while too much resistance makes us into unstable pillars, unable to move as well, but easy to topple. In a sparring session, you've got to be relaxed enough to conserve energy and remain difficult to read, yet you do sometimes need to resist in order to return to a space where you can relax. In dance, resistance as a source of structure is useful for weight sharing, but too much structure turns to stiffness and limits the creative avenues. A more balanced structure to the communication opens up opportunities for slow or fine movements to reveal themselves through a gentle suggestion from a change in angle and pressure from connected hands or shoulders, or even from the intent broadcast through gaze and body language.

With practice, we can take the principles of balancing resistance and relaxation from the dojo or studio into other situations, recognizing that resistance will give us information to clarify where we stand and help decide our next move.

Now for a different sort of post format. It’s a little more personal; just musings on a question that I haven’t yet answered, and to which there may be no 'correct' answer.

I feel torn between two different modes of moving. I'm practicing t'ai chi and other internal martial arts principles regularly, with both a focused session to begin most mornings and as my default way of moving through the day. I'm also learning modern dance, with a strong flavoring of ballet principles (and likely soon ballet itself). The demands from each are almost as opposite as they can get. In t'ai chi, a central tenet is to keep the hip joint loose and mobile, often actively rotating, and to move with bent, soft knees. In ballet and modern dance, the hips are kept stationary, with the legs and torso moving around them most of the time, and walking, balancing, and landing from jumps are done with straight legs all the way through or as soon as possible—it’s the ideal baseline to which the dancer returns. T'ai chi gains strength from softness, while ballet creates beautiful form from tension and structure. Ballet emphasizes raising up and standing tall; t'ai chi roots you into the ground.

At this stage, the principles I've learned about movement from conventional strength and conditioning, parkour, and martial arts (including t'ai chi) become interference patterns in my study of modern dance and ballet, causing hitches in my ability to pick up the movements and positions. It's tempting to try to forget the other forms in order to allow new ones in, but I'm more curious to see what happens when I allow seemingly contradictory movement systems to become part of my postures and to shape my unconscious default movement. I wonder what might show up from that fusion. At the very least, I much prefer the idea of expanding my movement vocabulary continuously, and having access to as many words and phrases as possible, to structure my movement to suit the situation at hand, rather than being stuck in one dialect.

Of all the life on Earth, one of the most intriguing creatures to me is the sea squirt. The grown sea squirts look more like bulbous modern-art vases than living beings, but the baby sea squirt, which looks a little like a bubble with a tail, begins its life swimming around the ocean, equipped with a nervous system that's obviously smaller than ours, but remarkably similar in structure, including a brain. That system enables it to move and survive, responding to threats and remaining flexible. A sea squirt becomes an adult when it finds a nice rock to anchor to, and, having no need to move for the rest of its life, eats its own nervous system and brain.

Like the sea squirts’, our brains exist for movement. We would have no need of such complex and metabolically expensive thinking hardware if we didn’t have such variable and adaptable movement needs, particularly concerning the use of tools. While our brains can be used toward myriad ends—speech, imagination, art, invention, empathy, and many others—the foundational piece that arguably enables the rest is the need and desire to move. We have always needed to move for our survival, whether that was escaping predators, hunting, exploring new territory, or building shelters and tools. We didn’t become the apex predator because we were the fastest, strongest, or meanest creatures out there, it’s because we are the wiliest: humans are extremely adaptable, social, and skilled makers and users of tools. All tools we use fundamentally require movement, although our modern tools focus mostly the fine motor skills of the hands—still movement, technically, but barely enough to qualify anymore.

We each have this massive, intricate brain, designed for and craving movement and novelty, and we’ve stuck ourselves and our brains in a modern world where the demands are less of the deadly-predator variety and more often the perceived threats of deadlines, tests, and boss fights. All these amazing skills literally sitting there during both work and play, wasting away due to neglect. It doesn’t have to be that way–we’re all capable of amazing feats of movement, it’s just a matter of getting moving and going out to play.

References

The Human Sea Squirt

Daniel Wolpert: The Real Reason for Our Brains (TED)

Stuart Brown, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about resilience—specifically, the way one can exercise it, and make it stronger, becoming a toughened individual. I gve a few examples, but mostly the post was an intellectual reflection on the concept, meant to start a train of thought. I didn't realise how soon after that I'd get to examine my own resilience up close, outside of my typical context for improving my resilience.

This past weekend I took part in a film hackathon. I've helped on a couple of films in the past, and I've certainly worked under tight deadlines to create other things. In this case though it was the first time in a long time that I was not just helping someone else create their idea, but shipping a finished creative project that I had more of an emotional investment in—and all under an extremely tight deadline. We had Saturday morning to create a concept, the afternoon and evening to film, and then Sunday at 4pm to edit together the final film. In total that was, at most, twenty four hours to work on the film from concept to completion.

Saturday was fine. My team of three had come up with a solid concept that seemed simple enough to execute. I wasn't at all stressed about getting enough footage—in fact, we'd been successful at getting several longer interviews. Sunday was a different matter: it was time to edit, and as the one with the most experience in that area, I was going to be driving. At best I would have had seven hours to complete the edit. Now, a typical short video takes me a couple of hours to edit and polish, and my own videos are intentionally simple to cut, and I already have the storyline worked out before I sit down to edit. In this case we didn't know the storyline going into it, and we had more footage to weave together (over an hour of interviews), so I knew this edit was going to take longer than usual. By the time we finished collecting and reviewing all of our interview footage and getting the good bits on a timeline to edit, it was past noon. I had less than four hours to complete the edit, and we'd be creating and tweaking our narrative on the fly during that time.

I didn't immediately feel physically stressed, but by 2:00 we were still constructing and restructuring the narrative. The film was still very rough, with many places where the cuts and transitions felt awkward, and I was doing my best to make quick intuitive cuts to save time. By 3:30 we had only just finalized the overall structure, but hadn't included any cutaways to secondary footage, fine tuned edits, adjusted audio, or even touched the color. The mounting pressure from the deadline brought forth a notable, and steadily increasing, stress response: feeling warmer, narrowed focus, a palpable sense of the blood pumping, and a drop in fine motor control. It took extra care to keep my mouse hand steady and to click in the correct places. I had a fear of wasting any time on unnecessary mistakes, as correcting those would cut into the precious time we had left. 4:00 passed and we were still working. We reviewed the cut at 4:15, and I fixed a few obvious mistakes and cut out a section to get us under the five minute max. Ten minutes trying to balance audio as quickly as possible and prep for export. 4:30: exported! Finally, I could get up and move. I hadn't realise how long I'd been sitting there, intently focused on the work—high stress while sitting is a challenge, it feels more difficult to dissapate it, as the body much prefers dealing with stressful situations through movement (the fight, flight, or freeze responses). I left the small glass conference room we'd been working in to take a walk.

I was still feeling anxious—showing your work always feels fraught with conflicting emotions, and waiting for the response often feels the worst, especially when you know that with more time you could have polished it more. I wandered around the space for a bit, working the kinks out of my body, still feeling plenty of adrenaline, and decided to try a vault (in my defense, I was around interesting architecture and was probably a squirrel in a past life). But with the stress, scattered focus and intention, and significant height (four and a half feet high, I'd guess), I clipped my foot (similar to before and fell. It wasn't too bad, other than a few scrapes, and I immediately vaulted the next railing to keep that fall from locking the experience of pain as a block to future practice, but the point remained: my body was still stressed.

That stress didn't go away until after our film was screened, and not knowing where it'd be in the order added a layer of anticipatory jitters to the process—and of course it ended up being nearly the last one shown. But once that perceived threat was over, the stress and adrenal state finally began to fade.

I don't think feeling anxious or fearful are bad. Often they're the signposts that point you towards worthwhile experiences that push you to grow, regardless (or really, because of) of how discomforting they may be. It's when those fears impact your ability to excel or accurately judge risks that my issue with fear arises. Thus it's why I find training to be toughened to be necessary and important: to experience fear and stress without interfering with my physical skill, intuition, or capacity to make rational decisions.

In that vein, I'm reminded by this latest experience that I need to maintain a weekly, or even daily, practice of experiencing discomfort, fear and uncertainty, and performing under some type of pressure. The practices I've found in the past that have helped have been cold showers, parkour (of course), and making videos...regularly. I'm experimenting with and adding others to that list, including dance rehearsals (a demanding, if different challenge), writing these more personal posts, and publishing more creative work in general.

Maintaining any one of those practices isn't easy, but consistently dancing at your edge is worth it, and doing so with regularity maintains and develops your capacity to choose growth.

Defaults are powerful. What we do without thought is what we'll do the majority of the time, shaping us more than anyone else can or any conscious action we can take. A helpful default behavior can protect us and encourage steady growth over time. Whether you're aware of it or not, negative defaults will always sabotage progress.

Defaults behaviors are impacted most by your environment. The ideal environment is designed so that the only possibility is the behavior you actually want. Trying to make change solely with willpower—trying to make yourself walk past the Chocolate-Coated Sugar Bombs in the pantry to get to the eggs every single morning, rather than just getting rid of the sugary cereal—without first changing your environment is a recipe for failure. As much as possible, remove even the option of the choice you've chosen not to make.

When you are faced with a decision that you can't entirely control, better choices come from having default heuristics or clear rules. Without some system for choosing, decision fatigue can lead to poor choices, but training yourself into the habit of only choosing based on one or two criteria can save precious willpower. If you have filters that help you choose quickly, you have plenty of willpower left over to make considered choices when there is no clear best option.

Learn how to identify, understand, and rewire your default behaviors and patterns and you will discover your optimal method for limiting self-sabotage, maintaining momentum, and reaching your goals in any area of life.