Cosine Thoughts

So I pulled the trigger and bought a Steam Deck (256GB LCD) while it was on sale for the Black Friday sale. Then I grabbed a 1TB nvme drive and a USB hub. General thoughts? It is a great device. It isn't without issues, but it is definitely a good value buy. Almost too good a value, made all the better by recent hardware price increases. This is no silver bullet. The battery life isn't going to make waves, especially on the LCD model and there are going to be games that you can't play or which don't play well. I also hit a few times where the Deck froze on me for seemingly no reason, though always when launching a game so it never impacted game play. Oh, and I've yet to successfully get the thing to install Docker, but that is not a problem most people care about and there are VM related solutions to that particular issue (I just happen to want it running natively on the device). And that is really the extent of the "bad". And I put bad in quotes because t...

If there is one thing which I think is characteristic of Kyudo, it is that it is a lifelong pursuit. Moreso than perhaps a lot of martial arts. And this is maybe more true abroad than in Japan. I don't know. I certainly don't think it is unique to Kyudo to think "it will take a lifetime to master this". That, I think is common to most martial arts. Rather, I think Kyudo lets that sink in a lot quicker and is almost a core philosophy. I don't think you'll find many beyond shodan or nidan who haven't accepted or internalized this. Growing up, I knew people my age who had black belts in Karate while I was still in high school. I met people with 7th, 8th and 9th-dan in various martial arts, and they are effectively everywhere. Most dojos, for most martial arts have at least one really high ranking member. And many have multiple. It isn't absurd, in most martial arts, to be able to set practical timeframes for achieving certain high ranks or even to be qual...