The beauty of posting something online is that if you’re not sure about it, someone will eventually come around and correct you. This saves you valuable time which could be spent going around correcting other people.

Also, I might have broken one or more toes on the heavybag tonight… getting that weird tingely feeling of endorphins just like the time I broke my hand(s), and my foot. Didn’t see the doctor about the foot, probably won’t go in for the toes either unless it gets too bad.

We don’t need to fix National Healthcare; we need to fix National Character.

One of the things I prefer about Facebook over MySpace has always been the low signal-to-noise ratio (also the completely lack of glitter, spam, and profiles so wide they’d require a Jumbotron to display without a scroll bar).

The reason for this is simple: people are more selective about who they befriend. Granted, everyone has those friends that they’ve added simply because 20 of their other friends have and they keep showing up as “People you may know”. If you don’t add them, you’re pretty much an asshole, even if you only have a shaky connection to the person at best.

But I’m not talking about these people; the socially expedience of adding acquaintances from work and school is a given. I’m talking about the “social drift” that would, apparently, eventually culminate in everyone directly networked with everyone else.

Here’s an example:

I recently “befriended” MMA and San Shou fighter Cung Le, and a few other notable personalities in the MMA industry. That’s not so bad, I’m a (D-List, at best) personality in MMA myself by virtue of running a huge MMA site, being a Judge, and occasional columnist/reporter/etc. Le popped up in the column on the right where it notifies you about mutual friends and very subtly mocks you for not being friends with so-and-such. An incidental mouse-click and the “situation” is rectified, pending approval. (If for some reason you’re rejected I’d imagine you wouldn’t get bothered with it again anyway).

So shortly after the request was accepted, I wander over to Mr. Le’s profile and notice he’s got around 4k friends. Deep within my itty-bitty heart, my inner child shed a tear; I guess I wasn’t so special after all. If I took anything on the Internet seriously, I probably would have been genuinely bummed to an appropriately minor extent for one simple fact: I hadn’t actually “networked” with Cung Le, I’d just added another point to his eCred (everyone knows at 5000 friends you level up and get new abilities). The guy obviously hasn’t been introduced to Facebook’s fan pages which allow notable persons to create page that can be more “public facing”. In my estimation, Fan Pages were created as a hedge against the kind of drift that’s effectively neutered MySpace as a viable networking platform: having umpteen-billion “friends”, 99% of which you’ve never actually met or share genuine connections with. But note to Facebook: it’s not working.

Like most reasonable people, I’ve never conflated my friend count with any statement on my individual worth, but it’s apparent that entirely too many denizens of the tubes actually do, and that this mindset is here to stay. It’s already effectively neutered MySpace as a viable medium for anything other than getting the word out about your crappy band or awesome t-shirts. And if Facebook doesn’t watch it, it’ll decimate them as well.

The true take-away from this is that as social drift occurs, people inevitably migrate towards progressively smaller and more “intimate” niche networks with a lower signal-to-noise ratio. An excellent example of this is LinkedIn.com. You could use Facebook to network for jobs, with colleagues, or to reach out to possible mentors and leaders in your industry. But do you really want to have your CEO sharing a data stream with the teenage friends that convinced you to get drunk and vandalize a railroad crossing? Or take my own “social network”, Bullshido, for example. The entire site’s centered around people getting together and beating the piss out of each other, in mutual celebration of everyone’s love for MMA and the Martial Arts. As such, the interactions there would generally not be appropriate in “Cube Land” or with your church’s youth group (especially since most people who participate there lean towards unrepentant skepticism).

Social drift is a boon to niche networks because the upside of networking is also its downside; the ease of information sharing can often unintended consequences (such as getting fired). The “you” you are with your drinking buddies isn’t appropriate or appreciated in the 10 AM Sales Meeting. In real life it’s easy to draw clear lines of separation between private, professional, and public life; on the internet: not so much. And it’s especially hard if you’re only networking on the conventional sites.

So I’d like to personally thank the attention whores who feel compelled to befriend anyone remotely connected to them. You folks are driving more and more people to niche networks like mine where people generally don’t have to worry about the social consequences of turning down a friend request from their boss, since he probably doesn’t train in MMA anyway.

Events conspired to keep me out of training both jits and conditioning yesterday so I doubled up on the latter today.

Afternoon session:

4 Minutes of Tabata on the rowing machine. Bluetooth headset crapped out 3 minutes in, so I had to set my phone on the damn neck of the bench and watch the timer out of the corner of my eye.

To the tune of some shitty top 40 song I twiddled my thumbs waiting for either the squat rack or the power cage since for the first time in a year they were both occupied at the same time. And lo and behold, people were more or less using them for their intended purposes *gasp*.

The overweight broskis bailed on the cage first so I wandered in there and banged out a set of 5 squats at 225, another at 315, and then did 20 reps of lying extensions with a 45lb barbell as perscribed by the Super Squats people.

Then I lugged through the 20 squats at 205. 12 in was ok, as I approached 15 my core started feeling wobbly. Gutted through (literally) the last 5 and felt woozy. BP was up. I wanted to get in some core work but after one set of leg lifts I wasn’t feeling so good so I headed home. A bit dizzy, actually. Wonder if it was from the blood pressure increase due to doing the Tabata at the begining, followed by high reps of a decent weight for squats.

Went home, showered, and then turned around and went to AJJ and beat on the banana bag. Caught the last 6, 3 minute rounds of Bas’s All-Around-Fighting, then did some crunches and bounced the medicine ball off the cage for a while, and swiped the Bas boxing CD and did 10 rounds of 2 minutes.

Then I came home and typed this.

Sometimes I hate my generation…

Weirdness; I just found out that Phrost.com used to be an anime forum back around 2001. I’ve been using the handle for longer than that so it’s even weirder. Here’s a link to the Internet Archive snapshot of Phrost.com 8 years ago.

Also, “RTOTD” can apparently stand for both “random thought of the day” and “re-tweet” of the day. Which is convenient given that I’m making an effort to commit to posting regularly, and retweeting important/relevant items is an easy source of content when things are busy. I’m still not exactly swimming in the Twitter kool-aid, but I can see its value as a hub for interacting with people in short bursts across multiple platforms (SMS, Web, Social Media).

There’s no such thing as either a trustworthy Government, or a trustworthy Business. But at least it’s in the immediate, unavoidable interests of the Business to live up to its obligations; Government never has to close up shop when they overspend their budgets or fail to provide services as obligated.

social gears

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

In a discussion thread on one of the forums I follow, someone asked the following question:

Why is being tactful considered a good thing? Or perhaps more specifically, why is being rude considered a bad thing?

I can easily recall several conversations, arguments, and debates I’ve had that entailed everyone involved being rude to each other, insulting their logic and thought processes, mocking any flaws in their arguments, and just generally not being tactful at all. These are the arguments that have changed mine, and others, minds, not limp-wristed overly agreeable bullshit.

There is no polite way to tell someone that their beliefs are formed by ignorance and that they are illogical. There is no honest way to debate someone who that is true of without bringing it up, and those people are the ones (I, at least) argue against most often.

How many people’s political opinions are informed by or shaped by South Park or the Daily Show? Those are about as far from tactful as possible, so there really isn’t an argument I can see that being rude makes your argument less effective.

I responded with a paraphrase of the above quote, that “Politeness and tact are social lubricants; it’s usually more efficient in the long run to make use of them”.

In the interests of full disclosure I felt that I needed to expand on that a bit, given the pointed nature of a lot of my written content on Bullshido. So I went back later in the discussion and posted this as well:

I currently make a living, more or less, being a complete dick to people who believe stupid things. But that’s not because it’s more effective at convincing people to change their minds about something, it’s because I am preaching to the choir and by doing so, providing entertainment to that choir.

Guys like Penn and Teller, or even Dawkins to some extent, care about their message, but they’re also focused on entertaining people at the expense of those they disagree with. If they happen to bring some more into the fold by happenstance, even better.

When I actually want to engage someone in a conversation geared towards helping them realize the errors in their thought processes, I do so in a reasonable tone and with calm, rational arguments.

Now when it becomes apparent that said individual is willfully ignorant, too far gone to acknowledge facts, or just isn’t worth the time it would take to do so, then yeah, at that point I think it’s ok to be a dick to them and then move on. This is for two reasons: 1.) if polite logic and reason fail to work, shame might do the job, and 2.) you can prevent having wasted your time completely by squeezing some entertainment value out of it.

I own way too many Internet domains that I’ve done nothing with, so I figured I’d keep tabs on the ones I almost bought.

This is the most recent, as of this morning. I didn’t buy IMNSFHO.com because in my not so fucking humble opinion, I’d probably get more use out of a salad at Applebee’s.

I was reading a thread this morning on Bullshido (of course) in our PT forum, about the difference between the Stronglifts 5×5 program, and the old-school “Super Squats” mass building program.

While I’d heard of the “Squats and Milk” maxim, I’d never known there was an actual program associated with it.  So I looked it up and it’s pretty simple; it even includes a diet plan, of sorts.  I’m already doing the Stronglifts program (5×5) and working up towards a 405lb squat (4, 45lb plates on each side of the bar).  30lbs shy of it now, but my form is ugly and I need to get deeper.

Anyway, the bad thing about the Stronglifts program is that while you’ll gain strength, you won’t gain any significant mass.  And considering that I’m built like some kind of goatweasel to begin with and have lost about 20lbs in the last year, the missus is already complaining about how skinny I am.  So it’d be nice to pack on a bit of muscle.

My solution is to blend the two workouts, which makes it that much more brutal, and see how things shake out.  I think I should be safe from overtraining, as long as I get enough sleep and nutrition.  Fortunately, this diet is all about craming food down your throat, mostly cow juice.

So today’s “experimental” workout went like this:

Warm-up

Squats 225×10; Dumbbell BP: 50×12; 5 Dips; 10 reverse crunches.

(Skipping the pullups because of shoulder pain)

Set 1, 2, 3

Squats: 315×5, DB BP: 65×8, 5 Dips, RCx10

Set 4

Squats: 325×5, 10 RC.

Super Squat Set:

20 lying barbell extensions (supposed to do it with 25lbs, use a 30), 20 deep squats -135lbs.

I underestimated the fatigue factor a bit on that, but it was a good workout nonetheless.  Instead of adding another 5lbs on the squat for each workout as suggested, I’m going to step back out of the rack and take my ass to my ankles for each rep which will suck, but is necessary.  I’ll then start adding on the 5lb increments.

Jiujitsu

Headed in to catch some rolling/sparring, and did a total of about 20 minutes.  Banged the hell out of my knee trying to fake a double on a new guy who’s a wrestler so he’d pop up and I’d get around to the side.  Was bad enough that while I was taking one person’s back and it came in contact with their heel  as they defended against the second hook, I yelped.  I also managed to catch an elbow in the face from one of our heavyweights who shucked off my legs into side control and brought it down directly onto my upper lip.  Strangely it’s not swollen, and I credit the “Talibeard” for saving me from both gimping around, and talking like Mush Mouth for the rest of today.

For extra cardio I’m going to speed-mow my back yard.  My last record was just under 2 hours (it’s fooking huge, unnecessary, and all down hill).  It’s tempting to do it at a slower pace because I’m usually listening to an audiobook while I’m doing it to keep me from mowing fractal patterns into my yard out of boredom.  And now with the knee giving me the finger I’ll probably manage to weasel myself into doing just that.