Reasons to Buy a Character in a Video Game

Okay, maybe you don't have $2,500 to pay to be a character in Spirit Lake: The Game.

We're not talking about you, then, but asking who would be interested? Here is my list:

1. Someone who really wants to get their son or daughter a present no other kid has but doesn't want to be that asshole parent that bought their kid a $55,000 mini-sized Hummer.
2. A guy trying to make an impression on a woman with a soft heart - "Look, Honey, I had you written into a computer game. And I also sponsored a whole school full of kids on an American Indian reservation."We presume you want her to be a good character in the game, like a very attractive older sister who gives the kids directions when they're lost, teaches them how to paddle the canoe - we're open to suggestions.
3. Someone who wants to get back at their ex. You have an ex named Frank? Sure, we'll create an evil character named Frank with a leer and a mustache. You can even give us the hair, eye color and a description. No, we won't do a complete photo match in this case because we don't want to be sued.
4. You are dating some guy who is crazy for gaming and you want to show you "get him" but you don't want to spend 512 hours playing Call of Duty.
5. Your son or daughter has been having a hard time with you working a lot and you want to give them something special, but without spoiling them or missing how privileged their life is. With our Kickstarter campaign the $2,500 sponsorship not only gets your child to be a character in the game but also sponsors licenses for an entire school. We'll send you a card from the principal and signed by the students.
6. You promised, "I got you something really special for Valentine's Day", but actually you had no idea it was Valentine's Day on Thursday, you haven't gotten anything, you have no idea what your significant other wants and you are going to be SO SCREWED when February 14th rolls around. 

If any of those fits you, wander over to our Kickstarter site and pledge. If none of those fits you, or all of them do but you don't have $2,500 take a look anyway. For $10 you can get a thanks on our website, for $35 you can get a game license for you AND we'll give one to a kid in a low-income school also. 

Any more reasons you can imagine? Please add below.

Teaching Escapes from Pins

To escape from kesa gatame - called a scarf hold in judo, and a head and arm hold by some other people - one way is to turn in toward your opponent, on to your stomach. Hopefully, you follow that with backing up on to your knees and then attacking your opponent.

A really, really key point that Sergio and Marcello here are demonstrating is that you want to start the escape BEFORE your opponent completely has you in the pin.

I was discussing this with Jim Pedro, Sr. one day and he said,

I'd really like to see, when I was in my prime, if I was squeezing your head, how you would get out of there. 

And he's right. If your opponent has you pinned, the truth is NONE of that stuff you see in all of the Kodokan Illustrated and other judo books really works. {I said that and God did not strike me dead. See, I'm still here. Typing.}

Like a lot of things Jim argues with me about, his answer is right, but to a different question. You want to escape BEFORE you get into the pin. Look at the picture below. 

Even though Marcello threw, he doesn't have the pin perfectly locked in yet,  and Sergio is on his side. THIS is the time to try to get out. Four things I want students to know when learning an escape from kesa gatame:

1. Never be lying flat on the mat with your shoulder blades touching the mat unless you happen to be dead. In that case, it's okay, because, well, you're dead.
2. Have your hands UP. Whether you are standing or on the mat, you should always have your hands up ready to defend yourself. While this seems a pretty basic fact, I want it to be an absolute habit, that you would no more lay there without your hands up in front of you than you would take off your pants and lay on the mat in your underwear. (And if you would, I don't want to know about it.)
3. Do an INSIDE turn. Turn the right way, that is, into your opponent, as shown in the two pictures above that are not of God.
4. React BEFORE you get pinned. The second you feel yourself in danger, do that inside turn, or, as Jim says, you will be too late and he will squeeze your head off.

Isn't this like escaping from being mostly pinned? Yeah, maybe, like in Princess Bride where he was mostly dead.

Not coincidentally, the first three of those things I want students to learn can be learned from a shrimp crawl, also called ebi in some judo classes (because that is the Japanese word for shrimp - you really want me on your team in Trivial Pursuit), and a hip escape by some people. See shrimp crawl video below.

There is a lot more in our book,  -
Winning on the Ground, which is now out as an ebook for
Kindle here 
and Also available for the Nook here
and for other e-readers at Kobobooks

It will be out in paperback in March.


Completely unrelated to this post ... my company is doing a Kickstarter campaign for a game that will replace math. If you have no idea what that means, go here to find out.

Punching the bitch card

Before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, no this is not due to any specific thing Ronda or anyone else did. It just happened to be what I was thinking about today. In fact, I was really thinking about what great people my three friends, Dawn Beers, Becky Scott and Laura Brown were for putting up with all of my shit all of those years.

When someone is getting ready to compete in the Olympics, for a world title or other super-fight type of event, you need to cut them a little slack. Let me give you my own perspective:

I have been training all of my life for this moment. Yes, there have been other events, national championships, other international events, but those are in the past. As my coach always said, you're only as good as your last match. At that moment, that's how I feel. The world as we know it is going to end - at least for me - if I don't win. It's the first thing I think about when I wake up at 5:30 in the morning and run sprints up that God damn hill, combine two of the things I hate most, getting up early and running sprints. It's the last thing I think about before my head hits the pillow after three workouts - God, I'm sore and tired and I have to win. All one thought without a breath. And I'm hungry. It's been so long since I had ice cream, I've forgotten what it tastes like. To hell with ice cream, I'd like to be able to just sit down and eat a meal without worrying about how much weight I'll have to run off at the last minute. I've got it all planned out in my head, what I need to weigh when, how much I can sweat off in the sauna. I've watched videos of my competition until I know her game plan better than she does. One more workout for the day and then I'm going to drink some water and go to bed ...

And then some cheery voice says .. .

Hey, do you want to go the mall and get frozen yogurt with me?

And I reply

What are you crazy? Fuck, no, I don't want to go to the mall and get frozen yogurt with you!

or

Hey, are these your nasty, sweaty shirt and sports bra on the floor?

And I yell back,

Who the fuck do you think they belong to? Do you see anybody else sweating their ass off in here?

The fact is that super-competitive elite athletes, as a general rule, are at the absolute heightened edge of anxiety in the few weeks before they compete. Coaches or parents who point to that one person who is calm as can be before their match are not helpful. That person is no more normal than someone who eats all they want, never exercises and is skinny as a rail. Good for them but don't plan your training by their experience.

No, I say that you have to give athletes a bitch card to punch, like those things you get when you buy lots of yogurt. After the tenth you get a free one. Except this is the opposite. You get so many punches on your bitch pass. When the match is over, you have used them all up.

To people who say this is treating athletes by special rules, I say, not so much. Look at it this way, if your spouse or child was about to go into an interview for a terrific job, is that the point when you would ask him or her to stop and pick up the milk on the way? No, you'd give them a pass. If your child has the SAT tomorrow, do you make them clean their room? No. You're not spoiling them. You are recognizing that doing well on the SAT is probably more important than giving them a life lesson in responsibility at that precise moment.

If you understand this, you and the athlete in your life will both be a lot less stressed. You will also understand why, when 17-year-old Ronda walked in the door, back from the Olympics in Athens, her sister, Jenn didn't even get  up off the couch and instead said, 

"I don't care where you've been or what you've done. It is SO-O your turn to change the cat litter."

Her bitch card was full. 

---------------------------- READ THIS DOWN HERE --/

Fund the Kickstarter my company is doing for a computer game that will replace math.

It's awesome. Seriously, even if you can only pledge a $1, it matters. I know you have Internet access because you are reading my blog, so get over to Kickstarter and pledge.

Buy our book, Winning on the Ground. It's out as an ebook and it will teach you to - win on the ground, duh, what did you think?

Crowd-sourcing and Ronda Rousey Logo

Crowd-sourcing: It sounds so much better and more professional than "Asking random people on the Internet"

We're into crowd-sourcing these days. First, there was the computer game to teach math we are doing that raised $1,500 on Kickstarter the first day. (Go check it out, it's awesome, we've got 19 days and $18,500 to go).

Since that was doing well, we decided to try crowd-sourcing the new Ronda Rousey logo. You might have heard that Ronda has a title fight coming up so she is kind of having her life consist of train-train-train-eat-train-sleep.

You might also remember Justin Flores, who was on a couple of world teams for judo, won the U.S. Open, stuff like that. After Justin retired from competition, he finished his degree in art and co-founded a design company.

Here is his first crack at five different possible choices for the Ronda Rousey logo. Please give your opinion on which you like best or whether you think a different direction would be better. Be honest! I know Justin and he has a lot more art in him.

When it rains it pours- good or bad?

Okay, so this week has been INSANE

Our Kickstarter campaign kicked off -

In 25 words or less - we have a game that teaches kids math. And it's awesome. And we are crowd-sourcing money to go the next level. Seriously, check out the video, it's awesome. We've been working on it for a year and the Kickstarter campaign kicked off this afternoon. Didn't I just tell you to follow this link and look at our awesome video? Don't make me come over there.

Within the same 24 hours, the book on matwork Jim Pedro, Sr. and I have been working on for over a year got published. It's called Winning on the Ground. AND WE'RE #2 IN THE KINDLE STORE IN THE MARTIAL ARTS CATEGORY AND THE BOOK WAS RELEASED YESTERDAY!

On top of all of that, I am teaching judo tomorrow at Gompers and the wonderful people from American Horror at FilmOn are coming out to do a commercial for our Kickstarter project and another bit on conquering fear using our middle school kids at Gompers.

I have two grants due this month (one submitted already) and Ronda has a world title fight.

SO ... my question to you all is --- do you think it is better to have all of the craziness at once and get it over with so the next few months can be mellow, or do you think it would have been better spread out over more than say, a day?

My crazy life

It has been CRAZY around here. First of all, there is the whole Ronda having a UFC title fight thing which has had journalists, photographers and film crews descending on us like locusts on a corn field. Often, I will come downstairs to find someone with a camera from HBO or New York Times or Fuel TV or who knows where. I usually say,

This is the point where I would put on make-up but I don't own any, so come on in and set up your lights while I make some coffee.

Saturday was particularly interesting as I heard Ronda downstairs talking to Julia, so I stumble into the living room wearing nothing but my husband's shirt and there is a photographer who politely asks,

Do you mind if I take your picture?

To which I responded,

"Well, I'm not wearing pants, but sure, whatever."

Fortunately, he is much bigger than me and the shirt goes half-way to my knees, so all of the interesting bits are covered up, which by the time you are my age no one is interested in anyway. Then there are all of the crazy questions like,

"Are you training harder for this fight since it's a UFC title fight?"

to which Ronda invariably responds,

"Did I not look like I trained hard for the last fights? I won them all in the first round. What more do you want?"

And it goes on and on and on. If that is not enough, our book, Winning on the Ground is now out as an ebook and you can buy it on Amazon! 

It should be available on Barnes & Noble and in the Apple store for iBooks within a few days. The paper version comes out in March.

GO HERE & SUPPORT AN AWESOME PROJECT  ---> And, more craziness, the math adventure game my company has developed a computer game to teach kids math and our Kickstarter campaign went live today !!

AND we will be doing a demo of our game at the 106 Miles Women in Tech event in Santa Monica on February 20th

AND we have two grant proposals due this month that add up to $600,000. One I already submitted and the other I'm working on now. Thanks very much to the ever-lovely and helpful Crystal Butts and the not-as-lovely but equally helpful Blinky Elizalde for covering judo classes for me while I worked on these.

Anyway, so, yeah, I guess you understand now why I have to finish this blog post and get back to work.

Matwork prevention is better than treatment

How does alcoholism relate to the rear naked choke ?

In my copious spare time, of which I have none, I run a consulting company and several of our major contracts have been with substance abuse programs, for both treatment and prevention. One of the major principles among professionals in substance abuse is that prevention is always cheaper than treatment. If you have limited resources, invest them in prevention.

Ronda was over the other day and we were discussing escapes in matwork. I said that chokes aren't that hard to defend, you just grab the person's hand and it is pretty darn hard to choke someone if they have your hand. Yeah, it doesn't look all macho and cool to grab your opponent's hand but you know what else doesn't look all cool and macho - losing! She said, yes, but once the person has their arm locked in under your neck, it's pretty hard to grab their hand.

That's my point though - in everything, whether it is the rear-naked choke in mixed martial arts, a pin in judo or an arm bar in anything - after they've locked it in as a hell of a time to be thinking of escaping. It's not impossible - just like treatment for alcoholism isn't impossible - it's just a hell of a lot more difficult and painful than not getting stuck in the first place.

How do you not get stuck? You need to be AWARE, be READY. When that hand is sliding in for the choke, you need to catch it. When the opponent is trying to lock your arm tight to his or her body, you need to get the hell of there NOW! When your opponent ALMOST has you pinned is the time to fight like hell and shrimp out.

To detect when you are about to be in a very bad position, when prevention is in order, you need to have a feel for the mat, what I have called in a previous post, "your spidey sense". I really don't think there is any substitute for doing lots of matwork to develop your "spidey sense".

Here is the part I don't understand, and please anyone who has any ideas chime in.

Why is it that some people will do lots and lots of matwork and still get caught? They just don't seem to develop that sense?

Part of the answer is no doubt coaching. If you get caught during practice and your coach puts you back in the position and tells you,

"Look, when you were on your back here, when you felt the opponent leaning this way you should have known the arm bar was coming...."

Some of it is also willingness to learn. I have told the same thing to many, many young athletes. Almost all of them argue with me or whisper to their friends how old and boring I am. Yet, some of them later really think about what I've said and practice it. Others never think about it again the second I've stopped talking.

Maybe some people are just too dumb to learn. Maybe.

Since you are smart enough to read this blog, I'm going to assume that you are not one of them and give you this piece of advice. Whenever you get caught on the mat in practice, think back to what happened BEFORE you were choked, pinned or armbarred. Then try to end up in that position again and prevent it.