As I started getting back in the swing of things, one of the things I came to realize was that I am reluctant to play any games. I’m not sure as to whether it’s because I’m worried that playing a game will cause me to disappear into another universe where time will fly by, or whether I’m subconsciously afraid of losing. Either way, it’s something I’m wrestling with at the moment.

On a more positive note though, I’ve taken back up a nice study regimen that has proven to be quite easy to maintain over the last week or so. It’s primarily problem solving at the moment, but a single step is better than none! Also, starting this Saturday, you can expect my weekly progress updates to start up again.

Finally, the Go Congress posts are progressing much slower than I originally anticipated; but I have not forgotten about them! It’s been sitting in my backlog, but it’s a burning itch that I’m constantly thinking about. So fear not, I have a plan in motion to get them up and online within the next week or so.

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, there were two things that I noticed: go and martial arts. And as someone who grew up on kung fu movies and watching subtitled Asian movies, I was sold immediately.

One of my concerns was that I would have to find some bootleg version of the movie online or wait forever to buy the DVD and have it shipped to the U.S. However, fortunately they had a limited theatrical release in the United States and one of the theaters was only about a 35 min drive away from me. Awesome!

In case you’re planning on seeing it soon and don’t want to have any of my opinion impact your viewing of the movie, I will just say that I recommend you check it out. The only word of caution I would advise is for people who are squeamish about blood and violence. It’s not anything horrific or terribly gory (like a horror movie), but it’s certainly not completely sugar coated (like some martial art movies where the people never bleed or have injuries).

If you’d like to hear a bit more opinionated review, read on!

Read More

You ever have one of those days that you just start to feel like you are making no progress even though you keep trying to put one foot after another? I had one of those days today.

As anyone who has read my blog will tell you, it has slowed down considerably over these past few weeks. I initially blamed it on life getting in the way, but I was forced to take a step back today and re-evaluate whether it is really true or not.

Long story short, I’ve actually missed regularly blogging a lot. And though I set out to straighten out the rest of my life before making my return, I was shaken awake to the fact that it’ll never happen. I shouldn’t set aside things that I enjoy in lieu of trying to take care of things first. There will always be something else to take care of.

So be on the lookout for much more regular blogging as I start piecing back the parts of my life that are important to me and make me happy.

Finally, even though I have clearly been writing journal entries for quite some time, I’ve always felt that there was not enough of a distinction between my journal entries and my posts that were more essay/article-esque. So to help keep this distinction clear, this post will mark the beginning of my Journal Entry series.

Making progress!

As I’ve been fighting off the onslaught of work and priorities that keep coming my way, I hate to admit that I’ve fallen quite behind on my go studies. In fact, they have become practically non-existent. I think the most exposure I’ve gotten to go is flipping through the new books that have been arriving. However, that cannot even begin to amount to any noteworthy type of study.

And to be honest, it’s not so much that I don’t want to study or play. In fact, I would love nothing more than to dedicate a nice chunk of time each day to my go studies. However, since that has been nearly impossible, I’ve been wracking my brain for ways to make progress before an obscene amount of time has passed since I last studied go.

As I was walking outside this morning, a thought occurred to me, “If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backwards.” (Of course, one’s progress in go is not even remotely that linear, but you get the idea.) And though this might sound repetitive to some, once again I realized the necessity of taking steps forward. And at this point, it doesn’t even matter what direction I’m taking the step in. As long as I am making efforts to move forward, it will be more valuable than simply waiting for the perfect time for me to pick go back up the way I want to.

So to those who are also caught up in the whirlwind of the responsibilities of adult life and being independent, I challenge you to take the smallest of steps forward (even if it is as simple as doing 10 easy life and death problems a day). For me, I will return to the Jump Level Up series to provide some structure for myself.

I’ll be sure to keep you posted as I begin making my comeback.

Though I wish I was already moving on with progress on the numerous things I want to do, I’m still deep in the trenches when it comes down to it. On the upside, I will say that I have been able to really gain some clarity on what I’m planning on doing. As a result, a lot of planning (and even more planning) is going on as I prepare to take off at full speed the moment all these extraneous tasks are off my back.

And though this might sound crazy to some, I’ve got a decent influx of books coming my way as I prepare for a second look at the infrastructure of the blog.

I’ve always had a vision for how I wanted to see book reviews written and organized, so I plan to begin making it a reality as I gain the final major pillar that was missing from my collection.

On another note, I wanted to give a shoutout to my friend Nate who wrote a great post today titled Don’t Break the Problem Chain. Be sure to check it out and comment if you liked it as well!

And though I haven’t been able to get on KGS as much as I used to, I hope that everyone is doing well and winning their games. Ganbatte everyone!

In my spare time recently, I started playing Infinity Blade 3 pretty obsessively. For those who have never played any of the games, it is essentially a hack and slash game where players are rewarded for their ability to determine how best to counter their opponent’s attacks. So for example, the computer might spin around and then try to slash at you vertically from the ground up. In order to ensure you don’t get hit, you can either dodge or parry the attack with the appropriate counter attack (which in this case would be a vertical strike down towards the ground).

With that said, there’s one boss (aka The Collector) that has been consistently crushing me (and taking my weapons which is demoralizing) when I lose. The sad thing is that it’s not because he’s necessarily stronger or better than me. In fact, there were a number of times where I was just one combo away from a victory, but then I choke at the last second and die.

Now most people might chalk it up to nerves or something, but it hit me that this was actually a pattern with me. In fact, I can recount numerous times where a game of go was within the clutches of my victory and yet it would slip through my grasp at the very end. And like any good inquisitive person looking to always improve, I started wondering whether I could locate the root of this pattern.

After a lot of thought and losing to The Collector a few more times, I actually noticed something right as I was about to lose once again: my heart raced at an incredible speed and I was extremely hyper-active. Yup. You read that right. I was able to notice an actual physiological change as I approached the line of victory and was about to choke.

Once I noticed this, I thought back to all the times of competition or when there was a lot of pressure and I choked. Sure enough, a faint memory of that sort of hyper-activity and heart rate speeding up was pretty consistent in each time that I choked. Of course, there were times where I was lucky and still managed to succeed, but the majority of the evidence was against me.

Hyper-activity might sound like a good thing at first; but in my case, I was actual becoming overly active and racing too fast for my own good. In other words, my brain raced ahead at 200 mph while the rest of my body was desperately trying to catch up at its 100 mph. As you might expect, this leads to a lot of actions that are disjointed. The intentions are but half-formed and the body’s intent to carry out the actions are more out of nerves than anything else.

In fact, upon much self-introspection, I came to the conclusion that my best performances were always during times where both my mind and body were one. If I was able to keep my mind and body running in sync, there was a synergy that did not exist before. Moves flowed easier, and I managed to be able to avoid choking at the last minute when battling The Collector once again. Perhaps with more training, I will be able to avoid ever choking in a game of go (or anything else for that matter) again.

Sorry for being MIA this past week. As most of you know, the U.S. Go Congress 2014 was last week, so I was swamped as you can imagine. Like I’ve done before for previous events, you can be sure that I’ll be doing a day by day recount of the Go Congress for those who couldn’t make it!

In terms of a short term update though, things are starting to look better. The Go Congress helped to provide perspective for me in terms of where my efforts and energy really need to be invested in order for me to see the results that I want. It’ll be different from my past approaches (where there was a high risk of burnout), so I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with this new approach.

Hope that everyone is doing well!

With the U.S. Go Congress quickly approaching, it only seemed appropriate that it be high time that I returned back to go. And to be honest, it couldn’t have happened a moment sooner.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve taken some serious time to truly re-evaluate how my time and energy have been spent and whether my efforts were helping me move towards a larger goal in life. As a result, I cut back on almost everything and spent a lot of time thinking and testing out new approaches to my time, my energy, and my life in general.

For a while, I had a hard time figuring out how I was going to work go back into my life. After all, it was a highly time consuming activity that I had begun to feel frustrated with since I felt like my game had gone to crap. Nevertheless, I knew that the problem wasn’t the game; but that the problem was me.

I won’t go into great detail about my thought processes and the various choices I’ve made along the way since it would end up making my post sound like some sort of productivity blog. However, the important thing is that I have found a way to bring go back into my life. It will be a much simpler approach than before and not nearly so haphazard, which I hope will be effective in the long run.

As for the blog, I will take a similar approach to my study of the game and approach it with a simple yet effective method instead of trying to do ten different things at once. So if you’ll bear with me for a bit, I’ll be testing out different tactics for consistent blogging while slowly reviving popular posts like Monday Go Meditation once I have a handle on things again.

With that said, I’m happy to be back and look forward to what the future holds!

As some of you might have noticed, I’ve been pretty MIA for a while. One of the major events that happened last week was I moved out to a new apartment. And for those who know what it’s like to move, you know how much of a monstrosity that can be when it comes to sorting, packing, and cleaning.

The move came at a rather funny time in my life as it happened to be a perfect representation of how I’ve been deconstructing my own life lately as well. Reassessing what I’m trying to do and where all my time and energy is being placed. On one hand, everything is a gigantic mess and it’s difficult at times to figure out what I’m trying to do in all this chaos. However, I have confidence that it will work out for the best.

As I’m reassessing my strategy for my life, it should come as no surprise that I’ve had to reassess how I’ve been approaching my study of go as well. I’ll be honest in that I have not been happy at all with my numerous training regimens and have felt like I’ve lost focus. In fact, my Yunguseng match which was rescheduled for today was the first time I even looked at anything go related at all in the past few days. It was quite a weird feeling.

So while I would love to continue the momentum I had going with the blog, I’m putting a hold on all the weekly articles and game commentary in order to give myself time to really sort through things. So I hope you’ll forgive me as I must tenuki for a while as I try and figure out what my whole board strategy for my life is.

I’ll be sure to drop in and update you on my thoughts and progress, so no need to worry that I’m simply dropping off the face of the planet. I’ll still be around.

Hope that all is well with everyone.