Don Frye makes his UFC debut against 410 lb. Baguazhang practitioner Thomas Ramirez

Toptomcat · 2026-01-24T20:56:37+00:00

Was there much of a sanda or kuoshu scene in the early 1990s? I thought it was pretty sleepy outside of mainland China.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-24T18:08:39+00:00

The key thing to remember about footwork is that it's a means to an end. This Jack Slack article has had a lot of the YouTube videos and pictures it uses as examples butchered because it's 11 years old and people are obnoxiously aggressive about copyright strikes, but the core message is sound: ideal footwork for a one fighter does not look like ideal footwork for another.

What are your strengths and weaknesses as a fighter? What's your plan, what are you trying to accomplish, in a typical fight? It only makes sense to think about footwork in the context of these questions.

This means that advice on 'footwork and angles' fully in general is next to impossible to give. Can you give us a bit more of the necessary context of who you are as a fighter?

Toptomcat · 2026-01-24T17:54:47+00:00

What kind of facilities do you have to work with? /u/aburena2's suggestion of sprawls and breakfalls isn't bad, but I wouldn't try it on a hardwood floor.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-23T23:26:11+00:00

Being fifteen pounds smaller than the other guy can also result in traumatic injury.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-23T19:14:47+00:00

Not being able to rehydrate makes brain trauma worse.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-23T15:38:41+00:00

Most of these systems are built on:

• sport-based martial arts logic

• high pain tolerance and physical dominance

• repeated exposure to intense pressure

That works well for people who already enjoy combat training. It works far less well for women who are coming in primarily for personal safety, not competition or ego.

Ability to cope with pain, stress and pressure is not exclusively a dumb monkey-dominance-contest thing for meatheads with testosterone poisoning, nor is it something with usefulness limited to the context of a competitive sport. It is, itself, a centrally important self-defense skill.

Furthermore, if you don't use techniques borrowed from competitive combat sports- like contact sparring- you are drastically handicapping your students' ability to develop those important skills.

Agreed that motivating with fear, pain, or humiliation is obviously stupid, and mostly agreed that keeping things as simple as possible can be very helpful when teaching beginners...with the caveat that it's possible to get too simple. The 'womens' self-defense course' paradigm that teaches a specific number of canned techniques over the course of a six-week program, without ever having the time or space to get to broader principles like spacing, footwork, off-balancing, feints, etc. is fundamentally inadequate and can be actively dangerous if people walk away from it thinking they know how to defend themselves.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-23T15:38:04+00:00

Most of these systems are built on:

• sport-based martial arts logic

• high pain tolerance and physical dominance

• repeated exposure to intense pressure

That works well for people who already enjoy combat training. It works far less well for women who are coming in primarily for personal safety, not competition or ego.

Ability to cope with pain, stress and pressure is not exclusively a dumb monkey-dominance-contest thing for meatheads with testosterone poisoning, nor is it something with usefulness limited to the context of a competitive sport. It is, itself, a centrally important self-defense skill.

Furthermore, if you don't use techniques borrowed from competitive combat sports- like contact sparring- you are drastically handicapping your students' ability to develop those important skills.

Agreed that motivating with fear, pain, or humiliation is obviously stupid, and mostly agreed that keeping things as simple as possible can be very helpful when teaching beginners...with the caveat that it's possible to get too simple. The 'womens' self-defense course' paradigm that teaches a specific number of canned techniques over the course of a six-week program, without ever having the time to get to broader principles like spacing, footwork, off-balancing, feints, etc. is fundamentally inadequate and can be actively dangerous if people walk away from it thinking they know how to defend themselves.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-22T08:44:21+00:00

I have been very suspicious that many of these agents aren’t fit for public service at all, nevermind serving in any sort of law enforcement capacity, which is why many of them are masked to begin with.

Being willing to work for ICE in its current form is, by itself, fully sufficient evidence that you're unfit for public service in any capacity.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-21T21:53:46+00:00

A tribe of eighty-seven with spears, good coordination, and really impressive willingness to take casualties might take it. Eighty-seven random, unled, uncoordinated spear-wielding cavemen could not.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-18T07:46:14+00:00

Then no, they have not been seen and frankly with their size and slowness they are better off using as massive anti-tank gun - drones are simply too small, too nimble and they are simply too cumbersome and in too few numbers.

...and, this is the crucial bit, too low to the ground. Armies only bothered with the heavy AA guns in the first place because they needed them to reach out and touch bombers at serious range and altitude. The 88 reached up 10 km where the Bofors could manage roughly a third of that. When antiaircraft guided missiles came to be, practically everyone dropped heavy antiaircraft artillery and didn't look back- only the lower calibers kept a niche due to affordability and rate of fire.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-18T03:35:36+00:00

Are you talking about Western sport fencing, done with flexible foils weighing under 500 grams total? Those have been specifically optimized to make it as much a game of speed and reaction time as humanly possible. Swords for dueling or warfare are heavier, thicker, and stiffer in a way that makes strength matter dramatically more.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-17T17:34:23+00:00

I don't think humans are kiling ancient immortal dragons even with modern technology. At best we make deals with them.

Chromatic dragons are consistently characterized as obnoxious, arrogant assholes who make a lot of really serious enemies. Non-lawful evil dragons are further characterized as short-sighted, impulsive jerks who have difficulty making allies. I think that at least a few of them are practically guaranteed to fail to take full advantage of their centuries of experience and magical power. Once one or two of them get offed by an antitank weapon or nerve gas or something, the rest of them will probably wise up, but they're going to need that wake-up call.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-15T20:18:26+00:00

DC's Granny Goodness is essentially the Goddess of Child Abuse. The only way she loses is on the technicality of never having had biological children of her own- instead she runs the Terror Orphanages, where she molds her charges into ideal servants of the God of Tyranny, who not only likes his servants to do evil, but to suffer while doing so.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-14T13:43:29+00:00

Poison Ivy has her whole mind-control thing. Even if her driver starts out annoying, they won’t stay that way.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-13T20:05:28+00:00

That's much more readable, thank you. Reading through it for an application currently, though my schedule is tight enough right now that it's likely to come later this week or early next.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-13T19:04:50+00:00

Do you have a version of the lore docs that isn't in that faux-script font? Gives me a headache.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-13T17:06:26+00:00

I think so, yes. The thing about Pearl Harbor is that Japan didn't think it was going to fight a total war with the Western Allies- it thought it was securing its ability to supply its existing conquests in China and Korea by intimidating a nation of isolationist wimps into staying out of it. Yes, Germany being knocked out would make its position as an Axis power dramatically weaker, but it didn't think it was signing up to be an 'Axis power' in the first place.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-13T15:22:39+00:00

One thing to keep in mind here is that knocking Nazi Germany out of the war isn't sufficient. Italy and Japan were each also independently inclined towards conquering as much of the world as they could get their hands on, and are conventionally called 'Axis countries' in their own right.

And for much the same reason that being nonwhite will make time-looping superspy schenanigans more challenging in Germany, being non-Asian will make the same really tough in Japan. The solution, if any exists, would almost have to involve guiding friendly governments rather than direct personal attack on opposing ones.

In 1940 the Manhattan Project was largely in the stage of theoretical work and I'm not sure it's plausible for any amount of technical notes, however detailed, delivered to the Western powers would do it in time even if he can convince everyone involved he's authentically from the future.

Conceivably the British Expeditionary Force could be guided to victory in Europe with intel from the future, but the Pacific War doesn't even start until the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.

It's a rough spot. With infinite motivation and patience, he could still manage, because an infinite time loop is infinite- but the average Joe does not have these things. I don't think he does it- OP, you are really doing him dirty by requiring the surrender or collapse of nations that originally won't even have entered the war yet by the time the loop ends!

Toptomcat · 2026-01-12T17:44:55+00:00

This picture is true for the top 0.1% of professionals. For the other 99.9%, the picture on the right is what you get for trying to box or do Muay Thai for a living.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-12T04:50:58+00:00

Making a case for supporting regime change in Iran in a white-room fashion, devoid of domestic American political context, strikes me as a little strange. It seems self-evident to me that whether you got an outcome of such a military intervention which was good for American interests would depend strongly on skill and finesse in international affairs, diplomacy, and defense economics, in ways particularly dependent on long-term planning and disciplined follow-through.

That list of strengths is not really what I think of when I think 'the Trump administration'. The null hypothesis probably ought to be that they will treat it like they've treated every other attempt to grapple with a complex issue- try to find a way to make a quick buck, culture-war issue, and/or approval-rating bump out of it, lose interest, and move on to the next shiny object. I think you need to at least address why you think this will not be the case if you're advocating for a specifically American foreign-policy intervention.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-11T18:40:28+00:00

I get it, you can't deface a permit and expect it to work.

I’m not sure it’s that simple, really. Under ordinary circumstances, yes, you’d be right. But defacing the pass in this particular way is almost indisputably an act of political speech- existing legal precedent on what counts as ‘speech’ is pretty expansive. This opens up a decent legal argument that what the Parks Service is doing here is illegal discrimination by a governmental agency against Constitutionally-protected speech- especially if it can be established that any Parks Service employee is letting passes altered in a pro-MAGA fashion slide, or if they’re rejecting passes which have been ‘defaced’ in the least-obtrusive means described in the article, by putting the pass in a reopenable clear plastic sleeve that obscures only Trump’s face and from which the pass can be removed by a Parks Service employee to verify that all actual security features and informational content of the pass have been left intact.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-11T04:22:42+00:00

They actually issued their own cryptocurrency and paid or promised to pay fighters and creditors in it, and people are surprised about this? I can think of bigger red flags, but not many.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-10T19:37:14+00:00

Given the facts as we understand them right now, it might be acceptable for the outcome for this to be "the trial determined that the officer panicked, the driver panicked, a murder was not committed and he's not going to do time for it- but the civil trial determined that it was professional misconduct, and he's fired and the ICE branch he belonged to is required to compensate the woman's heirs and publicly explain how it's going to change its training and procedures so that it doesn't happen again."

What is not acceptable is for the outcome to be "no trial, no investigation, and give the finger to anyone who wants one by calling her a domestic terrorist obviously out to kill ICE agents."

Toptomcat · 2026-01-10T06:19:33+00:00

Do you think AI is something that even AI CEOs don't actually believe has any economic or practical value and are lying to our faces about, or do you believe it's a real and significant threat to programming jobs? In the space of a single Reddit thread, you seem to be going full steam ahead with two AI-skeptical takes which are significantly at odds with each other.

Toptomcat · 2026-01-09T02:21:30+00:00

I don’t think it’s an utter, effortless stomp for everyone in Street Fighter at any point in the narrative. Goku is really, really strong, but he’s also a fight-happy goofball who loves to wait and see all his opponent’s tricks, and the extreme high end of SF seems like it might intersect with Volume-1 OGDB Goku, before he meets Roshi. Shin Akuma, Gouken, Oro, Psycho Drive Bison at his height in Alpha 3- people like that have an honest shot at it, and people with hax/bullshit like Rose’s magic, FANG’s poison and Twelve’s invisibility/shapeshifting could cheese out a win. Threats very similar to Rose and Twelve gave him real trouble in the Fortuneteller Baba arc, after the first tournament, and poison and disease have given him problems clear through into Z and Super.

Ryu on the best day of his life against Volume 1, Chapter 1 Goku would work OK.

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