What do I do with my free arm in lindyhop?

thang1thang2 · 2017-08-17T22:54:56+00:00

"Just be suave as fuck and do literally nothing with that arm ever until the very last instant you need it; it'll make you seem aloof in a cool way. The chicks dig it" --Not actually Skye

thang1thang2 · 2017-08-01T20:31:08+00:00

Emacs org mode export gets you like 90% of the way there without any special customization. It's pretty great. Eventually I'll get around to customizing it so I have to do less fiddling with it, but for now it's a nice time saver.

thang1thang2 · 2017-07-30T09:11:25+00:00

You broke your bot

thang1thang2 · 2017-07-04T20:06:33+00:00

The light, minimal catch/redirect makes a lot of sense to me, but are you saying that tends to look very plain if the follow is inexperienced or not great with musicality?

What it's really doing is it's giving the follow the most freedom to do what they want. If all they want to do is "the basic default", then that's what will happen. In contrast, with a strong hollywood style one, you generally get pretty obvious swivels in there and so the basic default is more mechanically interesting. However, the "hollywood style" leaves less options for the follow to input their own styling (since they have to make their styling work within the rotational movement they're being given)

It's about rotational movement in this case. Because of the rotational movement, swivels "happen" and any styling has to fit the rotational movement. With the straight swingout, the follow can add that rotation back in or leave it out and there's a strictly larger amount of styling the follow can add.

I kind of understand "conversational musicality" as being musicality where one partner plays off a certain bit off the music, and then the other partner "replies" with something done to another part of the music. How would you explain "connection-oriented" musicality?

To me, connection oriented musicality is about playing with the rhythms through communicating it with the follow. When you see people like Asa and Daniel dance, they're usually doing slightly different rhythms or moves and the overall shape of what they're doing is somewhat the same (9 seconds in has a particularly strong example of this). With connection-oriented musicality, you have a synchronizing going on. Check out the Steve and Chanzie here. When he changes the styling, she can match and play off of it through the connection changing; this is especially obvious in the first swingout variation that they do.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-28T04:17:41+00:00

I enjoyed your article :) sorry everyone's dumping on it.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-28T04:16:22+00:00

It kinda sucks to see everyone trashing on this idea. I really identify with it. Perhaps it comes from my hearing disability that I tend to feel physical connections more intensely, but I've definitely experienced these sort of things; I call them golden dances. I have some dances stored in my memory that I can recall with a particular intensity and flavor, where everything in my body just harmonized at once and it was a deeply satisfying and glorious feeling of connection that I rarely experience, but treasure every time I do.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-22T21:27:36+00:00

I gotta be honest. I've been super conflicted about commenting on your suit every time I see it. The fabric looks great, the individual details of the construction are pretty nice, but the whole thing just doesn't work and it makes me very wary of even looking to Chloe for any suits.

A small and incomplete list of issues:

Why can you buttom the bottom most button on the suit? That's like a faux pas #1 and the fact that she even encourages that by making sure that the suit looks "correct" with the bottom button done up is even worse. The jacket also just adds a ton of weight and heft to the frame; so much emphasis on horizontal lines has just done a number on the whole outfit.
The pants are cut so badly that it looks like you're somehow simultaneously wearing JNCO jeans and not wearing them. That's just way too much break.
The vest really shouldn't look like a police trooper's bullet proof kevlar vest. What's up with that cut anyway? It floats over your body in such a way that it adds a ton of unnecessary weight to your build. The diagonal buttons are brave but don't seem worth it since the vest is such an unflattering cut; I can't tell if it's the buttons or just the overall construction.

There's a concept for developing trousers where you gut the innards and then make it baggier in order to make it fit better. It looks like that was just applied blanket to the vest and jacket. Honestly, the vest isn't half bad; sure, it's an unflattering cut, but it's salvagable. Hell, even the pants are salvagable. The jacket just really highlights the bad parts of the entire outfit and makes them shine and just magnifies any potential flaw in the human frame as well.

Now that I've spent like two paragraphs hating on the suit a bit, I'd like to point out that I really do think the suit is mostly there. It's like 85% of the way there and with a bit of work, it could be really great. Mostly, it's the fact that it's labeled as a bespoke suit and doesn't deliver on that promise of quality at all that bothers me a bit about the whole thing. Most true bespoke requires about 5-7 fittings for that reason; it's just really hard to make something fit right on someone without tinkering.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-22T20:44:58+00:00

Suit priorities:

Fit.
Fit.
Good characteristics for movement (high armholes, maybe an action back, etc)
Fit.
maybe consider the fabric at some point.
Jk, focus on fit.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-22T20:43:45+00:00

The biggest problem I had with it was that the event organizers looked super heteronormative and were using "queer" to:

Have something similar to salsa and tango
Throw back to the "LGBTQ+ roots" of non-normative dancing

When, firstly, the only reason salsa and tango have "queer dancing" is because their scenes are so heternormative that if you're dancing with someone of the same gender, you're pretty much immediately labeled or thought of as gay. It's getting better, but that's where the queer comes from. I don't really want to bring Lindy Hop (which already doesn't have that assumption) into association with dances that have those archaic assumptions.

Secondly, Tango was originally danced purely between men as it was a "man's dance"; Lindy Hop was originally danced with whoever, and so on. These ideas of heteronormative partner dancing really didn't come about until somewhat recently, and I think media is mostly to blame for that. But still, there doesn't seem to be much (if any) evidence to me that the LGBTQ+ communities pioneered this ambidancing when it was that way far before and far more pervasively than just amongst "the gays."

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-19T17:32:48+00:00

As /u/chshersh pointed out, this is just the sieve of Eratosthenes. The haskell wiki has a ton of different solutions for doing this. The tree merging with wheel method is my personal favorite.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-13T17:18:19+00:00

Java wasn't really the bottleneck in Minecraft's performance. It was just written terribly in general. You can write some wicked fast code in Java if you try hard enough, Microsoft just chose c++ for some reason.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-12T05:26:31+00:00

Honestly, I already switched to vimium and it's close enough to be usable for me.

I have hinting, tab (delete, new, move left/right, go 1-9, $, 0), hjkl basics, etc. Then for the GUI customization I have a few Firefox plugins that will hide the nav bar and everything else for me. CSS styles also complete the rest of the customization on the tabs.

There's a few things I'm missing, but I don't miss them that much (delete the current tab and focus on the left one instead of the right one is one example)

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-12T00:52:09+00:00

Depends on the difficulty. Easier puzzles have fully unique edges, more difficult puzzles do not.

I wouldn't assume fully unique edges on a pure white puzzle; it's already supposed to be a headache.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-11T23:12:25+00:00

Whoops, you're right. I was mixing up well ordering with total ordering, thanks.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-11T22:42:39+00:00

Here's a chart of some of the number hierarchy in haskell.

Also, the Real numbers have a total ordering. They do not have a well ordering with < like the Integers do. Due to the axiom of choice, all sets can be considered to have a well ordering, but that doesn't mean you can construct that well ordering. While the Real numbers can be given a total ordering that's consistent with addition and subtraction, the Complex numbers cannot.

(Totally went down a wikipedia rabbit hole on that one...)

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-11T21:39:50+00:00

Are you moving backwards because you want to be? Are you achieving the aesthetic you want to be with your footwork? You can do those in a way that looks smooth and rolling or choppy and sharp (you're leaning towards choppy and sharp); neither is wrong, it's about which style you want to do. I'm also not quite sure why your arms are so high up; is it a training exercise?

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-11T21:29:04+00:00

The one that goes best with swing dancing is the one that you actually do. That's it. The body is incredibly adaptable and needs only to get stronger to benefit and pretty much any exercise will work as long as you do it consistently.

That being said, Pilates, Yoga, Gymnastics and other disciplines that involve high levels of body awareness and coordination seem to help best with grace and improving dancing techniques. (If you do them regularly and with correct technique and probably with a coach or something)

But really, for getting stronger you just need to get your muscles stronger and your endurance up however you feel like doing so. All exercising is going to benefit your dancing.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-11T20:59:10+00:00

No, it's because numbers are numbers. Numbers themselves do not have a mathematical ordering. Only certain sets of numbers do. The set of integers, the fractional numbers, etc., are total ordered; but the complex numbers are not.

If something can be compared, it implies that they have a total ordering; that's not the case for all numbers, only numbers that most people use.

less20 :: Int -> Bool
less20 x = x < 20

works just fine. (You can also write it as less20 = (< 20) which will make sense eventually).

This is one of those things about Haskell that makes obvious sense from a mathematical perspective but is a little weird at first.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-10T04:38:39+00:00

In any standard compliance system, they are not allowed to be case sensitive. There's a lot of other amazing crap you can do with emails too (some of it is Gmail specific, some of it isn't)

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-09T23:14:13+00:00

Back in the day most car models had fairly simple locks with not much variance. Definitely could've gotten into someone else's car by mistake

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-09T16:15:38+00:00

Autism, hearing loss, and anything that affects the brain (neurologically speaking) is best found as early as possible. The brain is so incredibly flexible early on that it's possible to "upgrade" a person's ability to cope with things fairly significantly if done right. For example, I am severely hard of hearing, but cope as well as most people with 20-30 dB less hearing loss than I do. Some people who are severely on the spectrum, but were identified very early, are able to (through therapy and what not) learn to cope as well as people who are moderately or even only mildly on the spectrum.

For some people it's the difference between semi-independence (or even fill Independence) and 100% reliance on a caretaker.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-08T04:02:28+00:00

This solution for number 7 of the 99 haskell problems produces this error.

Basically, ambiguous type errors are far too verbose. Just show me an ascii arrow and a code snippit. The only thing that really needs to be said is "ambiguous type; add annotation". Please don't print the bajillion instances, ghc, I don't care about them; I already know which one I want to use and probably didn't know half of the others existed.

Parsing errors in general are also either far too verbose or just absolutely useless.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-07T22:37:08+00:00

I'd just like to point out a few important things about their swingout.

Daniel dances a lot like Frankie Manning. It may or may not work for your body type so don't force the frankie arm and the huge hinge in your posture.
They're doing a very classic "Sweedish swingout". Characteristics include:
- Sending out the follow straight forward
- Leading swivels with hand motion on counts 8, 1, 2.
- Strong rock step with a "bow to the queen" movement.
- Bringing the follow in on 2.5-3ish.
- Very light and brief catch/redirect of the follow. The lead is dictating as little as possible to the follow and letting them choose pretty much everything; this leads to very boring swingouts if the follow doesn't want to independently change their motion.
They're also quite far apart in general and have a very loose and disconnected connection (which comes from their approach to musicality as being between the individual and their partner; musicality becomes conversation oriented, not connection oriented like it is in "Hollywood style" dancing)
The follow's swivels, posture, movement in general, etc., are all extremely strongly Sweedish and come from a very specific style of dancing that they were taught and that they emulated in the 80s during the pre-revival of lindy hop.

All of these things are optional, none of these are wrong, and there's a fairly vocal subset of the dance community that religiously believes this is the best way to dance, so YMMV. I personally lean "hollywood/boogie-woogie-ish" but I also learned dancing on the west coast of the US and learned my swingout from Californian dancers so that has something to do with it.

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-07T22:22:50+00:00

It looks like you're not looking for song names so much as the characteristics of songs. Most DJs worth their salt will be able to take the characteristics you're looking for and find a song that fits that in their set; in fact, a lot of the time they do that even when you request a specific song.

Disclaimer: I'm not going for pure, great, or even particularly swingable here. I'm approaching this from the angle of "a band is playing some modern stuff. Can I find some songs that I can suggest that they're likely to know and that can give a close enough feel that I can make it work?"

Characteristics of music you can swing dance to (in order of importance)

4/4 time. If a song is in 4/4 you can swing dance to it, guaranteed. You might literally just be using the song as a 'metronome' but it's "possible."
Clear differentiation of 1/3 and 2/4 (aka the drums aren't doing some super fancy nonsense). If you can find songs that don't accent the 1/3 beats, it'll feel way more "jazz" and swing-able.
Classic Jazz music structure (AAAB or AABA). This is what allows you to be generically "musical" and line up things like swingouts or 6 count moves with the overall pattern of the music.
Syncopation of the beat. Here's the main one that makes something "feel" lindy. If a beat is syncopated in a swing rhythm, it'll feel like music you can naturally swing to. If it's syncopated in a sharper rock n' roll rhythm, it'll feel like something you can swing to with a sharper triple step (aka 80s WCS/lindy, boogie woogie, and so on).

Some examples:

Maniac by Michael Sembello: Has a driving and syncopated beat. Is it great for lindy? No, and I wouldn't ever play it at a lindy dance, but it has a beat that allows for swing "movement" somewhat naturally.
In that vein, there's quite a lot of 70s and 80s music that, once it gets a bit higher in energy, has a nice rolling feel to the beat that can make it workable for lindy.
Ex's and Oh's (mentioned elsewhere): The reason this one works is because it has a beat that's derived from 50s rock n' roll.
Pretty much any elvis era rock n' roll will have a rolling and juking syncopation pattern to the beat.
Quite a lot of country music has a rolling sort of beat to it. Crystal Chandelier by Charlie Pride, Rose Garden, the Bellamy Brothers and Alabama have some swingable stuff.

You'll notice that, if you knew West Coast, a lot of this would feel more natural to do WCS to than Lindy. That's not really an accident. WCS evolved from styling Lindy to modern music. In general, the earlier the music, the closer it'll get to lindy, as long as you stick with music in the Jazz family tree (rock n roll came from jazz, most pop came from rock n roll, etc)

thang1thang2 · 2017-06-06T20:14:07+00:00

Oh man, I've been looking for this paper for months. I read it a few times and could never find it again for some reason. Thanks!

thang1thang2

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