Tea and cakes and fists. And bullets.

A thought that always ends up in my head is the term "mixed martial arts". The term of course has the connotation of taking different martial arts and mixing them together, and of course the most common of that is the ever popular bread and butter that is Muay Thai and Gracie Jujutsu. It's a marvelous concept, being able to simultaneously work with one art and another, the problem is what's become of it, and that's a sort of exclusion. There always seems to be a compulsive need to differentiate and place value upon martial arts, and even the idea of mixed martial arts has fallen into the same bin. There's always talk like "muay thai is better than karate" and even "mma always beats taekwondo", which is annoying in and of itself, but when even the idea of putting arts together becomes a generic label which describes a set object, usually just some form of anything that has to do with grappling and striking at the same time, which is extraordinarily funny, because it's become something that describes what most traditional martial arts are in the first place, yet still is touted at a superior form of fighting, and even more silly is that many martial systems are even actively excluded from the mainstream use of the term "mma".

I feel that this is partly due to the idea of the word "mixing", which of course is a combination of things, and is tied into phrases like "mixing and matching", which is to try different things and see what's right or wrong, likely popularized by Bruce Lee's quotes such as "It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential." and "Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own". Suddenly, the idea of figuring out a technique's purpose is out the window because it "doesn't work" or is "unnecessary", the idea of internalizing something somebody else has figured out is implied as something unwanted, and all that's left are things that are so simple anybody can see what the purpose is. How many people still believe high kicks are totally invalid, how many people recite stupidity like "Chinese martial arts are too limited and full of useless fancy stuff to be practical, that's why they had to make Sanshou which is Chinese MMA."? Why must things be organized in piles of "works" or "doesn't work", and to ice the cake "MMA" becomes the poster-child of a pile of things that "work" while everything outside of "MMA" "doesn't work", and to top that all off the very fact that MIXED martial arts is the basis on things being labeled as "doesn't work" based on an extremely shallow understanding, if not plain ignorance.

Unified Martial Arts is the label I subscribe to. It doesn't give the feeling of doing this while doing that, it gives the feeling of making them into a single seamless structure, rather than a messy pile of puzzle pieces that mixed martial arts implies. No exclusion, the only differentiation is what is known and understood, and what is yet to be.

I started playing the game Cosmicbreak again, despite splayko's new found hatred for it. So I found the polygon editor and ended up thinking "hey, it'd be awesome if Creamrose looked kinda like Shuu from Hokuto no Ken."

So I drew some scars over her eyes.



Then rolled a Koko Gaap and thought hey it'd be totally awesome if she were Kokoro from Milky Holmes instead. So I did this too.




After that I s'pose I finished coloring this.

Meet Vita Yake. Yake of course is actually based off of the mental image I had of Yake, the IaMP Yukari player, back when any time someone did something that caught my attention I would attribute it to moe traits and have a mental image of them as a loli. This picture, as you can probably tell from the lines is actually quite old. The jacket was quite dark, so I didn't think it would even be possible to see shading on it, so I just didn't shade it. Somehow even while sitting around doing other drawings instead of this one I actually find this character quite cute.




Anyhow, I note I've not been doing pet photos in a while. I think I'll take a picture of my dog later. And the new cockatiel.

Happy new year. I've spent the holiday on Killing Floor and also managed to get this thing out. Had a lot of fun drawing this one.



Real tense girl she is. So frowny.

Yeah I don't update much. Here's a picture. More will come soon.


I've also come across a cockatiel. I believe I will be deaf in my right ear in about a week. Sleep schedule is messed up again, so I can expect some pictures to come out and some exercise to happen.