Gamer Girls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmyEwade3b8

Tony isn’t allowing you to embed his videos any more. That’s weird. What’s the possible reason for this? Doesn’t it still count as a view if you watch it somewhere else? Maybe it’s me who did something wrong.

Well, just click the link if you want to watch this snoozefest. I don’t think that anybody watches the videos on the blog anyway.

So Bloodsport. I’ve seen it many times. One of the few movies that Tony “reviews” that I’ve seen. He seems to FINALLY be doing stuff other than horror movies.

Tony’s with some douchebag with a porkpie hat. Fucking Popeye Doyle over here. You’re not a hipster, sir. You’re just bald. Get over it.

I never even considered going down the hat route when I was losing my hair. Or comb overs. Or that scam cream shit. Or hair plugs. Or any of that shit.

Just one day, I noticed how bad my hair was getting so I went to the bathroom, got some clippers out, and the job was done. I started with a 4 guard, then about a month later went down to a 2 guard, and then a month after that I just started shaving it. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

You always get people saying, “Oh, you need to grow facial hair” or “Oh, you need the right-shaped head.” No. Fuck you, you fucking faggots obsessing over a man’s appearance. It makes no difference. If you have the “wrong” shaped head, you’re going to have the “wrong” shaped head with or without hair. And beards are for homos. So do whatever you want.

Anyway, back to Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle over here.

I’m ten minutes into this now. They’re just summarising the movie scene by scene. As usual.

Let me look up this guy is as I let the video play in the background.

This guy isn’t even on Twitter. He’s only on INSTAGRAM. What? Does he have sexy pictures of himself on there? Oh. No, it’s his fucking…he gives his job as “Makeup FX, Sculpture & Monster Maker”. In rural Pennysylvania. He has whatever stuff he’s made on there.

No Twitter, though. It’s madness. Personally, I never got into social media. I never had a Facebook account or Twitter or anything. What for? It’s never been an issue. I don’t want to talk to people I knew in high school or anything.

16:30 – They’re talking about some rope scene where the Jean Claude Van Damme character was able to do the splits. And they talk about how preposterous this rope contraption is.

I took taekwondo and to a lesser extent karate for many years as a kid. This shit went on.

I went to one “dojo” that had a rope fed through a hole in the wall and then it came out another hole in the wall. This was all at ground level. There was a noose on one end of the rope. So what you would do is sit on the floor, put the noose around your ankle, and then pull the other side of the rope. By doing so, your legs would be pulled further and further towards the wall. The idea was to improve your flexibility over time and eventually be able to do the splits.

It was obviously dangerous as fuck.

So this “sensei” is showing me how this works along with a couple of Mexican guys who were also students. The “sensei” was demonstrating this on himself. Then one of the Mexican guys said, “I think I saw this in a porno once” and the “sensei” got upset, I think because this was a grown man and making a joke like that around me. I was probably like 14 or so.

But it’s true. It is the sort of contraption that you might see in a porn movie.

That “dojo” only operated for like a month. Me and these two Mexican men were the only students. We never actually had a class, it was all just in the planning stages. Then one day there was a note on the door from the “sensei” saying that he broke his hand and he’d be re-opening the “dojo” when he recovers. It never re-opened. All good “dojos” take a break.

But yeah, that Mexican guy was pretty creepy. He pointed out some white girl walking by the “dojo” and told me that he thought she was cute. He said, “Probably a cheerleader, eh holmes?” Yeah, sure thing, Cheech. Can we just focus on the martial arts?

Back to this video, Tony talked about how some character in the movie was “gatekeeping” the martial arts by saying that he would only teach karate or whatever this martial art is to Japanese guys. And Tony talks about this like it’s something crazy.

No. That’s the whole fucking deal. Westerners were only taught martial arts after…I don’t know…World War II? And even then, for a long time, it was protected. If you weren’t Japanese, you weren’t learning judo. If you weren’t Korean, you weren’t learning taekwondo. Shit like this. Even among other Asian people, they weren’t going for it. Koreans couldn’t learn judo, for example. They took this seriously.

Then you look at the spread of martial arts throughout the world, it’s just a handful of people who brought it outside of Asia. And this was since WWII so we have pictures of these people and they’re contemporary. It’s not something that goes back thousands of years outside of Asia. This is a recent phenomena.

And when I was a student, I had an old Korean “sensei” at one of these “dojos” that I went to. He refused to teach. He didn’t do shit. And it showed. The students were all awful. He just chilled in his little office all day.

But it’s not that he didn’t know taekwondo. He knew it. When he would demonstrate something, it was clear that he was really good. But he just didn’t want to teach us because we weren’t Korean.

There was a Korean boy there, though. And this “sensei” did teach the Korean boy. The rest of us were just left to our devices. Fortunately, I already knew taekwondo before I came to this “dojo” so I kicked this shit out of everyone.

Anyway, back to the video. Eugh.

26:30 – Tony’s mother enters the “set”. We don’t see her but Tony talks about her.

32:45 – They’re talking about the monkey-style guy in the movie. Porkpie asks if it’s just racism or if there’s an actual monkey style martial art.

Yeah. Fucking monkey style kung fu. Or any of the other styles of kung fu. Crane style. Tiger style. Let me look this up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_styles_in_Chinese_martial_arts

Yeah. Right there.

These people don’t know shit about martial arts. How could you not know about monkey style kung fu? It’s in the zeitgeist. Didn’t Dale from King of the Hill know monkey style kung fu?

36:30 – Extended discussion about Jean Claude Van Damme’s buttocks. They’re starting to get excited.

I made it to 48 minutes. I think I’m good.

Didn’t even get sleepy this time. I think the key is talking about a movie that I’m at least semi-interested in. So not this fucking horror bullshit for 12 year old boys. Not that Bloodsport isn’t also for 12 year old boys.

But yeah, Bloodsport was great. This is how martial arts were in the 1980s and 1990s. It was full of mysticism and made up bullshit. “Kumite” was an actual word that was used. In the karate McDojo that I went to at least. It’s a Japanese word. I guess. Maybe. But it’s definitely not used in taekwondo. Taekwondo is Korean, of course.

People believed in like pressure point death moves. And the power of yelling (kiai). And that you literally had to register your hands with the police when you became a black belt. Shit like this. And not just me, as a kid. ADULTS believed this. I saw it. I heard it. The fucking “senseis” believed this shit.

The idea was that if you’re good at taekwondo or karate or whatever you can go out and kick everybody’s ass. But I never heard of ANYBODY from any of the “dojos” I went to EVER getting into an actual fight. If they did, they’d probably get fucking destroyed.

Although, maybe people weren’t getting into fights because other people knew that they knew some martial arts. The mere idea that you knew taekwondo or whatever was enough to put people off from wanting to fight you.

It certainly worked for me. I remember in the ninth grade somebody threw a slice of a tomato at some kid, the kid dodged, and the tomato hit me. I was pissed off. So I told that guy that I’m a taekwondo master and he better write a fucking two page apology to me by tomorrow or I’m going to fucking unload on him.

So he actually wrote the two page apology. I was like 80 pounds. I would have died if I fought this guy. But he wrote the apology and he specifically mentioned in the apology that he’s only doing this under duress because he got confirmation from somebody else that I do in fact know taekwondo.

I have a number of examples like this. I didn’t put up with any shit. And I had absolutely nothing to back it up other than taekwondo experience, which was TOTALLY USELESS. So the captain of the football team is suddenly giving me the business, hey fuck you, you fucking cretin. You better watch who you’re messing with. I’ve kicked the shit out of every kid in my taekwondo class. And it worked. People back down.

Even today. You get those charity people or whatever who jump in front of you and try to get your credit card details. When they don’t get the very obvious hint that I’m not interested, I tell them to fuck off. I put a middle finger in their face. Whatever. They never retaliate. Sometimes they get close. So I gesticulate in the well-understood, “Hey, you want to bring it. Let’s go” sort of fashion. They never bring it.

One of the things that these “senseis” use to promote kids joining their “dojo” is that martial arts help with your self-esteem. It’s true. So in that sense, martial arts are a good thing. You don’t have to actually put it into practice. Indeed, that’s the lowest form of martial arts. The highest form of martial arts is when you’re so confident of your abilities, people realise it and don’t want to engage. Of course, higher still would be people who don’t want to fight you because they like you.

Chapter 73 of Wen-Tzu sets this all out.

Lao-tzu said:
When you go on the Way, it makes other people unable to wound you no matter how boldly they stab, unable to hit you no matter how skillfully they strike.

Indeed, to be immune to stabbing and striking is still an embarrassment; it is not as good as causing people not to dare to stab you no matter how bold they are, not to dare to strike you no matter how clever they are.

Now not daring does not mean there is no such intention, so it is even better to cause people not to have the intent.

Those who have no such intention do not have a mind that loves to help or harm. That is not as good as causing all the men and women in the world to joyfully wish to love and help you. If you can do that, then you are a sovereign even if you have no land, you are a chief even if you have no office; everyone will wish for your security and welfare.

Therefore courage in daring kills, courage in not daring enlivens