House of Legends

Thoughts and Ideas

  • Sometimes sky is so beautiful

    Here are few photos of the morning sky I took yesterday.

    These are photos made almost in same minute just with different angles. Sunlight plays completely different games on each photo.

  • Djembro, RO, supports 🇺🇦🇬🇪

    @magical_cat

    Indeed. You’ve probably heard that all of taijiquan is to be found in the bear. I remember one particular day when I had an aha! moment with the bear. I had already been practicing it for several years, but had not made a particular connection. It was an epiphany, and I only wanted to keep doing the bear for the rest of the hour.

    Congratulations on continuing your practice! Happy exploration!

    May 31, 2026, 17:24 0 boosts 1 favorites

    This time for me it was not about the Bear. it was about the Deer this time. I found that “aha!” moment in moving weight from back leg to front, and then in Monkey and in Tiger of animal frolics, and finally – in Deer.

    My discovery was that as soon as I start to hurry, instead of living practice with attention it deserves, I end up the “front” leg being heavy even before I “moved onto it”.

    And then these moments come, when I recognized things from deep dive videos about how important to place heel first of empty leg before going forward, and that gentle transition when you place heel first and connecting all three points of “foot tripod” as you move weight to the leg which was empty before, without losing connection of back leg… This is important part of the flow, when weight leak from one leg to another like water from full jug to an empty one.

    Speaking of Bear, now I recall a thought, that I probably told to you once that Bear has all 5 principles described by Ben Lo (that video is great, I even do form multiple times often just to put proper attention on these principles, one at a time).

    Fediverse reactions
  • It is important to start it over

    It is important to start it over

    Yesterday I got an internal nudge to rego through the great lessons series by Rocky Mountain Taichi teachers Lee and Beth.

    Yes, I practicing this for a while already, but life happens sometimes in a way you have to skip a day. Or two.

    And after a difficult week on the work, during which I had to skip whole days in a row, I decided – why not review all these 13 lessons and start from scratch?

    And know what? It was a useful thing to review all that! I found that I made Animal Frolics lately with some extra spoon of hurry that took away all the joy. And missed few important details in process.

    Speaking of the details, now I recognize in these basics some bits I thought they are specific to round form and the deep dive lessons. But no, if you do Animal Frolics with proper attention, you have these bits too, even if some see them as beginners-only stuff and so on. In reality, there are no “beginner-only thngs” and basics span though all of taichi / taijiquan.

    PS: The illustration taken from here.

    Fediverse reactions

  • Googlification of FixBit app completed

    This post is sort of an outsider commentary to news I seen at Mastodon. The news story described how Google decision to replace original FixBit app with pile of AI garbage and UX catastrophe caused storm of 1-star reviews. I will think about the side effects of this story, some of which span beyond the gadgets and tech.

    Google awful testing flow exposed

    Or possible total lack of proper testing. This sounds like at least one these happening inside Google:

    1. The focus groups for new app testing has been stuffed with AI loyalists, like it happens with the candidates allowed to run in Russian elections.
    2. The real results of testing on the focus groups has been thrown into the recycle bin and different results have been shown to shareholders when managers were seeking approval of these terrible changes in the app. It can be called total break of feedback channels between the top bosses & shareholders, living now in own parallel reality never intersecting everyday life of proposed audience of Google Health app.

    Another myth about rich people exposed

    This is an observation my beautiful wife made when I told about all these news. Simply speaking, all these tales about rich people eating only healthy food and spending days in various healthy activities between few calls and meeting or a two – all these myths are busted now. Rich people do not use all these smartwatches, do not follow all these healthly lifestyle guides, and so on. Instead, rich people, like Soviet nomenklatura, enjoy all sorts of tasty (and unhealthy, haha) food, don’t spend hours in gym, don’t run daily, and so on. And of course, they don’t use these fitness activity tracking devices. Otherwise they would say at last minute something like “Hey, Sundar, your plan to remake this app is a total fuck and its outcome would be an unusable piece of fucked shit!”. Or at least they would found other words to express doubt that such plan will bring some profit growth.

    People hate AI

    People do not want AI features. People do not ask for more AI into their apps and devices. All possible use cases like image generation and disinformation factoring automation already are here. It would require a lot of creativity to find a new way to use AI that would not cause hate from people and a strong marketing research to find such people who really need this way to use AI.

    But billonaires and corporations behave like they have a common secret investor who never comes to their meetings with employees and shareholders but who have the most effective leverage on them. These corporations are likely sustained by a shadow investor’s infinite funding, contingent on the aggressive promotion of AI. This continues despite the fact that these technologies are currently in the red and unlikely to reach profitability in the short term.

    I have a theory that this hidden investor is the same investor who stuffed money into Epstein pockets, bloating his importance, and this investor likely is either Kremlin or CCP.

    And what could be done with all that?

    If we ever need gadgets, they should be created not by some corporations whose leadership lives in their own reality detached from everyday lives of common people. Such gadgets should be created using the most open electronics available, let it be PineCone. It should use not the most fastest chips but those which are closest to “I can print it in garage” model.

    Yes, some research on making 3D-printable microelectronics such as CPU, memory, and Systems-on-chip seems to necessary to make all this feasible. And the whole idea is to make a dedicated cooperative for a gadget or its series, where people who will use this gadget not only source of demand for mere existence of gadget but the single source of requirements for related features both for hardware and software.

    All this will be viable only when it would be enough to gather 3-5 friends together for a device project and establish into a garage full production cycle from CPU lithography or FPGA-like programming to 3D-printing of the case and buttons or touchscreens.

    I don’t know how exactly it is possible to avoid need for “clear-room” in micro-electronics creation process, or how to create some special metamaterials which would reprogram itself into combination of logical gates, like some materials pie, where each programmable cell exposes own programmability inputs on top side, and the contacts for CPU socket still would be at bottom, or some other arragement like that. But key point here is that both production of such “programmable pie” and its programming should be doable without need to use clear-room, “in garage setting”. This, again, surely will require a lot of not so easy research.

    As soon as a dedicated cooperative of people who will use the gadget will be the device creators, there is a hope for really usable devices and for avoiding enshitification, or as I call this in the headline, Googlification.

    Fediverse reactions

  • 26 May is Georgia ( საქართველო ) independence day

    Today, 26 May is Georgia country ( საქართველო – Saqart`velo ) independence day. I don’t feel too much festive about current developments in country, but hope it all will pass and country, people and language will prevail again like it happened already for over thousand years at least (I counting since times when Shota Rustaveli lived, near 1200 CE as I know).

    საქართველოს გაუმარჯოს!

    Fediverse reactions
  • It could be another game review

    It could be another game review

    But instead it would be two thoughts about the Yaga game, full of Slavic folklore like babushka1 who always have a story to be told to cheer you up or to calm you down or to give a bit of wisdom.

    First, I see sort of missing branch on the large oak tree of game plot.

    Vasilisa is missing from the start

    Playing game few times, I thought that there is a plot branch with an ending when Ivan founds Vasilisa somewhere, may be saves her from some danger, and marry her.
    For example, it can be that Vasilisa went to Underworld, kingdom of Veles, to find that Sheep of Fate, to make a magical thread, and make a healing scarf with it, to help Ivan get lost arm. But Vasilisa lost in her travel, and got imprisoned by Zmy Gorynich, three-headed fire-breathing serpent/dragon.
    In this branch Ivan can get blueprint for sword, weapon that missing in game, and for something else, such tool as plow, which may not have a combat use, but necessary for some plot quest, likely to open the portal into Underworld.
    After Vasilisa saved, but before the ending she can make/sell the magical scarfs for Ivan – not only something like Scarf of Scorn, but more interesting, like Scarf of Perun, as soon as Ivan shares Rune of Perun with Vasilisa. With such scarf there is probability of lighting striking enemy who touching Ivan in melee combat. Scarf with Veles rune would allow to dodge of projectiles. Scarf of Chernobog would cause “evil eye on enemy touching Ivan with some probability, and so on.
    Other thing that can such update can provide is the mere idea of some armor, a clothing slot for torso, then Vasilisa would instead of scarves would make vyshivanka with runes for Ivan…

    Other thing is a global and a bit sad

    It seems that Baba Yaga and Fates sorts of playing a tabletop game, and while Baba Yaga seems to be a Game Baster in this tabletop game, and Fates, as players in this twisted upside down tabletop game, give more and more difficulties for Ivan to overcome.

    This idea of people and their lives being just board game miniatures in a tabletop game, sometimes joyful, sometimes grim, or even boring, for The Great Powers, at some moment stroke my mind like some Arrow of Sadness, because, for person who lived 95% of own life with idea that we, people, have some control over our lives, it is still sad for me world in this way.

    At least I am not getting angry now about idea of some limits we have on what we can control and not in our lives, not speaking about being a tabletop miniature in someone else game.

    And even the final words of Baba Yaga can’t disperse away this a bit sad feeling I told about.

    Conclusion?

    Don’t get me wrong! The game is great! The things I told about – like possible missing plot branch or not being used to living outside of “me-centric” worldview, all this does not make worse or bad. Some things can be added, like it happened with plot branch about Leshy. And some things can be part of me either taking something too seriously or me growing up a bit as person.

    Lets enjoy the game, folks!

    1. I don’t know whether there are still such babushkas who remember folk tales and using them such way, but I find this interesting as part of folk tradition that could be revived as well ↩︎
    Fediverse reactions

  • Do EU want forbid social media for minors?

    Question is floating with headlines like this one from BBC:

    EU needs to delay social media access for children – von der Leyen

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9q3x19ddl7o

    It all sounds scary at first. Digital gulag, age verification and internet deanonymization, all that jazz.

    But what is a “social media” EU got scared so much of?

    How this applied to federated platforms and protocols like ActivityPub and Fediverse?

    How this applied to messengers? Especially to “small” messengers? Or federated, like Matrix or DeltaChat or SimpleX or XMPP-based stuff?

    It all does not have sense beyond WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram, when it goes to Messengers, and FB & Instagram, or IX, may be Reddit and Youtube with TikTok.

    But as it happens, state not just impose some restriction against something but defines it in the most stretchy and rubber way possible, so anyone can be declared a criminal just because. It just depends on pure luck, on whether some people in power will use new restrictions to block Kremlin propaganda and disinfo, or these restrictions will end up into making EU yet another bastion of internet censorship and suppression of human rights.

    Fediverse reactions
  • European ActityPub for payments and money transfers?

    European ActityPub for payments and money transfers?

    I seen lately some news about EU-wide project about payments and money transfers at EU scale and scope.

    I wonder how it come that EU still did not create any “ActivityPub for payments and money transfers” to be used together by payment gateways, online merchants, banks, digital wallets or who else today involved in payments at principle “join in one EU country and interact with each other easily as need” .

    And this surely should not be a system limited only within EU borders, it should be capable to accept payments towards EU merchants from abroad. For example, it should be able to process the payment from person living in e. g. Georgia country who buying a no-DRM game from GOG games store.

    I gave extra example with payments coming from outside EU as to remind that if such protocol like “ActivityPub for payments and money transfers” fits very well not only for local economy, making a reality more affordable payments for a grocery shop or a cafe, but also for everyone in EU, including EU merchants with worldwide audience.

    For local economies some low-fee or even non-commercial solution with zero-fees for local transfers and payments would be very useful for local communities, because it can make everything a bit more affordable for everyone within community.

  • Department of politeness

    Department of politeness

    Creepy news are coming from Georgia country these days.

    Georgia to Establish Interior Ministry Unit to ‘Systematically Monitor’ ‘Hate Speech’ in Public Spaces

    Do they plan to use political prisoners labor in some sort of gulag?

    Do country really need lot of cheap, unmotivated, and non-qualified labor of e. g. 100 000 of political prisoners done in inhumane conditions?

    If they fear that these people who swear on authorities would vote on elections against GD, I may surprise them. People are much more complicated entities, so depending on how all that will be defined, plenty of qoci1 may end up under supervision of such “department of politeness”.

    or they plan to send them to russian army to help putin to take the Malaya Tokmatchka?

    Or GD want use this to create a Legalese Curtain whose purpose is to prevent citizens from leaving country? And what they expect? That these people, instead of migration away, would start to “produce new Georgians” en masse like rabbits?

    I am not surprised that GD who experience the syndrome of hyper-legitimacy2 just doing so to convince themselves they are legitimate.

    And in some way, GD leader Bidzina Ivanishvili just express the fear of losing power out of the blue. Without any vision, without any goal or plan to do, just pure fear of losing power. Repressions for sake of repressions and censorship for sake of censorship.

    In this regard I wonder what will be next? Outlaw of abortions? Total censorship of internet “a-la Kremlin” via “white lists”? Mass restriction of election and voting rights for literally “farting in public spaces”?

    Time will tell.

    1. Qoci is an acronym from ქართული ოწნება – qartuli ocneba – name of the ruling party in Georgia ↩︎
    2. Here I use a joking way to refer the problems of getting official recognition by GD-dominated disputed parliament and GD monopolistic government by EU and other democratic countries after results of parliamentary elections 2024 where GD got a lot of seats and main opposition parties still boycott this parliament ↩︎
    Fediverse reactions

  • Reblog of MAKS 25 👀🇺🇦:

    Reblog via MAKS 25 👀🇺🇦

    🇺🇸🇨🇳 Canadian Toronto Star, summing up the first day of Trump’s visit to China, published an eloquent cartoon.

    Caricature author makes a common mistake of projecting own worldview and perception on a completely different person.

    More likely Xi thought could be something like:

    This idiot could be useful for us.

    Or

    Comrade Krasnov in a very weak position. It will be easier to control him than I thought.

    Or even

    This Putin recruit is even more dumb than I expected. Our plan can be completed faster.