Saturday, July 15, 2023

Blogshido: I Know Post-fu!

While Blogshido is as varied as the people who practice this ancient art, the core of the discipline has always been the same. You can remove the Monthly Kata and still practice Blogshido. You can even ignore the venerable, honorable and most inspiring Taekommentdo and still practice Blogshido. But if you do not practice Post-fu, then you are not practicing Blogshido.

Some Masters of Blogshido, when practicing Post-fu, will pour out their very life essence into it, an artistic outpouring. You can almost feel the blood, the sweat, the tears, the absolute agony that went into the creation of their mastepiece of Post-fu. You know you are watching something special, something never to be repeated even while longing to perform it so well yourself. The downfall of this kind of practice in Post-fu is that the artist themselves know they will never reach such artistic heights again. It can easily turn into a self-defeating spiral of doom instead of a celebration of something wonderful.

Other Masters of Post-fu take a much more workmanlike attitude towards it. They make posts like they make a bologna sandwich. Bread, mayo, bologna, cheese, bam, put it all together, wham, done. Eat and enjoy. And they can do this day after day, week after week, month after month and even sometimes, year after year. The audience isn’t wowed, they are not moved to tears, nor are their hearts shattered. But they get a nutritious and filling bologna sandwich every day (well, as nutritious as a bologna sandwich can be anyway!)

A grounded Master of Blogshido will know which style suits them best for writing. But they will also know the proper balance in the choices they make of which blogs to follow. If I follow 100 Workmanlike Masters of Post-fu, while my Taekommentdo might become second to none through practice, when will I have time to practice my own Post-fu? And if I follow 100 Artistic Masters, who only post once a year, that sets an impossibly high bar for myself when I do go to practice Post-fu.

Personally, I only follow people who practice Post-fu at least once a month. Now there are always special circumstances and that is fine, but if someone isn’t practicing once a month on a consistent basis, I don’t consider them a follower of Blogshido anymore. How can I call you a Sandwich Maker if you never make sandwiches? And don’t even try to pull that “There is no sandwich” crap on me, Neo tried it with the spoon and look what happened to him, he got Matrix Resurrections. I trust that is warning enough for you all.

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