Aikido Seiryukan Spring Seminar

 

This weekend just passed, our aikido club hosted a two-day seminar featuring Atsushi Mimuro Shihan, plus his wife Cathy and some of his students from Yokohama. We had a whole bunch of other guests as well, from Australia and around New Zealand.

It was a fantastic weekend. Mimuro Shihan's concepts and technique are very interesting to me, and he conveyed them very well.

I haven't written much at all about aikido on this blog, but it's been a major part of my life for many years — 36 years as of October 2nd this year.  (October 1st is our club's anniversary, but I couldn't find the dojo on that first day of training and didn't turn up until the next day).

I've tried several martial arts since I was a child — judo, karate, taekwondo, kung-fu — but aikido is the one that resonates most with me and that I enjoy the most. Which is why I've kept at it for three and a half decades; life is too short to spend on things you don't enjoy.

I started judo as a child, and had some competition success at a very junior level. But it was really just an after-school activity for me. I enjoyed it well enough, but had no particular affection for it.

Later on, as a teenager and young adult, I was interested in martial arts as a means of self-defence. Also, kung-fu movies were very popular at that time, which no doubt also had an influence on me. But again, I had no deeper interest than that.

I had a couple of friends who had practised aikido, and I knew of its existence, but I didn't try it until 1990 when I was 28. I was hooked immediately. I can't say exactly what it was that appealed to me about it so much, but it did, and it kept me at it over the years until I gradually became interested in the less obvious ways in which it works — biomechanical aspects of course, but also the ways in which our minds govern and respond to both our own movements and actions and those of our partners. It is endlessly fascinating to me.

I am a lot less strong and flexible than I was when I was 28, but I know myself much better now. And I think I'm beginning to get the hang of some of the basic bits of aikido. There's so much more to learn though. 

Web Image File Formats

 

This photograph of our hallway Buddha is about 800x110px, and has been saved in .JPG format from Affinity 3 with a compression ratio of 66%.

It is roughly 164 KB. 

This is my standard web image format.

 This is the same photograph, though post-processed at a later date, so the cropping and tones are not identical.

This one is again saved from Affinity 3, this time in .WEBP in its high-quality lossy format.

This one is only 104 KB, so already a decent bandwidth saving.

 Here we have another .WEBP image, also exported from Affinity 3, this time in its lossy low-quality format.

It's definitely softer than the high-quality image, but on the other hand it's only 22 KB, which is a pretty massive saving.

 

 

I've been resistant to using .WEBP as my default image file format for web display, but I think I'll have to change my mind.

There are a couple of other options coming up: .AVIF and JPEG-XL, both of which are reputed to give benefits over .WEBP, but neither of those formats is in common usage just yet. 

I can create JPEG-XL from Affinity, though with a pretty restricted range of options, but I can't create AVIF at all, and even if I could there's a good chance that they wouldn't display in a browser just yet. Soon though.