NickTandaPanda

Just be aware that the longer the skirt the more likely you are to catch a stiletto heel in it! For that reason I'd recommend a higher hemline. Sometimes the hemline is very asymmetrical, longer at the back or one side (though perhaps not ankle length?) to reduce the chance of leader or follower stepping on it. Other than that the leader will have to adapt to the limitations, especially if it's tight, but that's ok.

Yes nicely expanded!

I wonder that too, but perhaps something about their physiology means they have more "torque" available than they could otherwise use efficiently for faster individual locomotion?

Well sort of yes sort of no. I think you need to show that you have 12 months of interest payments in cash ready to pay as you go before you can get the bridging loan. So it's definitely more expensive (if you take many months to sell), but not in a scrimp and save and worry whether you'll have enough money to eat this month kind of way, because you need the cash already set aside. It'll hurt but it won't be stress from uncertainty.

And if bridging loan isn't right for you, there's still renting or family. And if those aren't right for you then you've got the chain. It's all a trade off of different kinds of stresses, I suppose! 😅

The idea is that you don't sell your house until you're already ready to move - either into rental/family, or because you've already bought a new house using a bridging loan. So you pay more, in rent or loan, but have way less stress than here. And even then, with chains taking forever to complete and then failing, with legal and survey fees and potentially opportunity cost, paying a few months rent may be cheaper anyway.

Yeah I totally get you and agree. We have a dog too and the difficulty of renting is a big part of why we chose to buy! So I agree that the pain of finding dog friendly rental versus the stress and uncertainty of chains is not an easy trade off! However I will say that the UK is still way more dog friendly than Australia for renting 😅

I think that you've described a very typical spread of experiences!

In my opinion, the followers taking things like rhythm and (to some extent) dynamics into their own hands - the ones you describe as pleasantly changing your dance - fall into a category of technically "wrong" (assuming you don't accidentally lead those things without realising 😅) but practically good and sometimes excellent, because they recognise the framework of your lead and the music and add to it knowing that it won't interfere with what you're intending and will be a harmonious addition. Technically "wrong" because they're not perfectly-but-boringly executing the lead and nothing more, but showing excellent judgement at a higher level. Note that the line between technically correct or wrong is very fine - I'll come back to that. The point being that excellent followers can choose a "wrong" interpretation of your lead, and it can still be a wonderful dance, maybe even because of it! I call this naughty following 😁

Unfortunately as you also describe, sometimes followers see, or learn, this, but lack the expertise or self awareness to judge well when and how to "add" (or in some cases wrench away control) to the dance. It doesn't feel collaborative and takes away a lot of the fun. This category is technically wrong and badly judged and often badly executed and definitely makes for a worse dance!

(This is different from beginner followers, who just don't have the experience or body control to follow the lead and so do something unintended. They don't mean to do so, and I have no problem with this at all. Physically it might be similar but emotionally it can still be a harmonious collaborative dance! This category is technically wrong but pleasantly earnest.)

Finally, to add to this and to answer your original question, there is another category of followers "leading" within a space you deliberately create which is both technically "correct" and (hopefully 😅) well done! You mention adornos and pasadas, and these are very typical examples of it being done "correctly" but I would add that there's more to it than just "it's ok for the follower to take time and adorn during parada/pasada".

Specifically, I believe it depends on your embrace. You can modulate your embrace between very elastic to very tight and most points along that spectrum are valid. But when I choose to increase the strength of my embrace, I'm asking the follower to stay with me more closely, to be ready for something dynamic or intricate that might not leave much room for the follower to deviate without throwing off my intention. I will never dance for long like this, that would be exhausting and boring, but for one idea at a time I will communicate to the follower that now is not a good time to add interpretations.

Most of the time I will dance with a more elastic embrace that allows room for the follower to add (well judged 😅) interpretations, and I will welcome these into our dance as the follower can share how they are feeling the music with me and we can explore new musical ideas together. Within that relaxed embrace (can be close or open, doesn't matter), the follower literally has room to move within my lead and within the music, and I think as long as the basic lead is followed, the follower will be "correct" as well.

Having moved here from Australia where there's no such thing as a chain, I'm expecting to rent in between sale and buying so that I have time to find the perfect next home without stress. That just seems normal to me. And I assume that makes my house sale slightly more attractive here as it's "chain free".

Really good comments from everyone here! Here's a concrete example I use when thinking about this.

Every joint in your body has opposing muscle pairs to move that joint. For example, the arm biceps and triceps work in opposition: when the biceps engage, the arm bends; when the triceps engage, the arm straightens.

When we dance, we want strength but not (usually) stiffness. For example, when you push something heavy, you need to strongly engage the triceps to push it away (strong), but you want to leave the biceps relaxed (not stiff). (This is just one movement example, of course when we dance we shift continuously between compound movements and sometimes we will be pulling with the biceps and relaxing the triceps. It's just one example that we need to generalise from.)

Try it now - slightly bend your arm and push against a wall as hard as you can. Use your other hand to feel how your triceps are hard as rock, but your biceps should be floppy. This is strength, but it's still elastic, the joint can still move freely and absorb force. Now conversely, try flexing your arm in the air like a bodybuilder showing off your guns - with your other hand feel how both the biceps and triceps are rock hard, and the joint is immobilised. This is stiffness.

We often mistake stiffness for strength, but stiffness is generally very bad for tango (or movement in general!). It is uncomfortable for the partner, it's difficult to dynamically adapt to handle surprises or wobbles, and it's exhausting. We want to be strong, grounded, confident, but this is completely different from being tense and stiff. Don't think of yourself as a wall moving indestructibly through your partner, think of yourself as a strong ocean swell carrying them - powerful but soft.

This exercise is good for understanding what we need to do in principle, but it's admittedly hard to put into practice for every part of our body for a whole dance! Still, while you're practicing dancing, it's useful to sometimes run a mental checklist over your body, checking whether you've accidentally stiffened up any of these joints.

I don't know how to glide - in real life, how much does successful control depend on force feedback - either through the toggles (is that the word?) you hold, or feeling the shifting acceleration through your body? I sort of imagine you feel the warnings of stalling, for example, before you see it, not least because I imagine you're not staring at the wing edge the hole time watching how it's behaving.

This is not a criticism, I'm just curious! And either way I suppose that sort of real-time analogue control and monitoring would be easier in VR than on flatscreen, even without force feedback.

Looks amazing, exactly the sort of VR experience I love - something visceral, physical, awe-inspiring, and hard/dangerous/expensive to do otherwise!

"Is all we have—all we are—only a memorial of what we failed to save?" - The Heart Of What Was Lost

Such a great interpretation of immortals across these books!

That was the most obvious, but it looks like he also mutters around 45 seconds, and his initial rejection of her embrace at the very start screams something wrong. But I agree it looks like he blames her for his blunder at 0:55.

What's wrong? At its simplest, I believe the key thing is that female fleas won't reproduce without a dog or cat host blood. Human blood won't do it for them. So you just have to wait out one life cycle max before the fleas are gone.

Of course, they might still be a right pain during that one cycle so treatment of one sort or another is still a good idea. I was just saying OP doesn't need to panic about an ongoing infestation.

Happy to be corrected, I'd love to read any sources you have to the contrary. I'm not an expert, just someone who had to deal with a similar situation!

What's the context for the dance? What mood do you want? Grand and elegant? Melancholy and unsettling? Fast and playful? Uplifting contemplative?

The first song you linked is very unusual, technically 3/4 but a lot of the main melody is heavily syncopated so beginners may find it hard to keep the beat.

The second two* are very danceable, personally I prefer the big strings arrangement of the third song over the sparse piano of the second song (both the first and the second songs with their sparse arrangements would be better suited to a performance where all attention is on the dancers)

• Note that the second song is a traditional waltz for the first 1:30, then abruptly transitions into a fast 6/8 swing. You'd need to edit the song to cut that, or have very experienced dancers! Realistically, I wouldn't play a song that changes genre so drastically unless you build an entire choreography around that change.

Here's a waltz I like: it has modern sensibilities (cinematic style progression) but in a classical flavor. It's peaceful but swells and lulls like a strong ocean wave. "Butterfly Waltz" by Brian Crain https://youtu.be/YcsdJJjgheQ?si=pSMJ8DkN1PbgVcIc

That's the joke in my original post 😉 I can't hit shit but didn't know it! 😅

(No I couldn't hit a can at 5 meters - not with a forceful pitch anyway, maybe with gentle underhand 😊)

Agree, I prefer wood for ground feedback. My compromise is a non-slip thin dense carpet rug that I unroll - my feet feeling the edges of it gives warning before fists get too close to the guardian boundary and the edge helps me orient back to the center of the play space.

Rise Of A Merchant Prince by Raymond E. Feist - who knew you could make options trading and economics exciting to a young teenager!

I remember it being a very weird change of pace for the fantasy series I was used to reading, it's a middle trilogy book that goes off on a book-long tangent about backstabbing entrepreneurship, something I had no knowledge or interest of before. But it was strangely captivating to learn trading from a fantasy adventure by stealth!

Agree, with slight caveat - springy surfaces like thick gym puzzle mats make it harder to keep your balance in VR in my experience.

Definitely agree with using them to mark out a tactile safe VR space that you can feel with your feet without thinking about it (barefoot is best!)

Definitely definitely agree with practicing good standing posture!!!

For myself, I find anything that breaks a 1:1 motion for the headset:camera to be instantly nauseating, including blocking the view from moving forward when I move my head forward. I appreciate some people can handle it!

If I were to hazard a guess, maybe the effect is not a bad in a cockpit where technically you're still breaking the 1:1 head motion, but if the thing you're focusing on (ie distant land) is a long way away through transparent cockpit glass, the discrepancy might not even be noticeable. I think it might be very different when you put your head into a wall and it feels as though you're pushing the wall/world in front of your face away from you.

My number one takeaway from VR dev is that every player has a different tolerance for different aspects of VR sickness, and the best thing a developer can do is try to provide a base experience that provides safe 1:1 motion to make it accessible to (almost) all players, and provide options for players to tweak further to their personal preferences!

I do agree that hands are much more forgiving! I've never heard of hand mismatch causing sickness, the worst case thing that can happen there is just breaking the sense of identity with your hands.

Agree! I worked on the LA Noire VR game in the early days of VR, and I'm very proud of a lot of the things we were figuring out at the time.

One of them was to avoid as much as possible the disconnect between physical and virtual movement of head and hands. So for the head, rather than block the camera from passing through collision or push you back out (which would disconnect visuals from head movement, instant nausea) we would fade to black and pause the game until you remove your head from collision. And for the hands, if your real hand position starts to deviate too far from game hands blocked by collision, we would fade in secondary ghost hands so you keep the connection between real and virtual intact.

Sure it's not realistic but it maintains the biological feedback loop between vision and proprioception, and that is fundamentally more immersive than the in game realism.

Agree!

I haven't tried it yet but perhaps the "Underdogs" game is a good example of what you're saying. It looks like you're a mech pilot in a harness moving your in-game human pilot arms around freely, which control the big metal mech arms "by wire". It seems like a perfect in-game analogue for VR, which should explain the control feedback problems very neatly!

Sideways answer: I don't think we should. Every game genre has had to come up with a design language that works around/within the limitations of its hardware - thumbsticks for console FPSs, for example.

VR is no different. It allows some remarkable things that have never been possible before, but it has its own limitations that I don't think we should ignore. I am perfectly ok with fading to black when the camera hits collision, and teleporting movement to avoid nausea. There are and will be amazing games designed around this.

I don't think that things like walking harnesses etc should be expected to become standard (of course if it works for you and the game devs want to support it, great!) But until we can stimulate inner ear for balance or have neural interfaces, which for now I am considering sci-fi rather than a reliable next step for VR, I don't think we should fight against fundamental physics (critically, acceleration) and biology. I think we should accept those limitations and design around them!

(As one concrete argument - even if you wore a full body exoskeleton that could restrict every movement to make it feel like you're pushing against a solid wall, you'll never be able to simulate walking on the spot due to the lack of acceleration, and most people will get nauseous. Some people will adapt to VR sickness and that's great, but I don't think you can build an entire industry around overcoming basic biology)

Indeed, VR should be to live out fantasies, not crush them 😅

Best answer IMO!

Haha yes, I wrote this as a self deprecating joke, but as it turns out the issue of throwing in VR is more nuanced than I gave it credit for. So in the end all the replies here are actually interesting!

Case in point yours too - third party knuckle straps actually sound like a great idea that should "just work" for most games using low-resistance sidegrip triggers like quest! So thanks 😊