Alright, after a few months of research and preparation, I can now officially announce the repurposing of this blog. Whereas in the past this has been a location for friends and family to catch up on what I'm up to, the new Tao of Derek has a new agenda. I plan to make this a one-stop shop for martial arts topics, product reviews, and discussion.

I have seen and read other martial arts blogs, and have come across basically two types. The first type is the personal blog of a martial artist. This type of blog is useful as a window into a real life training regimen, but unless the reader's martial interests very closely mimic those of the writer, the actual usefulness of the content is probably pretty low, other than the obvious uses as inspiration for best practices in training to take into one's own art. The second type of martial blog is the general-interest type. Blogs that fall into this category tend to include only very basic information on several different styles, thus providing a good jumping off point for the new martial artist, but very little for the advanced practitioner. The second type of blog is often associated with one or more specific schools or organizations, and serve as marketing tools more than information sources.

With this blog, I am setting out to do something different. I plan to touch on everything from the very basic applications of specific martial techniques to very high level 'meta' thinking about the martial arts. While every post will not likely be imminently useful to every reader, my hope is that each update will include at least one or two pearls of martial wisdom, best practices, or training techniques that will be universally applicable to any martial artist.

Additionally, I will be reviewing martial arts products. Subjects in this category will often include books and DVD's, but will also include things like training equipment, software, and possibly seminars.

Finally, you can expect some of my general babbling to continue. Posts about games and gaming in general will probably happen about as often as they have previously (which is to say, rarely), but they will go from being the major content of the site to a very small percentage of the content.

That pretty much sums up the new purpose for the site. You can look forward to the first posts of new content later this week!