Blog Archives
But how do you reason to religion?
I saw this on Facebook this morning. Check it out.
There’s a lot of wrong here packed into a short passage. Things like this have a lot of power mostly because it takes so much more space to explain what’s wrong with it than to say it. I mean, Lewis’s writing here is fairly clear and concise, if it speaks to your biases you’re going to be very tempted to just trust it and not bother reading long-winded rebuttals like the one I’m writing now.
But I think you should read this. If only so you can honestly say that you consider what you believe. Read the rest of this entry
Fighting the Monsters of Roleplaying Games
Last night I dreamt about a series of children’s books in which a girl fights monsters with the aid of a suspiciously accurate D&D Monster Manual. I think they were mostly paranormal mystery stories, but there was always a monster, and she could find useful information about that monster in this battered old game book.
I remember reading an interview with the author who said she’d come up with the character and basic premise way back in 1968, before D&D existed, but could never really get the stories to come together until many years later when she saw the Monster Manual and flipped through it. Can’t recall the author’s name.
What’s really driving me crazy though is that I can’t remember the character’s name. It was an interesting name, the kind that belongs in a book title. I think her first and last names together made five syllables. Bah, just driving myself crazy trying to think of it.
I suppose this premise would fit into the whole “D&D is a trick to make kids into witches and slaves of Satan” bullshit, but it felt more like the other way around. Like, “This is a way to get this information widely published so that people can use it to protect themselves”. A warning and a weapon, instead of a trap. Could actually get some deep mythology in there about how the anti-D&D movement was just right enough to get it horribly wrong, interesting.
Anyway, that’s the dream that I remember. I’m vaguely aware of having others, but they didn’t stick around. Have a great day!
Spontaneous rhyme
Another warm morning, a bright shining day.
I’m hoping the summer heat soon fades away.
Because while I love swimming, & diving down deep,
the nights don’t cool off now, it’s too hot to sleep!
Book Review: “Be Ours Forever” by R. C. Murphy
This is Ms. Murphy’s first book to be published in actual paper. You might think that in that case I’d go easy on her in this review. Especially since she’s not only a friend but also knows where I live. Bah! Honesty demands the truth, angry authors be damned! Besides, honest reviews will make it easier for her to get better, and since I like her writing, I want it to improve. Though I will be sleeping near a dog and checking for poison needles the next few weeks.
Be Ours Forever is a story about love, power, trust, outdated conservative political entities, telepathic group sex, sadistic monsters, nontraditional family units, and lots and lots of vampires. Seriously, there’s a whole mess of vampires in this story. The plot is kicked off by the question of whether or not the sole named human character should change and become a vampire. It’s that kind of book.
The genre is given as “Paranormal Romance”, but I kept thinking of it as “Fangbanger Porn”. An outline of the book might go: Introduction, Body Horror, Sex Scene, Torture, Torture, Torture, Sex Scene, Resolution.
Sexy Vampires from @RCMurphy
Did I ever tell you about my Close Personal Friend™ R. C. Murphy? She writes horror stories and puts them on her blog, and she’s imaginative and talented and wonderfully twisted. She’s very good at her art.
And now she’s made this.
I’ll post a review when I get done reading it.
I present to you R. C. Murphy’s first published print novel, Be Ours Forever.
I am so proud to know her right now.
Meowtastic!
Every evening my email is graced with a digest of all the Manboobz posts of the day, amongst other blogs. I don’t usually actually read any of them until the next morning, which is why it wasn’t until a few hours ago that I learned about Meowbify.
I clearly need to use more graphics in my blogging, if only so I can watch myself through that from time to time.
Meowbify simply replaces all graphics on a website with pictures of kitties, most (all?) of them animated gifs. As an added bonus, all of the links of a meowbified site are themselves meowbified! It’s viral cat madness!
I don’t have much else to say about this, so here’s the meowbified version of Wikipedia’s entry on regular polygons.
Share our message! Or possibly yours…
Oh internet, you magical place, you! There’s a social media “create your own ad” contest being held by Shell. In their own words:
Today, we want to take the Arctic Ready message offline, directly to the drivers who benefit from Shell’s performance fuels. That’s why we’re launching a new campaign (deadline this Thursday!), from which the best ads will be printed and posted in strategic locations worldwide. With your help, we at Shell can tell the world how pumped we are about Arctic energy, and take the Arctic Ready message to Arctic-enthused drivers everywhere.
It’s simple enough, you choose an arctic-themed picture, type your message, and it’s done. This being the internet, it’s being trolled like crazy, and it’s hilarious!
So far Shell is being pretty good sports about it, at least on Twitter. I hope they can maintain that attitude, it’d be a shame for all that to disappear in a flash of corporate indignity. Here’s the link!
When I read the Bible.
That bible verse mentioned in my last post got me thinking about this. I was about 12 when I decided to read the Bible. I don’t recall who’d been talking about it, but they said things like “answers to all of life’s questions” and I had a thirst for knowledge, especially rare or secret knowledge. So I found a copy, I think a King James version, though my memory fails me here, and sat down to read it.
I didn’t make it all the way through. It was disappointing from the very first page, I recall thinking “It’s just another creation myth”, and it never got any better. If anything it got more and more boring as it left the imaginative fairy-tales behind and got into history and ancient politics and rules. I recall being amazed by how much space Leviticus devoted to the nakedness you weren’t supposed to see. As I worked through the Old Testament I skimmed more and more, thinking maybe when I got to the new part it would get better. I don’t think I got any farther than the genealogy in Matthew before I gave up.
I didn’t find any answers, certainly not to questions I’d been asking. I didn’t find any secret wisdom or mysterious knowledge. The lesson I took from the Old Testament was much more prosaic and a little bit cynical: An awful lot of people believe in this. Read the rest of this entry
You’re persecuting me by not giving me special privileges
Ok, that title’s a little over the top. But not as much as you’d think. Via Alethian Worldview we have this tale of a pastor named Michael Salman in Phoenix, Arizona who’s been ordered to stop holding bible study meetings in his home, and may face jail time for ignoring this order.
Well, I’ve read the Examiner article that describes this as religious persecution, and I’ve read the fact sheet that the city of Phoenix published about this case. After consideration, I think the “Martyr Envy” tag on the AW post sums this up nicely. Seriously, it sounds like all the guy has to do is rent out a space for his “bible studies” and all his troubles disappear. Read the rest of this entry
Searching for better searching
Running a little late on my search terms post this month, but I do have the proper list. I’ve been getting a feedback loop on certain topics. Every time they’re included in a search term list that I post, they become more likely to turn up in someone’s search. Been trying to work out a way to exclude the search term posts from indexing, which is taking longer than I expected. In the meantime I’m just going to skip terms that I’ve seen over and over.
As usual, searches are in bold while my commentary is italic. Read the rest of this entry
Wishes really do come true!
I had two separate dreams where my dog was hit by a car this morning, so it’s more of a relief than usual that I woke up to find something cool.
The Digital Cuttlefish is an anonymous rhymesmith, and probably my favorite person that I know nothing about. Seriously, I know Cuttlefish teaches at a university, and I’m pretty sure lives in the eastern half of the United States, to the north. I think xe is male, but that’s little more than a guess based on universities still being mostly a boy’s club and my own biases. That’s about it.
Anyway, Cuttlefish had some time to kill and created a car sticker out of his logo, posting a picture of it with a joke that this product was clearly missing from EvolveFISH.com‘s inventory. Then this happened.
I love the internet.
Since Cuttlefish wants to be anonymous, obviously the more people who buy these and put them on their cars, the better, so here’s the link!
Screw you, existing customers
Wound up looking at cell phone plans today for reasons too boring to mention, and I saw that my carrier (T Mobile, whom I’ve been very happy with for the most part) offers a new plan that’s similar to mine, but generally better and only slightly more expensive. I was actually starting to do the math to decide if I wanted to change to it when I read the footnote which informed me that this plan was “New activations only.”
It’s things like that that make me feel you should get one free hit on marketing people before it’s considered assault. Daily.
I understand the desire to bring in new blood, (well, new money) but it really does feel like a slight to those of us who’ve been with them for a while. Oh well, I guess we’re all pretty used to corporate douchbaggery by now.
Yeah, I was just venting. Look, I’m way behind on my post count here, so any excuse to get something written is good enough for me right now!
Random Stuff I Learned Today: Ley Lines
I think I first encountered the concept of ley lines in one of the role-playing games by Palladium Books, though I couldn’t tell you whether it was Beyond the Supernatural or RIFTS. It’s now a fairly common plot device in fiction, especially urban fantasy or paranormal investigator stories set more or less in the present day. Ley lines appear in The Dresden Files, which was what inspired me to look them up this afternoon.
The basic concept is lines of mystical energy that crisscross the globe. Sometimes they are like magnetic lines of force, strong places in a more or less static field, other times they flow like rivers or arc like electrical currents. In RIFTS they have been supercharged so that they visibly glow, but in every other case I can think of they aren’t easily detected, at least not by regular people.
If you’d asked me to guess, I’d have probably thought the idea emerged during the spiritualism fad in the late 19th century. I would have been very wrong, the term “ley line” was coined in 1921 by an amateur archaeologist named Alfred Watkins. Watkins noticed that many ancient British sites such as Stonehenge lined up with landmarks in the local geography. He speculated that prehistoric people built them that way to make navigation easy. Sort of like sight-based rhumb lines for people walking overland without maps.
You’ll notice that’s nothing like the lines in fiction that I mentioned above. Not even a little.
The idea of ley lines as spiritually significant is less than ten years older than I am, it apparently came about in 1969 when a writer named John Michell combined Watkins’ lines with feng shui. It’s about a hundred years newer than I expected.
So that’s something I learned today, ley lines aren’t an old idea. Now you know, too!
Totally extra post!
Nuts, it didn’t work.
This is a candle stand I saw that I thought was neat. $75 is a little pricey, though.
This post was meant as another test of posting from my phone. I was hoping I had found a way to do more than post a bare picture & title. Oh well, I’ll keep trying!
Something lost, something found
Been quiet lately. I’d love to offer wonderful excuses, but I’m not going to. I loaded up a saved draft of a very large post I was working on, and found that only a tiny part of it had been saved, consigning hours of work to digital oblivion. Maybe I’ll try to rewrite it later, but for now just thinking about it puts me in a foul mood.
In less grumpy news, while I was out walking I found a rattle on the sidewalk. I wonder how it came to be there, what its story is.
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 