Wry Juxtaposition

Anime Fide: Smoke 'em if you got 'em

2008-08-26T09:37:00.003-05:00

...Not that I'm advocating smoking, just to be clear. I have always enjoyed this saying; there's something in me that can really understand the advice to take a moment to enjoy something as one never knows when either the moment will depart or the source of one's enjoyment run out. It calls to mind the virtue of being fully engaged in living. This is a virtue extolled in anime; let's look at two examples.
In Zombie Loan the character Michiru Kita begins the series in a state of limbo. She is not engaged in her life, neither enjoying herself nor suffering. Each day leads to the next because that is the way the planet spins, not because she has any particular impetus to continue living. She is forced to reexamine how she goes about living after meeting two very willful guys from school. They each have their reasons for valuing living so very much, but what they impart to Kita is a lesson about getting the most out of life. She opens the door on a new period in her life, accompanied but friend-like people, willing to embrace a philosophy of "nothing ventured nothing gained."
Amatsuki, a show I just began watching, features the adventures of lackadaisical high school student Tokidoki Rikugō. His poor performance in school and easy going nature are both drawn from the distance he feels between himself and his life; he feels like an observer of his life rather than as the participant. When he finds himself thrown into a world he knows little about he is at first nonplussed because it has about as much to do with him as his life before did. Only when confronted by the swordswoman who saved his life does he resolve to become engaged promising to do what he can. He finds himself happier in his new life than he had been in his old, even though he experiences more conflict.
This feeling of the meaninglessness of everyday life with which each of these characters begin was well known to the author of Ecclesiastes. This unknown teacher or preacher begins the book certain that there is nothing in human activity but ephemera and shadow. Human industry, human acquisition -- all of this pales in the face of human mortality. Therefore, he concludes at the end of chapter 2, rather than engage in meaningless toil it is better for humans to find pleasure in their work, in relationship with others, in the things that make for joy. This is a gift from God, indeed the ability to find pleasure in one's life is a sign that a person has grasped a small bit of divine wisdom.
Go, therefore, brothers and sisters working for peace and joy for yourself and for those around you. Take pleasure in this life that you are living and live it to its fullest.

Be Afraid

2008-08-25T08:54:00.002-05:00

This weekend there was an Irish cultural festival downtown at the riverside. Originally the plan had been for Mom and Dad to attend as well, but their car self-destructed on the way up so they ended up towing it home and missing out. Which might have been just as well, the weather turned out to be extremely muggy and down right hot from time to time. So Carson and I decided to limit our festing to just two acts. One of which was a group in which on of Carson's co-workers plays and the other was the exhibition by one of the local step dancing schools. Both of these events took place in the tent adjacent to the pitch so I could watch the field of play as well. I was a happy if sweating camper.
About halfway through the band's set the first of the step dancers began to appear. The one who wear wigs already had them on (here is a good example of the wigs I'm talking about), but in deference to the heat and sun the only bits of the outfits many of them had on were the knee socks. Rounding out their appearance, heavy make up, dark sunglasses, jutting lower jaws, and whatever it is that teens are wearing these days. As I gazed upon their unsmiling face I was stuck with the impression that I had wandered upon some new kind of gang and that I really really didn't want to meet any of these girls in a dark alley. Carson said maybe the heat was getting to me.
Now, to be clear: I'm sure these girls are all very nice and wholesome. They certainly are good dancers. The show was good this year as it was in previous years. We will watch them again next year. Still watch out for hooligan step dancers, and remember that I warned you first.

Anime Fide: Hajimemashoo

2008-08-19T09:49:00.002-05:00

As was mentioned in my last post, I am beginning a new series here on Wry Juxtaposition. In the interest of full disclosure I must confess that on some small level I will be using this article series as an excuse to continue to watch hours upon hours of anime each week. It's something that I really would do anyway, but now I can call it "research".
Since this is the first in the series I want to take a little bit of time to talk about purposes and methodology. Anime is really too broad a field to pretend any sort of mastery; its large sub-categories based on target demographics and multitudinous genre designations describe work of such sweepingly varied natures and qualities that no one person could hope to cover them all. As I sampled here and there I began to realize that just as there was a visual language that many of these shows shared there were also ideas and themes that crop up in shows that would otherwise have very little to do with one another. Many of these themes are ones that also appear with regularity in Christian theology and ethics.
Unlike DMing the Bible which takes the Bible as its source and moves from there to talk about pop culture, Anime Fide will be starting with a topic and moving from there back into faith fields. Each article will begin with an introduction to the topic laying out the parameters of the discussion. Next I will discuss the topic as it appears in anime programs; I will be limiting myself to three such instances. Finally, the topic will be examined through the lenses of Christian thought.
Hopefully then you all will continue the discussion. You can argue with my interpretation of the topic, the shows, the theology. You can suggest other shows that contain the topic.
Before I conclude, a brief word about cultural sensitivity: Anime is an art form that grew out of a culture. Its aesthetics and narrative form, its symbolism and archetypes grow out of the heart of Japan and her people. Western thought and culture are, at times, incredibly different from the culture given voice in anime. I will always endeavor to treat the works I am examining with the utmost respect; which means that though I will be discussing theology and ethics from a Western point of view I hope to never diminish or mar the unique vision and culture expressed in these shows.
So, hopefully I haven't bored you all to tears. Start looking for new articles in this series beginning next week.

My First Con

2008-08-18T10:30:00.002-05:00

Carson and I are newly returned from our first GenCon. There was much fun had by all. There are some things I will do differently when we return. I have decided that pre-registry of our events would have been a really really great idea. Maybe someday GenCon's web site and online registration will improve. I found the whole process very very frustrating.My single biggest complaint is the fact that one can't buy two passes, two tickets for an event, any of that at the same time. Yeah I know they feel they have a good reason, I would just argue they did their cast/benefit analysis wrong.
We met some really great people and played some really fun games. We bought dice and shopped and stared a costumed people. We attended workshops and panels and hopefully come out the other side better DMs and players. (as a side note the guys at critical hits took one of the worst pictures of me that I have ever ever seen).
Next time I will register to play more and wander about less. I will remember sun screen (it was an inside event, you say? though it seemed that way I still am sporting a pretty nice facial burn) (this contributed to a mild level crankiness by Sunday afternoon).
I still have not been introduced to 4e. This is a little par for the course though because I was a very late adopter for 3rd. Maybe some point in the next couple of months I'll make the move.

Sabbatical is now concluded

2008-08-18T09:33:00.003-05:00

I've been away for a while, I know. At first I was just being lazy, but in the last month and a half or so I've been gearing up for a new series for this blog and preparing for some pretty big changes here at Wry Juxtaposition. Here is a short list:

DMing the Bible: This series will pick back up where it left off in the middle of Genesis, but it will be doing so on the RPG blog Stupid Ranger. My dear friends who run and write for Stupid Ranger have graciously invited DMing the Bible to make their site its home. Look forward to episodes to appear late in the week, and while you're waiting read the really neat things that get posted there.

Anime Fide: Yes, it's true that one series is moving away, but in return I am announcing the launch of a new one. Fide is latin for "faith" but we'll be taking a rather broad look at a variety of topics (moral, ethical, etc) as it is shown in anime for both children and adults.

More Content, Frequent Posts: In addition to the new series there will be posts that will include from time to time things like original fiction, sermons, and movie reviews.

Everyone has been very nice about understanding the long absence of Wry Juxtaposition, and I thank you all. Hopefully, the post-sabbatical incarnation will be worth the wait.

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2008-05-12T20:31:00.001-05:00

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DMing the Bible: Geography Matters

2008-03-28T22:46:00.002-05:00

Introduction
Genesis' basic structure revolves around telling the stories of an extended family group whose tales frame the identity of the People of God. The story begins with Abram, called Israel's archetypal ancestor. He is introduced in a genealogy in chapter eleven, but his tale truly gets underway in chapter twelve. Today we'll set the stage for the various episodes of Abram's life told in Genesis. We'll take a brief glance at the promise made Abram by God (y'all don't worry you're totally going to hear lots about it by the time we get done with Joesph). On the game side, as the title suggests, we'll talk about geography and "grounding" your campaign.
Text
We're looking at Genesis 11:31-12:9. From time to time it's good to follow the family trees. Remember: part of the underlying logic of Genesis is that it matters a great deal who your family is. Abram (which is what we'll be calling him until he gets a name change later on) is the son of Terah. Terah, Abram, Sarai, and Lot (Abram's nephew) leave Ur where their family was to move to Canaan. Ur was situated in Mesopotamia. They settle down before getting there in Haran which in northeast of Canaan; in today's geography this would be a region near the Syrian and Turkish border. So far this is not that unusual; large family groups, particularly herders, would have to split apart to avoid over taxing the land.
What happens next is a bit unusual. God gets in touch with Abram and tells him to pack up, leave his family group, and head to lands unknown. Abram's movement is part of the fulfilling of a promise God makes to Abram and Abram's as yet nonexistent descendants. This promise has three major elements: 1)Land, 2) Numerous Descendants, 3)Abundant Blessing. It's worth stopping and taking a closer look at verse 3 in the Hebrew the verb in the clause that closes the verse can be carry either a passive or a reflexive sense. Now, this is the kind of thing that gets Hebrew scholars jazzed up, but the rest of you ...you sighed didn't you? It makes a difference for the translation, though. The NRSV ran with the passive sense, "in you all the families of the world will be blessed," and indicates the whole world receive blessings through Abram. The reflexive sense is rendered, "by you all the earth shall bless themselves;" meaning that all the people of the world will hope for themselves a blessing such as Abram received. Christian translators prefer the passive translation which conforms with Galatians 3, but it's fun to play back and forth with the different senses.
Abram moves from Haran into Canaan moving through the country past Shechen to the Oak of Moreh. This tree was known as "the oak that instructs" or "the teaching oak" it was a place to receive oracles or visits from the divine (this week's vocab. word: theophany= divine visitation). Here God says, "this is the land I have set aside for you." Abram sets up tents for a while in the hill country between Ai and Bethel (the "house of God"). Then moves in stages toward the Negeb, which is an arid wilderness between Asia Minor and Egypt.
This narrative, written probably during the height of the monarchy, sets up the theme of migratory verses settled (most of the Canaanites are farmers, Abram et al are herders), but also explains and under-girds the reason for Israel while at the same time reminding all that the successes enjoyed this nation are divine rather human.
The Game
Games happen somewhere. Your campaign occurs in a particular location even if that location is a whole continent. I love getting grounded in the geography, I love maps, and maybe I love maps too much. I use maps to create characters, I love planning the route a party will take from one place to another. As a DM I spend a lot of time on maps; I like knowing about all the places the PC's may wander. Abrams' route in the passage above takes him through urban and rural places and includes one interesting geographical phenomena. It keeps it varied. Here are two suggestions about the land and your campaign:

The Oak of Moreh: This was a place that was known for a particular thing. Such locations in RPGs almost cry out to be plot devices. Even if your characters arrive at a place known for being a theophany rich zone and nothing happens it can be meaningful to the action that follows. Boundaries, stone circles, crossroads can be interesting places with which to play.

Be a Brontë: I've only read a little of the sisters' work, but what I have I recall as being steeped in geographic atmosphere. The land became another character. It breathed, had moods, presented challenges, and exuded malevolence. It's no coincidence that one of the three kinds of conflict is person v. nature.

Reflections on Holy Week

2008-03-26T10:57:00.002-05:00

The church has just exited Holy Week to loll about in the relative giddiness of the Easter Season. Holy week is probably the busiest time of the year for ministers (and why any ministers you may see are walking around slightly shell shocked)(give them a hug). Palm Sunday services often have the most pageantry of any Sunday morning service all year. Then comes Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil, Sunrise service on Easter morning, then usually another service or two later in the day. As you can see a busy, busy week.
Each year the dozen or so congregations in the greater Peoria area (we actually call ourselves the Illinois Valley Cluster) get together and share special services throughout the Lenten season. Last week we had four. I preached the Palm Sunday service . The elder statesman of the ministers group preached on Good Friday. His sermon was stunning -- really really good.
A typo had him preaching on the wrong verse, which is my fault (I typed 20 rather than 30). But he took it is this amazing direction. He set up this thought: did Jesus have to die on Good Friday. This is a question with a long history in Christian Theology, and faithful people make good points on both sides. The sermon continued that if Jesus didn't have to die, then he died because humanity chose it. Humanity gets that choice, he said. We observe Good Friday because we need to confront that part of ourselves that would destroy the image of God (ready for a technical term? It's known as the Imago Dei) in another person. It ended up being a Dove sermon, and a really good one.
It snowed here as we went into church on Easter. No one alive today or born in the next 50+ years will see an Easter so early. I'm hedging my estimate conservatively because I'm pretty sure there's more life expectancy progress to be made.
Which makes me think...shouldn't we be spending more money on making sure nobody dies super early than on making sure a few people don't die for a long long time? Another post, to be sure.
The next post you should see from me is a "DMing the Bible" no later than Friday. Maybe I'll post the Palm Sunday sermon as a link, so you don't have to read it if you don't want to.

I've got to get my geek on

2008-03-17T18:51:00.002-05:00

Once long ago... long long ago. Somebody I respected and trusted turned to me and said, "Oh, Katherine, lighten up." Instruction I took to heart, and not a moment too soon, I assure you. Since then I have sought out past times that are not so very serious. As my hobbies, pastimes, amusements, and diversions amassed I discovered and then embraced my geek-hood.
So, when things get too serious, or when I have too many conversations of a professional nature, or even when I hear that little inner voice say, "Oh, Katherine, lighten up," I get my geek on. How? I'm glad you asked. Here is a small list:

Online Distractions: Ad Report Card on Slate.com and Stupidranger.com make for good reading, but if you're in need of less cerebral offerings there's always addictinggames.com. Beware however the name says it all. As the title of this post suggests, I spend a goodly amount of time on Funny or Die. If you haven't seen the landlady yet you owe it to yourself to watch; go on, you deserve it.

Video Games: I've already mentioned elsewhere about the trouble Rock Band is getting me into, in addition to that Civilization IV, Neverwinter Nights (just the first one for now, will give the sequel another try after upgrading the computer). Diablo 2 and I are currently on break (pathetic creature I am, I always return). Speaking of my pathetic side I have also fallen under the weird spell of time management games namely in the form of Diner Dash 2. Whenever the disk resurfaces, I will be playing Dungeon Keeper 2 again, it's simply genius.

The written word: Voracious and unapologetic reader that I am, this list would not be complete without noting some of the things I read simply for the joy of it. Jayne Ann Krentz and Elizabeth Lowell, Nora Roberts in her many guises, Laurell K. Hamilton (both the Anita Blake and the Merry Gentry), Neil Gaiman, Simon Green, Terry Pratchett, Jeffery Deaver, Kim Harrison, J.K. Rowling, Dianna Gabaldon. There are others, but these I always snap up when I see a new title.

Role Playing: I play with two different groups, and hope to be back in the DM's saddle soon. Currently one group is approaching the climax of an epic level campaign, While the other is just beginning. I'm playing a Gnome Duelist/Illusionist in the one and a Half-Elf Wilder in the other. The epic campaign is in Forgotten Realms, the one that is just beginning is one a recently re-vamped home grown world, and the campaign I am planning is on Ravenloft. I have in the past LARPed with Vampire, the Masquerade which was fun. I also briefly played Marvel, Call of Cathulu and TMNT, but those were years ago now.

On the Telly: Well that's a bit misleading, between Netflix streaming stuff and DVRs I hardly ever watch anything live anymore (especially since Heroes is off at the moment). Still things I watch: Torchwood and Dr. Who from BBC, Reaper and Psych, Heroes, Lost, Battlestar Gallactica, Supernatural, Anime like Ghost in the Shell and Descendants of Darkness, Red Dwarf, Farscape, and always always West Wing.

So that's a short list. What do you guys do for fun?

If anyone is interested

2008-03-16T12:50:00.002-05:00

I will be preaching tonight at Eureka Christian Church in Eureka, IL. Here is a map. There is dinner beginning at 5:00 and then the service begins at 6:00. Dinner is free. I'll be preaching on parts Luke 23.
I would have posted this earlier, but I'm afraid Rock Band is overwriting the rest of my memory. Red, Green, Red, Blue, Yellow, Green, Orange.

Jesus and the Living Dead

2008-03-13T09:40:00.006-05:00

This is a sermon I delivered at United Disciples Christian Church in West Peoria. The text is John 11:1-45.

So I need to tell you up-front something you may have already been able to tell. I am a nerd, a geek. I play video games and read sci-fi, I enjoy tinkering with my computer, I blog, I'm into Heroes and Lost and BSG, I have more computers than tubes of lipstick, I watch fantasy and horror films. That may be why in this past week as I've been working with this text that I just can't keep the same image from lumbering into my mind.
You see, this week I've been thinking about zombies.
There are certain fears that we as a species seem to share: the dark, death, things that go bump in the night. When something combines all those things it has real sticking power in the human psyche. Zombies...the dead returned to a shell of a life numbly but relentlessly striving in unfettered consumption, provide the underpinnings of some of Hollywood's most enduring chills. Zombie tales are not new. Stories about people getting up after death go back all the way to ancient Sumer and the epic of Gilgamesh, and show up in the cultures of Africa, Mesoamerica, Asia, and Europe.
I think zombie stories have real sticking power because the best ones ask us to take time in front of the mirror and look carefully at some of the darkest parts of ourselves.
Consider George A. Romero's 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead. While telling a scary story about the dead rising from their graves and hunting the living, this film also asked some difficult questions of a country wrestling with racism. Since then zombie films have asked us hard question about human community, emotions, war, violence, greed, class, and ultimately what it means to be human.
Which actually makes zombie films a lot like Lent. Lent is a season that the Church observes each years that takes us into the darkest parts of the Christian Scriptures and asks us to examine our complicity in them. It's a time to ask hard questions of ourselves, and to force ourselves to be honest.
The readings in Lent takes through Jesus' journey to Jerusalem ahead of Palm Sunday. In this reading Jesus comes to Bethany which would have been like a suburb of Jerusalem. It's so close to Jerusalem that Thomas is convinced that they will all be killed. Jesus has been called to the home of Martha and Mary; their brother Lazarus has died. Mary and Martha's home was a place Jesus and his disciples visited, a place where Jesus felt comfortable. By the time that Jesus and crew arrive Lazarus has been dead for four days. Jewish funerary practices dictated that Lazarus would have been entombed the day he died. Mary and Martha would have been about halfway through the proscribed seven day mourning period. Hearing that Jesus has arrived Martha goes out to the road to meet him.
What follows next in the story is something that I think is particularly valuable for modern Christians. Martha makes dramatic statements of faith in Jesus' person and power, but for all of that she cannot see a solution that Jesus can offer her. Death blocks her way -- the ultimate stumbling block. Jesus then gives her an assurance that echoes down through the ages. "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die." Jesus performs the greatest of his miracles at the tomb of Lazarus. He called Lazarus out of his tomb; calling him to new life and away from death.
We read Jesus' promise to Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live," at funerals, but it seems to me we should read it more often than that. We need to hear Jesus' words about the power of God to bring life from death.
It makes me think of another kind of zombie, actually. Jana Childers, who teaches preaching at San Francisco Theological Seminary, says, "We are in the very real danger of being dead while we are still alive." Our very spirits can wither and die within us. If the classic zombie is "the living dead" this new kind of zombie might be called "the dead living." Our souls are daily under assault. Each day we faces various forces of death. It may be the suffering caused by financial hardships: grinding poverty or demeaning work; it may be abuse: physical, mental, sexual, emotional, even spiritual (too often carried out within churches); it may be violence or unrest within our cities and halfway around the world. Whatever the cause, the effect is spiritual death, and results in people just scrapping along serving out their time rather than really living.
One of my new favorite zombie films is Shaun of the Dead, the British romantic comedy. The film open with people commuting, working as shopping cart returners and checkout girls. After the events of Zed-Day, the film closes with shots of these same people only now they're zombies. Their life before death was indecipherable from their new situation.
People, this is not what we were created for! Turn back about a page and look in John 10; Jesus tells us that he is the Good Shepherd who came, "that they might have life and that they might have it abundantly." It is this abundant life that Jesus offers us all. He calls us into life that is lived and lived abundantly. Jesus unbinds us from all that would hold us back from all that we were created to be. We are free from every death. Amen

The Plague, or why I haven't shoveled the walk

2008-03-05T10:35:00.002-06:00

There's the scene in Interview with a Vampire (and I'm thinking the film here) where Louis has become terrible hungry and so he goes down to a part of town where lots of people are sick so he can have a bite out. The why of the scene is less what I'm getting at than the visual of the shanties huddled close to one another each with huge X's on the doors to warn others that this is a house that disease has touched. I feel like I should be putting an X up on our doors. I wonder what Peoria would look like if we had to mark the spread of the flu this season. It's been pretty bad. When there is snow on the ground we're supposed to clear a path for the postal carrier, but being as sick as we are neither Carson or I have felt well enough to do more than just the basic housekeeping (shoveling snow falls outside of that list).
I usually am able to muster through times of sickness with little or no consequence, but this year I have been knocked squarely on my butt. Carson and I have been little petri dishes -- microbial wonderlands. We've managed to pick up and share whatever is going on here. I still have a cough and the remnants of one of the worst ear infections I can remember.
All I can say is, buy Walgreen's stock...I alone have boosted their profits for this quarter.

DMing the Bible: Languages Known

2008-03-05T10:27:00.005-06:00

Introduction:
The story of the tower of Babel occupies just a few verses in chapter 11 of Genesis; which is pretty short when compared to the Noah saga we just finished with or the story of Joseph which is practically a novella. However when people think back about the Hebrew Scriptures I would be surprised if this story wasn't on most people's lists. There is something cinematic about the whole thing, and that visual component helps it stay in our memories. In this DMing the Bible we'll take a look at this puzzling story, talk some about PC's, NPC's and languages known, and make a few suggestions on using language as a plot device.
The Text:
For years, Christian scholars working with this text were content with the same interpretation you would find in children's Sunday School material. In this interpretation, the people of the world get together to make a tower to reach into heaven. God, looking on, becomes threatened by humanity's creativity and ensures that people will have trouble speaking with each other. The conclusions drawn from the story suggest that the people's sin was hubris.
This surface reading presents some problems, however. If, as I asserted earlier, God created humanity as creative, striking people done for being what they are, what they were created to be, is monstrous. This is not the only interpretation available so let's for a moment consider one that was offered in part by Josephus, a first century Jewish apologist. It suggest that humanity was created for diversity and that the sin of Babel (if there was one) was the stifling of diversity. This would mean that the scattering of the people was not punishment as much it was the opening of new opportunity for growth.
Chapter 11 opens with all of humanity living in the same place sharing one language and one vocabulary. The repeats of the word "one" emphasizes the homogeneity present in the human community. Fearing being spread all over the earth, the people get together and build a city with a tower. The tower is not the emphasis of the project -- the phrase city and tower was used in the Hebrew Scriptures to describe a certain kind of settlement. In verse 5 God arrives and sees what's going on. Verse 6 contains what can only described as an aside. But how should it be translated -- if the people are not in open rebellion against God and God is not threatened by humanity's creative abilities, is not the typical translation ("And the Lord said, 'Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.'") lacking? A better reading is, "And Yahweh said, 'From what they have accomplished already, it looks like their plans to remain one people with one language in one place will succeed." (Hiebert, T. JBL 126 no 1, p 45) This translation has an almost regretful note and suggests that humanity being all the same is less that what we were intended to be.
Now God takes action. God mixes up their language so that people have lots of differences. The people form little groups of different people speaking different languages and living in different places all over the face of the earth. God's commandment to be fruitful and multiply can be carried out; as Azeem answered the little girl in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves "Because Allah loves wondrous variety."
The Game:
In D&D language is based in a character's intelligence as much as it is based in the culture from whence the character came. "All characters know how to speak Common. A dwarf, elf, gnome, half-elf, half-orc, or halfling also speaks a racial language, as appropriate. A smart character (one who had an Intelligence bonus at 1st level) speaks other languages as well, one extra language per point of Intelligence bonus as a starting character." (PHB p12). The existence of Common is super handy for players and DM. The party never needs to worry about walking into a village where absolutely nobody understands them. The DM never need fear not landing an important message or plot point for want of a translator. Many PCs have at least one bonus point in INT (probably for no other reason than because it influences skill points); for non-human PC's this means at least three languages. Languages known, I think, is one of the most "min/maxed" aspects of character creation. Rather than referring to their back-stories players try and consolidate power in the party trying to cover common monster language groups and provide a language that the party can converse in other than common.
It all makes me think of that song by the Refreshments, "Banditos." In the refrain one of the characters tells the border guard that he is Jean Luc Picard of the United Federation of Planets. I had thought for years that the next line was "they speak English everywhere" rather than "he won't speak English anyway." Sure the universal translator was nice, but some of my favorite episodes were the ones when, for what ever reason, the translator wasn't working. So here are some suggestions for using language in play:

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra: Why not use some of the interesting ways that language barriers form for people on Star Trek? In this episode though the words are being translated they make almost no sense to people unfamilar with a dense set of local metaphor and idiom. Let characters mourn their lack of Knowledge: Local (obscure village)

Oh no! I think he understood that: Don't skimp on NPC's languages known. Taking an extra ten seconds during planning to prevent characters from keeping their powwow secret from the bad guys might just make your night even if it doesn't make theirs

La préservation de diversité: In our world where English is increasingly making the world's population a people with one language and one vocabulary there are places where linguistic diversity is being preserved. Could perhaps your players enter the struggle to preserve or demolish a language group? Adding divine or arcane overtones to such a mission might make for some interesting low-level encounters.

Please oh please

2008-03-01T08:54:00.002-06:00

OK
I live in a racially diverse (for Peoria) neighborhood where many of the families are renters in low-income jobs. Many of the houses on our block are proud old homes that were built in the 30's when the neighborhood was one of the nicer places to live. Carson and I are not into gentrification. Just to make it clear at the get go. We were sure that we would have a nice time in our neighborhood as we restored the house we had bought, but it wasn't too long into our stay here that we began to notice ...things.
First to arrive on our attention was the excessive amount of garbage that seems omni-present. Now some of this can be laid at the feet of the garbage removal service the handles the route in the neighborhood, but not nearly all. Let me start at the beginning. Because of some questionable choices made by previous owners of our house and quirks of geography, our front and back yards appeared to be collecting trash as it blew in from other yards. Which would be bad enough, but no what was actually happening was worse. People were actually throwing trash into our yard. Pedistrians as they passed --if they finished with whatever they were eating, drinking, smoking, reading would just toss the refuse into our front yard. Our neighbors on either side who weekly seem to amass mountains of trash. And somebody, and I'd like to think it isn't our neighbors made a habit of throwing trash into our back yard. We have a high energy dog who needs lots of room to run, so we fenced in the back yard with a 6 foot tall privacy fence. I was sure this would be the end of it. People walking by would see the improvement we had made to the property and would stop with the garbage already, and blown-in garbage would also cease. Yeah, clearly I'm delusional. I want to say, "Listen people, and listen well...please oh please stop throwing trash into yards --yours or other people's; it's a part of what makes this neighborhood run down."
Moving on in my rant. Car horns. In many neighborhoods like ours honking is associated with drug dealing, and I know that it's a problem in our neighborhood, but the honking. Seriously it goes on day and night. Even the school bus as it drops kids off in the afternoon honks. People who carpool honk, families passing kids back and forth in visitation honk, people just driving down the block honk. Here's what I think -- if you would feel like you shouldn't honk on Grandview Dr. don't honk in our neighborhood. Get out of your car and knock on the door of the house you are interested in, that or be patient. I wish people would have a little more "pride-of place."
This neighborhood isn't run down because people are poor. This neighborhood is run down because the people who live here clearly don't want to do the things that makes a neighborhood nice. Short grocery list of other things that tick me off: dogs (barking excessively, chained up, too many in too small a pen), music (blasting, blaring, frequently after midnight), and truancy (kids should be in school every day it is in session for the whole day). Now to be fair I have to fess up that I am not a fan of some of the landlords in the area and would be happier if more people owned the homes they lived in. I feel this way in part because I think home ownership is a part of that "pride of place" thing I was talking about above. Maybe there's a part of my idealism that's in intensive care, but I'm beginning to think that it wouldn't change much for some of the people in our neighborhood.
You may say, well just move you haters--don't be hatin' on people who choose to live that way. To which I say this neighborhood can be a nice one, it has the potential...and no child, no senior, no anybody should have to live in a neighborhood where people don't take these basic steps.

Remember this for Valentine's Day

2008-02-12T16:07:00.001-06:00

Urban Commune...Hmm...

2008-02-12T09:41:00.000-06:00

Maybe I have just gone 'round the bend, and perhaps this post will be proof. Lately I have been thinking a rather lot about the nature of human community. It's a theme I return to again and again; humans needing to be in community with one another is an important part of my personal ecclesiology.
This latest return to the subject was prompted by I am Legend which Carson and I saw a the theater a while back. The novel on which this film, Omega Man, I am Omega, and The Last Man on Earth were all based describes the growing burden solitude presents for the main character. Will Smith may not be recognized as one of the great actors of our time (because he probably isn't), but his nuanced and tenderly heartbreaking performance was one of the best I have ever seen in this genre. Kudos to Mr. Smith for his investment into this side of the character; a side, I might mention, that Mr. Heston didn't even attempt.
So anyway, Carson and I are coming to terms with our decision not to be parents. One of the consequences of which is the fact that Carson and I are pretty much all we can count on for domestic human companionship. This is not remarkable for American middle-class people our age, but in the course of human history this lifestyle is really novel. Not that long ago the idea for two people to be living alone would have been seen as strange (even on the frontier). The business of living was shared by many adults all pulling together. Extended families lived with or next to one another and supported each other not just with labor or finances, but with those harder to measure things community brings like human contact. The tasks of working and housekeeping is more than two people can stay atop, particularly if you want to do both well. The solution lies in the adage, "many hands make for light work."
Carson and I were talking about all this over dinner last night when I wondered aloud if there were urban communes. When I think about communal living I end up picturing agrarian hippie types who cast off concepts of ownership and urban life, which is a cute, quixotic vision, but holds little appeal for yours truly. Carson suggested that a group of young professionals could go in together for the purchase of an old hotel, and that even after renovations it might still be cheaper than renting or buying lots of individual dwellings, and that when somebody wanted to move out they could sell their portion to a new member.
His idea really captured my imagination. I saw a group of people taking a hotel and altering it to contain a collection of one or two bedroom units that share common areas (like kitchen, dinning, living) Depending on the overall size of the project shared spaces could include several dens, a dedicated childcare area, a library, a multi-work station office area for flex workers, console video game room, paper-pencil/ board game room, solarium/ garden, or party room.
Group members would contribute 1. effort (scheduled cooking, cleaning (of common areas), child care, building upkeep, etc) and 2. money (both initially to "buy in" and monthly to cover costs of cable, internet, electricity, water). Meals would be prepared for whoever is around for that meal and wants to eat. Those cooking would make food for people who noted on a sign-up sheet that they would be in for the meal.
There are things that would need to be ensured. The group would need a pretty clearly defined social contract, rooms would need to provide sufficient "private" space and amenities, the soundproofing that is typically used in hotels would be substandard for this application -- it would need upgrading, and rooms would need to provide sufficient closet/storage space. Group members would elect a "bill payer" semi-annually who would collect the monthly bill portion and pay the communal bills. People would still have person bank accounts, retirement plans, person wealth (we're talking communal living, not communism).
Are there glaring flaws in my wild idea? Post a comment and let me know

DMing the Bible: Denouement

2008-02-08T15:20:00.000-06:00

Introduction:

OK. So it's been a while, and if you're just joining me ... welcome. Follow the tag links to catch the beginning and some explanations. When we spoke last Noah and his crew of amateur mariners were adrift in the boat that they had built at God's behest. This time we're going to pick up after the flood. The last few verses in chapter eight and chapter nine contain the end of Noah's adventures. Our focus for the text will be primarily on God's promises and the formation of the post-diluvian covenant. On the game side we'll look at wrapping up campaigns.

The Text:

The rains came and covered the earth, but Noah and company couldn't leave the ark right away. I think sometimes we get a little glib with flood stories; we see a big fluffy wave of blue pristine water pick up the ark, and then once the rains stop, the water recedes like a tub draining. French artist Gustave Dore etched his vision of the great flood (which you can see here), and they strike me as helpful, though icky. In August of 2005 those of us who live in America were confronted with the real grusomeness of a flood that wipes out civilization. Two and a half years later the effects of the post-Katrina flood are still being felt.

So it's really no wonder then that the p-source doesn't have Noah stepping foot on earth until a year after the rain stops. God tells Noah to head out of the boat and let the animals go do their animal things. God's instructions to “be fruitful and multiply” restores the corrupted creation; the world is given a new start. Noah builds an altar and preforms a sacrifice of an unidentified number of animals. The p-source narrator of this story points out that Noah offers some of every clean creature. This is an element of anachronism in the story. It would be a bit like my telling you about the Battle of New Orleans and explaining to you that Jackson hadn't checked his email, which is why he didn't know the war was over. The sacrificial system is established in the covenant at Sinai. Until that point animals were not differentiated clean v. unclean.

God then makes a pretty big promise. Take a look at verses 21b-22, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures , seestime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.” God here is removing the curse placed on the ground after the incident at Eden; humanity may well have the capacity for great evil, but God will not scourge the planet and all the other beings with whome we share it because of our shenanigans.

As a perk for having made it through the flood, God allows humans to start eating animals which had hithertofor been a nopey-no. This comes with some instruction though. People should not eat meat with the blood still in it. This is because of what I call the threshold theory. In some Hebrew worldviews and to a lesser extent some Christian world views, places of threshhold -- that is experiences, substances or locales that emphasize the thin line between life and death, flesh and spirit carry with them a kind of power. Being too close to them carried with them risk, being too close to the presence of God was dangerous. Blood is one of those threshhold substaces; when it's inside a creature that creature is alive, but when the blood departs the creature dies. The other caveat to eating meat is that it's bad to kill humans. So Ravenous is right out, but it's more than that. God's stiff penalty for killing people is a sign that God still sees humanity as very good and creatures that are made in the likeness of God.

Then, God makes the first covenant. There are three covenants that God makes with people in the Torah, this one, one with Abraham (which I hope to get to in a couple months), and one with the people of Irael and Moses at Sinai. Covenants are one sided, God has made a promise that is not contigent on the actions of humanity. God establishes the covenant with every human and every animal that never again will God flood the whole earth. God sets as a sign of the covenant a bow in the sky, signifying that God's destructive powers are decomissioned. When we see a rainbow in the sky we can be comforted by God's steadfast promise not to wipe us off the face of the planet (since we seem to be plenty good at that by ourselves). Noah retires to pursue a hobby in vintaculture. Noah's sons and their wives get busy repopulating the earth and planting seeds of racial tension that will plague humankind for millenia.

The Game:

Your players have battled through dangers untold, fought their way into the castle beyond the goblin city, and discovered that the Big Bad ultimately had no power over them. The size of the denouement will vary based on the scope of the campaign, of course, but the very nature of calling it a campaign as opposed to the latest in your series of unrelated missions implies that there is some significance. The city/ area/ world/ plane is different now in a demonstrable way because of your PC's activities. Like Noah, PC's need a moment or two to have their adventures place into perspective. On the other hand, a DM can't say, “Well done, you guys!! Your dominance has killed off all adventuring potential for this world.” Here are a few of my suggestions for balanced Adventure endings:

The 4 L's: Loot, Land, Leisure, and Legend. Because of the mammoth nature of their exploits, the characters have amassed large monetary rewards with which to rent happiness. Try not to limit your self to the piles of gp that accompany regular play; reach out to the others L's. Allow the PC's to be connected in a proprietary fashion with the geography of the places they have saved. These last two are more ephemeral, but can make or break a denouement. Leisure allows characters to pursue quests and projects that linger as concerns (e.g. pushy bard in town #2 that needed being put in his place, but plot drove the characters away before getting to it). Legend means that when the party shows up again in town #2, people will pay attention.
Rock the Foundations: If you are playing in Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance, you may feel like you can't shake the boat too much because of the pre-written material about political systems and power structures. There are a handful of work arounds, but my favorite is this: “Don't worry about it so much.” The second and third are nearly identical “play somewhere that is under-emphasized in the books” and “play some when that is under-emphasized.” The forth is to mess with the power behind the thrown. Chances are your PC's aren't looking to rule the roost anyway, but if they pushed out another set of advisers to become the regent's go-to guy and gals – that's snazzy too.
Create a New Natural Phenomena: You want to show your PC's how much you care, but don't know what to get a party that already has everything? Let their last battle create a new constellation, add an aurora to the world in their honor, maybe cause desert to recede and fertile land to appear or make an oasis or hot spring. Maybe set a rainbow in the sky to remind everybody of the characters' accomplishment. Creating a natural phenomena gives players a sense of having changed the world even while you're rolling up the next Big Bad.
Don't Reset Time: You may have wondered why I didn't include reseting time as a work around to the stable pre-built world; I didn't because I don't think it's a good idea in the long run. Just look at the increasingly insane Doctor for evidence of what happens to characters who are cut adrift of the consequences of their actions. In some cases it feels like a cop out, and in others it created a sense of futility in players. I just don't recommend it.

2008-02-08T10:54:00.000-06:00

Law's Game Style

You scored as a Storyteller

You're more inclined toward the role playing side of the equation and less interested in numbers or experience points. You're quick to compromise if you can help move the story forward, and get bored when the game slows down for a long planning session. You want to play out a story that moves like it's orchestrated by a skilled novelist or film director.

Storyteller

83%

Tactician

75%

Method Actor

67%

Specialist

50%

Butt-Kicker

33%

Power Gamer

33%

Casual Gamer

17%

Yes, I know it's another quiz result, and I'm sorry, but I think there is a lesson to be learned here. Take a moment and check out the scores of some of the others in my group at Stupidranger.com you'll see that my results are a bit different than those of my comrades. Does that mean I'm a bad fit with the rest of the group? No, but it does add dimensions to play that should be taken into account. Our group is heavily weighted towards fluff that means we spend lots of time in character and our character's personalities drive the action. My style of play however suggests that I feel most involved and have the most fun as a player when I know that the DM has a good understanding of the way our characters tick and is using that to create conflict, incentive, challenge, and rewards that allow us the freedom to play "off the rails" sometimes but also gives us good reasons to care about the plot.
One of our players was DMing another group for a while that was very hack and slash oriented. That group worked well because they were happy to battle their way through whole sessions. A real challenge for a DM would be having one group that contained power gamers, some hack'n'slasher, and fluffy types. If the golden rule of DMing is "Everybody at the table has fun," a group like this would present a wobbly highwire.

heh heh, Magic...

2007-12-05T23:29:00.001-06:00

Take the Magic: The Gathering 'What Color Are You?' Quiz.

Fortunate One

2007-11-16T10:15:00.000-06:00

My Fortune Cookie told me:
Inspiration is like a collection of old teaspoons, but I forget why.
Get a cookie from Miss Fortune

And you thought I had dropped of the face of the planet

2007-11-16T09:57:00.001-06:00

When, in fact, I have only been out of town. I had a relaxing week of nominally working on the West Wing study with my writing partner Amanda. I've been home this week running around like a chicken with my head cut off. Now I am returned.

DMing the Bible: Sometimes we sail

2007-10-26T11:31:00.000-05:00

Introduction:
This week we move into the Noah sequence. Let me say a few things about the way I approach this text. This is a story, one that has important theological content, but a story none the less. I believe that having a Biblical faith does not require a literalist interpretation of these texts. I believe these texts resist such interpretation and therefor those who claim to be literalists are in fact selectivists (for more about this, consider reading this by Peter Gomes).
The Noah story gains meaning when moved from "history" to "myth." We can then consider what it is that the people who told this tale were trying to say about their God. Consider, briefly, another story about a world flood, the epic of Atrahasis. In this story the gods created humanity to do the labor the gods no longer wanted to do themselves. The people multiplied and became very noisy -- the gods could no longer sleep for all the ruckus. No matter what disaster the gods set upon the people in 1200 years they had shaken it off. The crankiest of the gods decides to flood where the humans live and kill them all, but a nicer god gives a heads up to a wise man to build a boat. When the flood commences the gods become frighten by the flood and hungry because the human sacrifices which had fed them were suddenly cut off. After the flood waters receded, the wise man emerges from his boat an offers a sacrifice. The gods are so happy with the meal that they make the man immortal. The decide they will never flood the world again, and are very cross with the god who did it in the first place, but to keep the human population in check they institute death in childbirth, barrenness, and infant mortality. What kind of gods are these? What kind of world does this story describe?
The Text:
Genesis 6:9 introduces the beginning of the priestly (p-source) flood narrative, and reintroduces us to Noah. We are told that he is a righteous man which would go along with what we learned about him in verse 8, that he had found favor in the sight of God. The world had become corrupt, even the earth was bent because humanity by-in-large was messed up. God resolved to wipe out the corruption of the earth and the people that caused it. God gives Noah precise instructions on making this ark. This boat would be roughly square or rectangular and would bear little resemblance to the stately craft this story usually calls to mind. God also gives clear instruction to preserve the multitude of creatures that God had created and declared "good." Now if you compare the instructional verses you will see what I mean about texts being resistant to literalism. 6:19 and 20 read, "And of every living thing, of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark, to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female. Of the birds according to their kinds, and of the animals according to their kinds, of every creeping thing of the ground according to its kind, two of every kind shall come in to you, to keep them alive." If you read on into chapter 7 however you'll discover verses 2 and 3, "Take with you seven pairs of all clean animals, the male and its mate; and a pair of the animals that are not clean, the male and its mate; and seven pairs of the birds of the air also, male and female, to keep their kind alive on the face of all the earth." Noah gets the creatures and loads everybody onto the boat. Then the waters came and flooded the earth.
What theologically can we draw from this part of the Noah story? As compared to the world and deities described in the Atrahasis epic, this narrative tradition has a world that was created good and people that were created in the image of God and called very good. The God of these tales is one that demands justice and rectitude, and though corrective action needed to be taken (which caused God grief cf 6:6), planned ahead for the survival of life.
The Game:
Full Disclosure: I am not a boating person. I have lived in landlocked parts of the US my whole life and have only spent fleeting vacations on the shores of great bodies of water.
Recently I've been playing rather than DMing, and in a couple of the campaigns we've been playing long distances need to be traveled, sometimes by land and horse, and rarely the most efficient path took the party by boat. Mostly these trips were undertaken with the assistance of a loyal crew under hire, so role-playing decisions regarding the piloting of crafts was fairly limited. Once the party did have to sail a large pirate ship without NPC assist. The role playing sounded a bit like The Princess Bride, "Hurry up. Move the thing! Um ... that other thing. Move it!" Clearly we were not up to snuff on our nautical lingo, but I had a great time and I think these sessions were some of the most fun of that campaign.
I can't help but think of Noah when ever I look back on those sessions. Here is a man who (nominally) is living in what would later become Iran/Iraq; he was probably painted as a person engaged in desert climate subsistence agriculture. In this world there is precious little water, but one day God shows up and says I've decided that you should build a boat, fill it with animals, and sail it aimlessly for the better part of a year while I cover the face of the planet with water enough to drown all life. Of course you'd want to take on such an important "save the cheerleader" kind of mission for God, that doesn't mean that you know how.
One of the appeals of fantasy role-playing games is that through a group imaginative process people can take part in steering characters who can achieve and preform beyond the abilities of the players in their real lives. This means, in part, that the characters know things that the players don't. While this usually has little impact on game mechanics, it does hamper role playing from time to time. Players worry that they will be penalized for saying or doing the wrong thing because of their own ignorance. I would guess that most of our role playing groups do not have access to stores of naval information and marine strategy. So what do we as DM's do? Avoid ocean going adventures? Make sure there is always a crew hanging around? Here are a few humble suggestions:

Go on and buy the book: Wizards of the Coast is like a benevolent, but demanding god. There are so many great resources out there, so many pretty books and tiles and miniatures. But they are so very costly to own. However, if you anticipate spending much time on boats, the Stormwrack resource may be a wise expenditure of thirty-five bucks. Share relevant passages with your group, learn new things...educational and fun!
Cheat, a little: If the point is to challenge players to the point that they no longer want to play, by all means do exhaustive research into vessel construction and navigation and require that they come up with realistic role playing. If, on the other hand, the point is to have fun and enjoy one another's company, you may choose to let "Hurry up. Move the thing! Um ... that other thing. Move it!" suffice for genuine docking procedure.
Give them the tools: I have long loved the folding boat, a wondrous item in the DMG. I'm gaga for mounts that can shrink to statuettes. What if there was an artifact level item that had some of the elements of the folding boat but was also crewed by departed sailors. An interesting plot twist would be if these sailors are there by some kind of evil magic, then using said vessel would carry some kind of karmic penalty. One the other hand, this might be a little like an afterlife for sailors faithful to a certain god who after death continue to sail in the god's service on behalf of special chosen types.

Facebook

2007-10-23T16:19:00.000-05:00

I have been cajoled and harangued into signing on with face book. You can find me there, though, if you've found me here you're likely to get more attention (as my friend Ryan says, I'm just saying).

Fight Club

2007-10-23T16:09:00.000-05:00

So, clearly I was far far away from the civilized world in 2000 when the movie Fight Club was released. By the time I came back I knew enough to realize that I had missed something important, but didn't do anything to rectify the situation until this past Sunday evening.

This film is clearly one of the important films of the decade, and if you have missed it so far...go confess it to one of your friends who will help you out. You will find yourself watching it over and over again, and each time you will see something new.

Oh, btw, bring your brain -- there are plenty of scenes with guys beating the living snot out of each other and that is interesting, but that is not the major focus of the film.

Dming the Bible: PCs from beyond the Prime

2007-10-21T16:58:00.000-05:00

Introduction:
The text for this week moves us from the genealogies of chapter 5 and into the Noah narrative of chapter 6 (which we will in theory cover next week). This prologue to the flood provides us with many bizarre details that interestingly enough get skipped by those who believe in the literal truth of the text.
The Text:
Genesis 6 opens with the natural result of all those generations having other sons and daughters. The world is beginning to feel full and there are a rather lot of unnamed women running about. Characters known as the sons of God decided that they would make swell wives. Now we can't be very sure who these sons were, whether they were human beings of great renown or holiness ( both things that might have resulted in appellation of the title) or spiritual beings who were actually the children of God and some mate (some in early Israel assumed that the Canaanite goddess Asherah was God's wife). This latter belief would not have been out of place in the ANE or even out of place well into the common era. The world was full of the unexplained and mysterious; it seemed a reasonable bet that the world in which we lived was full of supernatural agents who influenced the world and our lives in ways beyond our control. The gods of all the surrounding cultures got married and had children, some of whom had relationships with mortal men and women. In verse 4 we learn that the name of these half-breed children, Nephilim. The Nephilim were great warriors and legendary heros. Verse 5 says that people were getting pretty wicked, and the badness level was particularly high for a world of our size. Some have suggested that one of the signs of this depravity is the tale of the Nephilim; that the mixing of supernatural and human stocks was an affront to the natural order. In this story, however, there is no indication that the Nephilim were anything other than important and noble characters.
The world was getting it's wicked on, and that was something that irritated and angered God. Verse 6 tells us that God was sorry to have made humanity, "it grieved him to his heart." God resolves to wipe out humanity along with everything else. Then God remembered that he kinda liked Noah (who we'll talk more about later).
The Game:
In campaign settings like Forgotten Realms, the gods and goddesses are near-by, active in the world and meddlesome in the affairs of mortals. In addition to the recognized gods and goddesses there are a host of other spiritual beings (extra-planar creatures). Like in our text today, a world brimming with such creatures would inevitable spawn races of hybrids: in game terms, the elemental Genassi, the Aasimar and their lower planes brethren the Tifling.
I have been playing an Aasimar in a long ranging campaign in the Forgotten Realms setting, so I for the first time have been thinking about these races and how I would run them as a DM. The first consideration is, how weird are they: Planetouched characters are not all identical, like mutt puppies the various lineages show up differently in different individuals. ECL is your friend (and while it may not be the player's best friend it can be helpful to them too) use the ECL to determine how unexpected or odd the character should seem to the general populace. A character with and ECL of 1 will seem much more tame to NPCs than would an ECL 3 or 4 character. The second consideration is, how many are there: Is your party made up of planetouched, are there two or three, just one? The more planetouched you have in the party the more of an acceptance problem they're going to have, but it's a fabulous opportunity to move play off the prime. However if there is only one character, chances are that even if the evil wizard could spell her to some other plane, you're not going to want to run a single player adventure while everybody else gets bored and looses interest.
A third consideration on a more adventure writing note: maybe it does mess with the natural order of things. An interesting story line might involve PC's being asked by one god to keep other planar or spiritual beings from fiddling with a particular population and making more planetouched. Another story line might see the characters protecting infant or childling "Nephilim" from angry or regretful deities.

DMing the Bible: This guy begot What's his name

2007-10-12T12:28:00.001-05:00

Introduction:
Ah, the begots...the foil of so many readers, the bane of study, the bore of the book, in this installment of DMing the Bible we're going to tackle all the first testament genealogies in one extravaganza blowout. While the modern reader may skip over these texts whenever they appear (and they appear with frequency), to the communities that handed done these texts first in oral then in written form they represented important, crucial information about who they were as a people and about their relationship to the land and to God.
The Text:
The genealogies in question begin at the end of Genesis 4, dominate Genesis 5, pick up again after the Noah narrative in Genesis 10 and 11, and are featured in Genesis 36, Exodus 6, Numbers 26, etc. Being able to claim connection to people in generations past imparted a bit of power to the present generation. The genealogies may well have been used by people in the ANE to establish legitimacy for office holders, or as a kind of calendar to track the when of seminal stories. They also held the people together, and, because so many places shared the names of important people in the lists of ancestors, held them to the land.
In the ANE, staying close to the land, having claim on it, was important not just for property reason. It was believed that gods had specific portfolios that applied not only to their domains (sun, fertility, harvest) but also to geographic regions and specific peoples. Therefore to lose one's connection to important ancestors meant not only losing claim on property or political office, but being disconnected from your god. Thus the genealogies in the First Testament carry not just political or chronographic information but theological information as well.
A prerequisite to any claim an individual could make power was a pedigree that demonstrated a god's involvement with your family. In the Bible this use of genealogies is used by the author of Chronicles. These books sought to show God's direct involvement with the history of the people of Israel, and the large sections devoted to lineages were included to show the deep connection between God, the land, and the people. This would have been especially important for the residents of Judea recovering from the shock of Babylonian Captivity.
The Game:
Biblical Genealogies kept the people of Israel connected to each other and to God. The people drew power (political, religious, personal) from the names of their ancestors. In the realm of D&D, player characters usually have to stand on their own two feet when it comes to claims of power. However I can think of a couple of ways to use this idea of pedigree= power.

Ancestral Knowledge: lately I have become miffed with Bardic Knowledge, it seems to grant the Bard too much information too easily without any requirement that the Bard be able to show a clear connection to the source. If however the player could roll an ancestral knowledge check, then the character will mystically recall some forgotten lore that was known by a relative, now deceased. Clearly this wouldn't be an option for changelings and orphans who don't do research to discover their roots.
V.I.F.: The very important family might be a feat that could be picked up first level, it would provide a +1 intimidate, +1 diplomacy, + 2 to two of the following Knowledge : Local, History, Nobility, Religion. When playing in the ancestral stomping ground these bonuses are increased by 1.
Blood of Heros: This would be particularly the case for characters that wield an ancestral weapon, Characters who can trace themselves back to a particular hero gain bonuses in combat that make their opponent more likely to surrender or run away. This trait only works if the bad guys know anything about the legend of the heroic ancestor.

Alignment: another view

2007-10-11T12:45:00.000-05:00

Not long ago another member of our role playing group and contributor/co-founder of stupidranger.com, Vanir, submitted an article about alignment (you can read it here). Vanir's article is well reasoned and entertainingly written, but I simply disagree. As a player and as a DM I find the alignment system in D&D to be helpful and enjoyably complex.
As a game system, D&D allows for many types and levels of play. Some of the most basic levels focus on broad and sweeping categories, campaign plots are simple, easily discerned (though perhaps challenging to carry out), and require little in the way of difficult choices. This is where many of us began as players and DMs. As we age, and in theory mature, we see that the world is not nearly as simple as we once thought. I call this the DC-Marvel shift, but that's the subject of another article. If this new understanding of the world doesn't send us into escapism, we are likely to include this more nuanced side of life in our role playing and in our characters.
Nuanced Characters rely more on shades of meaning than on broad categories. Some would say that the alignment system prevents nuanced characters. I say the way some people play alignments didn't mature with the rest of them. It's not the system (remember the system allows for many levels of play), it's the people. Consider this: in our real life world, many people rely solely on the good-evil spectrum when identifying someone's personality. In the D&D universe one would never consider having only one alignment.
There are many many ways to be Lawful, Ethically Neutral, Chaotic, Evil, Morally Neutral, and Good. When building a back-story I would urge players to discern carefully the alignment position, to determine what about this character's philosophy of life leads them to this or that alignment. A player might play six Neutral Good characters in a row and they might all have slightly different moral priorities. A character's alignment is a tool to be used for better role-playing; it is a precision instrument, not a sledgehammer. Thinking critically about a character's alignment before the game even begins can go a long way towards warding off metagaming and broad performances.
For my part, I hope that alignment sticks around for a long long time, and I also hope that the core rule books remain sufficiently vague on their behalf.

Also Check Out: Hero Builder's Guidebook. This work contains helpful chapters about adding nuance to the character creation process and demonstrates beautifully the "there are many ways to play each alignment thing" I was trying to describe above.

New Irking trend

2007-10-07T09:43:00.000-05:00

Well not so much a new trend, as one that has recently begun to irk me. Churches that don't update their websites with important information regarding things like service times.
Carson and I have been trying to attend St. Paul, a UCC church in Pekin, IL for several weeks ...mostly it was our own faults that we hadn't attended, but the one Sunday we have our act together I checked the website at least six times (so there would be no mistakes). The site (an official site, as far as I could tell) said the church had two services one at 8:15 and one at 10:45 with church school in between.

We arrived at the church in plenty of time for the 10:45 service only to discover that the church has changed to having a 9:00 service with church school to follow. We snuck out of the church so as to avoid having to explain the problem. I don't feel people need to call to check out information that is published online on an official site.

Yes, I know that by in large church websites are maintained be volunteer amateurs. Yes I also know that if we had sucked it up and talked to someone at the church they would have been made aware that two of the most coveted church goers, the young couple first time visitor, had been unable to worship with them because their website has bad intel. Ouchy.

We still plan to attend worship at St. Paul's but I can imagine others who would simply move on to another congregation that demonstrated an understanding of how people my age seek out information.

DMing the Bible: Party Murder

2007-10-05T11:29:00.000-05:00

Introduction:
While much is made in popular theology about Adam and Eve and the incident in the garden, the story does not, in fact, introduce human sinfulness into the Biblical narrative. The story we're talking about this week does. In this issue of DMing the Bible we will look at the story of Cain and Abel in greater depth and then talk some about party relationships.
The Text:
Genesis 4 continues with the Yahwist account (the j-source) of the family of Adam and Eve, this time focusing not on the parents but on the first two sons Cain and Abel. Cain is the first born, and shares in Adam's work with plants and agriculture; the second son Abel keeps the livestock. This is a fairly typical distribution of labor for inhabitants of the ANE.
Though God has not laid out a system of recommended giving (as will happen, at great length, in Exodus), Cain and Abel both come to make a gift to the Lord. The both bring gifts from their particular trade. Now when I was a kid in Church School, this story was illustrated and told with great frequency. The story and the pictures always showed Cain, almost Neanderthal in appearance, carelessly dropping of the rotten remainder of his crop (which were usually illustrated as new world crops like tomatoes and corns, but I digress). Clean, blond, somewhat frail, almost radiant Abel comes skipping along with the very first lambs of his flock. The suggestion in these tellings was that Cain and his offerings were clearly inferior to Abel and the offering of the lambs. The story doesn't paint such a clear picture. Abel did bring from the first of his flock, but the text merely tells us that Cain's offerings came from plants. Further it suggests that Cain cam first to make an offering, and Abel's gift was made in imitation. This is not all that surprising when one considers the meaning of their names: Cain calls to mind human creativity, Abel means "shadowy" and "nothing."
It is not clear why God accepts the Abel's offering and not Cain's. Biblical scholars and interpreters through the ages have offered several possible reasons: Abel's sacrifice really was better than Cain's, in later Israelite ritual animal sacrifices are preferred to vegetable, God favors the younger sons in most Biblical tales. The reason is less important to the story than simply that things have been tipped off kilter.
Cain is understandably upset, God has chosen his younger brother over him. God talks to Cain suggesting that the door to acceptance is not yet closed; look at the wording in verse 7, "If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well , sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it." Cain has an opportunity to do well, but God does give warning about what a bad choice will bring. The way sin is described in this story it is lying in wait on the doorstep like an lone roller skate looking for chance to trip you when you're already late. God holds out the possibility that Cain doesn't have to fall for it, and if he doesn't the world would be set right.
As we know it doesn't happen, Cain lures Abel out to the fields and kills him. From this point on in the Bible there in no sibling relationship that is free of tension.God asks Cain where Abel is, and Cain responds with the classic line "I don't know; am I my brother's keeper?" Cain, who had turned the disappointment of his relationship with God outward and onto his brother, is now claiming that Abel and Abel's life and accomplishments mean nothing to him -- that they have no bearing in his life. God knows too well where Abel is and what the consequence or Cain's activity will be. In this case, God is not the punishing agent. The ground is turned against Cain, and so he can no longer stay and be a farmer. Cain says the punishment is too heavy, leaving the land he knew, and being removed from the land meant separation from God. Cain was afraid anybody who met him would kill him (we'll talk about this when we get to Sodom and Gomorrah) but God makes it so that people who meet Cain will know he's connected and cannot be killed indiscriminately.
The Game:
PC parties are often strange things. They are cobbled together of different characters with different skill sets, different races, different values, and different gods (sometimes even different pantheons). Yet this group are not just traveling companions who may bid one another adieu at any time, they are supposed to be a team. Teams in general can pull together and work towards a common goal. All these differences can lead to conflict in a party, and that tension has to work itself out eventually. As a DM you have a chance to provide opportunities for inner-party conflicts to be worked out in such a way that the characters are closer at the conclusion. Here are some suggestions:

Well that's one thing we've got: The chaotic evil fighter and the lawful good cleric can't agree on much, but they can agree that the demons that are taking over the town are bad. Keeping players focused on places where most everybody agrees might help to bridge some of the gaps in the team building process.
We call that Improved Critical: Each character has a place to shine (assuming a well balanced party). One way to keep characters from each other's throats is making sure that each character gets a chance to show their usefulness to the party and their competence in general. This is particularly helpful in getting evil characters not to kill off the good ones.
All Aboard! Express to Therapy: Yes, railroading players is not a good thing, it frequently backfires and annoys players. But, if you were to do it in a limited way...like in dreams or in the dungeon of a mad, but beneficent wizard. It may give a player character or two a chance to work out whatever needs working out. Dream sequences work particularly well between sessions.

They went and killed each other anyway. Well, don't you feel a little like God. What happens now?

Res and repeat: D&D can at times make death seem cheap; for moderate level parties True Res is not that difficult to come by. This solution gets your plot back on track but ultimately sets things up for a bigger confrontation later.
Time to Depart: The dead character stays dead or doesn't, but either way the killing character(s) are cast from the party. Your players can introduce new PC's as you see fit and now you have a handy new villain to reintroduce at some later date. The exiled PC's player may be helped to stay involved in the game if you allow a little input about what that character does next.

Quiz results are fun

2007-10-02T09:44:00.000-05:00

My Inner D&D character:

After analyzing your answers with state-of-the-art medieval fantastic psychology profiling tools, Dungeon Mastering is confident that your inner D&D character is a Chaotic Good Halfling Rogue / Bard!

Thanks to Stupid Ranger for pointing this quiz out. You may go here to take it yourself.

All in all I am not that surprised with this outcome. Look a little later on for an article about alignment -- in my way of thinking I usually lie a little more neutral than chaotic. I couldn't point specifically to where I am like a Halfling, but it doesn't strike me as totally wrong. The least surprising part of these results is the Rogue thing. There is something in me that seems to gravitate that way. The last three characters I have played were rogue-like characters (even the cleric I'm currently playing has a prestige class that allows her to fill in as the party's rogue).

Heavy Cream

2007-09-28T09:44:00.000-05:00

Carson and I like to dine out at a local pub that does a good hamburger, a very good potato coddle, and a decent full breakfast (I like the coddle and the hamburger, Carson is mad for the full breakfast) (yes we do know what's in black pudding, your point?). The ambiance is good, it sits right on the river, and they serve coke products.

What they don't do well is dessert. I'm not really sure why, but they routinely miss the mark. One of their best, most consistent desserts is their bread pudding. I like it in the traditional way served with heavy cream (they will also serve it with ice cream). The last time I was in, I ordered the bread pudding with heavy cream. When the dessert arrived it was clear the poor skinny waif had no idea what heavy cream was because instead of pudding with a bit of high-fat dairy I was served a bowl full of milk with a little bit of pudding. She had clearly understood "heavy cream" as "heavy on the cream."

It took me the better part of the night to figure out why she had drowned the bread pudding in milk; when I finally did, I couldn't stop laughing. Now when one of us misunderstands the other Carson and I will look over and say "heavy cream." We can't help but laugh. But seriously what has happened to our culinary traditions when waitresses don't know what heavy cream is? I despair sometimes.

DMing the Bible: Table Talk

2007-09-26T13:34:00.000-05:00

Introduction:
Though this series not intended to be a verse by verse commentary, this third installment will focus on the third chapter in Genesis. In the first two chapters the world and all its fullness was created. The human species received gender and gave us our first cast of characters. Chapter three continues the distinctive j-source narrative as it explains why humans live in the desert instead of the lush garden setting for which God had created us.
The Text:
The first verse of chapter three introduces one further character, the serpent. The word used here is really garden variety snake, but in the Ancient Near East (ANE) the snake was viewed as a creature of supernatural quality. Because a snake will from time to time shed its skin and appear rejuvenated, they were believed to be immortal. Let's take a minute to talk about the serpent as it functions in this tale. I believe if we are to take this tale as a proto-"just so story," it would be inappropriate to draw the character of the serpent out as an allegorical figure. This is simply a character in a fable, and in the rest of our lives we do not need to identify talking animals in fables as agents or personifications of evil. The serpent approaches the woman and engages her in a conversation about the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil
In Genesis 2:16-17, God explains to the human creature that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is off limits for eating. By the time Eve and the serpent discuss the fruit of said tree, she has constructed a second layer of defensive legislation that prohibits not just eating the fruit of the tree but also touching it. The serpent suggest that it is not true that eating the fruit will kill you, but that the reason God gave humanity this rule is to keep you from being like gods yourself. Indeed Eve eats the fruit and gives some to Adam who also eats (though without first debating the question as Eve had done), and it turns out that they didn't die. The realized all kinds of things about themselves and their situation.
God, in the habit of walking in the garden, finds the people and gets Adam to tattle on Eve. In the punishment phase of the trial God makes the world as people living in the ANE would find very familiar: snakes slither about and engender fear and loathing from people, pregnancy is difficult and dangerous for mother and child, the genders are not equal, and agriculture is difficult and thankless. As a kicker at the end of the story we discover that the knowledge of good and evil did make humanity like the gods, to protect them from immortality, God must send them away from the garden. And that's a story about why the world is the way it is.
The Game:
If this story were a game session, the plot places PC's (Adam and Eve) in a position where through conversation they must decide between competing claims of two NPC's. As a DM, I love running this kind of session. I enjoy the side of D&D that encourages people to think through problems and decide upon courses of action. This kind of play demands that people stay more or less in character during play; it certainly means that players need to avoid "table talk."
I define table talk thusly: conversation that sounds like it might just be happening in character. For example anything that would prompt a DM to exclaim "Did you really say THAT?!?!?" or "You did WHAT??" is probably table talk. Here are some solutions.

Character "voice":The group with whom I play includes only one or two players routinely use an alternate voice for their characters, and so they have fairly adroitly avoided having jokes the make wind up in the mouths of their characters. This doesn't mean of course everybody has to play with crazy accents or affected speech impediments, but it may mean that a character may have a particular phrase that only gets used in character particularly at the head of a dialogue block.
The White Flag: My husband, Carson, is the most likely of our group to wander afoul of table talk. He likes to play out alternatives to the scene during the session (alternatives that would probably have horrible horrible consequences). Our group has basically agreed to let Carson say whatever he wants, with the knowledge that it will be counted as "in-character" unless he holds aloft a piece of white paper set aside just for this task. Whatever Carson says when the paper is up doesn't count. This is a rule that we only apply to one person, but it works for us given the nature of the group.

DMing the Bible: Gender Games

2007-09-21T14:19:00.000-05:00

Introduction:
Last time we looked at the beginning of the Bible and the first of the creation stories. This time I thought we might look at the second of these stories. The first creation account is poetic, almost liturgical, which is appropriate as the first story is believed to come from a scripturally forebear known as the "priestly source" or "p-source." The account that is featured in chapter 2 is drawn from what Christian Biblical Scholars call the Yahwist tradition or the "j-source" (because when Germans transliterate Hebrew the letter 'yod' becomes a 'j'). The account is more personal, a little more fable-like, and the one the one that is easier to put on Sunday School felt boards.

The Text:
God again creates the world out of an extant collection of matter. In the first tale the material was described as water; this time the land is described as barren and desolate for lack of moisture. God makes a man-creature, a dust-thing, as one of the first creative acts. Notice I didn't say man; the word in Hebrew is most closely related to the word for dirt. In translation, the word is sometimes rendered human or human-being; what is most important to keep in mind is that until we get to verse 23 "the man" does not indicate a male gendered person.

God places this creation in a garden where all sorts of fruits and vegetables veritably spring out of the ground (can you tell this account was written by desert subsistence farmers?). The garden is feed by the four great rivers that provided water for much of ancient Mesopotamia.

God gives the creature the task of managing the garden. God decides that being alone on the earth is not the way life should be for the creature. God makes all the animals just to see if the a match for the creature. God brings each animal not just for a blind date, but also so that the human can name all the other creatures. God and the human run through every animal, but no partner was found. Male and female are created when God splits the creature in two (check out Rabbinic interpretations of this story for very specific ideas about how the split took place).

The Game:
Most games of Dungeons and Dragons use as backdrops richly detailed worlds that have at their hearts the late middle ages or Renaissance Europe. This was not a time well noted for sweeping equality between the genders. Truth be told our own time is not known for sweeping equality between the genders. The designers of the third (and later) edition D&D took great pains to distribute gendered language evenly making it clear the they were trying to describe a world where men and women were equal partners in the waging of war and the building of civilizations. My interpretation of the text (Genesis 2:4b-25) suggests that in God's world design the genders were also supposed to be equal partners

With all of that said, it is very difficult to fully eradicate gender roles from role playing sessions. Here are some suggestions:
1. Watch your NPC's: Are your bar keeps always wenches? Is the head honcho of the land always the King, noble Lord, or Herr Mayor? Try writing against the period stereotype. If you use pre-generated materials see if they are balanced--most materials can be gender swapped on the fly (just give the physical description a look-see first, and tweak as needed
2. Consider the options: If there is simply no way to even the actual distribution of males to females, check out the wide spectrum of masculinity and femininity. Is it possible the Master at Arms is a gentle and nurturing man? Can the mayor's socialite wife lead the local athletic efforts?
3. Roll with it: Be unambiguous about the values of a society that does not hold either males or females in high regard. Use the tensions of unjust gender roles as a plot point or opportunity for players to shine in problem solving or role playing.

Neil Gaiman's Stardust

2007-09-21T07:06:00.000-05:00

Carson and I went to see Stardust at the theater last night. He had been reluctant to go, having not read the book. I had been anticipating it for months before it was released. I was also a little apprehensive. The seeming over-emphasis in the publicity on the characters played by DeNiro and Pfeiffer concerned me. I was worried that the transition from novel to film would render a delicate and nuanced plot into a broad comedy or stereotypical witch and wizard fantasy (not of course that I mind either type of film in general). As we purchased our tickets the manager of the theater gave it a raving reveiw, saying that he had purhaps enjoyed the movie even more than he enjoyed the book.
Now, I don't have to tell any of you how exceptionally rare it is that a movie holds even a candle to a book let alone shine as brightly. Stardust however both as film and novel told a charming and sensitive story. I would recomend this film to just about anybody.

DMing the Bible: When God Began Creating

2007-09-20T14:31:00.001-05:00

Introduction:
For our first outing into scripture I thought we might begin at the beginning. The beginnings of the Genesis (a book the by its very name talks about beginning) are not in fact believed to be the oldest parts of Scripture (that honor probably lies in the text of Job), but they are of course the most foundational. Humanity has been for time immemorial as concerned with what came before as with what happens next. Large portions of the oral tradition are dedicated to describing the beginnings of thing, and the traditions that contributed to the formation of the Bible were no exception. In Genesis we have two different stories about the making of the world.
The Text:
Genesis 1:1-2:4 is the first of these accounts, and the one I'd like to use as springboard this week. The text as it was written in Hebrew carries a bit more ambiguity that does any one English translation. For example "Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'arets." Can satisfactorily be translated "When God began to create the heavens and the earth", "In the beginning when God created the heaven and the earth", or "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." In this account of the creation though there was matter already present there was still the need for divine creative endeavor to render either heavens or earth as fully created.
The matter that existed prior to creation was all jumbled up and God set about making things better (or good if you prefer). God sends the divine breath, or wind, or Spirit out over the world as it stood and separates light from dark, rain and clouds from terrestrial waters, water from dry land, and seasons from one another. Once proper order had been established the earth could bring forth plants and animals of every sort. After all of this God says (to somebody, but we're left to wonder who) lets make women and men in our image, lets make humankind like us in this natural world. Having done all these things God declares it all very good and takes a day to reflect on the labor of creation.
The Game:
This seems like a lovely text to keep as a conversation partner when considering what was once called the ethical alignments (i.e. Law and Chaos). While it may be argued that the struggle between the moral alignments (Good and Evil) lies at the heart of the majority of global conflicts in fantasy settings, it is not to say that it is the only way it has to be. The campaign setting of Dragonlance, for example, features the lawfully aligned people of Krynn, good and evil alike, battling against the forces of chaos.
It is fairly safe to say that God, as described in Genesis, is operating in a Lawful world view. However unlike many constructed worlds in role playing, there is not a diametrically opposed deity featured in the story. The chaos just is, and God's effort on the behalf of order are not explicitly opposed.
As a DM, it is sometimes tempting to make things tidy and symmetrical for your players. Lawful paladins find natural enmity with the chaotic Robber-king. Having an interesting villain lends face to the forces of disquietude that have been raising the anxiety of local town halls or noble lords. What about the times when things just are? While I would not suggest making a villain-less plot line the major feature of your next campaign, it may be interesting to engage lawful characters of mid to high levels in rectifying chaos caused by a world/ plane's natural process.

DMing the Bible: the beginning

2007-09-20T13:15:00.000-05:00

Apologia:
As the series title has indubitably raised anxiety in a few of you let me first of all spend some time talking about Role Play (in particular D&D), religion, and civility. As my user profile notes I am both a minister of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and an enthusiast of role playing games (btw the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) is a denomination of withing the wider religion of Christianity Check this out for more info). I see no inherent contradiction between the two in much the same way Christian Cubs fans see no basic conflict in their love of God and their enjoyment of Wrigley Field and baseball.
This section is called Apologia because I want to give an explanation I hope will persuade those who are uncertain. Though wittier people than I have placed fingers to keyboard as apologists of role playing to the Christian community, I would like to throw in my two cents. As a Christian I believe that in the person of Jesus, God redeems the world. Reconciling all things through the power of God's amazing love. This activity of reconciliation and redemption is lived out on both the individual and the cosmic scale. On the individual scale God calls people away from broken lives and into new a life and an experience of unparalleled wholeness. Nothing in the experience of a healthy role-playing group damages a person's ability to live such a wholly holy life.
Children, listen to me; if you take part in a group where you do not feel you are safe to be the person you are called to be, if you find yourself in the midst of a group of people who will not accept you as a unique and lovely Child of God-- I don't care where you met these people: at church, at role-playing, at school --get away from them post-haste. People like that are not pursuing a hobby, worshiping God, or attending to their studies they are being abusive. Call it what it is and find yourself a new group with whom to hang.

Methodology:
Here on out I will be looking at Biblical texts with the eyes of a Biblical Scholar and as a Dungeon Master. I will select these texts at whim. I have in mind to talk some about character classes of all types, alignments, play techniques, campaign settings, plot devices, and combat mechanics (oh it's in there, and I won't even have to stretch). Biblical Quotes will come from the New Revised Standard Version, and role playing materials will come mostly from core rulebooks of Dungeons and Dragons version 3.5. You may find it handy to have access to these materials.

Return of the bride of Where I've Been

2007-09-20T13:10:00.000-05:00

I know that in general blogs only are useful if they are updated from time to time. This, however has been one of the most serious weak points of any of the blogs yours truly has attempted to begin.
During the Summer months I was away working in a local congregation as their substitute senior minister. It was an amazing experience, and one that I know will ride close in my heart for a long while to come.
I am back now...and Wry Juxtaposition has received a face-lift in honor of a new series I am beginning in just a few minutes that will hopefully be a weekly feature of this blog

Hair Cut?

2007-05-26T11:08:00.001-05:00

I'm thinking about cutting my hair. Click here for some samples.

I dreamt I died last night

2007-05-25T15:38:00.001-05:00

I had a pretty rough time of it last night. In my first dream a woke up before a home invader could rape me and in the third I dreamt I drove a 15 passenger van off a bridge and into the Ohio River.

The second dream had snakes and I woke up whimpering.

What's worst about this dream where I drove off the bridge is that after the van left the bridge the dream held in a steady cam wide angle of the bridge as some cars stopped so the people could look down and out of frame to where the van went into the river and other cars continued on. After about twenty seconds of this I thought, "I think I died." But the dream didn't end and I began to freak out that this was what actually happened after you died. Of course, freaking out is what broke the dream and I woke up. It was 6:15, and I decided not to try and get any more sleep.

Where I've been 2

2007-05-24T08:30:00.001-05:00

I was away a while ago, geographically, away from the internet more or less, but I've been here at home for over a week now. I seem to have been away from you, my dear imaginary readers. I wonder, really, who reads this. I got nothing. I've been listening to David Sedaris read Dress Your Family in Denim and Corduroy. His dry simple delivery the nonchalance over the important ...the crystal clear observation of the mundane. It was what I had always hoped for a blog, or book, or conversation, or sermon, but realize now that I want it too much to achieve, crushing really. I too had wanted to tell a story about nothing but in such a way as the story was quite more than nothing it would become a statement about American life and the emptiness of being modern. The big things I've been doing, attending funerals, traveling across the country, preaching, interviews, employment there are many stories to tell, but my heart for telling them has departed.

I dreamt last night that Jamie Eubanks and I went grocery shopping. We were living in an apparent police state, and Jamie had been wanted by the state police, but had tricked them into arresting somebody else (now that I type it, that's really horrible). He seemed uninterested in produce; I bought limes because my father was coming to town, oranges and orange rinds  (for the zest I guess, and they were so much cheaper than the whole orange), candied fruit for a fruitcake, hot dog buns because Jamie had eaten the last of them in a post-church camp frenzy (that's the explanation he gave me, said frenzy did not occur in the dream) I awoke as I was considering whether or not I needed to buy eggs. strange dream.

Where I've been

2007-05-08T07:07:00.000-05:00

I haven't posted in the last couple of weeks, and mostly I have no real excuse. The only thing I could offer is that I have been to Louisville twice in the last six weeks, which at 6 and a half hours one way is saying something.

This week I am with my friend Amanda during the funeral for her grandmother and a few days afterward. Last time Amanda and I finally finished the format for the Bible Study we've been working on all year.

I may not post again until I get back home to Peoria, but until then at least y'all aren't in the dark.

Slow and Steady

2007-05-03T14:47:00.001-05:00

It occurs to me that this expression we have "slow and steady wins the race" is really rather silly. Slow and Steady definitely beats "fast and faltering," but what really wins the race is fast and steady. Could it be that when we teach our children to be slow and steady we are in effect training them to be stoic, stolid losers?

So where is Peoria?

2007-04-12T11:33:00.001-05:00

While I am looking for a church job, I am also on the search for a secular job, and so I have career builder email me links to job postings. These are the towns that Careerbuilder.com thinks are around Peoria:

Davenport, IA: 98 miles from Peoria
Warrenville: 152 miles from Peoria
Lisle: 142 miles from Peoria
Saint Charles: 154 miles from Peoria
West Chicago: 146 miles from Peoria
Carol Stream: 157 miles from Peoria
Elgin: 174 miles from Peoria
Burr Ridge: 137 miles from Peoria
Streamwood: 159 miles from Peoria
Oakbrook Terrace: 144 miles from Peoria
Hanover Park: 156 miles from Peoria
Elmhurst: 157 miles from Peoria
Franklin Park: 153 miles from Peoria
Rolling Meadows: 165 miles from Peoria
Oak Park: 159 miles from Peoria
Schaumburg: 164 miles from Peoria
Niles: 169 miles from Peoria
Northbrook: 173 miles from Peoria
Evanston: 168 miles from Peoria
Glenveiw: 171 miles from Peoria
Skokie: 171 miles from Peoria

All of these with the exception of Davenport (which is in Iowa) are suburbs or encapsulated cities in and around Chicago. It is very vexing; especially since from time to time they actually list jobs that I might have a shot at.

Another Quiz from the boys

2007-04-12T10:30:00.001-05:00

What Be Your Nerd Type? Your Result: Literature Nerd   Does sitting by a nice cozy fire, with a cup of hot tea/chocolate, and a book you can read for hours even when your eyes grow red and dry and you look sort of scary sitting there with your insomniac appearance? Then you fit this category perfectly! You love the power of the written word and it's eloquence; and you may like to read/write poetry or novels. You contribute to the smart people of today's society, however you can probably be overly-critical of works. It's okay. I understand.
Drama Nerd
Gamer/Computer Nerd
Social Nerd
Artistic Nerd
Musician
Science/Math Nerd
Anime Nerd
What Be Your Nerd Type? Quizzes for MySpace

Big Fish story

2007-04-10T09:30:00.001-05:00

Carson and I have this on going fact, truth, meaning debate. Last night we watched Big Fish (2003) which brought this right up to the surface. In the film the point isn't whether the stories are factual or not (though Carson and the son spent the whole time doing this very thing), the point is the way lives are given meaning by the way we tell the stories. In that these are the stories that tell of something important in the life of a man, they are true. It's a nice bonus (for me) that they had some grounding in fact.

In this debate, discussion, argument, discourse, language is becoming more and more an issue. Finding different words to use so as not to confuse the other is quiet difficult. But we muddle through. It's all we can do.

Ok so now I know why, but I still don't think we should

2007-04-10T09:22:00.001-05:00

For an explanation of children and Palm Sunday click here

Still (a word I am finding I over use) perhaps it is time for us all to move on.

A New (to me) Favorite Hymn Writer

2007-04-05T12:32:00.001-05:00

Oh there are many of course, and so many writers of favorite hymns whose names are lost to history. There are a few though, who seem to do no wrong in the field of hymn writing. Bren Wren has long led that pack in my opinion, but a name I have just added to the list id Thomas H. Troeger.

Troeger is the wordsmith who gave the world "A Cheering Chanting Dizzy Crowd" (my new favorite Palm Sunday hymn), "God Made from One Blood" (a good hymn for many occasions), "How Long, O God, How Long" (a meditation on loss in short meter), and "Source and Sovereign, Rock and Cloud" (a superb hymn about not pigeon-holing God). This is just a sample, and only a few of his contributions to The Chalice Hymnal (my denomination's hymnal). Look this guy up. Use his hymns; sing new songs!

My new favorite addicting Game

2007-04-02T19:12:00.001-05:00

http://addictinggames.com/fantan.html

can't read any of the instructions, but it's really easy to figure out what's going on. And I just love the animation when the yellow player-thing loses.

heh heh, Dice

2007-04-02T09:32:00.001-05:00

You are the rare, the overlooked, yet incredibly useful dodecahedron: the d12. You are a creative, romantic soul. You often act without thinking, but make up for your lack of plans with plenty of heart. You easily solve problems that stump others, but your answers tend to put you into even deeper trouble. You write long, detailed backgrounds for all your characters, and are most likely to dress up as one or get involved in cos-play. You can be silly at times and are easily distracted by your own day dreams, but are, at the end of the day, someone who can be depended on.

Take the quiz: http://dicepool.com/catalog/quiz.php

Short post about wii

2007-04-01T17:14:00.000-05:00

how fun is that!!! we went to a video game party last night and played on all these systems. The DDR was fun (I danced along with Jen, Ryan's wife, she did better than me, but we were both pretty bad), but it was the wii that got me. My goodness that was fun. I think the most amusing thing, though, would have been to watch me trying to box. It turns out I'm good at the hitting sports. I'm really old on my fitness age though (71, eek).

Palm Sunday

2007-04-01T09:10:00.000-05:00

Today is Palm Sunday, which is a weird weird holy day in the Christian Church (by which I mean the one holy catholic and apostolic, to borrow language from the Nicene Creed). In many ways each Sunday is a lifting of the Lenten burden. If you are fasting, you don't fast on Sundays --etc. Palm Sunday which remembers the triumphant entry into Jerusalem is a little more festive than other Sundays in Lent. The difficulty is, for me at least, how does one celebrate with the crowds who welcomed Jesus without flashing forward to the end of the week and remembering the behavior of these same people or recalling why this is holy week at all.

I think about the disciples and how pumped they must have been it would have felt like all the hard work and suffering they had gone through for the last three years was now finally paying off. I think about the crowd, so many of them in from the surrounding countryside, what it must have felt like to have been a first time visitor in Jerusalem for passover. I think about the way that every year or so somebody would come along promising to rid Israel of the Roman Occupation/ restore the splendor of the old Kingdom. I think about all of these people looking to Jesus to give them something, some kind of hope, having all these expectations of him.

As a Christian in this modern era, I interpret the observation of Palm Sunday in this way: We stand with the disciples and the members of the crowd. We too are among people who are looking for Jesus to give us something, to change something about us, to give us some hope, to make the world a better place, to make us rich, to smite our enemies, to agree with our judgment of others, whatever. We have all have things that we want to project onto Jesus, ways in which we want to classify and pigeonhole him. Palm Sunday reminds us of our place in the massive crowd of people who still have room to grow in our understanding of who/ what Jesus was, and what he was up to.

To that end I have some suggestions about changing the way we celebrate Palm Sunday. Let's stop making Palm Sunday the day where we parade the children around the church. It's not scripturally accurate anyway. Let's say words about the ways we seek to define Jesus rather than letting him define us (I like responsive litanies for this). Finally we should refrain from preaching holy week and certainly refrain from preaching Easter on Palm Sunday and just preach Palm Sunday.

Last Night I dreamt I returned to Memphis

2007-03-31T08:54:00.000-05:00

Actually, I'm there often in my dreams; I just like the line. No last night had had three pretty good ones.

1) While out for a walk in the neighborhood where I grew up I noticed that the smoothie/coffee bar on the corner appeared to have gone out of business. I noted to my brother, John, that it was unfortunate because it had nice ambiance and a good feel. I tried to predict what would take its place. I voted for one of those modern head shops. It could have jewelry, incense, t-shirts with naughty sayings, music, home (mother's basement) decor, absurd shoes, and the like.
John got tired of the conversation and announced that he was going to go to lunch, but we had to change. So we went home and John changed into colonial period clothes, which were very dashing. I was having trouble getting into my colonial period clothes. John implied that it was because I was too large a woman for the period (which just isn't true, there have always been fat women), but I pointed out that it was the petticoats I was having trouble with. He jot mad and left and I changed back into my jeans. This is the point at which the dream becomes weird.
Because of the zombies outside, I had to be very careful as I walked to the campus of the boarding school. I also had to be careful because I had neglected to put on shoes. Turns out this school was a boys school and the smaller kids were all quite frightened. The older boys were just mean, but they thought they knew of a place where there wouldn't be zombies. SO we begin walking. I goof and imply to one of the boys that because he died as a character in a Stephen King novel he was pretty much a goner here. That freaked him out and so I had to take it all back. At one point we had to descend into a storm drain, it was handy though, because some one had cached a rather lot of supplies (including shoes). All the shoes were too big for me, but one of the pairs were canvas tennis shoes which I could wrench down pretty tight so that it basically fit.
We walked out of the drain into a snowed over urban landscape, somebody had plowed the roads but we had to walk in the roadway because the side walks were clogged up. While we were underground the zombies had learned to drive, so walking in the road was not the safest of all the options. Meanwhile a pregnant zombie had crept up behind us. She blamed us for the death of her baby (totally unfair charge, her baby died when she became on one the undead, which we had nothing to do with). She came around the front of me and I tried to convince her to be happy instead with a pizza box I had found by the road; it diverted her for a while, but then she came after me again so I ran back towards a back hoe. Two more zombies came at me from the side, and I tried to take them all out with the shovel of the hoe, but it was frozen stuck. I woke up, and had a hell of a time going back to sleep.

2) I was a counselor at a summer camp that was being run by Admiral Adama. The seemed to be a serial killer on the loose. Also all these teens were in spiritual crisis, so taking a break from hunting down the killer I delivered a kick-ass sermon about using more metaphors for God than just the disapproving Father. It was beautiful and poetic, and such a sweet speech that when I was done Adama dumped a cooler of Gatorade on me. I then had to find a way to modestly walk to the back of the field for my jacket as I had been wearing a white shirt. When I got to the back of the field I put on my jacket and looked up into one of the trees. There was a kid up there hanging in the tree. I let out a Hollywood worthy scream. Adama came over, his son was very upset (not the son from the show, younger like a really young James Franco) because he had really liked the kid in the tree. Adama, spotting a roll of scotch double-sided tape, called up for the kid to come down and stop fooling around. He explained that the kid had been seeking some attention. We didn't find the real killer because I woke up.

3) The third one is very very long, and a bit disjointed so I'll pass on telling it. But it had to do with travel and planes and hotels and airports, It was crazy. Trust me.

Things I thought of while in the tub

2007-03-30T09:42:00.000-05:00

Why don't they make a device for your bathroom that shows you when your hot water heater is done doing its thing? If you had that, you wouldn't turn the water on until it was ready (premature hot water requests slow down the heater, don't they?).

There should be a thing like a poncho with snaps around the border that you could attach to the tub to make a warm air tent. It could be made of two layers of stretchy terry cloth separated by a thin flexible layer of plastic and have hand holes. It would keep cold air out, warm air in, and would enable book-safe bathtub reading. They could market different shapes: rectangle, round, and oval; they you would pick the best match based on the tub. The snaps would attach to the tub with some sort of water-proof, but non-permanent adhesive, so that you could move them if you weren't happy with their placement.

What I read this month

2007-03-29T14:15:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth Lowell: The Wrong Hostage
Jayne Ann Krentz: White Lies
Kasey Michaels: High Heels and Homicide
Steve Martini: The Jury, abridged on audiobook (abridged audiobooks is a rant for another day)
Simon R. Green: Hex and the City
Christopher Moore: Coyote Blue

books that I have read but can't remember if it was this month or last month
Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman: Good Omens
Matthew Pearl: The Dante Club

and finally a book I continue to work on, having been unable thus far to finish it.
Susanne Clark: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel

Second Life Rant

2007-03-29T14:05:00.000-05:00

So I signed on to second life this week. Then I signed of, deleted my account and uninstalled the software. Why? It turns out I am just hopelessly naive. Here is the response to the question I gave the people who maintain Second Life.

When I signed up with second life, I expected to find a global community working to perfect cyber-civilization, eschewing the divisions of class and rank, and endeavoring to reach the highest achievement in philosophy, discourse, aesthetics, and harmony. Instead I found a tawdry and perverted landscape dominated by casinos that were little more than fronts for pyramid schemes and spam baiting and pathetic sex clubs which seem to be the only place brand new members can find employment within SL. I was saddened, then disgusted, and finally disillusioned, which is why I am canceling my account and uninstalling the client.

So in the end I lost a couple day's productivity, had to abandon an email address I had used since college, and found that some small part of my optimism had died. Thanks Second Life, for nothing.

Yeah I'm guilty

2007-03-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

Already letting the blog slip a bit, oh well. I'm back. It was a pretty busy week. Last Sunday I was supplying in Cuba, IL at a really nice, friendly small town church. The sermon wasn't all I was hoping it would be, but the service was quite a nice one. Then Tuesday morning I had an ill-begotten interview with local company Multi-Ad seeking what's know in the ministry as tent-making work (after Paul's secular work so that he could pay his own way in ministry and not be a burden on the Corinthian church)(though of course he did accept money from the Philippians, so read into that what you will). Tuesday evening it was my turn to bring a sermon to the area church Lenten worship series. The sermon was a really good one, but would have been better if I hadn't stumbled once or twice on delivery. Then things calmed down a bit; I was declined for the job. We Role played on Friday night until we were all too tired to see straight (except for Carson and Matt who were still on whatever kind of high the two of them experience at role playing, I can only hope they're not like that at work). Sunday I was back at Cuba for the second Sunday of a two week engagement. This time the sermon went a good deal better, which is nice, though Carson thought there were two sermons in what I was preaching (though of course they were a different two than the ones I would have picked out). Boy this is a long paragraph.

I've decided to start keeping a journal that is not online as well, to track what I've done during the day and what kind of day it was for me. Also, I'm trying not to be paranoid about the mail carrier, though I'm almost sure she's stealing mail.

Amanda has some really great ideas about finishing up the west wing project, starting some new projects, working with Thoughtful Christian, and submitting things to Disciplesworld (our denominational magazine). So it's good to have something to keep myself busy. I also have the seemingly unending flooring project, I see it coming to an end soon though.

Lost day

2007-03-19T08:46:00.000-05:00

Last night I dreamt I got the job at Multi-Ad.

Carson and I were driving into work, I fell asleep in the car. I woke up -- what I could have sworn was only a few moments later, but turned out was the next day. I was worried that I would lose my new found job because of my lost day (I didn't know where my desk was, what I was working on, etc). Carson said it would be fine.

We got to the office, but now there was a major hospital attached to the building. We went in the nearest door, but it was clear that we were nowhere near the Web/Development/Testing area. At one point arson left to go to his desk and I was left wandering around this hospital looking for my boss's office. I found the pediatrics department (the floors there were waxed to a high sheen and I slipped and fell. A nurse made fun of me; it was traumatic).

Eventually I found my boss's office and she asked me to take her daughter to the pediatrician in the building. We headed out and got to the department. When she was done we walked through the shopping mall on our way back to the office (the building having taken on airport perportions at this point) we decided that the Ralph Lauren spring collection looked a better set of clothes for me than for her (they were like ocean fairy clothes, stuff I'm pretty sure Ralph didn't design)

Just before we got to the last staircase before we were back in the office, this guy I knew from CPE, a guy who I'm pretty sure is totally unfit for the ministry, came walking in. He was shocked to see me, and claimed that he had picked being a chaplain at this hospital so no one who knew him would have to work with him again. I explained that I wasn't working as a chaplain but for a technical wing of this hospital in testing. He totally freaked out my boss's daughter, so I told him we had to go. After that I think I stopped dreaming for a while because the next dream had something to do with floods and river rafts and 300 as a football game.

Moving On?

2007-03-19T08:26:00.000-05:00

Every now and then I get sudden, serious wanderlust. It's never convenient and to be perfectly frank I have never followed through. Last night as I was preparing for a Lenten service coming up this Tuesday and I suddenly got the urge to move to Oceania. I'm totally, irrationally afraid of snakes so Australia is right out. New Zealand though, well I think I fell in love with the scenery of NZ through film and television.

I was encouraged to dream about NZ because of the rather lot of exciting liturgical work that is going on there (and Australia, but I refer you above). Really, the only modern work in metrical psalms that I have seen of late comes out of this continent.

Apparently, the NZIS (which just looks wrong doesn't it?) has a category of immigration requests from people in fields of long-term shortage. They even have a little quiz thing so see if you are qualified enough. Carson, my husband is really really qualified, but I'm not quite qualified enough. The two of us together might make a really skilled immigrant couple.

Realistic things like mortages and interviews and such makes this little day dream a bit moot. Still it's always fun to dream.

About the title

2007-03-17T11:34:00.000-05:00

I once knew a guy who had a personal game where he would attempt to develop the most exquisite complements for people he knew. When he finally got around to me, he decided that I was a wry juxtaposition of something and something else (he actually had words in place of the somethings, but the memory of them has faded) (it was something like innocence and a mouth like a sailor or intelligence and humor). At first I was not a happy camper. It seemed to me that this was not a complement at all (I was about 16). However the idea of my personally being made up of disparate parts, a personality formed by holding these parts in uneasy relationship with one another, that stuck with me.

I am really bad about blogging. This is actually the third or fourth attempt at a blog. I make no promises about being better. What I do promise is that what I post here will be true, and it will undoubtedly be a little weird.