Overanalysis

going to New Orleans

2009-12-29T14:59:05Z

So I have an bit of time to kill in the airport, and since google put in free wifi for the holidays I figured I'd update here. So here you go.

So my parents got a book called Atheist Delusions and I read it over break. It's pretty well done, essentially it's a response to the people who claim that Christianity is "a net negative in history". He does a good job of addressing the issue from several dimensions, with the second section which focuses on the history of various events used to support the thesis being quite interesting. It doesn't have much in the way of citations, but on the areas where I know the literature somewhat it does seem rather accurate. It is a bit too focused on the West, in my opinion, with Greek and Roman paganism representing paganism generally, and I'm not sure if it really is representative of all non-Judeo/Christian faiths. The argument might work just as well for traditional religions in Africa or Australia, but it'd be nice if they were addressed explicitly a little bit.

The one major problem I found, however, is in the tone. The book, especially the first part which establishes the premise, is somewhat triumphalist. I found the thesis (that modern secular values, though post-Christian are still based upon Christian values and are no more self-evident or permanent than any other set of values and that there's no guarantee that what they are developing toward will be "better" than what has come before given that it is being based entirely on uninhibited human will) quite convincing, and I'm obviously not the hardest sell on the idea that Christianity was not a historical tragedy, but even I thought the book was a bit antagonistic in its tone. This might not seem like a big deal, but I think it's a major weakness. The book will serve well to confirm the pre-conceptions of those who will read it, and maybe that's all it would have done in any event since I figure the hardcore atheist (regardless of any claims of open-mindedness and rationality) will not really be convinced of the historical value of Christianity by reasoned argument or historical evidence. There is too much emotion in the issue, and it's really never been about historical truth. Yet, I think the book owes it to its readers to try, and I don't think Hart does. Which is too bad, because even if not too many people will really examine their pre-conceptions after reading a book like this, you do want to give them a chance to get to the meat of their argument before you close them off by angering them through some offhand comment in the first part of your book.

Still, I do recommend the book to read over and see what Hart has to say about our past and where he sees us going in the future. It's an interesting vision even if his comments about other thinkers are sometimes somewhat jarring.

Anyway, I have my netbook with me in New Orleans, but I'm not sure how internet access will be. So, if I don't see you until then, have a happy New Year. Hopefully it'll be warmer wherever you are than it is in Boston right now...

Merry Christmas

2009-12-25T23:23:49Z

Like the subject says: Merry Christmas.

I've been on break for the last couple of days. Just recovering from the semester and spending some time with family, since all of us are in one place for a couple of days. It's been nice, and I hope all of you are having a wonderful end of the year and very happy holidays. Now if it was only warmer...

link to the economist

2009-11-28T02:44:24Z

This would probably be better as a twitter update, or maybe something on my facebook feed if I used my facebook feed, but I'm putting it on here instead.

Essentially, I read this article on the Economist website about climate change a few hours back. I essentially agree with everything in it, though I tend to read things from them in the most charitable possible way.

I want to write something about nuance, good/evil dualism, and the use of gray areas to attack ideals in modern culture, but it's still percolating. Maybe I'll sit down and work it out over the weekend, or maybe it'll wait. I do have four papers to write in the next couple weeks. We'll see.

arcane legions

2009-11-01T15:06:42Z

I realize this is going to be a bit of a niche post, not too many people who read this play miniature games. Then again, it's not like I have been posting much recently anyway or that that many people read this in the first place. So maybe this will spur me to write more often, or at least give me a chance to mention something that I found recently.

About two weeks ago I picked up a copy of the miniature game Arcane Legions. Specifically, I picked up the starter set. This is the first miniature game that I picked up for the rules rather than the figures. The figures themselves are okay, but nothing to write home about. Below is a picture of the figures for the Egyptian side that came in the starter (I set up the Egyptian figs first since that's the side I'm considering playing). This is one of the three sides in the starter, the total cost $35 so not a bad deal at under $12 a side.

As you can see the figures are fairly simple but get the job done. Special figures, such as the one commander fig per side included in the starter, come prepainted to a fairly low standard, but might be fairly easily improved by a dark wash and a couple highlights. A finished army would have a lot more of these prepainted figures since many units include a lot of special figures. I am not particularly overjoyed with the paint jobs, I would rather paint them myself, but I realistically know that I don't have a ton of time so I probably would never get around to it. The inclusion of the painted shields for the units is a nice touch though, trying to get 20 shields to have the identical pattern in 25mm scale is horribly frustrating to do by hand, it's nice to have a machine do it for me.

I haven't had had a chance to play this yet. It's taken a back seat to classes and other things, and the one time I thought I'd be able to sneak a game in the guy I was planning on playing against happened to have come down with a bad cold. However, I want to mention a couple of impressions from reading the rules:
* I like the unit bases, it makes setup and movement much faster. It also makes building armies easier and figuring out enemy formations a snap, just glance on the card rather than having him pull out the rule from his book which you've never seen before.
* I am not enamored, however, with the idea of moving only 8 action points of units each turn. I can justify it, but I just like being able to move each unit each turn. Not a huge deal though.
* The forums have a thread started by representatives of the company looking for data about whether archery is overpowered. I think it might well be, but I can't speak authoritatively since I haven't played any games yet. I am just wondering how this didn't come up in play testing...

cactus update

2009-10-23T22:45:48Z

I haven't written anything in a very long time, and due to time restraints I am just popping out of radio silence just to put up a quick picture of the cactus. As you can see it's growing quite well (it's actually a bit larger now, given that the photo is from Tuesday). I need to figure out how to shift all the soil an inch to the center without destroying the root network so it's not crunched up the side of the cup like that... Not quite sure how I'm going to do that yet. The matter of the purpose of the strange growths on the cactus is now resolved.*

* Unless, of course, this whole thing is just a clever ploy to put me off my guard for the surprise strike. Stranger things have happened. Though, admittedly, not often.

cactus update

2009-08-31T02:44:17Z

So, since my last post about the cactus it has sprouted many more of those branch things. In fact, it looks a little bit like this:

Note that the longest one of the branch appendages has taken root in the ground it was placed in. So the purpose of the growths is now clear. Why it needs so many of them is still an open question. The fact it stands over my head while I sleep is slightly disquieting. It is still small enough that I believe I could fend it off if it came down to that.

third-gendered kitties need extra love

2009-08-30T02:19:32Z

So I've been back in Boston for a bit, and getting ready for the start of the next academic year. Things are going well other than the weather suddenly turning for the colder. I would talk about the trip, but frankly I've put up a number of photos on facebook and each of those is worth 1000 words, so I said too much about it as it is.

Speaking of facebook, this article was linked on my home page. Now, I've had a number of discussions on here with people who hold (like the author of this article) that the notion of binary sex is mythical. I disagree, but since earlier conversation did not lead to any changed minds I figure there's no particular need to go over the same ground again. However, I am confused on one point. The article claims that one in 1500 or 2000 children require specialists to assign a child's sex (I am not sure who exactly counts as a specialist in these matters in rural Nigeria, but that's neither here nor there), assuming for a second that this number is accurate (I heard that it might be common in some areas since a practice of giving women certain hormones during pregnancy caused male children to not fully develop as male and so be genetically male but look female. I don't know enough about this topic to say anything intelligently about it) and that the matter is really not as simple as "check to see which sexual organs are present" for as much as .2% of all live births, that seems like something that would come up a whole lot for mammals with large birth numbers. How come I never hear of an animal shelter looking for good homes for cats that are neither male nor female? It just seems that there would be an organization that would want to focus on helping find homes for pets that don't fit the binary sex model. I wonder if I just haven't heard of it or if the number of such pets is so small as to make such an organization unnecessary.

jaded traveler

2009-08-13T20:21:14Z

The flight over here was on JetBlue. It was my first time flying with them, I was honestly a bit worried since I figure they're a small airline so there's less wiggle room if something goes wrong. I kind of figure the big lines have a couple extra planes lying around to toss into the air if there's a slowdown somewhere, though I am not sure if that's actually the case. Mostly I was just worried because I heard horror stories from really tiny airlines in Europe which would have just a single plane going on a complex circuit and everything would fall apart if there was any sort of mechanical problem along the way.

All that aside, the flight was quite good. Mostly just because they let me watch cable tv the whole flight, which seems like an economical way to keep me quiet, much better than giving me the choice between Disney's Ice Princess and seeing the plane inch its way across the continent. Yet a surprisingly big part of the experience was the attitude of the flight crew. They did a jaded smart-guy routine, complete with (assuredly canned) jokes about being willing to accept bribes to fly to a different destination and about how boring the safety presentation is. I knew it was all contrived and fairly cheesy, but I appreciated it. I can't even tell you exactly why, I just liked it the way I like the demotivators from Despair, Inc.

San Diego

2009-08-11T20:47:46Z

I've been in San Diego for a little over a week, and it's been good so far. I've been walking around a fair bit and quickly developed a serious farmer's tan, which isn't a huge shock since I used to have one most of the time when I lived out here. I realize this place is always in danger of serious drought, but to me there's never too many sunny days.

It's been really nice to spend time seeing people I haven't seen in years, though there's never enough time to see everybody for nearly as long as I would like to. I'm glad I gave myself as much time as I did. I still probably won't see everybody since most people have to work during the week so there is not as much time to see them as there would have been during high school or college. Part of all of us growing up, I guess.

At one point Shira and I went to the Comedy Club in La Jolla, we caught a nice show. They sat us down in the front and center. The last comedian ended up choosing me to ask about what I do, and jokingly cursed his luck when I answered that I'm a seminarian (it didn't work for the joke he was trying to set up). After he found out what a seminarian is, he ended up telling me that I should leave before the last 15 minutes of his set and then took a picture of himself with my camera and asked me to pray for him (in the last part of his set he looked at me and said "I told you to leave for this part"). It was both quite funny and really really strange.

on letting people do whatever doesn't harm others

2009-07-23T22:07:59Z

A while ago somebody suggested the principle that laws should allow people to do anything they want as long as they're not hurting anybody. I've been thinking about it, off and on, ever since. I addressed a related topic a couple times before, though I don't think I expressed myself perfectly. I don't believe I will express myself perfectly this time either. Instead, as a form of personal reflection on the topic, I will list off a number of things that would have to change in their legal status to meet this ideal, and see if I can imagine a person who would accept all of them. I try to keep "common-sense" definitions of "anybody" and "hurt", though I guess those definitions are also part of the debate.

Things that are currently illegal but would have to become legal:
Suicide, or assisting suicide, regardless of circumstances.
Dog fighting and other forms of animal abuse (for own animals only, of course).
Incest between adult family members, including child-bearing marriages between fraternal twins.
Buying and selling human organs.
Selling oneself into slavery and, by extension, slave owning.
Drug use and production, from pot down to heroin.

Things that are currently legal but would have to be banned:
Abortion.
Death penalty.
Forced deportation of illegal immigrants.
Visa and work permit restrictions.

surprised this morning

2009-07-01T15:20:25Z

So the Globe had an op-ed piece by one of their columnists talking about a growing scientific debate about the existence of global warming and whether energy bills such as the one passed the other day are necessary or effective, with some scientists saying that recent data has moved them away from their earlier global warming position. Now I don't know whether this is true, how serious this debate is, or which side of the debate is right (I freely admit to knowing rather little about global climate trends or the physics of it), but I was very surprised to see somebody making the claim in the Globe of all places (became less surprised when, while writing this post, I read what other op-ed pieces this particular writer contributed recently, and realized that he's not really going along with the paper's editorial board on most issues.

So yeah, this is not actually me weighing in on the debate. I was just surprised to see the debate in the Globe and felt like commenting on it but couldn't fit my comment into 140 characters so it went here.

on sports and nations

2009-06-28T20:39:31Z

One thing that surprised me about Poland is that whenever a Pole would start doing very well in some sport, suddenly everybody following it really closely. When I first got there the sport of the day was the ski jump. I thought people just really liked it (for some reason) but it was just that there was a great Polish jumper at that point. It died down when others surpassed him. A while later everybody was watching women's volleyball (which at least is a real sport, I honestly can't think of many things more boring to watch on TV than ski jumping. It is seriously mostly just watching somebody sit on a chair waiting for the wind to turn...) In the US there's a similar phenomenon locally, you notice that people suddenly are all baseball fans when their city's team has a good year, but not nationally. Case in point, the US national team just came in second in an international competition (losing to Brazil, Spain was third and South Africa came in fourth). Nobody seems to care. On the one hand it feels kind of genuine to consistently care or not care about sports, on the other hand it's a touch sad because soccer is really such a great sport to watch.

Anyway, good job US. Too bad that Brazil came back in that second half.

David Mitchell and today's advertising

2009-06-18T20:54:45Z

A couple weeks ago I learned, via Nodwick about a series of youtube videos where the British comedian David Mitchell rants for three minutes on a random subject of his choosing. I enjoyed them, and annoyed random people on my aim buddy list by linking to them. (Apparently they're from a video podcasts called David Mitchell's Soapbox, available for free on iTunes.) Today I went back to see if there are any more, and there were. The one on men's grooming is my favorite. Normally this would be covered by a tweet, or more likely, just links sent to whoever had the misfortune to catch me on aim at the moment, but this made me thing of something I wanted to write a bit more on so here it goes.

So the video linked above is sponsored by the British company Bulldog Natural Grooming. The ad clearly works since I didn't need to go back to the video to verify the name, I'm pretty sure that's it. I feel no particular need to buy the product, since my position on grooming is not much different than Mitchell's actually, but assuming the ad was about building brand recognition then it's served it's purpose. The reason I mention it is because, in the video, Mitchell doesn't actually praise the products at all (and he fails to mention them in the other videos at all), rather he cracks jokes about the wisdom of hiring him in the first place. In effect, he's saying that using the men's product he is advertising makes the man using it either effeminate or vain. A counter-intuitive way of selling something, granted, but, given the jaded smart-ass market that anything willing to associate itself with David Mitchell is clearly targeting, a brilliant one. After all, jaded smart-asses like myself are not going to be swayed by celebrity endorsements anyway, we're much more likely to take a shining to a company that pretends to not take itself seriously (even though, we're pretty sure that they're just pretending, see the jaded part of the description). So anyway, good job David Mitchell, and thank you to Bulldog Natural Grooming or whatever for giving me a chance to write David Mitchell's name many many times on here, in a transparent effort to bring him higher in the public consciousness via complex google algorithms.

Also: David Mitchell.

thoughts on flights

2009-06-04T22:59:51Z

I bought a plane ticket to fly to San Diego in August. I am scheduled to be there August 3rd to 21st. I should be staying in the UC area, so hopefully I'll get to see a lot of people while I am there. It should be a good trip.

Yesterday I spoke to somebody who is going to Europe, flying an Air France flight. On the exact same type of plane that went down off the coast of Brazil. That's got to be a bit of a scary thought. Statistically flying is very safe, but it's still a bit of a strange thought to know that one could have been on a plane that went down. Though I guess it's always something that feels like it only happens to other people.

regional differences

2009-05-25T22:16:40Z

I was talking with somebody who grew up in Arizona, and he pointed out that there is a greater tendency in New England than in the Western US for people to make a big deal of their ethnic background. People just routinely claim to be Irish or Italian or something else in background, a tendency that I don't recall from San Diego. In fact I don't recall many people in San Diego mentioning their ethnicity at all, ~~except strangely enough some Filipino friends of mine~~. It's not that it wouldn't come up, but it would come up indirectly like when somebody would say that they have to go to Japanese school. It could be simply that the city of Boston, and region more generally, was long divided into mutually hostile communities with the Irish sticking to their own neighborhoods and generally keeping separate from the Italians or the WASPs. It could also be just a trick of my memory based on deriving a pattern from a small sample size based upon something I heard. Anyway, that's just some random musings. Anybody who has spent some time on both coasts can feel free to toss their own thoughts.

* Edit * Took out that one phrase since it wasn't particularly relevant and now that I think about it, it's not particularly accurate since nothing I experienced in San Diego is quite like the tendency around here to claim their ethnic heritage.

Philadelphia

2009-05-19T22:05:10Z

I went down to St. Charles Borromeo seminary in Philadelphia for the graduation of two Boston men who were studying down there. The place is very nice, that's where the two photos above are from, and it was good to spend some with those guys. Being in a car for roughly 12 for a trip that consisted of roughly 36 hours including travel was a bit tiring. Some thoughts from the trip:

Saw a DeLorean on the way down. I noticed that I have been watching cars on the roads a lot more recently, ever since I realized that I will have to get a car in around two years. It made me realize how opinionated I am about style in cars. Outside of my general dislike of those boxes on wheels (like the Element, thank goodness that style has passed), there are just a set of design criteria that I like and that will probably matter to me more than things like engine power or other traditional car specs.

This is a random and rambly post since I think I am coming down with my usual post-final cold.

After 6 hours in a car I saw a sign for something called the Beardly Zoo and commented on how a zoo where they put beards on all the animals seems like a cruel but incredibly funny thing. Trust me, after being in a car for six hours that is the height of comedy.

Five non-random things about me

2009-04-23T20:40:23Z

I got a list of five topics to talk briefly about from tacky_tramp. If you want me to suggest five topics for you, let me know in the comments. No big deal.

D&D
This game hits me from all the right directions. It is a cooperative game which includes a small group of close friends hanging out for prolonged periods of time cracking jokes and hanging out. It is also hits me from the direction of the imagination, I love creating characters and worlds. I like thinking of plans and scenarios. It's really got everything I could ask for in a game. The rule system works well for it so I can't complain about it too much even though I do kind of wish it did everything just the way I would like it to.

However, I don't think I think of the game in the way most people do. In working on it I look more to the Silmarilion than for the Lord of the Rings in my games. Sure characters and their individual stories are important, but what really interests me is the world around them. The way it all works, the mythology... I am probably the only person who wishes that characters would never level, because I think it makes it very difficult to work out monster populations (if Grayhaven is surrounded by level 1 monsters when you're in your early levels, what do you do when you're in high levels? Do the monsters scale up? If so where did they come from? Do the PCs have to go somewhere else for a challenge? What's keeping those tougher monsters from moving in to Grayhaven? Some people would get around that by making a PC heavy scenario, so the monsters scale up because of a drow invasion or something. There's nothing wrong with that, but that's writing a story and not a world, and I can't do that). This is also the source, I think, of my hostility toward expansion books. Every time they add an option for the players, they're really adding a whole set of concepts I suddenly have to retrofit into my world.

Catholicism
While I have been Catholic my entire life, I only started to understand the faith, and the persons of God, starting with a particular experience on a Confirmation retreat in high school. My understanding has been slowly growing and maturing since then, and I believe it will continue doing so. It has been especially interesting since I've entered seminary because it let me really start learning what Catholicism teaches in a complete and systematic way. There is a real logic to it, starting from reasonable premises and going through to the conclusions. It helped me to understand why the Church teaches some of the things that she teaches, and convinced me of the reasonableness of those teachings. While I believe it's possible to live a good life without being Catholic, I do think that God gives us guidelines for a good and happy life through his Church.

Poland
I really enjoyed my time in Poland. It's really a beautiful country. I really liked spending time with my family and got to know a number of great people there. But it was strange to live there, since I constantly felt like a foreigner. In good part simply because I was constantly asked where I was from because of my accent (which is more pronounced in Polish than English). While the country still has a lot of problems, I identify with it quite a lot. And really, what country doesn't have a lot of problems?

Semantics
tacky_tramp and I used to say that all our arguments come down to semantics. This was never actually true, and has become less so over time as we have really moved in different directions. However, there is still a very real element to that statement. None of us is very good about stating our premises, we all take a lot of things for granted in what we say and write, and tend to not worry too much about alternate meanings of words and making sure we understand the nuances of the other person's position. As such a lot of arguments come down to two people saying basically the same thing but using slightly different words, and convinced that the other person is being obstinate to not see just how clearly wrong they are.

Chastity
I don't think people understand the point and value of chastity. I know that I didn't. Chastity isn't just an arbitrary obligation placed upon some. It's a way of life offered to everyone as a gift. In practice, I find that the closer that I live to the ideal the more at peace and happier that I am. Which kind of makes sense, really, if we use the gifts and abilities we have been given in the way they were originally intended the better. And the way sexuality was originally intended was as a means of letting a man and a woman to grow closer into one, and forming a fruitful and loving family union. Many people are really out of balance when it comes to sexual matters, and that leads to them feeling ill at ease and trying to drown out those feelings by coping mechanisms and focusing on self-gratification, which often throws them further off balance.

cactus revisited

2009-04-22T15:15:34Z

I want to follow up on the earlier post about the cactus. I tried to see if the little white tendrils coming out of the extension were roots. I placed them so that they just touching some potting soil. The plant recoiled from it, and started shifting back toward the window. It seems to me that the whole green sprout turned back toward the window, so my theory is that it's only going out to the side since it is growing toward the light and confuses the window with the sky. This does not explain what in the world the little white tendrils can be, they are in the wrong spot for roots (since they come from a part of the plant that wants to be as far away from dirt as possible) and they don't seem to be attaching themselves to the wall which is the next thing I tried. I have not tested the theory that it is a vampiric tube for the feeding on of human blood, nor am I going to.

cacti and chocolates

2009-04-16T00:27:41Z

The cactus that I got a while ago (now shorter since the different species grafted on was lost in a tragic accident) had sprouted a strange branch like thing that seems to be sprouting tendrils at the end that are either meant to become roots or meant to attach to some other item in its environment in order to anchor the cactus' new tendril. Either way, the thing is not acting the way I expected a cactus to act. Anybody know what it's doing? It looks vaguely like this:

From random pics for lj

Completely unrelated:
I like dark chocolate. I prefer it to milk chocolate, generally speaking. However, it seems that there is a limit. I bought a bit of 86% cacao chocolate, and it's a bit too bitter for me. Live and learn I guess. It's exciting posts like this one that caused one of my brothers to remark that I shouldn't worry about whether my journal is public or not since all it reveals about me is that I am a very boring person ;D

Edit: I hate how Picasa has a "embed picture" link that includes extra html code that makes the picture not show up and I have to fix it manually. Just give me the image tag already or let me hotlink the old fashioned way...

History of politics

2009-04-14T00:02:43Z

Quite a while back Rastin sent me a copy of Jose Ortega y Gasset's History as a System: and other essays toward a philosophy of history. I have only now gotten around to reading it. It's interesting, a Spanish writer writing in the 1930s (the collection is copyrighted 1941 so I figure the parts must have been written in the previous decade). He has some of the traits I associate with writers of the period, especially a tendency to paint elaborate theories which make sense and sound good but have only a doubtful connection to the historical record (his idea of the beginning of human organization is especially unlikely, but cool all the same). He is however quite amusing to read, full of commentary such as:

Aligning oneself with the left, as with the right, is only one of the numberless ways open to man of being an imbecile: both are forms of moral hemiplegia. Furthermore, the persistance of these terms helps not a little to falsify the already false "reality" of the present, for the circle of political experience to which they correspond is closed, as witnessed by the fact that today we are offered a prospect of tyranny from the left while the right promises revolution.

I find the whole thing terribly amusing.

looking backwards and forwards in time

2009-04-09T02:10:38Z

A couple conversations and random webcomic today have made me realize how quickly time is flowing by. Things that feel like they happened only yesterday are half a decade to a decade in the past. That's pretty crazy.

It also made me think about the fact that, God willing, I will be ordained in a bit over three years. Now I have never made any effort to separate my real and online identities, and I am not about to start now. Especially given the fact that my journal is clearly geared toward people who know me, and is (to be honest) not that exciting for anybody who doesn't. However, as the date grows closer I will have to start considering whether a personal public journal is the wisest thing for a public person.

Like I said, plenty of time to think about it, but it is something I will have to think about.

translation

2009-03-26T18:56:37Z

A week ago or so I read an article about some parishes in South Africa which have started to use the new English translations of the mass before they were supposed to. That means that they started doing it before the period of preparation and education that's supposed to take place first. So, naturally, there's a problem with people not understanding why certain changes were made and just generally unhappy that changes were made in general. That's kind of understandable given the bungled implementation, but it still strikes me as somewhat odd because it's a translation. The article stresses how surprised, and upset, people are that the English will now be more like the Latin. That was the point. That's why you translated it in the first place, did we miss that somewhere? The whole point of translating the Latin mass into English, as opposed to just writing a new one, was so that people could better understand and participate in the mass. The same mass being celebrated in Rome, and Tokyo, and Sydney. The mass is a unifying celebration, that's why it's supposed to be identical everywhere, using an accurate translation only assists in that. Focusing on the fact it's different, as opposed to more accurate, is kind of random. If I buy an English edition of Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, the key to me is that I get to read a translation that lets me understand the author's story as closely as possible, I don't see why a translation of the mass should be any different.

The whole thing reminds me of nothing as much as something that happened when the new DS edition of Chrono Trigger came out not too long ago. I glanced at the reviews of it on amazon to see what people's reaction was. The review was almost uniformly positive. One user, however, gave the game one star. In his review he made it clear that that score isn't due to the game itself, which he or she loved. The one star was given because the wording chosen to represent the Japanese words used by Chrono's mom to wake him up were different, and a number of names were changed to better reflect the original Japanese ones after being changed on the SNES version either due to worries about American audiences or space considerations created by the Latin alphabet. The user clearly wanted to relive the game from their memories, not actually enjoy the game as it was created to be. That's fine for a lighthearted Japanese RPG, it's a bit more worrisome to me that a number of people take a similar approach to their understanding of what the celebration of the Eucharist is. When people come to it as a familiar comforting thing they remember from their childhoods and not as a living participation, as part of the universal Church, in Christ's sacrifice then we have a lot of work and education in front of us. Hopefully the couple years that we still have before the new translation comes into use in the United States will be well used to provide a chance to explain and prepare much better than the premature implementation in parts of South Africa did.

a little more open schedule, I hope

2009-03-26T02:34:05Z

Took my last midterm today. Hopefully things will settle down now somewhat. They kind of need to. I still need to fill out my state income tax stuff, mostly because I am doing that one on paper (due to annoying technicalities that don't let me do a free online filing). Plus there's a number of random projects I either have to or want to get some work on. Not to mention just regular classes, and the requisite goof off time that always sneaks in whether I allow for it or not.

syfy

2009-03-18T22:40:14Z

So I found out via Penny Arcade that the Sci Fi channel is changing its name to SyFy. Story here. The article, especially the quotes for the executive really got me mad. It's all about how the network believes that there is a large subset of viewers that likes science fiction, but thinks that the word science fiction is geeky and makes things uncool. So they're perfectly willing to watch a Sci Fi movie, but not on the Sci Fi channel. I find that both ludicrous and insulting, especially since the network admits that it just had its best year ever.

A much more plausible reason is found at the bottom of the article, where it claims, in short, that the network is going into other media and needed a name they could brand things with. Putting SyFy on a line of books and a game looks like you're establishing a brand identity, putting Sci Fi on a line of books and a game looks like you're establishing these items within a genre. So yeah, I still hate the change (even though I haven't watched much tv, or the Sci Fi channel at all for something like five years now, so maybe I don't have much room to complain here) but I can see the second part of the rationale.

This evoked a discussion with my brother about whether "syfy" is a legitimate Polish plural of the word for mess. I'm sure I could look it up with a modicum of effort, but instead I'll just ask people I know who spent more time speaking Polish than I did.

dreams

2009-03-17T18:26:41Z

I woke up several times last night. Each time it was after some dream woke me up. I only remember the last two of those, but I know that all of them had a uncomfortable feeling of being surrounded by a hostile world.

In one I remember being pushed by two guys breaking in to a high-tech Egyptian pyramid into the pyramid itself. I managed to get away from them but was aware of the fact that the ancient Egyptian soldiers (each with a khopesh) rushing into the building were not going to be especially willing to listen to my explanation of how I ended up inside a place where nobody was allowed to be. I spent the rest of the time wandering around the tunnels seeking to avoid the soldiers and hoping that none of the technicians and priests walking around the place (not sure why they were okay to be there). At some point there I woke up.

Second dream spent a while talking to family and dealing with the delivery guy for some medical device that my brother had ordered for himself. It was some sort of sharp knife/plier contraption that he was planning to stick into his arm to pull something out. No idea what. I just remember it being expensive and unpleasant looking. After that I ended up in some vacation spot where there was a stream that was rushing by at unsafe speeds and some of the people who risked going into it were swept away. Instead of risking that I went up to a little courtyard filled with stores in booths on two different levels. The booths didn't have anything I wanted, the passages didn't lead anywhere, and the shopkeepers looked threatening. I ended up getting angry and throwing a cup I had really far away, just to see it strike an invisible wall and appear somewhere else to land back in the courtyard area. Somebody picked it up and threw it in a different direction just to see it loop back to them from the other side. Then guards showed up and dragged her away. Then I woke up.

I just thought I'd record those because they kind of weirded me out in the morning. Also they meant that I am somewhat more tired today than I had hoped to be based on the time I went to bed...