I beheld Satan fall as lightning from heaven

Does it really matter any more what the Founding Fathers wanted?

I hear that phrase used so much and frankly. I'm more concerned with living in the world as it is rather than worrying about what a lot of dead people who lived in an age that did not have internal combustion engines, widespread use of electricity, or even the telegraph saw as the destiny of the nation. I appreciate the Constitution, and I think we can take it from here, guys. You can continue to be dead. Well, except for Ben Franklin, who arranged to be resurrected once the machine god reaches the critical point. And Thomas Jefferson, who tried to possess Edgar Allen Poe. Aside from those two, the rest of you can stay dead.

It's not even that I'm disinterested in what the Founders saw as the future, I'm just tired of it being trotted out to justify whatever some hateful exclusionist has to say this week. No, Jesus didn't drop in on the Constitutional Convention with a copy of the document no matter what anyone paints, it was the result of a lot of hard work by people of many varying religious beliefs (including Jefferson, who didn't believe Jesus was divine, and Franklin, whose beliefs are impossible to summarize) and it grew out of a decade where the preceding Acts of Confederation proved outright useless. It's not magic, it's not holy, it's simply the best option mainly due to its ability to be amended to adress new situations.

If you're going to be hung up on what the Founders intended, how about chewing on that one?

They knew shit was going to have to change. They worked it into the document. They knew they didn't know the future, didn't know every possible problem and pitfall facing their posterity and their descendants. They didn't want us to constantly stop, stick our thumbs up our asses, and wonder what they wanted us to do. They wanted us to figure it out on our own.

As Jesus said in one of those gospels that didn't make it into the main book, let he who has a mind use it to think.

Edited to mention that wow, I forgot that the whole thing that started this was the current health care bullshit in the States. Seriously, guys, the Founding Fathers didn't even have the concept of medicine the way we currently understand it: a lot of what we see today as how doctors operate grew out of the carnage of the Civil War. Asking what George Washington would think about state supported health care when said health care would need to be explained to him for an extended period of time first is just silly. It doesn't matter what they would think, it matters what is in the best interest of the majority of Americans.

Went to the SOTD, got soda and milk, saved a cat from a tree, got hit in the head with a branch. Came home. Kissed wife, who is the best wife ever and who I do not say enough good things about. Am now preparing to raid in World of Warcraft. Have lost a fundamental element of how to type grammatical sentences.

Sorry, but there's a "Look the fuck out Motherfucker cause it's going to be fucking windy" alert for Edmonton today. I will just have to make do without being accosted.

Because the universe loves a good objective correlative, I guess.

Keats used to talk about negative capability. I wish I had the ability, when presented with something mysterious or even just plain fucking ridiculously insane, to endure my 'doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason' as Keats so exhorted. It's the heart of what I consider my personal philosophy, the ability to hold doubt without feeling it necessary to solve it, but unfortunately in real life you don't always get this option.

Today at the SotD, I was purchasing the usual caffeine and sundries when the first of two really irritating incidents happened. The first reminded me of why so many atheists are so hostile towards people who profess a religion or another. I walked with my small basket of items to the express line to discover two grey haired women of indeterminate age discussing something in hushed tones while purchasing 15 cakes.

Yes, 15 cakes. Big, frosted cakes, apparently all some variation of chocolate or another. I don't know why they felt the need to go to Safeway and buy 15 cakes. Now, if I could have done as Keats suggested for art and simply allowed this mystery to exist without that old irritable reaching after fact and reason, I could have left without the sincere pain in my head that followed.

Curious as to why there would be such a purchase of cakes, I leaned forward to attempt to eavesdrop on them. This was my prime error: all further error flows from this one lapse in tact and politeness. For I overheard "...I know Denise is sold on him but he's just one of those people and I can't trust them."

Those people? A whole host of possibilities followed: was it a racial issue? Perhaps one of sexual orientation or politics or nationality? Her companion, rather than busting out with anything I might have expected like, say, "grow up" or what have you, simply replied "Oh? How long has he been one?"

This made me assume it couldn't be race or nationality, because, well, the answer would presumably be "His whole life" and so the question would be almost aggressively stupid. Since they were wearing clothing that didn't look like someone else had to put on them, I assumed they couldn't be that stupid. (I turn out to maybe have been optimistic here.)

"Oh, I don't recall, but you know what they're like. Thinking that Froed-er-ech Nitchee" yes that's how she said it "killed Jesus."

So yeah. Not only was the universe fucking with me in grand style, it was doing so through the mechanism of two women who apparently believe that the average atheist is of the opinion that Nietzsche took out Jesus in a knife fight. I have no idea how they got onto this subject while on their great cake buying expedition, but I made the mistake of loudly snorting here.

"As if. Jesus was a carpenter and Nietzsche was a philosophically minded syphilitic." (I know the syphilis diagnosis is very disputed, but fuck me if I was gonna bring that up in the checkout line.) "Jesus would have shanked Freddie on his way back from flipping over moneylender tables, no problem." For some strange reason, the two cake eaters didn't find this immediately moving and inched away from me as far as they could get while the cashier made a face that clearly said she'd be telling this story while getting extremely drunk or high tonight.

As an aside, the idea that one's belief or disbelief in God makes one moral or immoral is almost as ridiculous as the idea that many Christians seem to hold that in order to be good and moral one merely needs to believe in God: no actual good behavior is necessary, and it's acceptable to be rude, condescending, even an outright deluded liar who rejects the true and factual in order to substitute one's own preferred version of what is true.

The idea that an atheist is untrustworthy is as absurd as the idea that all one has to do to be trustworthy is to believe really hard in Jehova. It's like arguing that I'm a good, moral person entirely because I've chosen to believe Superman is real. Now, if I actually patterned my morality on Superman's, I'd have a few issues (you know, like destroying all the cars in a city to force people to drive more safely) but I'd have at least as good a claim to good, moral behavior by doing so as a Christian does by patterning his or her life after Jesus, and in either case it would still be a more active choice than simply believing that you're done with everything you need to be a good person simply by saying "Yeah, okay, that all happened" to a book, whatever book it is.

These are the thoughts that haunted me as I walked home. It's as if I read Watership Down and decided it really happened, and that decision made me automatically moral and you automatically immoral simply because you didn't believe Watership Down happened. They don't even have to live by the strictures of their chosen book... after all, there they were in the Safeway of Impending Doom, buying 15 cakes (gluttony) while wearing artificial fibers and casting the first stone despite their not being without sin... they just have to believe it to be true and they're done. The entire world is divided into good (those who believe what we believe) and evil (those that don't) in so stark a boundary that anything they choose to do, think or say is automatically a good thing purely because it comes from them.

So they can lie and, when confronted by evidence of the untruth of their statements, will retort with "Well, that's not my truth" and expect the debate to be over, much as a woman recently did to my wife when my wife pointed out that despite her declaration that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, there's plenty of evidence that he was. She simply responded with "Well, that's not my truth." Great. Keats would have loved this woman's ability to dismiss fact and reason, boy. (No, he really wouldn't have, I'm torturing negative capability to death here.)

However, my musings were interrupted (I was up to exactly where Organized Supermanity would consider the Supermanic Scriptures closed... would they stop at the Death of Superman? Would people who believed in the Electric Superman be like the Mormons of Supermanity?) by a crowd of 20 or so small children being led about by four very frazzled adults. The lead child took one look at me, my head down, glowering and chewing on my lip while debating if Mon-El serves as Superman's John the Baptist or Simon Magus figure, and screamed, running behind one of the adults legs and cowering. I felt bad, but before I could even try and be reassuring several of the children asked me where I got my beard.

"They gave it to me when I turned 18."

"How come Daddy doesn't have one?"

"He's probably not an adult yet." They all seemed very interested in tales of my beard, but I beat feet out of there and got myself home. We have no cake, unfortunately.

I apologize to anyone I've nerd raged at today. There's no excuse for that kind of shit, and the fact that I'm still prone to it at this point in my life humiliates and disturbs me.

The really big posts don't get many comments. Occasionally, someone will agree or disagree with them, but in general, they lie there on the site like giant turds.

This is why sometimes I'll post something short even if it ends up being pretty shitty, since either way you get scat and at least short is over faster.

And I don't, cause I'll probably have to use the bathroom well before I hit that mark, plus I generally have to conserve energy. But I generally haunt these subjects in my head like a sore tooth, so...

As far as it goes, atheism is a far more rational response to the world than, say, believing a kid whose dad worked as a contractor was one third of an omnipotent entity that made all of existence stuffed into a human like a Divine Hot Pocket. As someone who is at least intermittently rational, I recognize that there's no more reason to believe in Jesus as the Logos, One Third of God, the Messiah than there is to worship Zeus, or pretty much any other religion you want to name. I grew up Catholic, but learning about shit like the Donation of Constantine and wrestling with my own doubts over the years has really done a lot to kill my faith. Hell, I don't even like faith as a concept. I don't like that they tell you up front "In order for this shit to make sense you have to not think about it and just believe it without any sort of consideration". Why would I even want to do that? Why would I want to have faith when it requires me to shut off my brain?

I call myself agnostic because I believe that human beings are barely jumped up primates, monkeys with slightly better tools, the ability to store information outside of our DNA or brains, and big time delusions of grandeur. A little more than a hundred years ago we knew based on all of our best scientists that the reason light traveled between stars was due to ether. The ancient Greeks accurately measured the Earth using observations about the length of shadows while postulating that the sun was a burning rock spinning around the planet, and some still actually believed it was a chariot drawn by flaming horses. Our senses are limited and easy to fool, our observations flawed by them and our inherent cognitive limitations. We're barely one step along on a journey of almost infinite duration and we think we know everything.

This doesn't mean that I don't recognize that religions have done some pretty horrible shit and created ideas that are pernicious at best. Part of the problem seems to be that once you have a religion, the things you worship have to get started telling you what to do. To be fair, if they don't, there's really not much point to them, is there? Lovecraft aside, there's really not much call for blind idiot nuclear chaos that not only doesn't care what you do but doesn't even acknowledge, and might not even understand, that you exist. For some reason almost every religion postulates entities that, despite their vast cosmos-creating powers, really care where you put your penis. I've always had a hard time with the idea that a being responsible for the vast panoply of creation (see, we even call it creation imply that it has a creator) would care very much what the insignificant effluvia infesting one small planet at one short period of time do at all.

That being said, I am not swayed from my opinion that we are insignificant effluvia. We're simply not very important. We're not very intelligent. We're not very perceptive. I can conceive that there could be cosmic entities that transcend everything we can perceive and understand and to who all of our known universe is a bunch of shit floating in their equivalent of a petri dish. I have no way of knowing and won't ever have any way of knowing. I'll live and die completely ignorant of the truth about life, the universe, death, and existence beyond death. I don't know and I can't know no matter what I do. Believing otherwise... believing that I can make a statement like "There is no God, but I'm willing to be convinced by evidence" is utterly and wholly hubristic. There is no way you could even understand the evidence if it was put before you. You're like an ant that decided humans didn't exist because if they did, they'd be leaving formic acid messages around for the ants to detect.

This is why I don't personally find agnosticism and atheism compatible. To be agnostic is to say "I don't know" while to be atheist is to say "I know" just as surely as to worship does. The difference is, philosophically I can at least respect atheism for its determination to make its decision based solely on evidence and reason, to say "I do not believe in a God or gods because I have applied my reasoning ability to the evidence to hand and see no reason to do so" as flawed as I think human reason is. When the options are to be told you can't even use the tools you have to hand, however limited they may be, I'm suspicious.

If all you have to build a lean to with is some bamboo, some vines and a few rocks, telling me I can't use the vines or rocks and I have to just trust the bamboo to stay up on its own, I'm inherently suspicious. But even so, I'm still cognizant of the fact that all I'm working with is sticks, rocks and vines. The lean to isn't going to be very good, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't construct one at all, we should just be aware that it sucks and be constantly looking for new ways to improve it, not sitting back and taking it on trust that the lean to is done and we've done a wonderful, marvelous thing in constructing it.

In the previous post I didn't bother to say any of this. My issue is not with atheism itself, but with atheists who tell me that their atheism is a matter of faith (I should possibly make it a capital letter F there). The whole point of atheism should be, at least as far as I'm concerned, the rejection of capital F faith. If it's not, why bother? You've just replaced a pantheon of inscrutable entities with an unexamined nothingness. In essence, I'm an agnostic because I simultaneously hold the viewpoint that we are too stupid to ever understand and that we should keep trying to understand anyway and never believe anything 'just because'.

If God showed up tomorrow, how would I possibly know that He was real and not a hallucination, a trick, a delusion? How could I prove it? My senses can be lied to, I can become insane, and a sufficiently resourceful being could certainly seem like God to me. Saying you'll believe once you get proof is dangerous because you need to be able to test the proof: how do you test this particular proof successfully? How can you possibly evaluate this evidence? What frame of reference could you possibly make use of to verify an Omnipotent being, as opposed to one merely tens of millions of years more advanced? And would it even matter? Is functional omnipotence to us good enough?

I don't have answers. I don't think I ever will. But that's why I don't trust faith in this context.

And while I could probably add another 1800 or so words to clean up where this is inconsistent, ill considered, vague or outright futile, I'm gonna have to go pee now, just like I predicted.

I let this thing die for what, two years? Now suddenly I'm Slappy McOpinion again. Baffling.

I'm sort of gut-wrenchingly disturbed by things like the Birthers and the constant right wing call for military juntas to overthrow President Obama, but at the same time I'm also fairly inured to it all. Discourse died a long time ago, the best we can do is putting swastikas on placards protesting *gasp* socialized medicine. God forbid people not die from shit we have the technology to cure just because it's expensive, right? I've always secretly hoped the same folks would opt out of socialized education, roads, police, fire, Social Security, unemployment insurance, and pretty much every other thing local, state and federal governments provide and go live in a vast underground cavern somewhere.

Preferably one we could roll a rock across the opening and call it a day.

Anyway, not going out today. No squirrels, no teen on teen domestic violence, no dudes with ponytails stepping on my feet. I feel sick and exhausted and I'm just not up for whatever wacky hijinks life has in store.

As an agnostic, I've always found atheism and atheists a bit baffling.

The religious I often find maddening, but at least I understand why. They're pretty clear on what faith is, what belief is, and what they themselves have faith in and belief. But for every atheist that will deny that atheism is a religion there's another atheist who will straight faced tell me that you can be an agnostic atheist because agnosticism is about knowing while atheism is about belief: that an agnostic atheist doesn't believe in God or gods, but is willing to be convinced if evidence comes to light.

Being willing to believe in God if God shows up at your house is not agnostic in any way. And frankly it makes atheism into a weird religion: one where the atheist in question has faith that there's no God or gods instead of knowing that there's no God or gods.

Is it me? It's me, isn't it?

After yesterday's... whatever you'd call it... I was a trifle hesitant to return to the Safeway of the Damned. However, I was hungry and wanted some junk food for today's WoW.com column composition (Speaking of which, check out this thread from work about the new five man coming out, it amused me) and tonight's raid on Trial of the Grand Crusader, also known as "We die a lot", so I girded my loins (with Hanes) and strode forth to confront iniquity.

The trip was uneventful save for a persistent young fellow who asked me for 'cigs' three times before understanding that "I don't smoke" means I don't have any. No birds, no squirrels, few cars, a pretty solidly nice cool fall day. I made my purchases in the store without incident. No roller derby with people so ancient they could have changed Ramses II's diapers in their grim grey motorized plastic carts, no people attempting to take down a jar of pasta sauce by knocking six jars to the floor one at a time, no couples frantically stuffing danish cooked ham cans down a woman's pants five yards from where the security guard stands and shakes with laughter.

So completely normal was the excursion at this point that as I walked out the door and began making my way home, I began to fear that frozen toilet ice from a passing airliner was in my future. (That's still #3 on my 'ways I don't want to die' list.) Dreading the arrival of the Nazgul, I made my way home, passing several large trees when I heard the soft, lilting pipes of the background music to a BBC special playing... well, all right, I didn't, but I really should have.

Events unfolded quickly: I saw a local cat I've noticed before on walks (mostly black with white paws and a white smudge on his face, quite frankly a rather attractive and winsome little cat to be allowed to run around outside... but also, remarkably faster than I am so that's unlikely to change) run past me, pursuing a small grey blur I could barely make out. They ran up a tree in front of me, and as I passed said tree craning my neck, I heard a remarkably high pitched and throaty yowl from above.

The cat was now backing out onto a branch, tail almost as spiky as a porcupine, yowling frantically. Six or seven squirrels were chittering and screeching and edging him inexorably out further and further, doing their best "We're the Squirrel Special Forces" impression.

I stood, cursing myself for my luddite tendency to avoid a cell phone (both to film it and to call animal control in case the cat got stuck or, worse, knocked out of the tree) when the cat suddenly remembered that it had two paws full of extremely sharp claws pointed in the general direction of the approaching Squirrel Armed Forces. With a scream that quite frankly made me fairly glad I wasn't a pack of squirrels up a tree with him/her, the cat quickly reminded everyone of two salient facts.

1 - The cat was a cat.
2 - The squirrels were squirrels.

The squirrels broke and ran, and after a couple of seconds the cat tore ass down that tree and down the street while I may have been indisposed wiping a sudden burst of tears out of my eyes while I convulsed with laughter that I'm sure was completely unrelated and in no way reflected on the cat's unfortunate complete and total loss of dignity.

Then I imagined how David Attenborough would have described it the whole way home. Trust me, he was very dignified and yet impish about the whole thing.

I had this whole post about "Nice Guy/Girl" behavior... you know, when a man or woman acts friendly towards someone but isn't genuinely interested in being friends, but is rather hoping by said overtures to somehow sidle into a relationship? (Short version of that post is, it's pathetic and creepy, don't do it and don't encourage it by taking advantage of the nice guy/girl as a shoulder to cry on knowing full well they're seeing this as a signal to continue on their desperate charade) when I had an experience that sort of killed any interest I had in continuing that discussion.

On the way back from the Safeway of the Damned (where I have been hit by cars, hit by old people in motorize carts, run into by fleeing shoplifters, and climbed by squirrels) I took my usual shortcut down the alleyway between one of the several assisted living apartment buildings in the area and the store. I probably shouldn't, as this is the exact place where people with failing eyesight often come barreling out of their subterranean parking garage to smash me under the wheels of their ancient behemoth motor vehicles. But since it's also where a squirrel used me as a ramp to climb a tree (yesterday, in fact) I figured perhaps some other charming fauna would come forth for a cute, wholesome experience of whimsy I could share.

Instead, I rounded the corner to see a young couple, no older than their 20's, locked in a loud argument. As I stepped around the garbage strewn everywhere, the man grabbed the back of the woman's head and shook her like a rat terrier by her ponytail, screaming some sort of obscenity (to be honest, I didn't catch much of what he was saying due to the spitting frenzy he was saying it in) as he did so. I'm ashamed to admit that I actually froze for at least a few seconds, completely unable to believe in what I was seeing.

Finally I managed to gather my wits enough to yell "Hey" in my best imitation of my father voice. It's deeper and projects much further, and they both stopped what they were doing to look around as if they were under the spotlight of a passing helicopter. The man in question let go of her head and ran off. To be honest, I don't even know if he saw me or just ran reflexively.

The young woman, on the other hand, did not allow me to come close enough to see if she was okay. She wouldn't let me call the police (or more accurately, kept saying no when I asked her if she wanted me to) and when I tried to convince her to come back inside the store (so that I could maybe get the manager to call the cops for me) she booked off in the same direction the man had run at a lot faster than I could have managed even if I didn't have four 2 litre bottles of diet soda in a backpack. I quite honestly think she might have struck me if I came any closer than I did.

So that was my afternoon. Failed to act promptly and failed to get someone to help themselves. Now I'm home wondering why I froze up. I honestly think I've started to realize I'm a lot older than I used to be, and my awareness of my mortality has sunk in pretty deeply. It's a bit shameful, but there it is.

Do you suppose that the people who supported the Patriot act throughout the Bush years ever lose sleep when they realize Obama is using it right now to justify wire taps, financial records without a warrant, and other measures against them?

So I'm thinking of doing a journal webcomic.

I can't draw, so it wouldn't be a well illustrated one, but I do have one thing in spades, and that's embarrassing or even downright humilating stories.

Didn't go to bed till 5 am. Didn't go to sleep until much later than that. Woke up to find note from palintheist saying she was out with her mother. No caffeine in the house, which is desperately needed to live (and yes, I know it's probably a main cause of my insomnia, but unfortunately if I cut it out now I'll be unconscious for four days) so a walk to the local store was necessary.

I have very bad luck when I go to the store by myself. Today was no exception. There was a rather blatantly intoxicated (although I couldn't tell you the toxin, I didn't smell any alcohol on him and as you'll see shortly I got close enough to do so) young man in the store speaking on his cell phone so loudly that the young woman in front of him was actually flinching.

However, I'm old enough and was tired enough that no, I didn't go to her rescue. No, loud jackass could have continued his loud jackassery (I'm fairly certain the phone call was about him having successfully had sexual intercourse with someone in an equal state of chemical alteration to his own... she apparently had smaller breasts than he usually likes yes that's how loud the phone call was) had he not staggered backwards, stepped on my foot and caught me in the jaw with his arm while flailing.

When I was younger, my instincts would often work before I was aware of them on a conscious level. This time there was no instant reaction, no body performing before mind, I very consciously grabbed him by his ratty little pony tail. (Thank you again to ursuscelticus for sending me my brown leather boots, which saved me from broken toes.)

Then, as the guy stared in dawning comprehension, I very politely and calmly said "I'm sorry I hit you in the face while talking on my cell phone. I should pay more attention." For some reason, I smiled very calmly and yet that seemed to upset him even more. Possibly it was because my face was a couple of inches away from his and I had him by the back of the head. "Now you try."

There was probably some spittle involved, I admit. And my idea of polite and calm in this instance might be louder and more growl-intensive than the usual.

He stammered out and apology and I let him go and waited to see if he'd hit me back. In the past, we'd have a fifty/fifty chance of a fight at this point, but perhaps Canadians are more opposed to blatant violence. Or perhaps the fact that I was vibrating with the urge to bite his fucking nose off, I'm not sure. At any rate, he didn't take a swing and I walked out and to the other local store which is further away and realized as I got there that I was shaking.

It's nice to know I can still project an air of insanity when needed. It's less nice to know I still feel the need.

I was capable of going days without sleep when I was younger. I am not capable of it now.

It is 4 AM Sunday the 20th and I am in so much pain that I cannot see without putting my face right up to the screen, so please excuse my typos. I just hurt. My face feels hot and greasy, my skin is itching on the inside where my fingers can't get at it. I listen to loud loud music to drown out the pounding of my own blood in my temples. I keep lurching forward, barely catching myself before I faceplant into the keyboard.

I'm so tired that I'm angry that I'm awake. I'm working myself up into a frenzy here, I'm so goddamn pissed off that I'm not asleep. I half want to go get dressed and go get into a fight with one of the college age drunken lumbering mindless jackholes infesting the neighborhood. I'm too old, though. I might win but I'd take damage that wouldn't heal fast, if at all. I'm too old for violence and too old to be without sleep and yet I'm awake at 4:30 AM local time and my whole body is shrieking at me to sleep.

There's a burn on the back of my hand where I got something out of the oven a little too slowly the other day. I'm actually ripping the blister open because it feels better than letting my head talk to me without a buffer.

I just want to go to sleep. I'm fantasizing about snoring, that's how bad this particular night is. I rather desperately need to sleep.

Found a notebook with a timeline for an old story/stories I used to write called Tempest. Tempest was basically comic book space opera with everything I could think of thrown into the hopper. Apparently I'd written a complete timeline going back over 1 million years for the whole thing, with alien abductions, nuclear plasma aliens in a giganic uni-mind linkage that essentially parallel processed so that the more of them there were the smarter they communally became, forced evolution through insanely harsh conditions, psionic abilities... it was equal parts Superman, Lensmen, the Green Lantern Corps, X-Men, and was influenced in turn by Julian May, Theodore Sturgeon, and Bester. As it went on it started to get some Phillip K. Dick in there, too.

Lately whenever I go for a walk the story unfolds in pieces in my head. No narrative line, and the characters aren't the same as when I wrote it before, which is to be expected I guess because neither am I. I probably won't ever write it. But I see it in my head... a dead world the size of Uranus or Neptune, radioactive and dotted with settlements of beings descended from our ancestors. Cities like mountains made of silver shimmering and moving in thousand mile an hour winds full of diamond-hard silicates. Glowing, burning eyes the color of a tropical forest, so green they hurt to stare at. Crashing vessels that cut through the Astral Plane, scattering godlings like seed pods on an ancient Earth. The building of the eternal city in the place that's outside of time. Earth sealed away from the greater universe by those that fear their fellows, fear discovery, a hothouse never allowed to grow.

I should probably actually write it before it drives me insane.

Trying to do a list of all the times I came close to death. So far:

The time I went ice skating, fell through the ice, couldn't get my shoes back on and fell unconscious in the snow on the way back to the house. Think I was 10. Have been told my heart stopped and I needed resuscitation.

The time I set the garage on fire trying to make a time machine out of an arc welder and a battery charger hooked up to a Naval officer's dive watch. Melted the watch, too.

The time my dirtbike's engine blew up while I was trying to fix it and set the barn on fire.

The time I got shot in the leg by a deer hunter while riding said dirtbike, which is why I was fixing it in the first place. I was 16 for both of those, I think. (Broadleaf arrows really, really rip flesh up.)

The time I crashed my car into a tree because the steering died.

Then there was the multiple times my cousin and I went down into the basement of the old collapsing stone buildings swarming with rats and tried to kill them using fire axes, acetylene torches, and our compound bow and target arrows. My father later decided we should just use shotguns instead.

Whenever I managed to fracture my head and didn't get medical treatment for it for years so that to this day I have painful headaches.

What's amazing is, this is just my 10 to 17 period. More to come when I think of it.

And I will be picking up the Dark Sun books for 4th Ed when they come out.

I feel like my response to mysticalforest today was both overly harsh (Eric, I don't know why, and I apologize for the tone) and missed a good general point he was making. 4th Edition works. People are playing it, enjoying it, it is a perfectly valid system and one some players find superior. Now, I don't feel that way about it. It has remained an MMO simulator in my eyes, albeit one that takes advantage of the ability of players to make changes on the fly that computers simply cannot match. (A DM is infinitely more flexible than Blizzard's servers, you will never see pen and paper RPG's as limited as an MMO.)

To a certain degree I can accept the idea that some players are more comfortable when there are rules for things like, say, trying to intimidate a clerk into giving you a better deal on a sword vs. just saying "I try and intimidate the clerk" and letting the GM decide if you pull it off. I always thought it was a little odd that my character Skulvryn wasn't scarier, considering she was huge, pale blue, and had tusks. You can certainly argue that being a gigantic brute should be scary without making a skill check for it. I guess I just don't see that as limiting: the secret meta-rule of all RPG's is "Ignore the rules when necessary" and I see Pathfinder as being perfectly at home in that tradition.

Either way, I like both games and I'll play both if I get the chance to.

My lovely and brilliant wife picked me up a copy of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook last night. If you're a roleplaying enthusiast you probably already know what that is, but if you're not, it's basically the Open Gaming License put to a use I had not anticiptaed, namely, keeping the widespread 3.5 ruleset for Dungeons and Dragons current and relevant. At least, that's what I assumed it was before I'd gotten a chance to look at it, and to be fair to me it does in fact do that.

But it goes further than that. To be honest, it feels more like the revisions I was expecting with 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. It retains classes, multiclassing, hit progression, prestige classes, spells... it looks and feels more like Dungeons and Dragons than the current books with that title on them, to be completely honest. Part of that is the rather lavish color illustration (the cover is astonishing and the interior art ranges from good to very good to even great in a few places, if you were reading Dungeon Magazine or picking up D&D products between 2000 and 2006 you'll recognize quite a few of the artists) and the layout is distinct without being overly cluttered while the typeface manages to be sharp and distinct against colored pages, something that can be very difficult to pull off.

But as I said, this isn't just a revamp. The basics are all here (races, classes) but there have been quite a few changes. Grapple makes sense now. No, really! It does! It's a simple set of opposed checks, you can read the paragraph and understand how it works. Combat won't surprise anyone who played 3.5, but definitely seems more coherent now. Polymorph is broken up into two spells for use on the caster (Polymorph and Greater Polymorph) and Polymorph Any Object, for use on enemies. These spells also seem much less likely to break your game.

It's a 500+ page book so I haven't gotten to excavate the whole thing yet, but in general I'm very pleased with it. The clear illustrations of combat situations alone would probably have won my heart. Strangely, the fact that this book exists has not made me decide to switch away from 4th Edition. No, I'd like to play both.

4th Edition is actually a pretty nice fusion of a modern MMO like World of Warcraft and a tabletop RPG, it plays like the WoW TCG jacked up in every way. I can think of a lot of fun things I could do with it. 4th Edition D&D is a lot like a stripped down stock car to my eyes, trading complexity and weight for the power to do the one thing it wants to do (in this case, simulate combat with each class having a predetermined role... you're the damage, he's the tank, I'm the 'leader' which basically means healer, and she's the ranged 'controller') although I will admit that my initial enjoyment of 4th Ed was marred by some poor choices in the initial releases. Frankly, the 4th Ed PHB actually made me angry. It was so unpolished in places that it felt more like the first draft than a ready to publish product. Later releases (I'm very fond of the PHB2 for 4th Edition) mollified me somewhat. My current view of 4th Edition is that it's a fun, fast, but not terribly flexible or elaborate game. (I'm sure we could get into arguments on this score in the comments, and frankly, I'm more than willing to as I am a nerd and love arguing just for the sake of it so feel free to tell me all the ways I'm wrong.)

But Pathfinder has retained all that lovely flexibility that 3.5 (and 3.0 before it) offered. And even adds some of its own: I very much like seeing three different experience progression speeds, for instance. I liked seeing classes like Druids and Rangers offered a choice between taking an animal companion (with improved rules for pet scaling that keep the animal companion from becoming a free kill at higher levels of play) or a different ability to help their groups. It not only feels more inclusive to different styles of play (I'd very much like to sit down and make a fully melee-oriented Ranger with the new rules in Pathfinder, eschewing both ranged weapons and the pet entirely, and I think it would actually be more fun to play than the 4th Edition Ranger even though that's exactly what they do) but in such flexibility there's room for surprises.

Remind me to tell you about the time a man named Jason Nelson actually killed the entire Psionics rules in my weekly D&D game. One week, I had a Soulknife. The next week, I did not. It was very, very impressive.

Each class has new flavor added to its abilities (Paladins can add Mercies to their Lay on Hands abilities, for instance, while Barbarians can choose specific powers for their rages) although I'm pleased to say that the Fighter remains a very simple class. You get a lot of feats. That's basically it. And that's enough. Sorcerers do more with their Bloodline now, which seems like a nice way to emphasize that whole 'inborn magic' aspect of the class, while Wizards can choose between a familiar and an enchanted object such as a staff or wand which will grant them extra spells. I'm really just skimming the surface to give you some small idea of what seems to be a design philosophy of broadening the scope of what 3.5 allowed.

Jason Bulmahn has done something really impressive here. He's presented me a rule system I already know fairly well (although I admit I'm no Jason Nelson) and done so in a way that's refreshed, restored and revitalized it for me, shown me things that I didn't expect it to be able to do, cleaned up the things that never really made sense to me (like why, say, my Ranger brings a free hostage into high level content) and in general actually managed to make a new RPG in the process that I'd really like to run a campaign in. If you wanted to run a fantasy campaign, whether it be a grim Black Company style mercenary setting or a lighthearted Lankhmarian tale, or even raw Kull/Conan/Bran Mak Morn ultraviolence you could do it with Pathfinder. Lord of the Rings, Discworld, Greyhawk, this would work for any of them with minimal effort. (For Discworld you'd basically just have to ramp up the irony.)

I'm very happy about it, honestly. I may even try and write something for it just to play around. Everyone who worked on this thing should be very proud of it.

My wife has volunteered to help with the secret project so hopefully we'll get that done tonight. Yay for my wife, who is awesome, and no you can't have her cause I'll kill you dead.

Unrelated, the workplace place that I currently work at is awash with patch 3.2 news. If you know where I work you'll know what that means. For me, it means very little. I honestly only really play the game cause I get paid to at this point.

Trivial post is trivial.