I beheld Satan fall as lightning from heaven

My beautiful wife (palintheist, who enjoys pulling hairs out of my beard) and I often have discussions just before bed that I consider interesting. One is in the differences between the two of us: my wife is of strong (albeit unconventional) religious faith while I am an agnostic. We had a discussion of a mutual friend who is an atheist, and who always derides Christianity and those that profess faith in it as stupid, mocks their belief system as 'the sky fairy' and similar, and yet when presented with neo-pagans and other religions says things like "Well, you're not religious, you're spiritual."

Of course, first of all that's a ridiculous statement. There are plenty of religions world-wide that aren't Christian and yet which hold equally implausible beliefs - if you're going to mock those that profess the belief that a simultaneously triune yet whole entity that created the universe sent a part of itself to Earth 2000 years ago to save us all from our sins, you have to mock the idea that the Shiva Lingam is 5000 miles long.

Secondly, while I have no trouble acceding that atheists, as far as I can determine with my human senses and the information currently available to me, are certainly right in that the universe as it exists does not require the hand of an inscrutable deity or deities to function, I find the contempt towards those that profess faith to be baffling. Of course, as an agnostic, I believe that the ultimate truth of our existence is unknowable as long as we are human. But even if for the sake of the argument we divorce ourselves from that point, I find intellectual contempt for people based solely on their choice of religion (divorced from what they do with it) to be puzzling at best and repulsive at worst.

Faith is belief in the absence of evidence: it's an ability humans have had for as long as they've been able to describe themselves as human. Like any human ability, when it is used positively (to prevent despair in the bare face of the unknowable fate that awaits us in death, to allow us to achieve cultural bonds with each other and share through ritual our common experiences as humans) it is a very fine thing. When used negatively (to scorn those who do not share our beliefs, to try and impose them on others because that's what God/Kali/the horned one would want, as a justification for intolerance and bigotry) it is a very bad thing. There is no question that throughout history religion has been used to justify genocide and wholesale torture.

There is also no question that throughout history economic systems, scientific inquiry and the possession of land have also been used to justify genocide and wholesale torture, yet no one seriously advocates that those things be done away with, much less treats all of these involved with those processes as imbeciles. (I shouldn't say no one, as I'm sure you could probably find someone who does on the internet with minimal effort.)

If you have made the intellectual choice after working through the various factors of human existence that there is no deity or deities, congratulations. You are to be applauded for having made the effort. You may well be right. That mere fact no more justifies your intolerance of others than it does their intolerance of you, and the fact that you have decided that religion is silly does not make those that have not made the same decision as you stupid, or lacking in the facts you have in your possession. They may in fact be stupid. They may in fact lack information you have. But they may not, and until you know one way or another, treating all people who profess to a faith as if they were cretins does you no credit.

This of course leaves out the fact that as an agnostic I find any such declaration to be monstrously arrogant. I do, but I don't go around calling atheists and people of faith monsters of arrogance based solely on that decision. You're free to swing you arms around until the point where they would collide with my nose.

Conservative radio show host who argues that waterboarding isn't torture gets waterboarded and decides it is.

Now, all we need is for everyone else who thinks that to get waterboarded.

Note to the fine people of western civilization: just because you are speaking into a cell phone, you are not inaudible, especially if you speak at a louder than conversational volume.

Note to the fine people of Edmonton: I'm sorry I threatened to shove that cell phone up that man's ass in the Macs today. In my defense, not only was he being very loud, but he told that person who asked him nicely to stop yelling into a small plastic device about his sexual escapades to do something anatomically impossible, thus justifying my loud, bellowing, frothing-mouthed threat to introduce his colon to the wonders of modern electronics.

Per my wife's request: yes, he put the phone away. In his defense, this was yelling at him. I'm pretty sure I got a few specs of enraged spittle on his expensive sunglasses.

Here's the complete scans of DC Comics Presents starring Superman and OMAC. It's from the 1980's. The scans aren't very high quality.



Yep, MURDERMEK. He never appears again, which is too bad. I'll most likely come back and post some snarky comments after I put this live, so if you like that sort of thing, then yay.

( Since I can't think of anything else to use this LJ for. )

In case someone's still looking to blame the internet for that...

No, you guys killed yourselves. When presented with a clearly deeply flawed Administration, you presented their words as truth, unexamined. You stood there, because you believed that these were the kind of people that we could all relate to, and let them weasel their way into power. Then you allowed them to blithely abuse their power for eight years. When lies were told, you did not question them. When blatant lunacies were committed, you shrugged. You chose to behave as though objectivity demands printing easily exposed falsehoods as if they had equal weight with true statements. You did not dig. You did not do the hard work of questioning those in power. You focused on Swift Boat storytelling instead of reality.

You proved time and again that you could not be trusted. You did Karl Rove's bidding, were his lickspittle, his plaything. You stood there and blandly relayed the fantasies and delusions of a cabal of dangerous thugs who wanted a war, any way, to restore America's image to the world. Millions, billions looted by the companies the American people trusted to help 'rebuild' Iraq, you did nothing. Gulags run on American military bases.

I could literally go on forever, but I am tired. If you cannot question, if you cannot find a way to point out that the economy is made of sand and built of debt for eight solid years, then it is time for you to go.

McCain still attributes the attention to nothing more than Keating's "great respect for military people" and the duo's "political and personal affinity." But Keating, for his part, made no bones about the purpose of his giving. When asked by reporters if the investments he made in politicians bought their loyalty and influence on his behalf, Keating replied, "I want to say in the most forceful way I can, I certainly hope so."

John McCain, ladies and gentlemen.

Have fun obfuscating his record, hard-line conservatives who'd vote for any Republican no matter what just to keep a Democrat from office. I'm sure you'll do fine.

( A rant about idiots )

Now, granted I know some of the people at Paizo. But I've never worked for or with any of them, so this is about as unbiased as a statement of preference can get. So far, I feel like Paizo's Pathfinder RPG is an easier to use game than 4th Edition D&D.

I intend on trying to write a more detailed review when my brain stops pounding in my ears. For now, let the fact that not once during reading the beta release of Pathfinder did I say "Huh? WTF does that mean?" be your guide.

So little time. Eighteen years. Less than half of my life to date, and gone as long as it lasted. Snatches of memory... eyes brown as newly turned soil, hair streaking with silver through black waves, a smile that turned a slightly predatory cast of nose and cheek into a bonfire of warmth.

Proud of me despite there being nothing to be proud of: whatever potential I had then, I rarely realized, a pattern that has continued the rest of my life.

Today I realized the sound of her voice is gone from my memory, while listening to a woman bark at her offspring far, far below in the streets surrounding my apartment. The air that strange quiet calm that carries sound with perfect clarity, a screech of panic, of rage at fear caused by a wayward child. I know I caused my mother to assume that tone many, many times. Yet I cannot remember it, or any other shading of her voice. No joy, no fear, no anger, nothing of the way she sounded lives in my mind. I only remember the way she looked because I have a few pictures.

I knew my mother but briefly, and every day that grinds itself fine I know her less.

That's right, I'm not talking about the important issues of the economy, or politics, or any of that stuff. (What's to say? My worst nightmares have come to pass, the US is on its way to economic and political obsolescence, I don't think Obama can get elected in the face of how massively racist and ignorant the majority of US Citizens seem to be based on their media but he's basically the only possible hope for the nation regaining any of its international prestige and economic viability, and I'm sad and depressed as I view the future for the country I loved so much and now just feel unhappy for.) Instead, more D&D talk to distract myself.

On further reading/rereading of the PHB, I feel that I now understand how 4th Edition works. The guiding principle behind the game redesign seems to me to be twofold. One is simplicity: if at all possible make any and all processes in the game simpler. This philosophy I can actually get behind even when I don't necessarily like all of its results.

The second principle seems to be change for change's sake. Change because it's 4th Edition and stuff needs to be different or it's too much like 3.5 and not enough like a redesign. Some of these changes are pretty interesting. Some seem forced and pointless.

( So what do you, mister not a professional game designer, have to say? )

So yeah, your humble British Society of Fantasy nominated author (I am not going to win, or have not won, I forget when the awards even are/were) makes his monthly post. My beautiful wife and her mother conspired to get me a copy of the new PHB, DMG and MM for 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons. My feelings are so far mixed.

Things I hate and things I like:

( A lot of ranting to follow )

I'm sure everyone was worried as to what I thought, right?

In case anyone still reads this: I've been nominated for an award from the British Fantasy Society. Scroll way, way down. Yeah. Way down there. But there it is. This is almost as cool as when I got a runner's up in one of the Year's Best Science Fiction collections.

Okay, back to my hermit hole. Take care, everyone. I miss you guys.

palintheist and I have basically decided to stop using Livejournal. She doesn't like comments made by the new owners, and I don't like LJ all that much, I just used it for ease of friending.

If you're looking for me, I'll be at this site when I have anything else to say. You can also keep up with what little professional output I have as a writer by reading this site if reading a grown man talking about video games doesn't bore you to death. I know I tried to keep a Typepad site going for a while, but I found their monthly billing practices insanely annoying.

Let's hope I can actually sustain some writing this time out.

Here's a thought I had today.

It's not their basic doctrines that make Scientology objectionable. It's no more odd or unusual to believe that an alien tyrant stuffed people into volcanoes and then blew them up with H bombs, and then trapped their souls in a movie theatre in order to strip them of their individuality and imprison them as thetans, or soul fleas, within human beings than it is to believe that a carpenter had a visitation from a celestial entity informing him that his fiancee was going to give birth to God's baby and that said baby was born in a manger with a star floating over it.

People flown to Earth in DC-10's? No stranger than wheels within wheels.

Scientologists hate psychiatry. Christian Scientists won't even go to the doctor if they get shot.

Scientologists believe that they can develop superhuman abilities if they are cleared of their thetan soul fleas by means of auditing. Mormons believe that an angel brought a magical text encoded on golden plates and a pair of magical glasses to their founder.

Leaving aside the idea that Scientology officials attempted to spy on the IRS, including Hubbard's own wife, and of course the weird tendency of people to die at Scientology run hotels, the only really objectionable thing I can find that is unique to Scientology is that, unlike just about any other religious entity on the planet, they don't want to tell you what they actually believe.

I mean, love them or hate them, the Vatican is not shy about letting you know what's what. Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, even fringe groups like the Unification Church tell people what they believe. Only Scientology makes you pay tens of thousands of dollars before you even get to hear the creation myth, sues people who reveal it, and otherwise tries to treat the central dogma of the faith as a trade secret.

I've given up writing, more or less. I do it for the video game site, of course, and they pay me for it: I'm a glorified marketing drone at second hand, ultimately. This doesn't really bother me, inasmuch as it seems to be the consensus view that all I'm worth as a writer is that position, and so I'm just happy to be getting paid at all.

On June 24th, 2006, I married the only person in all the world who has ever unabashedly, unreservedly, believed in me. She believed in me more than I did (and still does, I hope) and deserves a better return on her belief than to be married to a cheerleader for a video game. But for good or for ill, she chose to marry me. We will be married two years this June.

The past two months have been, as they have been for a very long time now, months wherein I nearly totally collapse. I wake up feeling like I'm drowning. I feel so exhausted that I crave sleep even after hours of being unconscious. I weep for no reason. I say cruel, monstrous things. I am in turns hateful and pathetic. I find living inside my skin intolerable, and cannot for the life of me understand how she can bear living around me.

If this entire world were on one side of a scale and she were on the other, and I had to choose which would endure and which would pass on, I would choose her. Because no human being has ever shown me more compassion, intelligence, concern or love than my wife. She deserves a man a million times better than I am or could ever be just to be good enough to be rejected by her. The fact that she loves me is a clear sign of her superhuman ability to love.

I am unable to say what should be said about her. So I say empty, pallid things that will never do her justice, and hope she can grasp how I feel anyway.

I love you, Julian. I'm sorry I'm not able to say it better.

Just found out E. Gary Gygax is dead.

I am bummed. I did not know him, but he did create one of the things that helped make my childhood a touch more bearable. My best wishes to his family and loved ones.

One of the interesting things to come out of my recent overview of the first two years of published Superman stories is to realize how devoid of mythology the character was. Sure, he was an alien, come from the doomed planet Krypton. But Siegel and Shuster seemed totally disinterested in Krypton. All we really knew about it was that everyone there had the same physical gifts as Superman himself... a few strips in the newspaper daily covered the death of the planet, and in them, we saw Jor-L capable of surviving a quake that topples buildings down on him. And then, a few panels later the baby goes in the spaceship and the planet blows up, thus ending Krypton... and really, any interest on the part of the writer and artist in ever seeing Krypton again. Theirs is a Superman of the world they lived in, and it was in that world that they were most interested in seeing him operate.

I've said before that I viewed the original Superman comic books as wish fulfillment, because that's exactly what they are: social wish fulfillment. It's no accident that the first, second and third things Superman always seems to be doing is smacking down bullies, gun-toting mobsters, and those with wealth beyond their needs, especially arms merchants, slum landlords and those that profit from the poverty or death of others. Whether it be crooked oil speculators who don't actually drill for the stuff when they can just keep offering stocks or Emil Norvell, forced to enlist in a foreign military so that he might see his own weapons in action, the Superman of these times is often found punching rich people in the face. Or forcing entire towns to drive more carefully by waging a one man war on each and every bad driver they have. Or destroying slot machines because kids play them instead of going to school.

Their Superman is a science fiction concept, yes, but the science fiction is really just there to allow them license to present their little parables. Their Superman is not so awe inspiring as later ones... he's far more capricious and cruel, for one thing, and just as likely to disguise himself as a washed up, suicidal boxer and help lift the man to the world championship as he is to expose crooked construction kingpins. He brazenly (and at times giddily) defies the police, going so far as to kidnap the mayor of an undisclosed town after smashing into a radio station twice to force them out so that he could make a radio address to the townsfolk. He's certainly good at heart - he'll help young orphans and wrongly abused convicts - but he often does so by convoluted and ridiculous means seemingly just for his own sense of fun. His alien heritage is absent: he's wholly and completely what you might expect from two young men in that time period, a strange mixture of imp and thug who has the power to actually do something about those things he finds objectionable.

All the things that would become so recognizably Superman over the next three decades... the Phantom Zone, Kryptonite, Kandor, the Fortress, Jimmy Olsen, the Daily Planet... none of these things are even in evidence. While Superman is much less potent, his only real adversaries are brilliant, but still human and outclassed by him. There is no real way to prevent him from doing whatever he sets out to do, ultimately. He's much less like a god, and yet, much less regulated or controlled by his milleu. He has no special weaknesses, no flamboyant alien robots or rocket-imprisoned sleeping Kryptonians to battle him. In fact, he is singular and unique, not just the only one of his kind as a last survivor of his dead world, but the only one of his kind period. No one else exists with powers like his. The closest we get is a dwarf hypnotist in the newspapers and a fake indian swami hypnotist in the comics.

This character is alien only as an afterthought. He is most sincerely a creature of his world, because the central pivot of the character is that he wants to change that world, and he can. His wish fulfillment is that of two men who wanted to see things get better, and imagined someone who could actually force them to.

Or are fictionally married to.

( Big wall of text crits me for 10,000 )

Okay, after this I promise I'll dry up and blow away. Hand to God and everything.

My lovley and loving wife palintheist defied me this Christmas and got me volumes 1 through 3 of the Superman Chronicles, reprinting every single Superman appearance from the first onward in chronological order. So I'm reading the adventures of Superman as written by Siegel and Shuster, from June of 1938 to June of 1940. While reading this, a few things occurred to me.

The first is that the Superman of the early Siegel and Shuster conception, by virtue of being limited in his powers, was far freer to be active. He could break through walls to confront a wife beater, he could wrestle the steel door off of the Governor's mansion in order to save a woman from execution, he could actually declare war on, say, slot machines or reckless drivers and go forth to destroy whatever he felt needed destroying in order to bring about whatever result he was going for. Hold a room full of diplomats hostage by threatening to collapse the entire building on them if they don't make peace? Kidnap a munitions profiteer and force him into a foreign military in order to force him to see the weapons he makes in action? Disguise himself first as a washed up football player and then a washed up boxer and in so doing, falsely lift them to the pinnacle of their respective sports? Superman does all these things, when he's not killing people by throwing them over the horizon or crashing their airplanes by throwing himself into the propellers.

( I do this purely to save your lists )

Okay, that's enough out of me. I apologize to your friend's list. I'll go find my rock now.

Just some thoughts, then I promise I'll go away again:

1 - homosexuals are as capable of caring for their sexual partners as anyone else. So making a statement that in any way implies that they generally don't is homophobic. Just in case that needed to be said.

2 - Joe Quesada aying that he wants to make Spider-Man easier for new readers to relate to by not only undoing the character's history but by returning the character and his comic to his 1960's cast is ridiculous. You're not trying to make the character easier for new readers to relate to by bringing Harry Osborn back from the dead and retconning his marriage out, if you were, you'd just publish Ultimate Spider-Man where he's a modern teenager. Instead, you set the wayback machine to the comics that he was in when you were a kid, Joe. You're doing exactly what you accuse the fans of the marriage of doing, trying to make Spider-Man freeze in the moment of your perfect platonic love for him.

I don't actually give a fuck, since it's comics and he'll be doing some ridiculous shit or other in short order, but going out and working this hard on the whole "One More Day/Brand New Day" bullshit to freeze the character unchanging as you remember him and then arguing it's so new readers, kids more than half your age who could give two shits in hell about Harry Osborn, can relate to the character is absurd. Hell, most kids who read the Ultimate version of the book seem to relate to that Peter... who is dating Mary Jane.

So go ahead and make the character your own private terrarium where he's forever how you remembered him. But don't tell people it's to make him more accessible to new readers when you just put him in a jar labeled "Perfect Spidey 1969".

3 - Seriously, talking about lube and anal sex as if it is in any way the apex of homosexuality or provides any kind of insight as to whether or not homosexual couplings revolve around love or respect or caring for each other... it's juvenile and beneath an intelligent person. Stop that shit. If you're not interested in gay subtext in your fiction, just say so, don't make pronouncements on 'tops' and 'bottoms' please. It makes me wince, as a man who has been with men, to see this kind of shit. Clearly you don't know what such relationships are like, so don't speak as if you do.

Yeah, this is aimed at one specific person. The rest of you are probably wondering what the fuck I'm talking about. Sorry about that.

4 - There are two Batmans. There's the one who appears in Justice League and so on, the omni-capable, can breathe in space, always right tactical genius who can beat anyone in a fight because, if he couldn't, why would they waste time keeping a dude whose main power is being rich? Then there's the Batman who appears in his own comic, who fights a fat guy who is obsessed with birds, an evil clown, a dude with an obsessive-compulsive disorder about leaving clues, and an assortment of sexually demented women in tight outfits. The one who could very well be killed by a lucky shot from a zip gun.

We need both Batmans because, as I said, if the JLA Batman isn't the most brilliant badass of them all, there's absolutely no reason for him to be on the team. If the writers don't go out of their way to let Batman beat Solomon Grundy, the Starkiller and Jesus, then he's basically just a rich nutcase in a rabid animal costume. But, if we have that Batman show up in Batman's regular comic, then we have the mystery of how a crazy dude with green hair can possibly defeat the guy who hypnotized Jesus in last week's JLA. So there must always remain a soft filter betwene the two books, and we must agree never to question how the Riddler could actually get Batman to walk into a room filled with exploding Matryoshka dolls considering that in the same month it was Batman who talked Darkseid into wearing a parasol and a gingham overcoat. We all know that the perfect Batman who can beat up Superman is boring and we wouldn't want to read any of the stories starring him solo, just accept it.

Okay, I promise to go away again now.