Kings of Israel

I just finished Kings 1 and Kings 2 in the Bible.  This was not much of a departure from the last few sections in that it was a chronicle of Jewish men (almost exclusively) and their relationship with a massively powerful, unflinchingly violent and incredibly random supreme being.  It goes on about king after king, reign after reign regularly mixing in divine judgement from on high.

The most bizarre thing is the inconsistency of divine judgement.  51 men come up to a prophet and ask him to come and see the divinely appointed king.  God incinerates them on the spot.  51 more men come up to a prophet and make the same request and are again instantly conflagrated.  Yet a third 51 men come up to the prophet and make the same request slightly more politely and the prophet decides to follow them to the king.  By this we can learn that God's response to unwanted requests is instant immolation of the offending person.

Later on we see a King of Israel offend God over and over.  He worships Baal, he sacrifices to alternate gods, he ignores God's commandments and ordinances and much of the nation of Israel follows.  God then sends that he is going to destroy this King and his household.  The King repents and begs and is granted a reprieve:  God will destroy his son and his son's household instead.  Nothing happens until the King dies, and then shortly thereafter God causes the son, the son's friends, relatives, priests and everyone else associated with him to be destroyed for the father's sin.

What?  So a King begging is sufficient to gain a decades long reprieve from destruction, but regular people are instantly destroyed?  A suitable punishment for a lifetime of 'evil' is a massacre of people who weren't involved in the crime at all while a suitable punishment for making a polite request is death.  The Bible continues to be incredibly random and unpredictable, more so than I imagined after reading atheist writings on the subject.  Reading these passages surely makes me wonder how anyone could laud the Bible as a source of law and morality.  Rape, genocide, murder, torture, oppression and destruction are regularly upheld and even required.  It is even true that people in the Bible who are insufficiently devoted to genocide, destruction and murder are denigrated for violating God's will.

At the end of Kings 2 because of their lack of obedience the Jews are scattered across the lands as subjects of other nations and Solomon's first temple to God is destroyed.  Clearly the story of a fall from grace and an odyssey of an orphaned people searching for a way to regain their homeland is a compelling tale.  It is unfortunate that the deity that granted them that homeland is 1.  Not real. and 2. A murderous, random, megalomaniacal sociopath.

I still have a long way to go it would seem.

A Beautiful World

I was walking through HMV the other day and saw a rack with some comic books.  One of them had an interesting cover and was titled Dark Avengers.  I figured I would take a quick look and keep going since I was on my way to the grocery store and didn't have much time.  I opened the comic and read the first page... and was utterly lost.  20 minutes later (entirely a guess on my part) I read the final panel, closed the comic, put it back on the shelf and wandered away in a daze.   Somehow this comic had simply grabbed me like a face hugging alien and would not let me go.

This story is a story of crazy, destructive, often evil people doing mostly good deeds.  It is a story about a man who was once a villain following the path of righteousness and justice and using every dirty trick and mind game at his disposal to assemble his group of miscreants and maniacs into a force for good.  These are dark, troubled heroes in desperate times.

I *love* it.

Certainly this one comic isn't unique and the theme of tortured souls fighting for justice is a common one in modern comics as well as many other mediums.  I suspect that I would have been as easily captivated by any number of similar stories on that same rack and just hit upon this one by accident.  Like a crack addict trying to take just one small hit I couldn't put it away once I started.  I have a problem you see... I am addicted to heroes.  The world they live in has so many characteristics of a world I long to live in.  In their world those who stand for good and justice can stand up to evildoers and defeat them, brave incredible dangers and emerge alive and live without compromise.

In the real world we are surrounded by compromise and uncertainty.  The death penalty is foolish because it is more expensive than incarceration until death as well as being irreversible.  Sometimes we find out that despite our best intentions justice was not done and incarceration can at least be ended.  Our society spends incredible amounts of money supporting those who make bad life choices whether it be teenage pregnancy, homelessness, drug abuse, insolvency or crime we take care of people who have made decisions that are not good rather than just leaving them to their fate.  We prevent vigilantism because vigilantes create cycles of violence and end up persecuting the wrong people;  police bureaucracy and legal red tape is a mess but it is better than the alternative.  In these ways we compromise.  We mostly do not rely on Justice as a guiding principle but rather Greatest Happiness for All.  I agree with these choices.  People as a whole are better off by far when we strive to help people and improve their lives even when they make terrible mistakes.

Knowing that a world of compromise is best for all does not reduce my longing for a stark world of heroes and villians, right and wrong, justice and certainty.  In this world you know who the evildoer is as he is dressed in a skintight costume, has the body of a greek god and an unmistakable aura of menace.  There can be no compromise; the evildoer must be defeated.  In our world it is best to eat local, recycle, call the police if you see something suspect and crush pixillated monsters on the internet.  I hope.  In their world it is best to stand up, put on a skintight costume, be incredibly ripped and utter lines like

"You will have to go through me first you madman!"

Compromise is best for all in a world of uncertainty.  That will not stop my dreaming about a world of heroes.

I'll be home for Easter

It's sort of like I'll be home for Christmas, except different.

I find it amusing that the two really important occasions of a given year for me are located on traditional Christian holidays.  The first of course is Christmas, which I value simply because it is a time when my family makes an effort to get together and return back to our place of birth.  I very much enjoy that event and strive to be there every year.

The second occasion is Easter.  This is quite different because instead of flying to visit family I drive to visit friends at the Comfy Lounge.  Back when I began university my frosh leaders told me that I would spend an awful lot of time in the Comfy Lounge.  At the time I had no idea what this entailed but they assured me that since I was a gamer I would be unable to resist the siren's call the Lounge puts out.  They also assured me that should I deny that irresistible song I would see my marks go up 20% but that few gamers managed to achieve this.  They were right on all counts.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Lounge in all its glory:

Surely there can be no nobler pursuit than the playing of games in a comfortable, familiar spot while furiously trashtalking all opponents and wishing desperately for the dice or cards to fall your way, just this once.

I spent 12 hours a day in the Lounge for several years.  It was my living room, my den, my dining room and occasionally my bedroom.  I met most of my current friends, most of my past girlfriends and my wife there.  That room is simply soaked in memory and mystery, a place so shrouded in lore and the ghosts of games past that it is hard to even zone in without being overwhelmed by visions of things long gone.  Each year I send around an email to those who once occupied this room with me inviting them back for just one day to recapture some small shard of those times.

Each year on Easter Friday we converge on the Lounge to talk, reminisce, reconnect and play.  This year will be the 9th time we have done this and the crowd is not diminishing as the years pass, rather it is changing.  The hardcore gamer bachelors are still there, but now we regularly see babies and new parents joining the festivities.  I rather did not expect that dirty diapers and cribs would end up being a main topic of conversation in the Lounge but that is where we are these days.

The Lounge waits for us, quiet and patient.  It knows that although we have moved on in our lives once a year we will hear that song once again and be unable to resist:

FOOOOOOOOOOOOOURTH!

(You know, the thing you shout when you have 3 for bridge and you need ... a fourth)

Underwear Atrocities Anonymous (UAA)

Hi there, my name is Sky and I keep my underwear way too long before throwing them out.

Crowd:  Hi Sky!

My wife has been hassling me for quite a while now to get new underwear.  I know I have a problem in this department; I hate going out to buy new things.  Some part of my brain insists that I need to be saving money and that going out to stores is a waste of valuable time I could be spending reading drivel on the internet.  I did this with my vacuum, I do it with my shoes, but the worst is underwear.  You see a vacuum at least has the counterbalancing feature that it is a tool.  I like good tools, tools that hum along and work smoothly and are of quality.  Underwear have this issue that they can perform their primary functions while being almost completely ruined and they are hidden away.  A terrible vacuum or wrecked shoes actually cause me pain, frustration or time while underwear do not, unless you count the time I spend telling my wife that yes, soon I will go and replace them.

Today I finally got off my behind and went out and got some new underwear.  They feel silky smooth and not at all wrecked on my bottom, though really the greatest relief is that the chore is done and I can get on with my life for another half dozen years or so.  An example of the offending garments:

I do wonder how much of it is normal and how much is just me being lazy and cheap.  Surely others delay the purchase of new underthings unreasonably too.  If I try I can put all kinds of good spins on this though, and some of them are even true:

I am helping the environment by reducing garbage volume.
I am helping keep underwear costs down by reducing demand.
I am saving cotton plants by necessitating less of them be harvested.
I am promoting a lifestyle of minimal consumption.

There, you see?  Wearing underwear until they are literally falling to pieces is a good thing and makes me a more moral person!

P.S. Briefs are for uptight people and boxers are for hippies.  Boxer briefs all the way.

The Lich King is hard

Boy, is it awesome.

WOW post incoming, probably incomprehensible to the non WOW crowd.

My guild has been smashing itself into the Lich King over the past 2 weeks and I must say that it has been one of the most enjoyable parts of this expansion so far.  This fight is hard, wonderfully so.  It brings me back to the early days of WOW, where fighting a raid boss for 3-4 weeks to get the fight down was not unusual and we had to plan and prepare to find ways around the specific mechanics.  Certainly it is true that those old fights were hard because largely we were incompetent but nonetheless the experience makes me remember the first days of WOW raiding in Molten Core and Blackwing Lair moreso than most Wrath encounters.

I find that the combination of challenge and cinematic elements is what intrigues me the most.  Putting in a dps and execution check is one thing, making that check be a flying undead monster that grabs a random player, carries them to the edge of oblivion and tosses them off (unless you stop it!) is magnificent.  Having the Lich King put heinous diseases on people that must be dumped onto his own hideous creations to destroy them is great.  I LOVE the idea of getting taken into Frostmourne to do battle with an evil creature there to secure my freedom.  This battle has all the hallmarks of a brilliantly written final epic battle from a fantasy movie or roleplaying campaign.  The enemy we are facing has been taunting us, throwing his minions at us and making our lives unpleasant for over a year and now we corner him at his throne on the top of a pinnacle of ice and do battle.  Just delicious.

ICC has actually been very well designed.  The early bosses are quite easy and many PUG groups wander in and have success with them.  The wing bosses are noticeably harder and very few people are able to beat them outside of guild runs.  Then we come to the Lich King himself... and he tears people apart.  It is a fitting way to end an expansion; a boss with 6 phases who requires a combination of good gear, good basic skills and substantial practice to nail down his many mechanics.  The *big* exception to my enjoyment of this zone is limited attempts.  Practice is a huge component of being good and to be denied the opportunity to practice is frustrating.  Hardcore guilds will still use alts and 10/25 settings to max our their tries while smaller guilds are stonewalled.  This mechanic has not been successful and needs to go.

We have the Lich King to p5 (p3?  Depends how you count it) now and we just need a bit more practice to seal the deal.  5 10 man Strict guilds have defeated him so far and we are hoping to be the sixth.  Best in the world we are not, but contenders we do hope to be.

The Patriot

I have always been intrigued by the way people react to the Olympics.  There are the wild, unrestrained celebrations when our athletes do well and the paralyzing sorrow and anger when they underperform.  Announcers spend huge amounts of time pumping the chances and stories of the home country athlete while trying not to actually advocate other people falling/failing/crashing.  I am not entirely comfortable with the onset of such rampant patriotism.  The Olympics themselves are relatively harmless I think, but the attitude of placing people in one's home country far and above anyone outside it is troubling.  I am proud of my country, the morals the laws of my country support and much of how my country is governed and yet when this pride is taken to extremes it disturbs me.

Some time ago I was talking to one of my wife's uncles about Afghanistan and he strongly advocated removing all of our troops from that country.  His position was that any troubles the Afghan nation is in or got into without foreign troops maintaining order were their own problem and that Canadian lives should not be wasted protecting people outside our country.  I attempted to convince him that 1.  The people that would be most negatively affected in Afghanistan would be those who flat out had no say in their situation and 2.  That simply letting violence explode in other nations has been tried in the past and is a failure of foreign policy.  In the end those problems have a tendency to spill outward and bring strife to one's own doorstep.  I did not succeed in changing his mind.

This type of attitude does not sit well with me.  While we have to prioritize people within our social group for assistance I do not think that those sorts of reciprocal agreements translate well to a nation.  We each have no reason to think we know more about how to help a particular Canadian (or whatever your nationality is) moreso than someone elsewhere and we also can hardly be said to have significantly more in common with a random Canadian than a random person in many other countries.  I should clarify that I do not think it a bad thing to help a fellow Canadian, but rather that placing Canadian lives so dramatically above the lives and wellbeing of others is something I cannot support in good conscience.

I have been thinking about parallels between racism and patriotism.  In both cases people support others based on who their parents were, what language they speak and what culture they exhibit.  In both cases no merit or connection is needed to justify that preferential treatment.  Racism is frowned upon in our society and yet patriotism is supported and encouraged.  I do not think that racism and patriotism are exactly the same, yet the similarities are problematic.  Surely patriotism is useful to nations and racism is not (particularly in Canada), but should that define our moral choices?  Why is it okay to show preference to a Canadian when it is surely not okay to do so to a Caucasian?

Sky, son of Leonard

I have been slugging through Ruth and Samuel 1 & 2 in the Bible, and this section is a lot like what I was expecting before starting my reading.  They are stories of an ancient people and their struggles with their enemies and their God.  One thing that has been coming to mind here though is how powerfully the Bible is focused around males, inheritance and ancestry.  People are introduced as Jim, son of John, showing just how much the father of the person in question matters.  Abraham, who was the original person to be granted the immense tract of land God set aside for his people, was promised that his descendants would become a great nation and be granted special treatment under God.  Over and over it is made clear that God decides who is part of his people and who is not by looking at who their family is and where they trace their ancestry.

I do find it frustrating that the Bible is so obviously biased in favour of men.  The important figures are male, it is clearly stated that the most important thing about a woman is her virginity and her ability to produce sons and women are barely considered human in many cases.  I do not know how modern women, or men who claim to believe in equality, can claim that the Bible contains good advice for morality and happy living after taking a good look at the way women are portrayed in the Bible.

I thought about how we treat this issue today and some interesting ideas popped out.  We place far less emphasis on inheritance than the Bible does, but it still exists.  For example, when I am addressed formally I am addressed as Mr. Roy.  Not Sky, not Red, but Mr. Roy.  The emphasis is on my family rather than on my individual name suggesting that when things get tough and formal the importance of my ancestry increases.  I am not sure what the intent of this originally was, whether it was a gesture of respect for those backing a person, a warning of those who might be disappointed if the person in question screws up, or some other reason.

It is easy to see why the importance of family was so high before, and so much less now.  These days if you get sick or injured society will take care of you.  (In Canada, at least)  In the days of the Bible you absolutely needed your family as should anything go wrong as they would be the only ones you could rely on.  An arrangement where everyone in a family took care of one another was necessary for old age, infirmity, child rearing and more.  Being shut out of your family would be a disaster almost unimaginable, whereas today that obviously isn't true.  People can support themselves comfortably without any external network and as such the importance of family as well as the power structure based around the family patriarch diminishes.

I love my family and am very proud to be a part of it.  That said, I don't want to be judged or judge anyone else primarily based on who shares genetic material, but rather on what is said and done.  I am glad I live in an age and place where being free of that particular bias is possible.