Kevin Schut argues that games are good. They are similar to books in that they create new worlds for us. “But creative play, mental challenge, narration, and imagination in today’s games are similar to what we experience when we learn to paint, ride a bike, or bake a non-virtual cake. That’s not to say games should take over all the time we spend on those things! It’s not an either/or equation.”
Everything matters, but watch your time.
This is curious. John Cotter holds the magnifying glass over the reviews of Toni Morrison’s new book, Home. Is it a rich, emotional book or is it not quite what reviewers hoped to read? Perhaps some of these reviewers are suffering from their own expectations? Sometimes when you expect to see the really, really, really awesome and see merely awesome, you’re disappointed. Santa has set me up like that many times.
It occurs to me a bit late that today is Friday, and we used to feature a live steel combat video on Friday, and you know Lars is out today, on a Friday of all days, so maybe the vikings have recorded some new fights. Oh, look. They have.
First, a personal notice. I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a Scandinavian festival in Stromsburg, Nebraska, so I won’t be posting anything. Be strong.
Over at The American Culture, where I cross-post now and then, Mike D’Virgilio has some thoughtful comments on the historical revisionism—distressingly popular among young evangelicals—that blames the “culture wars” in America on conservatives. I suppose if you weren’t around at the time, you can be excused for believing that kind of nonsense.
Below, a short history of religion in America as I suppose it’s taught in schools nowadays. (In case you’re new to this blog, the material below is satire. If you don’t know what satire is, look it up.)
In the beginning, an earnest group of Deists founded the United States. In order to protect the country from the fearful ravages of religion, they included in the first amendment of the Constitution a guarantee that the right to religion, and “the free exercise thereof,” might not be infringed upon by the government. Why they expressed it quite that way, when their clear purpose was to protect the people from all public expression of religion, remains a mystery.
Throughout the course of our nation’s history, religion has always been taboo in public life. No public figure ever prayed, or called for prayer, or defended his policies on the basis of the Bible. That was not done. The average citizen, in fact, never entered a church, and had no idea what the Bible has to say.
Throughout the greatest crises of our nation, the idea of calling on God was never even considered. The movement to abolish slavery, led by such stalwart secularists as Sojourner Truth, John Brown, and Rev. (the Rev. stood for Revisionist) Henry Ward Beecher, proudly proclaimed the equality of all people based on evolutionary science. Julia Ward Howe’s classic song, “The Battle Ballad of the Republic,” with its classic lines, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the horde,” expressed the humanitarian, humanist philosophy that united Americans (even when they were shooting at each other).
In the late 19th Century, the entirely secular Progressive Movement found a presidential candidate in that staunch secularist, William Jennings Bryan (who, probably under the influence of a brain lesion, later became the only American of his generation to question the theory of evolution). Another progressive cause was Prohibition, spearheaded by the entirely secular Women’s Skeptical Temperance Union.
It wasn’t until the 1950s that an insidious conspiracy of Christian fundamentalists wormed its way into American life, and started banning a lot of traditional freedoms that Americans had always cherished, like abortion and gay marriage. Where these religious fanatics came from is a mystery, since such people had never before been seen in this country. But it is the duty of all patriotic Americans to oppose them in their crusade to take away our precious constitutional rights to “choice, security, and the guarantee of happiness.” (This original wording from the Declaration of Independence has recently been restored by the Federal Department of Deconstruction Criticism.)
As General Custer once said, “The west would be nice, peaceful place, if those Indians hadn’t sneaked in and started causing trouble.”
Tonight, a couple links, courtesy of Facebook friends.
First of all, by way of frequent commenter (and my de facto e-publisher) Ori Pomerantz, an open letter to the Bishop of Exeter, in England, from Telegraph columnist James Delingpole. The bishop, apparently, promoted a plan to erect two wind turbines in a rural locality, and is now offended that his plan was rejected (with some rather rude comments).
What surprised me about your letter was that a man intelligent enough to have gained two degrees (one from Cambridge) and canny enough to have risen to the not totally immodest heights of the Bishopric of Exeter should yet be puzzled as to why his flock might object to having a hideous pair of bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes plonked next to their tranquil North Devon villages.
I like the “bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes.”
I love this sort of thing—when it’s in service of my own opinions, you understand. It’s what I tend to write, and then (usually) not post. Sarcasm is my native tongue.
Not generally a very effective tool in debate, though. In my experience.
And my old roommate, Brother Brad Day, sent me this link to an article at medievalists.net, describing recently discovered 11th Century documents from Spain, detailing ransoms paid to Vikings for kidnapped women.
In the second case, which is found in a document dated to 1026, a man named Octicio describes how his wife Metilli and his daughter Guncina, were captured by Vikings in the same area. In his account, the women were released from the Viking ships after he gave them “a blanket of wolf skin and a sword and one shirt and three scarves and a cow and three modios of ground salt.”
I’m always happy to read of prisoners being ransomed. The whole slavery business is touchy stuff for any Viking enthusiast. Kidnapping and extortion are so much more civilized.
Interesting to hear of Viking successes in Spain too. Most accounts usually concentrate on the great raid of 968, which was pretty disastrous and ended up with the Moors hanging Norsemen from every palm tree in the city (I forget which city it was).
Forbes criticizes many useful words and phrases used by the utilitarian linguists in corporations around the world, great words like empower (“the most condescending transitive verb ever”), best practice (“pompous confection” from consultants), core competency (“Do people talk about peripheral competency?”), and take it to the next level (a reference to Super Mario Brothers).
I agree with most of this, but sometimes even these words and phrase can communicate appropriately, and while we may not choose to write with them, we don’t have to snark at those who do.
If you’ve ever noticed the email link in our sidebar for contacting us without leaving a comment on a post, it gives you the email address dnifriend at yahoo. Over the years, only one person has asked if that’s a reference to Cyan Worlds and their classic Myst games. Yes, it is. Thank you for asking. The D’ni are the ancient people of those stories.
I mention it today because I found the Internet Archive of a site I designed, wrote most of the content for, and collected the rest of it. It was called Rawa’s Home, a tribute to Richard Watson of Cyan Worlds. I probably still have all of the files for that site, but I can’t say at the moment. I need to do more new stuff. Looking back feels weird.
This will have to be a mixed review. Gary Neece’s Cold Blue
Cold Blue concerns a Tulsa police detective, Jonathan Thorpe, whose wife and daughter were murdered. The crime remains unsolved. Now he’s involved in the investigation of the murders of a string of gang members and drug dealers. A female FBI investigator (gorgeous, of course) comes in to take over the investigation, and suspicion soon turns to Jonathan himself. Not without reason. It’s not a spoiler (since the synopsis on Amazon.com tells you as much) that Jonathan himself is systematically taking revenge on the people responsible for the murder of his family. And his revenge soon extends to members of the police department itself.
The story moved right along, and kept my interest (the ending was pretty satisfying, with some surprises). I had to stop, though, from time to time to shake my head over amateurish infelicities of language. Subject and object confusion, as in, “Having reached a clearing, the barn loomed before him.” Homonym confusion, as in, “Thorpe identified an even smaller click of five [people].” Misuse of words, especially when falling into clichés, as in, “At the conclusion of these chases officers aren’t able to just switch off these ‘fight or flight’ chemicals; they [the policemen] are literally drug-induced.”
These are things a good editor could fix. In spite of my being part of the e-publishing world now, I miss copy editors. Continue reading Cold Blue, by Gary Neece
I just had to share this video. It’s something a few of us have been searching for for some time. The theme song from the old 1950s/60s TV series, Tales of The Vikings.
A cheesy series? From all I can remember, yes (note the comment that says only three episodes may still exist. So we may never know for sure).
But let it be set down for the historical record—if anyone wonders what it was that first sparked author Lars Walker’s interest in Vikings, it was this series. I actually only caught it in re-runs, but it caught me good and hard in return. I realized, in a blaze of enlightenment, that nothing in this world was so cool and romantic as Vikings, and that Vikings were my birthright.
While we’re on the subject of rousing entertainment, I finally made it to the theater to see The Avengers this weekend. My reaction: Holy moly.
I didn’t love it as much as, say, The Lord of the Rings movies. But I don’t think I’ve ever had such a pure entertainment experience in a theater. It was way, way longer than I think any movie should be, but I didn’t care. I hit the light button on my watch at one point, and realized I’d been in my seat for a full two hours. I couldn’t believe it had been that long.
Highly recommended.
It occurs to me that the whole comic book thing, and the ancillary stuff (like movies; comic books don’t actually sell that big anymore) is almost a form of myth. Having cut ourselves loose from our cultural tethers, we’re reverting to simpler, more elemental kinds of literature. Instead of epic poems, we have epic movies.
This is not a good thing.
Unless I get a movie deal for my books, of course.
Not long ago I heaped high praise on Norwegian author Karin Fossum’s police novel, Don’t Look Back. I’m sorry to say that the book I read as a follow-up, The Water’s Edge
In this book, Inspector Sejer, a police detective in a town in the Oslo area, along with his assistant, Skarre, investigate the rape and murder of a small boy, found dead in a wooded area near a lake.
What makes this novel bad (in my view), and bad in a particularly Norwegian way, is what I might call the author’s considerateness. She’s considerate of everyone—victims, grieving parents, pedophiles, and policemen. She goes into everyone’s thoughts and lets them make their own cases. I approve of this to an extent—I like a villain to be three-dimensional—as long as the author remembers which side he or she is on. Fossum is willing to condemn murder, of course, but when a pedophile character complains that society just hasn’t advanced enough to embrace his particular philia, as it is now embracing homosexuality, no really strong counterargument is given. (Or so it seemed to me.) This injects a genuine creepiness into the whole enterprise.
The problem is aggravated by the fact that Fossum seems to have lost control of her characters. Sejer and Skarre, who came off as well-realized personalities in Don’t Look Back, have gotten all muddled. In their conversations, they seem to switch attitudes toward the legal system back and forth for no discernible reason.
And over all stands the fact (in which the policemen seem to take some pride) that Norway isn’t barbaric like the United States, and compassionately puts all criminals, even child murderers, back on the streets after a maximum of 21 years.
The point of it all would appear to be that we’re all equally guilty, but some of us have better luck than others. I accept that theologically (to an extent; I believe in degrees of guilt and sanctification), but in terms of the law it frankly offends me.
So consider my endorsement of Karin Fossum’s work withdrawn for the time being.