beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Playing the Wrath of the Righteous RPG
the cleric of Shelyn keeps on talking about confession and offering to take other characters confessions
even if they do not in fact worship Shelyn
and he isn't trying to get them to convert.

And I'm like
basically fully unable to take this as an in world in character thing
and just keep wanting to tell the programmers
your experiences are not universal.

Also, the goddess of beauty focusing on confession makes no sense
though I could sell it as a Sarenraen tradition
for the goddess of honesty and redemption.

April Fools is The Worst
so I hid and slept
which made it a pretty okay day


Also I read about greek and roman gods and underworlds
which is Not Simple
not least because I can't remember which are the good sources and keep ending up on poorly translated neopagan pages with no sources, poorly translated tourist pages, or wiki.


I was looking because GURPS spells include Plane Shift but it is a different spell for each plane. So if Janus, god of doors, is handing out Gate college spells, how many spells are there? ( Read more... )

There's a story I remember from school assemblies and tried to google just now to get an attribution for, but I don't really know how, without a title, author, or quote. But it goes something like:



A man dies and arrives in the afterlife, and the guy who comes to greet him asks exactly how he wants to spend eternity. And he says he wants a gold castle, a full roast dinner daily, and deliveries of the Times. Which he duly gets.

Every day.

For years, and years, and years.

And after a while he's sick of roast dinners, and he doesn't recognise anyone in the Times, and why should he even care when it's nothing to do with him any more?

And he gets progressively more fed up.

Until he sees the greeter outside his castle and flags him down and yells at him, "What kind of heaven do you call this?"

And the guy is just like "Who said this was heaven?"




Which is your basic be careful what you wish for as suitable for making an impression on twelve year olds, unless it was elevens or tens or under eights.

But it makes a good point.

And it just idly crossed my mind to see who wrote it, or a thing like it, but it turns out that if you mention roast dinners and the times you don't google stories, so. Heck if I know.




But it's right up there with the one about heaven and hell both involving very long spoons. Like, someone has to have written it, but I haven't heard it in a context that would tell me who. And it still seems like a good idea.

I went to meditate and it was in the middle floor with the interesting big Buddha painting and I did sitting still pretty well and better than usual.

But now I've hurt my hip. Sort of my hip, like over it? And it's fine until I want to move a particular way. And it's annoying because I was plenty comfortable and now I'm emphatically not, if I try and move sideways.

Also we did mindfulness of breathing and what I was mostly aware of was how tight my sports bra is. Probably I need a less bitey bra to meditate in.

so there were a few distractions.

But I like meditation and I'm in a better mind than when I started so is win.

I did a meditating at the meditate place.
Their cushions are dark magic and it is much more comfortable to sit on the floor.
But I maybe possibly sat more still today?
It is tricky.
We did the loving kindness meditation where you think nice thoughts to get in the habit
and there's a bit where you think nice thoughts at a person you like
only that would have been easier if he hadn't specifically said 'not someone you're sexually attracted to', because then it's purple goats
and when he said 'think about the person you like, coming towards you, happy to see you'
well
my mental images are very well trained.

... but I can feel many happy kind thoughts about wentworth miller smiling also, so i feel that almost works...

And then we're supposed to remember a happy and get that feeling of happy towards all other people
only the last time I was happy at plural humans in that full up and sharing kind of way
was when the DJ put on Highway to Hell
so then I got that stuck in my head
in the shrine room.

*sigh*

I do feel a higher level of happy wellbeing type thoughts than when I started though, so it remains useful.


kind of.
I maybe am more incline to feel smug and self important about knowing things, rather than settle down and feel meditative.
it's a bit annoying.

but I shall go at least one more time and hope I get better at it.

So a while back, while reading about European history, I decided that I'd never invent a world with no Jews
because many people across millennia have done their best to make a world with no jews and I do not ever want to be on their side.
(This is part of what is creepy about future worlds like a couple of centuries away without religion. How do they think they get that? Did the world wake up with amnesia?)

Which is a grand declaration, especially given my ongoing lack of actually doing writing, but then I have to do, like, work and thinking and stuff.

( Read more... )

Norwich had the highest proportion of respondents in England and Wales reporting "no religion", 42.5% compared with a figure of 21.1% for England and Wales as a whole.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-20679514
The article mentions how there's a church for every Sunday and a pub for every day (or there were, and the saying persists); two cathedrals and 32 medieval churches, not to mention all the newer boxes. Then it gets a lot of quotes from religious people being surprised, because they have a lot of business. Well if population goes up then percentage of religious people can go down and numbers attending church still go up, or if a larger proportion of said Christians are church going Christians in Norwich than in other places you get the good attendance. Don't mean the census is wrong.

With 42.5% no religion and 7.2% not answering, that probably means Christians are less than half of Norwich.
Yep, poked the website, found Christians in 2011 44.9%

Times change.

I dreamed something kind of like St Trinians vs Zombies
but it was more like a horror convention used StT's as a venue and then turned out to be made of the ranks of the undead. Enough kinds to fill a video game.
So there was running and screaming and corridors full of zombie walking and the most horrifying school bathrooms ever. The usual.

But I defeated them without all the stab smash stuff this time.
I retreated to holy ground, that looking a lot like a lecture theatre that can project videos, and brought all my friends, and got a bit of meditation going. Probably with a dance soundtrack.
And then I started talking about love. Specifically, fan love.

Fan love is generous. Fan love shares. We like best when others love those we love. And when people show us their shiny, we can see how they love it too. And it's not just about the fictional stories. Those of us who follow certain people around the country, or indeed the world, get to know them a little at a time too. And it's not necessarily because they're unique unusual special people. I've seen some people at conventions dozens of times, and the more you know them, the more they're one of us. All the people I'm a fan of have in common is they were, at least once, involved in a story I really liked. Not even that actually, they might just be great con guests who only ever guested in shows I wouldn't watch for money. So they're just these almost random people. So why do I love them? Because I turned up with the attitude that I would love them, and I listened, and I loved them just a little then and just a little more for all the times I got to know them. They tell stories on themselves, they tell their most embarrassing moment, or the coolest thing that ever happened to them, or what it was like when they met the person they'd stand in line for. And we see they're flawed and human and happy and sad and loving just like the rest of us. It shines out of them. And they're just people, not especially beautiful or necessarily very skilled, they're people getting up and showing us they're people and we love them for it. And then we look around, at these other fans who love the people we love, and hey, more love for all of us! I mean, the guests we love best are the ones who are not so secretly One Of Us, fans. So then, we love other fans. And there's millions of us! That's a lot of love to go around.

And between us we can do great things. The charity work inspired by, carried out by, funded by fandom is spectacular. There's individual actors who most of the world have never heard of who have fanclubs that have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity. There's people who spend their weekends in cosplay being jedi or daleks or whatever else caught their attention and they use it to collect for charities. And they keep doing it, for years, decades even. Acts of kindness on many scales are inspired by and done in the name of fan love.

Little by little, our stories, silly or escapist though they may be, inspire discussions, priorities, values, inspire people, and in splashes of light here and there they make the world a brighter place.

So my dream of an undead con was not defeated but was healed by the generous fan love, because we could share the stories, the ones that taught us how to get through or how to hold on or just that we are never, ever alone, and we could share the love. Bad magic hates the world? Meet the good kind that dreams a better one.

So I woke up full of this warm glow of loving kindness for all the world, or at least all the world that loves stories, and isn't that everyone once they find the right story? I woke up hours ago and I'm still full up of this. It's maybe like being high. I think I was meditating in my sleep a lot or something.

And, yeah, loving kindness needs practice, I need a run up to have this kind of mood and not the one inspired by the newspapers, but everyone needs practice, monks practice even, lots of hours of practice. So I'm not very good at it. *shrugs* It's a pretty good feeling once I get the right mind.

So I'm feeling pretty good about the world right now.

All y'all are awesome, you know?

While looking for religious clothes (because there's some really nice fabric arts in some robes, and also because shiny) I found a catholic site full of little saint medals. I thought they'd be like those places that say you can get your name on a t-shirt and then just fill in a name, even though I knew there's lots of saints with conventional signs worked up for centuries of church art, I just thought they'd be cheap, but they've all got their own little pictures so far. Also their own stories.

Saint stories are weird. I can understand saints who built schools or did a lot of studying or even the ones who like lived in a small room and thought things about god (seeing as I live mostly in a room and think things about aliens and ghosts and buddha and gods), but I do not understand the ones who are famous mostly for having bits chopped off or having terrible diseases or just dying horribly. I mean, I can understand telling stories to aspire to, or even to inspire courage in adversity, but... there's so many of them. Dead people everywhere. Er, I know saints have to be dead before they get to be saints, but I mean, I'd have thought people to go in stories would need to do something before that.

... I have always liked the story about St Lawrence though. The one that says he was getting grilled to death so he told them to turn him over, that side was done. Is probably made up, but if you've got to go, may as well leave a good story. I do still reckon it's a very odd story to tell small children though. Like, hi, your school is named after someone getting cooked to death. Bacon for breakfast anyone?

The saint who has the story of never being alone with a woman in his life is a whole different kind of weird.

I think I like how they all get to be patrons of things, and how lots of things have lots of patrons. Seems like an efficient sort of afterlife, having a Thing and getting the hang of it.

So now I'm thinking of making a list of Saints Who Seem Quite Useful And Don't Creep Me Out, but it seems like it would take quite a long time. And maybe be a short list.

So far this weekend I have read the essays for class on Monday and read a whole lot of GURPS Magic rules, then figured out a set of spells for a priest of Janus.

Clearly this is a productive use of time. *nods*

Ethan's spells are hard to model because there's a half a dozen spells that almost but not quite do what he did, and also because he cast a spell on a whole town at once, which has power requirements that are off the scale. Assume the Hellmouth is a Very High Mana area (so absolutely anyone can cast spells, and mages have a lot of bonus), and that Janus did most of the lifting. I still don't even know how to start calculating the costs. Impressive, anyway.

Ethan: very strong indeed.

But we knew that.

The other thing about spells is they all have the same names, but to ally them with specific gods you really have to think about the tone or flavour of things. Like the spell 'Drunkenness' has effects kind of like getting every adult to act like drunk teenagers, but being drunk isn't especially associated with Janus. Getting people to express their repressed sides *is*, in the Buffyverse. So you rephrase it just slightly, and it's a spell with the right theme. Weaken Will works too. Emotion Control and Suggestion don't quite cover it, I think. Madness, being really specific, with a Delusion, is probably enough... but it's really rather thorough. And to incorporate real world knowledge like Xander's soldier did would require a ton of Knowledge spells too. Basically you pretty much have to say 'A God Did It', but it's hard to game that.

Ethan: god likes him. His god, anyway.


Which leaves you to wonder why a god of doors didn't bust him out of prison.

But Planar Visit (Dreamlands) treats the dream worlds as an actual world as real as the demon dimensions, so getting to wander around in there is pretty powerful of itself. And since you leave your body behind it don't much matter where you left it. Unless you're worried about the damage...


I had mostly set out to invent some characters to throw at each other in an original story world. I got a couple of people, but then I thought of Ethan, and, well, it's not like I've any particular reason to focus. Ethan is fun. Storytelling gold.


I should probably sleep at some point.

I'm reading a set of fanfic pet peeves, and they say:

Things our guys almost certainly do not do --

With few exceptions, they aren't pagan.
With no exceptions, they aren't media fans. (As Helen sez, they don't have time.)


There were a couple other things, including something about teddy bears, but those two were next to each other at the top of the list.

And the thing is, these strike me as fundamentally different things.

'Not pagan' is an equality issue. 'Not media fans' is probably a characterisation issue, though given the pervasive misrepresentation of media fen in the mainstream media I could make a case for it being a rights thing too.
( Read more... )
And right there we have a parallel - because it's a bit like slash, to my mind. There's not enough queer characters. So let's make a few.

Yeah, maybe it stretches them in new directions. But. Some mainstream media limitations? Need to be stretched.



... and sometimes the result is a clunky story, but that's craft, not the point of itself.




PS: reasons the Buffyverse rules: We have pagans (Tara, Ethan) *and* media fans (Gunn, Xander, Andrew, geek trio, just about everyone when the right pop culture reference would help).

... Torchwood clearly needs non-Christian geeks of it's own.
... Is Toshiko likely to be Christian? Cause she's likely got geek covered.
... Of course mostly they've got a whole atheist/humanist thing going on, but.

Am watching Boom Town.
Think Invisible Lift is in the wrong place.





Yes, I stay awake all long night to keep the light on in a vaguely religious way.
And Doctor Who is entirely appropriate for this.


Is all about thinking *why*.
Why the light, why the burning, what worth the risk, what the darkness really has in it.

Fiction plenty good for that.



I also drank tizer, which is red and fizzy, and had egg and chips for light time again meal, and now I have chocolate fingers. Which I need to stop eating some time while it remains fun.


Today good.

I just read a thing in email about a guy who found a bag of letters to God and now he's going to sell them on e-bay.
Is it me, or is that really *deeply* wrong?