Shadowlight's Lighthouse

For context: http://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/19649309/dems-gop-join-ballfield-team-scalise-honor-wounded-colleague

Did you hear that the Congresscritters had that baseball game they were practicing for, yesterday? The Democrats won 11-2, then handed over the trophy to the Republicans to put in Rep. Scalise's office (the racist homophobe House majority whip who got shot and who was then saved by a same-sex-married black woman bodyguard. I'd like to think that he will carefully consider that detail of his detail, that he will emerge from the hospital a changed man. I'd settle for a haunted man. I'm expecting somewhat less than I'm hoping for.) Hillary voters are talking about how heartwarming it was. To me, it perfectly encapsulates the Democrats' whole problem: even when we win, we lose. We play nice, they play for keeps. They cause a problem, then blame us for it.* ....We bring a delicious homemade blueberry cobbler to a gunfight.

(*I'm infuriated by the internet comments from conservatives who seem to think _we're_ the monsters. One of them even said liberals want to starve old people. I don't understand how they can have a view of reality a full 180 degrees away from mine and yet not slam into walls trying to walk around corners. But, in fairness, I also saw this opinion piece from the Far Left. While I sympathize with the anger behind the sentiment, I cannot agree with his conclusion: https://medium.com/@SonofBaldwin/let-them-fucking-die-c316eee34212 ...surely there is a middle ground between giving away the store and punching people in the face. Unless you're being mugged, I guess.

I'm not sure what is to be done. There's no shortage of people on the internet arguing over what the perfect clean seashell-wiping future should look like, but before we can build this intersectional omnigendered color-corrected world, first we need to find some way to win the war with the Yestermen, hurt them like they hurt us, use their systems against them.
The Tomorrowers want to roll out the cultural future for beta testing as each new piece is developed. I don't think they've really worked the bugs out (not that most culture is debugged before being implemented. Usually the extraneous bits get snapped off as the car zooms down the road) and I'm fairly well-read and open-minded (i think), but even I can't figure out how it all fits together. I suspect the sort of people who would rather be seen as mean than as stupid probably hate this plan (with its myriad pronouns and conditional rules and not being able to say the word 'stupid' because it's an ableist slur and so on) because deep down, they think they can't keep up. Is it ableist of us to insist that they keep up? Is it ableist to assume that they can sift out true facts from propaganda on their own? Is it actually surprising that they would choose a past they think they know over a future that's constantly shifting, growing, and demanding more and more of their attention?
Maybe the future needs a display model. A 21st century Mayberry so people can see the values in action.

Hey LJ, Maybe I shouldn't expect much wisdom from a 10-year old, but..
December 4th, 2009
this blog, the one where I rant about the stupidity of the retail sector, has a pop-up commercial for Best Buy. Yes, there is fully functional Close button. Yes, I'm a freeloader on this site, a prosumer who provides only the content that gives anyone a reason to come to this particular blog, and not a very productive prosumer, really. Still, banner ads are one thing. When we progress to pop-ups, you're actively wasting my time. Keep that close button fully functional, bean-counters. I'm not just typing to hear myself think; certainly not to hear Madison Avenue think. You, LJ, are still superior to the newspaper that charged ~$70 to run Dad's obituary on a Monday. That's advertising rates. Sister was mad, too. I assured her the Internet is killing the newspapers. In my naivete, I'd assumed all these years that the part of the paper that 40% of readers turn to first was... y'know, news people wanted to know, info provided as a public service, meaningful primary content. and if obits are advertising, ours didn't get much bang for our buck. Numerous wake-goers told us they almost didn't see it, didn't realize it was him, almost missed the Wake (and probably others actually did miss it). Insert swear words here.

Dear people in the future: it's getting pretty volatile back here in 2016. Donald Trump's still running for president, winning most of the Republican primaries. I hope you're laughing at that, in the future, ("as if that lackwit would've ever won the general election!") but I don't have that luxury, the schadenfreude of watching the Republican Party Elephant have to decide if it'll tear itself in half or let its disobedient ass march it backwards off a cliff. Where I'm at, the low-information voters only know what's on tv and the tv news only cares about easy ratings and quick answers and Trump's got his supporters beating up protesters and blaming the victims for starting the fight. He's on the record, (national tv, his own words) as being in favor of rounding up people of certain races or religions and putting them in internment camps, on the record, admitting he gave other politicians campaign contributions because he expected favors in return. He's got the media eating out of his hand and all the violent racists and neo-nazis are crawling out of the woodwork to support him.
We say in this country, that we don't like bullies, but the bullies are everywhere. I got heckled last October, just walking down the sidewalk. Bullies are congealing into roving gangs on the internet, given global reach by lightspeed communication. The bullies in Congress can keep a sitting President from doing his job for seven years so far and we just watch it happening. helpless. Hey, if the Leader of the Free World can't get a senator to do his job, what chance do we have? Who's voting these corrupt jackasses into Congress in the first place? How does a voter get so stupid you can tell them war is good, healthcare is bad? that the President who was elected by the Supreme Court because of glitchy ballots in one state is the undeniable victor (Respect the office, support your President in a time of war) but the one that was actually elected by the people is somehow illegitimate, ineligible, not just disrespected but un-respectable, even in the time of the same war. How does anyone fall for that?

I know the point of National Novel Writing Month is to create a countering pressure to all the reasons why everything else is more important than getting any writing done. and yet, I still get frustrated, stand up from my keyboard, try to do something else, realize I'm overwhelmed by my never-ending to-do list and unable to prioritize what to do first or next. I think about calling someone for a reality check, some reassurance, something, but can't decide who to call. I spend several minutes just feeling worthless and stupid and pissed at myself for being so frigging emo, and then I sit down at the keyboard again. I did this at least six times tonight, just writing that last blog entry.
Halfway through the month, I'm 10,000 words in on my story (ie, a fifth of the way) and I'm been feeling less than impressed with this story since Day 2. I don't know enough about most of the stuff in here, the setting, the characters, how psych wards are constructed, whether it's too 'occult', ... this was supposed to be just the warm-up before all the stuff I planned out started to happen, and now I probably won't even get to the parts I did all the planning for in November. I can't seem to make myself prioritize the writing. I can't seem to let go and just write as if I were speaking it to an empty room, making it up as I went along. ...which was its natural state, since it was originally a game scenario.
I had been writing every day, but not enough each day. One night, I fell asleep pressing a key and had to delete a page and a half of the letter 'd'. Then, that stopped. I've missed three days. Today, I decided I'd write one of the occupy posts I've been wanting to write but unable to because of using all my keyboard time for my stunted novel. One of them. There are more. I thought if that went easier, I'd shift to those for a while to get writing in while buying time to figure out why I'm so uneasy with this story. ...however, as noted, my spurts of rapid typing were still interrupted by guilt that I wasn't doing more for the church, more to get my holiday plans untangled, more to clean this place, and I wasn't doing the novel. Whatever. I don't know. It's 980 words. maybe I shouldn't count it. Maybe I'll only count it if it makes a difference at the end of the month. I doubt it will, so it doesn't matter.

Know this. I am here and I will fight you and your collectivist philosophy to the death. username ReardenMetal, comment left on OWS website.

People are seriously saying this stuff. That scares me. Bumper sticker says, "I'd rather be killing zombies." ....traffic is bad sometimes, but I'd take it over the living dead. More and more, I suspect that 'zombies' is code for 'people I don't like'. All these people out there are stocking away guns for the apocalypse, praying for the rapture. I'd rather we had a future where we communicated like rational grown-up human beings, and found a society that we could all live with, rather than some faction, even my own faction, coming out on top, reshaping the entire nation to suit their values, and conveniently mistaking for a zombie anyone with opposing values and shooting them in the head. Unfortunately, showing an ability to think about issues and change your mind is seen as weakness. A moron who is 100% certain is preferred over a genius who is only 80% sure, pending further research.

I hear people bemoaning the loss of common sense. Problem with 'common sense' is that it mostly only creates an illusion of commonality, and rarely can be recognized as sensible. It tends to lead people to shouting matches because "I can see this as clear as day. How can you not see that? You must be stupid if you see the world differently than me." It is more delusion than real perceptive ability. I wasn't born with a capability to sync up with the local common sense parameters. You have to actually give me a reason to do things. I'm disabled that way.

I find myself really puzzled by the repeated comments I see on the internetz that: a. government can't create jobs (anymore than they can make it rain)... followed by b. Government is Too Big and that's bad in general and/or for the economy. uuhhh....doesn't bigger govt mean a govt that's employing more people in, y'know, jobs? but apparently those jobs don't count because (hypnotized monotone--uh, I mean, c.) Corporations do everything better than Government does the equivalent thing. ...ok, some things, sure. but everything? schools?? generally, corporations tend to talk outwardly about how many jobs they'll create but inwardly measure their success by how much productivity they can squeeze out of the minimum number of people. In America, salary is an expense to be minimized... unless it's your salary.
I feel like people don't understand how the concept of money works. Money is not a god or a force of nature, it's just tokens we exchange for goods or services. (Even gold, Mr. Beck, is just a shiny rock if you can't exchange it for something useful. In a true societal collapse, gold is just piss-colored lead.) The money we don't spend on our neighbors' goods is money they can't spend on ours. You can save for later, bargain for better prices, gamble ... these are part of the game. ...but greed, price-gouging, loan sharking, theft, fraud, and price fixing/monopolies all break the game. That's why they've been illegal since the time of Moses. It is as if we programmed computers to play poker with us, and now they win all the time and we keep playing. A prime example: rising oil prices drive inflation because most businesses need oil to ship their goods, and/or heat their offices/stores/etc. so the price of everything else goes up and then no one's going to lower prices when everything else is so expensive now, so yeah... government can't make it rain, but they could pour water in better places than their lobbyists' swimming pools while farmers at the bottom of the hill are told to grow crops with what's trickling down to them.

Welcome to another episode of the 837 Club, here on the Christian Blogcasting Network. I'm your host, Mal Kavertson, and with me, as always, is Glory Meowwsen. (Glory: "hi, Mal!") Now, folks, as you can see out this window behind us, it is snowing here, and accumulating, _in Autumn_. This isn't a special effect or trick photography, it really is snowing, thousands of intricate, beautiful little crystals falling from the sky every minute; Lord be praised... However, the untimely early start of the season is a concern, because we all know what Scripture has to say about this. (Glory: "mr-hm. We certainly do, Mal.") Folks, it's a well-established fact that snowflakes are individually sculpted by trained artisan Snow Fairies. (embed here video clip from 'Jack Frost' Christmas Special, with subtitles saying "Documentary footage courtesy of Rankin-Bass") I don't think any intelligent person can conclude that a snowstorm like this, so soon after the Maine referendum on Same-Sex Marriage, is just a coincidence. We've known for years that the fae are close to the Gay community, socially as well as in rhyming dictionaries, and these hard-working spirits of the Icy North are clearly ~enraged~ at our society's turning away from traditional neighborhood values, like respecting others, and letting people decide for themselves who constitutes a family... and friends, this is just the beginning. If these early flurries aren't heeded, if we don't repent and turn away from this path of intolerance, well... we could easily be looking at months of ice-cold winds, rain that freezes into sheer black ice as it hits the ground, huge snowdrifts on roads and driveways, schools and businesses will have to close.
...and as the ice crystals fall on all of us, I'm pointing my finger at the gay-bashers, and the cross-wavers and the politicized religious and the redneck bigots and the bad tippers, and I say, "You allowed this to happen."

I've been doing lots of thinking on philosophical and metaphysical topics lately, and one side note of that is this: The threefold or triangle system of classifying gamers could be adapted to people in general, if "how you view the game" was changed to "how you view the meaning of life". Some people are Gamist. They do things to acquire the things that enable them to get the other things that count as trappings of success. I've never understood what sane person would eat brownies lined with gold foil, or needed a fleet of cars for one family...but see, it shows they're "winning" (the filthy twinks. Understand, I don't begrudge people for having money. I begrudge them wasting it. Bad twink! No xp!) Anyway, other people are "simulationist"-equivalents...um, Experiencers? They believe that living life means enjoying the sights, sounds, and experiences in life. They care what a peach tastes like, what their daughter's first word was. Some of them travel to have adventures. Some of them are happy watching paint dry or staring at the full moon for forty minutes at a stretch on a summer night. What they want to experience varies (like different genres of game) but the attitude underlying it is the same. The "narrativist"-equivalents, however, believe that the purpose of life is to fit yourself into the larger, unknown plan of a higher power, and the more you're in harmony with where God/the Universe/Glorynnea wants you to be, the smoother your life will go and the happier you'll be. I'm amused that this makes Rick Warren and his evangelicals the bigger triangle equivalent of the Storyteller system goths. (This would indicate that the coordinates of a given person on each triangle do not correlate. One imagines the separation between real and imaginary, single self and current character, more than explains this. It's one thing to accept that your character has to have setbacks in order to make a better story, but something much more difficult to see that your life is but one thread in a larger tapestry, that every time you meet someone else, it's a crossover or cameo into their life story.) In gaming, I'd say I'm about 60% Simulationist, 20% each Gamist and Narrativist, getting more Narra as I get older. (I keep trying to Simulate the feel of Gamist play without really being Gamist.) In life, I'm 45% each Experiencer and Purposeful, only about 10% Gamist... and I like to Experience *being* Purposeful. but sometimes, I'd like to Experience the stuff the Gamists keep hogging as 'prizes' for being 'winners' (like wearing nice clothes just to look good, going on a date, visiting Australia just to see and hear and feel it)....and the genuine religion the Purposefuls enjoy is spammed and messed up by all these twink Gamists who think they can *win* at religion. No absolution without true repentance, munchkin! and no real God of Love endorses hate! Faith without Works is Dead! I can feel this getting foamy. I think I've made my point, though.

 <a href="http://www.superstupor.com/sust02132009.shtml"><img src="http://www.superstupor.com/sust02132009.jpg" alt="Super Stupor" border=0></a> 

Con will be held the final weekend in March. The theme is Superheroes.
I will NOT be attending, at least in , unless there are massive highly unlikely changes. It is my personal experience that certain current students of a certain Liberal Arts school have shown a considerable level of disrespect for , and that, beyond past instances of disrespect, the current level of demonstrated disrespect is rising *daily*. I cannot in good conscience do anything to support the prosperity of a sentient being which has revealed itself to be of Lawful Evil alignment.

He does not own our tradition. I will be urging the rest of to likewise remove their underappreciated support and instead assemble peacefully in another location to which our traditions may be transplanted, perhaps growing freely into a new viable shape capable of self-sufficiency and attracting players instead of dissappointing any that show up. Thank you. (I will explain further in personal correspondence upon request. Please note in your letter whether it's okay if I swear while I explain. )