Who is I?

This post was provoked by a Brit in LA, adding albums to the list.

Four jobs I have had in my life (not including current job):
Chinese Take-Away Counter Assistant
Programmer
Managing Director
Building Site Labourer

Four Movies I have watched over and over:
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
The Matrix
The Thing
The Big Lebowski

Four Albums I have listened to over and over:
Warrior at the Edge of Time, Hawkwind
The Carnivorous Adventures of Lupine Howl, Lupine Howl
Pure Phase, Spiritualized
Exit Planet Dust, The Chemical Brothers

Four places I have lived:
Cambridge, England
Edinburgh, Scotland
Paris, France
The Hague, Netherlands

Four Shows I love to watch:
The Trailer Park Boys
The Prisoner
The 4400
Monkey!

Four Places I have been on vacation:
California, USA
Geneva, Switzerland
Malta
Southwold, England

Four of my favorite foods:
Curry
Cullen Skink
Lobster
Full English Breakfast

Four favourite drinks:
Real Ale
Margarita
Coffee (without milk)
Tea (with milk)

Four places I would rather be right now:
Café Cremers, a coffeeshop in The Hague
Mesquite, Dallas, Texas; working for id Software
The ISS – the International Space Station (a.k.a. Thunderbird 5)
Cuba

Four People I Command to do This:
Err… I know even fewer bloggers than BritInLA. I’ll ask around some of the students, will post links if they do it.

Science vs Nutters

I spent a little time animating a cartoon strip I’ve had stored for years. It perfectly encapsulates the difference between science and religion.

Click on the thumbnail for the whole story. Frames have quite an amount of text on them and take about fifteen seconds each, so please be patient.

Force of Nature

When asked for his favourite childhood TV program, Steve Irwin said “Thunderbirds was my favourite, but they’ll always be a place in my heart for Stingray”.

Irritating Antipodean self-publicising beast-bothering furry, Steve Irwin.

Scorpio Rising

I’m a rationalist, I hold no faith or belief in any religious cult or terminology, including the four main branches of Judaism (orthodox, reform, Christian, Islam), or Orientalism like Buddhism or Hinduism, or any of the New Age rites and rituals, or even the various enticing entities worth worship in the Cthuonic Mythos.

I’m not into astrology, but even so, as a Scorpio I feel cheated. They just removed my planet, Pluto, from the roster! Actually it used to be Mars that governed Scorpio, but that was moved to Pluto upon discovery of that sub-planet in 1931.

There’s a bunch of stuff about the Scorpio star-sign I just have to love. For example my “bodypart” is the genitals. I’m a pervert by birth-month, it seems, and how true that is. Take this from Astrology Online:

Scorpio is the symbol of sex and Scorpios are passionate lovers, the most sensually energetic of all the signs. For them, union with the beloved is a sacrament, an “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.”

Their overriding urge in loving is to use their power to penetrate beyond themselves and to lose themselves sexually in their partners in an almost mystical ecstasy, thus discovering the meaning of that union which is greater than individuality, and is a marriage of the spirit as well as of flesh.

They are thus capable of the greatest heights of passionate transport, but debauchery and perversion are always dangers, and Scorpios can become sadistic monsters of sensuality and eroticism.

They KNOW me! How about some more?

They are fortunate in that their strong reasoning powers are tempered with imagination and intuition, and these gifts, together with critical perception and analytical capacity, can enable the Scorpions to penetrate to profundities beyond the average. They have a better chance of becoming geniuses than the natives of any other sign.But charismatic “twice-born” characters such as they can sink into the extremes of depravity if they take the wrong path, and the intensity of their nature exaggerates their harmful tendencies into vices far greater than the normal.

Rebelliousness against all conventions, political extremism to the point where hatred of the Establishment makes them utterly unscrupulous terrorists. Brooding resentment, aggressive and sadistic brutality, total arrogance, morbid jealousy, extreme volatility of temperament, these are some of their vices.

Bonkers, but I love it.

Did you know the constellation Scorpius has a star system called Nu Scorpii, traditionally known as Jabbah? I like that, Star Wars fan that I am.

Magis v Clerics

I’m a fan of the card game Magic The Gathering, it’s a great game. The concept is each player, normally two but there are variants with more, take the role of a wizard. You do battle, via spells, with other wizards until they are dead. You have a deck of cards and each card falls into one of two categories: Spell or Land. Spells are effects to play, for example casting a Fireball, or summoning a creature to defend you, perhaps a Paladin. Land is the mechanism that “funds” the power of spells by generating “mana”. There are five basic lands which each give a colours of mana each corresponding to a theme, and each type of land helps fund one of the many types of spell. So the Swamp gives black mana and is considered evil, where Plains give white mana and is holy, Forests give green mana and governs nature and growth, Mountains (volcanoes) give red mana and is focused on anger and on violence, where Islands give blue mana and is good for divination and affecting the mechanics of magic, for example being able to counter other wizards’s spells. What’s cool about the game is almost every card has a rule that “breaks” the other rules, and cards work well together, often in combinations of two, three, even four cards. With around ten thousand different cards there are billions of combinations to discover.

I haven’t had much (any) opportunity to play though the summer, but I’m very much looking forward to playing again this winter in Glasgow, where there is a vibrant play scene.

Anyway, I was thinking about Magic and searching the web randomly and I found the site of Pastor David L. Brown, Ph.D., who was writing about Magic as far back as 1995. Pastor David “the L stands for Lunatic” Brown is carbon clone of other famous evangelists, like Jim “the box got bigger, the outside, the buildings. And all that we were doing. I had to raise about $1 million every two days just to stay alive” Bakker, Pat “feminism is a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians” Robertson, or Pastor “I’m gona build a 45 foot tall highly fortified structure in the shape of the most powerful thing on earth, me” Richards. Brown’s thesis is that Magic the Gathering is evil, quite literally, and that in playing it santa exposes himself to you, sorry, you become exposed to satan.

The pastor quotes Deuteronomy 18:10-12, which tells us

There shall not be found among you any… that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD.

Which begs the question, what does the good Pastor make of the notably absent passage, Exodus 22:18, which tells us

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Capital punishment for playing a card game, seems slightly fucking harsh to me. I’ve emailed the pastor:

I looked through the various occult sections of your website, including gaming and witchcraft, and wish to ask your response to the quite explicit and clear instruction in Exodus 22, verse 18, “suffer ye not a witch to live”.

How can that order be taken, other than quite literally a directive for direct action? Is it not the case The LORD has given us quite clear instruction, but instead of carrying out His WORD we skirt around His Order, making websites and writing books but not killing witches, and by doing so directly disobey HIM?

I await his response (or a call from the cops). I know, teasing a bonkers pastor is naughty.

Pastor Brown, and possibly the most effective spell in Magic to kill him with.