Back of the Envelope

I still haven't had a chance to write any really long posts, so I thought I'd point you in the direction of some interesting discussion:

George Bailey vs. Howard Roark -- At the Evangelical Outpost, Joe Carter argues that George Bailey of It's a Wonderful Life and Howard Roark of Fountainhead are actually a lot alike, and argues that George Bailey is the true countercultural hero, eschewing the American dream of personal fulfillment for his fellow man. It's an interesting read.

God and Time (additional discussion here) -- In this series of posts, Jeremy Pierce goes through theories of knowledge and discusses whether God is in time or not, and how that affects the interaction of free will and divine foreknowledge. It's interesting stuff, and maybe a bit above my head on the philosophy side, but I can't help feeling that something is missing. I'm not sure I can put my finger on it, or effectively contribute to the discussion, but I'm thinking a bit of Modern Physics might help put things in perspective.

Anyway, a little light reading for folks interested.

I've returned to Boston, where the Internet access is so much faster. I'll be dusting off the blog and getting things rolling again, but first, I was a bit lazy with the last Storyblogging Carnival. They've been like clockwork every two weeks since the founding, but I think that, because the last Monday fell on Christmas Day and the next one is New Year's Day, we'll push back the Storyblogging Carnival by a week. The question is whether we should push it back by one week, altering the cycle, or by two, effectively skipping a Carnival. Thoughts? Or should I simply kick myself into gear and start the new carnival here and now, and get it online by this Monday? This will require more than just my effort, of course, and I haven't gotten any submissions since the last carnival.

I'm heading to Louisiana to visit family today, so I don't know how much of a chance to blog I'll get. I'll be back in about a week.

Sluggy Freelance — Holiday antics for Sluggy. Zoe decides to stay in town and do her radio program rather than go home to visit her family, which doesn't sit well with said family. They call up her program to complain, and although she manages to get through it, it leaves her pretty depressed and very lonely. Fortunately, Torg shows up with a PSS3 to cheer her up. The PSS3, by the way, is the result of Bun-bun's prank on Santa leaving presents strewn all over the place.

Day by Day — A grab bag this week, with Barack Obama, Kofi Anan, Putin, William Jefferson, and the military's rules of engagement all getting a mention, mostly in conversations between Jan and Damon. They're a cute couple, aren't they? It's interesting they get along so well as they seem to be arguing about politics all the time.

Scary Go Round — Ryan goes to see Tim, who manages, via high voltage, to restore his memories. Now that he's back to himself, he's trying to figure out who's been sabotaging Tim, and Riley seems like the most likely culprit.

Dominic Deegan — Luna's shopping for a new house, while blatant racism in the newspaper has Dominic down, but a visit from Szark helps to cheer him up. And it seems that not all the Knights of Callan are as bad as most of the ones we've seen so far. But before Dominic can get too cheery, we get a vision of Jacob. He's always creepy.

Schlock Mercenary — The nanites at work trying to fix Kevyn have finally recovered his missing memories, so we get to see the rest of what happened along with Kevyn. Hopefully, they'll get the damage repaired before his body gets incinerated by the hostile aliens.

Welcome to the sixtieth Storyblogging Carnival. This time we have ten stories by nine authors, including one of my own which I never got around to submitting.

People have done better this time around sending me blurbs for their stories. Thanks, guys, and I apologize for being impolite about it earlier. Now, rather than wasting my time ranting, on to the stories.

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Postcard #2 Spirit Antarctica
by Karyn Hunting of Reason-and-Rhyme
A 467 word brief story rated PG.

Echoes of memories of a last half of the last raisonette shared in Antarctica never sounded so delicious! And even the cold and the splash and the dive had to have been worth it!

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Chew on This
by Laurence Simon of this blog is full of crap
A 500 word brief story rated R.

This is a twisted tale of the realities of modern Halloween ruination.

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Adventures of an Unlikely Super Hero (Part One): Ambition — For a Woman?!
by Laura Young of Dragon Slayer's Guide to Life
The first 547 words of a story in progress rated PG.

This story was published in Become Your Own Great and Powerful. It's the tale of a woman and her relationship with power.

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Apple
by Anna O. of Anna O.: The Talking Cure
A 613 word brief story rated G.

Short story about a young artist grappling with her neurosis' and her struggle to differentiate between dreams and waking life.

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yellow pillow case
by Anna O. of Anna O.: The Talking Cure
A 618 word brief story rated PG.

A short story played out in the narrative of a young woman's mind about change vs. consistency in relationships and life. In a universal sense, it's about the constant readjustments we all have to continually make in order to keep moving forward.

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A Squirrely Lesson
by Madeleine Begun Kane of Mad Kane's Humor Blog
A 739 word brief story rated PG.

Madeleine Kane's home is invaded by a squirrel, and the exterminator doesn't want to pay a house call. What's a poor feminist to do?

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Mist Magic, Parts 15-20 (Beginning)
by Dave Gudeman of Doc Rampage
The latest 1,493 words of a 5,485 word story in progress rated PG.

This is the story I was told by the mystery-man about how magic entered the world in the early bronze age.

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Untold Onward Drawn - Part 2 - The Departure (Beginning)
by The Rocketman of The Rocketman's Change For A Dollar
The next 1,583 words of a 3,345 word continuing story rated PG.

"Untold Onward Drawn" is the (fairy-tale?) story of two happenstance travelers and the result of their supernatural encounter during a bit of primitive mythological archaeology. Part 1 was posted in an earlier edition of Storyblogging. I originally had no further plans for the piece; however, I recently took to the idea of continuing it. Part 2 of this installment was written just as the first - extemporaneously. Any subsequent entries will be added in the same whimsical manner. It's been great fun to write. Enjoy.

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Es ist Schwer
by Postmodern Sass of Postmodern Sass
A 1,700 word short story rated PG.

"This is the story of my grandfather, who died, and how a little piece of him came back to me, 25 years later."

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Unwanted Grace
by Donald S. Crankshaw of Back of the Envelope
A 2,967 word short story rated PG-13.

Ryan meets God and bargains for a miracle. A not-completely-canon sequel to Eyes in the Shadow.

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This concludes the sixtieth Storyblogging Carnival.

If you'd like to take part in a future carnival, please contact me. I am also looking for hosts. Other carnivals can be found here.

The Storyblogging Carnival can be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival.

Mark Shea has an interesting article on the origin of Christmas. Like most people, I thought that it was borrowed from a pagain holiday, but it turns out that that may not be the case:

[O]ur records of a tradition associating Jesus' birth with December 25 are decades older than any records concerning a pagan feast on that day.
...
In addition to this there's another small, but telling, point. We also find St. John Chrysostom (a patriarch of Constantinople who died in 407 A.D.) noted that Christians had celebrated December 25 from the Church's early days. Chrysostom reinforced his point with an argument that used Scripture, not pagan mythology, for corroboration:

Luke 1 says Zechariah was performing priestly duty in the Temple when an angel told his wife Elizabeth she would bear John the Baptist. During the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, Mary learned about her conception of Jesus and visited Elizabeth "with haste."

The 24 classes of Jewish priests served one week in the Temple, and Zechariah was in the eighth class. Rabbinical tradition fixed the class on duty when the Temple was destroyed in A.D. 70 and, calculating backward from that, Zechariah's class would have been serving Oct. 2-9 in 5 B.C. So Mary's conception visit six months later might have occurred the following March and Jesus' birth nine months afterward.

Mark also mentions another reason why the early Church was celebrating Christmas on December 25th, namely a Judaic belief that prophets died on the day they were conceived, so if you believe Jesus died on March 25th (which many of the early Christians did), you add nine months and get December 25th for his birth date. I find the second argument more compelling.

Anyway, whether or not these calculations of Jesus's birth date are accurate, it's a convincing argument that Christmas predates the pagan holiday. Granted, there have almost always been pagan holidays on or around the winter solstice, so it's not like Christmas was alone in that time of year, so it's not hard to believe that there'd be some interactions between the holidays, whatever the origin.

An oldie but a goodie by Jonah:

Despite all of the posturing, nobody is addressing the real problem with Hollywood: It's not the violence at all, but the message of moral relativism. Violence has been a constant in world culture. You can draw a line starting from cave paintings, and trace it through all visual media up to this weekend's latest blockbuster. Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's plays, Japanese picture books, and Native American oral histories can hold their own with just about any Schwarzenegger film in terms of murder and gore. Talking about violence — even graphic violence — as something "new" is like talking about a disturbing rise in the use of percussion instruments in music.

The antiviolence handwringers contend that it is the graphic, realistic nature of modern depictions that does real damage. But if simple film violence were the problem, one would look for some correlation between crime rates and violent-movie distribution. Such correlations remain elusive.

A more realistic contention is that while movie violence is not bad in itself, it can be bad when presented in a morally harmful context. During the 1992–93 round of Hollywood-bashing, Sen. Paul Simon threatened the television networks with government "action" if they didn't clean themselves up; in response, the networks sponsored a UCLA study that concluded that "context is the key to the determination of whether or not the use of violence is appropriate." The problem for liberals, though, is that they don't think there are many contexts where violence is permissible — save, perhaps, in cautionary tales about Nazis, southern slaveowners, and military homophobes. The Left always despised Dirty Harry movies, for example, because the moral context of those films suggested that criminals were, in fact, criminals, and that a liberal do-gooder court system was allowing the bad guys to rule the streets.
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Violence in popular entertainment, then, has a complicated history; it's neither new nor especially harmful. What really is new and harmful is the trendy moral relativism that characterizes so many movies and TV shows. These cultural products receive rave reviews from liberal activists for their "positive" (and relatively nonviolent) content. But in these films, protagonists do not defy the legal order so that they can uphold a higher moral order; instead, these "heroes" rebel against the notion that there is any moral order at all.
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The entertainment industry has hammered home the idea that conformity of any kind is a sign of spiritual surrender. While films with excessive violence often receive considerable critical and popular scrutiny, the idea that we are all our own priests is celebrated throughout the popular culture. This idea is found even in technically well-made films like Dead Poets Society and the pernicious Pleasantville, both of which redefined the concept of "to thine own self be true" to mean "thine own self is the only truth." It is also the moral of hundreds of individual TV shows and movies; it is the core social and political insight of rock 'n' roll and rap music. How else to explain the familiar litany of rap songs which exult in killing and rape?

This attitude makes violent films all the more poisonous. In a world where no set of moral principles is superior to any other, why not make heroes out of murderers? This is the lesson of nearly the entire Quentin Tarantino oeuvre and its many ripoffs. More and more often, we are seeing psychopaths and serial killers as protagonists. An early example can be found in the 1984 Terminator, in which the audience is invited to see things through the eyes of a killing machine — and enjoy it. Since then, the pace has only accelerated. In the 1991 Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter was a profoundly sympathetic cannibalistic serial killer; in the upcoming sequel — if it's adapted loyally from the novel — he will be the hero.

I quoted a lot, but it's a long article, so there's plenty left to read. He talks a bit about sex as well, seeing the Hollywood attitude towards sex (roughly, anything goes) as the starting point for this amoral worldview.

This ties in pretty well with my argument that America has a clear consensus on when and where violence is appropriate (despite plenty of Hollywood movies presenting contrary ideas), but it has no corresponding consensus on sex.

Every once in a while I notice an interesting Google search that brought people here. Such as the one about whether Jesus rode a unicorn to Babylon. Today, I got an even better one: "single female pastors in usa searching for husbands".

This particular search was from Nigeria, according to Sitemeter, which isn't surprising since it was on the Nigeria Google page. Now, I don't happen to know any single women pastors, but I do know some single women in seminary. Hmm... I wasn't planning on starting a matchmaking service.

I'll be hosting the next Storyblogging Carnival here at Back of the Envelope. If you use your blog to share your fiction, then the Storyblogging Carnival is what your opportunity to share. Here we host any and all forms of storytelling in blog format. If you're curious about what this looks like, have a look at some examples of previous storyblogging carnivals. The next Storyblogging Carnival will be the sixtieth. It will be going up December 18th. I don't generally do theme carnivals, but if you have a Christmas story, now would be a good time to post it. Unless you're Doc, who really needs to actually remember to submit his Mist Magic story this time.

If you'd like to participate, please e-mail your story submissions to me at dscrank-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu (or post in my comments), including the following information:

• Name of your blog
• URL of your blog
• Title of the story
• URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
• (OPTIONAL) Author's name
• (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
• A word count
• A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Saturday, December 2nd. More detailed information follows (same as always):

1. The story or excerpt submitted must be posted on-line as a blog entry, and while fiction is preferred, non-fiction storytelling is acceptable.
2. The story can be any length, but the Carnival will list them in order of length, from shortest to longest, and include a word count for each one.
3. You may either send a complete story, a story in progress, or a lengthy excerpt. You should indicate the word count for both the excerpt and the complete story in the submission, and you should say how the reader can find more of the story in the post itself.
4. If the story spans multiple posts, each post should contain a link to the beginning of the story, and a link to the next post. You may submit the whole story, the first post, or, if you've previously submitted earlier posts to the Carnival, the next post which you have not submitted. Please indicate the length of the entire story, as well as the portion which you are submitting.
5. The host has sole discretion to decide whether the story will be included or not, or whether to indicate that the story has pornographic or graphically violent content. The ratings for the story will be decided by the host. I expect I'll be pretty lenient on that sort of thing, but I have some limits, and others may draw the line elsewhere. Aside from noting potentially offensive content, while I may say nice things about stories I like, I won't be panning anyone's work. I expect other hosts to be similarly polite.
6. The story may be the blogger's own or posted with permission, but if it is not his own work he should gain permission from the author before submitting to the Carnival.

If you'd like to be added to the e-mail list, please let me know. Finally, I appreciate folks promoting the carnival on their own blogs, and I'm always looking for bloggers willing to host future carnivals.

Sluggy Freelance — Torg buys a PlayStayshun 3, hocking his car to do so, but immediately loses interest when he realizes that it doesn't come bundled with any games. So he sells it on ebay, and buys a new car and a SuWii. Gwynn loves the new toy (and delivers a great show to the boys, since Torg wasn't honest on how the motion sensing controller works), but isn't too thrilled that Torg's sporting the Hereticorp logo. A quick offer of pizza calms her and her monkeys, though. Meanwhile, Bun-bun's planning to mess with Santa this year. I can't say that I'm really surprised.

Day by Day — The Iraq Study Group has issued its report. Which suggests negotiating with the Iranians and Syrians for terms of surrender, or something like that. The ludicrous claim that they don't want chaos in Iraq doesn't jive with the reality that they're the ones causing it. Chris gets a lot of mileage with that this week. Still, there's room to mock the AP's inability to produce evidence for their stories.

Scary Go Round — Well, it looks like Rachel has been cooked. I'd feel sorry for her, but she was trying to start the apocolypse. Besides, who ever stays dead in this strip? Shelley's busy trying to help the mer-man figure out what he is, going so far as to request the aid of the assistant to evil scientists, Moon, who's now on the straight and narrow as a research assistant in Oklahoma. Amy's father seems to think he recognizes the other crazy guy as a brilliant professor, but he sure isn't behaving like one.

Dominic Deegan — Stunt's on his way out, and though Bumper offers to go with him, each wants what is best for the other, which means parting ways. Dominic is touched. The earth elemental Rocky, not so much.

Schlock Mercenary — The aliens have rescued Kevyn. At least, that's what he thinks, before they inform him that he had recently escaped captivity to them and they execute him. Dang, amnesia's inconvenient. Fortunately, his blood nannies get to work reviving him again, but they're getting sort of tired of all this work. They want him to take better care of himself.

Well, I've just reached a fun new minigame in Neverwinter Nights 2. I've been given a ruined keep, along with instructions to rebuild it and garrison it. To that end I've been given command of fifty soldiers and 70000 gold. This is all a rather involved minigame. The first order of business, as I saw it, was starting up a steady revenue stream, in this case money I can tithe from merchants using the road. In order to do that, first I need to attract merchants to the road, which I can do by sending my soldiers to patrol it. But my soldiers aren't effective until they're trained, for which I need to recruit a sargeant, and equipped, which requires recruiting an armorer and a weaponsmith and paying them to produce the goods. But I can't recruit either of those until I build a smithy, which requires gold. You see? Fortunately, the seed money is enough to build the smithy and begin repair on the walls and the roads, but only just. It's not enough to rebuild the keep or buy the best equipment for my troops yet. Part of the fun is recruiting. Rather than just being given a list of people to select from, I need to go out and talk to the NPCs I've dealt with over the course of the game so far, and convince them to join me at my keep. I also got a visit from some adventurers looking to follow in my footsteps, and asking if I have any quests for them. Unfortunately, adventurers are notoriously unreliable. You ask them to look into reports of spies in a town and they get sidetracked rescuing a farmer's daughter from goblins, or you tell them to clear out the bandits in an area and halfway there they stumble on a long forgotten tomb and start searching it for lost treasures. Still, usually they do a decent job once they get around to it, except that these seem to be even less competent than most.

Overall, it's an interesting and fun game in itself. Of course, it's a sideplot and there's more to be done in the main plot, but it was enough to keep me up way late a night or two.

This is really, really late this week. My apologies, but you probably shouldn't be surprised.

Sluggy Freelance — Torg and Riff stumble upon the House of Cheese, a new pizza place that serves really good pizza and prominently displays the Hereti-Corp logo. It is, of course, a Hereti-Corp business. Furthermore, as Riff's already figured out, it's designed to draw out Oasis. Override B-1 and all the moment she spots that logo.

Day by Day — Sam draws the attention of a calendar photographer with her shooting, so now she's off to a photoshoot for some calendar of women and guns. Jan and Damon accompany her to make sure everything's on the up-and-up, but it looks like Jan's very uncomfortable, possibly more due to the guns than Sam's skimpy clothing.

Scary Go Round — Rachel's domineering personality has run afoul of the Satanic nuns, and they've decided to burn her in effigy--well, more accurately, burn her inside an effigy. Actually, it looks more like a wooden house, but whatever. Tessa tries to save her without getting herself burned alive, but she's not having an easy time of it. Back at the bachelor pad, Shelley's showing Ryan where he used to live, but it's hardly a happy homecoming, as his pet bat has died in his absence.

Dominic Deegan — Just as it looks like Stunt's dead, he manages to reach his feet and cut Urban Eddie's throat. But he's been stabbed fatally, and we get a touching death scene where he tells Bumper how much he cares about him. Then Gregory shows up at the last moment and heals him, making everyone feel very embarassed. It's quite disconcerting to give your deathbed statement and then survive. Despite all this, Stunt's arrested for murder. Even if everyone feels his killing of Urban Eddie was justified, he did a lot of other nasty things, so Pam decides that his punishment is exile--which wouldn't be so bad if Bumper were going with him.

Schlock Mercenary — Kevyn's nanobots are helping him to set his bones to make their repair work easier. It's a painful, often disgusting process, and way too much of it is shown. But moving along, Schlock and the others are heading farther and farther away, trying to discover where the air ship they spotted came from. Unfortunately, it was just out for a spin around the world, so they've got a long walk ahead of them. The aliens the air ship belonged to, meanwhile, are curious about what started the forest fire they witnessed.

Welcome to the fifty-ninth Storyblogging Carnival. This edition includes nine stories from eight authors.

Recently, I've been getting a lot of submissions from the Blog Carnival submission form. This is good, since it increases the number of submissions, but there are some drawbacks. First, because there's no filtering, I sometimes get submissions that don't even resemble stories, and I wonder whether the submitter even read what the Storyblogging Carnival is all about. (There's a description in our page on the site.) These are rejected, with an e-mail to the author explaining why and what we're looking for in the Storyblogging Carnival. The second drawback is that there doesn't seem to be any way to explain what we want in our carnival submissions, and there's no entry on the form for some of those things. I have a fairly lengthy list, including some things other carnivals don't look for: aside from author, post title and URL, and blog name and URL, we want a word count, a rating for adult content, and a blurb describing the story. These are important, but I'm willing to let the first slide, since it's easy enough for the host to perform a wordcount (although not all of them do). I'll even let slide the second, since the host is ultimately responsible for the rating anyway (although, admittedly, I myself sometimes only skim the entries when I don't have much time to work on the carnival, which makes it hard to be sure about the rating). However, what I'm not willing to let slide anymore is the blurb. The carnival entry form does have a section for a description of the post, and it seems to me that if you want to have people read your story, you have to at least tell them what it is about. I used to write the description myself for the one or two stories that lacked it, but this time we had six entries with no blurb for the story. I e-mailed the authors to ask for their blurbs. Those who got back to me are in this carnival, and those who didn't are not. This will be the new policy whenever I host from now on.

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Shoeless
by Jeremiah Lewis of Fringe
A 50 word brief story rated PG.

A man's new habit proves dismaying to friends.

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Size Matters
by Jeremiah Lewis of Fringe
A 50 word brief story rated PG.

What's a few extra inches?

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100 words on Horbgorble
by Andrew Ian Dodge of Dodgeblogium
A 100 word brief story rated G.

"The word of the week was Horbgorble. I thought it was something mispelled so I thought someone hearing it would definetely get the wrong end of the stick!"

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Proving his religion — Dr. Tundra and the Noodly Norsemen
by Mark A. Rayner of The Skwib
A 350 word brief story rated PG-13.

Dr. Tundra proves scientifically that it is a lack of Vikings, not pirates, that causes global warming.

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For Safe Keeping
by Rocket Barber of The Rocketman's Change For A Dollar
A 457 word brief story rated PG

A perspective on a sunrise.

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Hunting Cows by Moonlight
by Chris Dolley of Author Chris Dolley's Page
A 618 word excerpt from a book rated PG.

"'Hunting Cows by Moonlight' is a self-contained and true story from my book, Nous Sommes Anglais - chronicling eight months in the life of a man who moved to France with one wife, two cats, two horses and a large puppy. Everyone except the horses feature in this story of animals turning their owner's lives upside down."

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Secret Shopper
by Madeleine Begun Kane of Mad Kane's Humor Blog
A 704 word brief story rated PG.

Mad Kane tells the story of a rather unusual shopping expedition with her mom.

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NaNoWriMo: The Path to Enlightenment?
by Laura Young of Dragon Slayer's Guide to Life
A 940 word brief story rated G.

How writing her live autobiography is changing one woman's life.

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Where the Boys Are, Part II (The Beginning)
by Postmodern Sass of Postmodern Sass
The final 1,200 words of a 2,100 word short story rated PG.

Thanksgiving in Napa with a family of vegans and baby rock stars.

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This concludes the fifty-ninth Storyblogging Carnival.

If you'd like to take part in a future carnival, please contact me. I am also looking for hosts. Other carnivals can be found here.

The Storyblogging Carnival can be found at The Truth Laid Bear's ÜberCarnival.