Theomania: A Game of Religions

Goal

The goal of Theomania is to make up a religion in a short time and try to convert the other players.  The prophet with the most converts wins.

Rules

Round 1

All prophets have some drinks or other psychoactives to open their minds to the cosmic truths they will soon be channeling.  This round lasts anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours, depending on the mood of the room and the psychoactives being used.

Round 2

Now that the prophets' minds are properly opened, it is time to create some religions.  All prophets need a writing implement and a surface, and have five to ten minutes in which to create the outlines of their new religion.  This may take any form the prophet feels inspired to create, but should include the following:

• The name of the religion
• Requirements for joining the religion
• Requirements and restrictions for members in good standing
• Major and routine holidays and celebrations, and the reasons behind them
• Description of the afterlife, if any, for believers and non-believers
• Description of the universe, its origin, and the eschaton
• Description of the major figures of the religion, including but not limited to:
• Gods and their servants
• Monsters and other creatures
• Saints and other major human figures
• Exclusiveness of other religious systems

Contradictory information is not just allowed, but encouraged.  These are typically called "mysteries".

Variant

For an extra challenge, prophets may randomly select characteristics for their religion from one or more of the lists below.  The lists may also be used for inspiration.

Deity(ies)

• Monotheist
• Polytheist
• Dualist
• Manichaean
• Ancestror worship
• Deist
• Abstract
• Animist/shamanic

Nature of the Deity(ies)

• Nature spirit(s)
• Ascended/enlightened human
• Aliens/UFOs
• Traditional deity

Important Beliefs

• Individualism
• Community
• Virtue and salvation
• Reverence for nature
• Aggression and violence

Rituals

• Animal sacrifice
• Effigy burning
• Meditation
• Construction of a large structure
• Ritual magic
• Ritual nudity and/or sex

Round 3

Armed with their new belief systems, the prophets then set about seeking converts among the other prophets by any means necessary.  Enlightened debate, cajoling, bribery, unenlightened debate, and intimidation are all legal methods of gaining followers.  Potential converts are encouraged to question the prophet about his religion; if the questions are not addressed in the existing scriptures, the prophet is free to make up whatever answer he likes, which immediately becomes part of the orthodox theology of the religion.

After the conversion period, the prophets reconvene.  Each in turn asks how many converts he has gained, and any prophets who wish to convert (which may or may not include the prophet himself) raise their hands.

Prophets may join more than one new religion as long as they both allow it.  The prophet with the most converts wins.  In the event of a tie, the game is decided by a holy war among each religion's followers.

In Which My Hair Is On Fire

OK, I have fifty thoughts about this excellent essay by Rachel Held Evans. They are best expressed by yelling and throwing heavy things through windows, but we don't have the technology yet to do that over the Internet. So, here we go:

The Homunculus Theory of Cognition Always Appealed to Me

What with one thing and another, I have been spending a lot of my spare time in the last few months scrutinizing my mental processes.  The timing has been good, coinciding as it did with the meatier parts of my graduate school experience, in which the curriculum was equal parts basic engineering, information theory, and, relevantly, cognitive psychology.  So, at a time when I was learning to think about other people's mental experiences, I had a need to look to my own as well.  The crossover benefits are obvious.

Greatest Hits of my Previous Blog: Chronologue (12/31/2008)

The day before the day before yesterday Brendan came over. We took a walk and played a game.

The day before yesterday I walked past some cows.

Yesterday I walked over a mountaim toward a beach, and was present for the discovery of a Cthulhoid lemon.

Today I am celebrating the new year.

Tomorrow is unknown.

The day after tomorrow I will take a short flight and eat a fancy dinner with mostly children.

The day after the day after tomorrow I will fly toward home, and be picked up by a nun. The day after that is the day before my bullshit life resumes.

Greatest Hits of My Previous Blog: An Unlikely Scenario By Any Measure (1/8/2009)

[In lieu of writing actual new posts, which I've failed to do for a while, I've decided to occasionally repost old stuff from my previous blog that still kinda makes me laugh.  This series, such as it is, will be called Greatest Hits of My Previous Blog.  Hopefully this will actually be new to some of you.]

Words that don't exist, but should

There should be a word for...

• ... sorrow caused by the good fortune of another.
• ... the feeling of vertigo caused by jumping from a high place... in a video game.

Can you QWOP and chew gum at the same time?

 

One of the information processing tasks that our brains take care of for us automatically every day is how to walk correctly.  It turns out that this is an enormously complicated task, requiring visual, touch, and proprioceptive information to be recieved, analyzed, and reacted to on very short timescales, all of which happens automatically after about the first year of life.

Abberant Blog Neglection

Well.

It has been in excess of a fortnight since I blogged anything at all.  The start of school always hits me hard, even though there's very little work involved, and the way that this semester has shaken out it's been starting for three weeks now.

But rest assured, I have not been idle!  I am even now considering the beginnings of two reviews.  The first is of a comic/comix biography of Niels Bohr, and the second is of none other than Cryptonomicon, which I only just this morning finished, having been reading it since October or so.  Crypto will take some serious digestion, but I will give it my best shot.  I actually found a plot hole, but it concerns something surprising that happens in the last five pages of the book, so I don't think I'll mention it.

The Lesser Vowel Shift

Ten years ago this summer I spent a few days in Italy with a high school group.  One night we, and several related groups, were having a banquet/party at a charming little restaurant out in the country.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing a Surfeit or Deficiency of Sleep From Being a Burden, and for Making It Beneficial To Me

Abstract

For the most part, I sleep fairly well at night, insofar as that I don't often wake up, and I can usually get to sleep quickly as well. However, as far as I can remember, I have never ever been happy to get up.  Whether I'm forced to get up after 5 hours, or reluctantly drag myself into the world after accidentally sleeping 11 hours, I always feel rather terrible; this feeling is what leads me to sleeping for too long, which only makes things worse.  I'm only ever driven out of bed by the alarm, or by shame, and it takes shame a lot longer to penetrate the fog on my consciousness.  It's possible that, for whatever reason, this is just my lot in life; however, I think I can throw some science at this problem over the next semester and find the exact right amount of sleep for me.

Book Review: Doorways in the Sand, by Roger Zelazny

There is a lot to love about Zelazny's writing that is utterly present in Doorways in the Sand.

Now, I've given Zelazny a small amount of shit in the past, at least in the limited context of this blog, but only in the interest of being an honest reviewer.  I now feel obligated to give the old boy some love, publicly and on the Internet, at the cost of my nil critiquing cred, but fortunately that won't be necessary; I actually read Doorways, and enjoyed it as much as I've enjoyed any other book ever.

Several Thoughts

A couple of things have occurred to me, none of which is large enough to make a full post out of.  I guess this is what Twitter's for, but I can only manage so many Web-2.0 life outlets at once.

The Good

The extent to which the alignment system of 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons influenced my philosophy of the world is very nearly embarrassing, although the writings of Michael Moorcock helped too.  Good and Evil is a fine spectrum for some stories and some religions, but Law and Chaos are so much more interesting.

The Story of Brother Giles

It seems that there was a Gaelic monk named Giles who was a brother of the priory at Lindisfarne.  Giles took his final vows in the year 745, and soon afterward, in a fit of holy inspiration, took up residence in a small wooden box.  An ascetic among ascetics, Giles spent his days in silent, cramped meditation, leaving his box only for the Palm Sunday precession.

Brother Giles continued his life as an enclosed anchorite until June 8, 793, the day of the famous Viking raid on Lindisfarne.  When the Northern raiders found Brother Giles in his box, they demanded that he come out of his box to be killed.  When he refused, two of the stoutest warriors carried the box to the top of the bell tower and cast it to the green.  The Vikings descended to inspect the ruins of the box, but Brother Giles' body was nowhere to be found.

Because of his controversial lifestyle, Brother Giles was never canonized, but the sad story of the miraculous monk soon spread through the flock of the faithful.  An idiom grew among the merchants of Europe: boxes containing precious cargo were to be treated "as it were Brother Giles' own box".  As greater literacy arose in the 15th century, traders began marking such cargo with the now-shortened form of the idiom, simply "Brother Giles", or in Latin: "Fra Gile".

Semster-end Work Spike: Update

Just released an amount of tension via my second presentation of the week.  Some of the work for this was going on ten minutes before class, so very high stress.  I need to try really hard not to relax though -- there's plenty of more work ahead.  My portfolio will definitely get beefed up by the end of the month.

After taking 5 classes this semester and promising myself, "Never Again", my very favorite professor ever ever announced an independent-study class involving work on the gigantic Sakai Project.  I have never been so excited about anything.  Also, this is the first class I've ever had to apply for.  News on that will be forthcoming.

Book Review: Conjure Wife, by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber, today best known as the author of the excellent sword-and-sorcery tales of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, died in 1992, at the age of 81, of "organic brain disease".  I have no idea what that means.  He was the son of the Shakespearean actor Fritz Leiber, Sr., who is actually in the picture; I found this a lot more compelling than most photos of Fritz Jr.

Conjure Wife is the first of Leiber's stories that I've read which is set in the then-modern world.  That it was published in 1953 (according to the copyright information), or 1943 even (when it was serialized), goes a long way toward explaining some of the book's more... politically awkward moments.

Misery, Death, and Slime Molds: My Love Affair with Roguelikes

One of my favorite pastimes in this modern world of 3D movies (who ever thought those would come back around again?), beautiful multiplayer online games, and graphics cards more powerful than my entire first computer, is to play in the humble genre of roguelike games.  But what exactly is a roguelike?  It is a game that is, in most respects, a lot like 1980's Rogue, the first graphical computer game.  Given that they are classified by their similarity to a particular game, roguelikes for the most part share a set of common features:

Book Review: Wizard World, by Roger Zelazny

Who couldn't love that face?

There is a lot to love about Zelazny's writing that is totally absent from Wizard World.

Now I am a huge fan of Roger Zelazny.  The Great Book of Amber is the best 1258 pages I ever spent, twice.  Lord Demon, Donnerjack, and Creatures of Light and Darkness are among the most imaginative, atypical works of fantasy I've read.  Zelazny's main characters are typically demigods, in one way or another, dealing with their demigod problems, but with some kind of connection to something like the modern world (e.g., the main character of the second half of Amber has a CS degree from Berkeley, and is also a sorcerer).  Something about this is strangely compelling to me.  As another e.g., Amber starts with the main character waking up in a hospital with amnesia, and is very much in a noir style; the true nature of things is revealed only slowly.  Great stuff.

For these reasons and more, I really, really wanted to like Wizard World.

So About The Name...

So about the name of this blog:

At some point in the mists of the past (I'd say 2006-2007) I got on a roll of making fun of romance novels.  I could swear that I wrote two or three several-paragraph things about the ridiculously manly Count Dangerham, only I cannot find them for the life of me.  Maybe I can try to work myself up to writing some more, but I doubt it.  It's kinda been "done", you know?

Blasting Off to a New Latitude

I spent this very extended weekend in Florida, celebrating my stepdad's 70th birthday / hip replacement.  (I guess that should be "(70th birthday) / (hip replacement)".  /s have always made me uncomfortable that way.  I know for sure that he only had his hip replaced, not his birthday, and I'm reasonably certain that it was his first procedure of that sort.)  He lives in the extraordinarily rich community of Aventura: