Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at December 28th, 2005

Though I’m confident you’ve never been exceptionally interested in my kitchen, my wife is strongly interested in covering all available counter space with tile. I’m mostly not involved except when she hits a tough spot and feels the need to call upon my non-existent carpentry skills.

Or alternately, just needs a little muscle.

I’m not much use there either, but I do what I can. Tonight, I assisted in ripping out the formica and the backsplash on the walls. The result isn’t pretty, but it is a good candidate for laying tile.

The ultimate goal is to have it look like the section of the kitchen that she’s already partially finished. Grout and some touch up work will hopefully make both spots usable in the near future.

Posted by Jim at December 25th, 2005

My brother grew up knowing Jeff Bates (Hemos) and Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) of Slashdot.

From what I understand, it may have been Derek that introduced Jeff Bates and indirectly Rob to the idea of modems and computer BBS’s. I was talking with him during Christmas and it turned out that he specifically remembered explaining what a modem was to Jeff Bates.

And why did Derek know? He knew because I’d bought a 300 baud modem for my Commodore 64 with birthday money when I was in high school. And why did I have a Commodore 64? Because I’d been over to Ed’s house a lot, thought his Commodore 64 (with an unbelievably fast 1200 baud modem), was pretty cool and had saved up money from picking blueberries one summer to buy my own.

Strange how tenuous a series of events it is.

Before people come to the conclusion that I’m in tight with Rob and Jeff Bates, I should mention a couple things. First, I wouldn’t know them if I saw them on the street. Second, I didn’t speak with them much even then. I’m pretty sure I dropped Jeff off at his house a couple times and I’m sure I saw their posts on boards that I frequented, but I’m pretty sure I also ignored them because they were seven years younger than I am.

Funny, eh?

Posted by Jim at December 24th, 2005

I’m pretty sure that the the world can survive without another blogger commenting on the “War on Christmas,” but I have an irrestible urge to do it. For those of you who successfully managed to avoid knowing what this semi-controversy is (and I congratulate you on that), I’ll give a quick summary. From what I understand, Steve Gibson, a reporter for Fox News wrote a book arguing that Christmas is under attack, pointing out that there’s a movement toward saying “happy holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas”. From what I’ve seen in a clip from Bill O’Reilly’s show, they link this to the decline of religion in Europe, saying that once you push religion out of the public square you get things like legal prostitution and other social ills.

I don’t agree.

Personally, I think that the source of the decline of the European church can be traced to state sponsorship of religion. In Europe, the state sometimes owns the church buildings, pays the clergy, and generally makes it possible for the state sponsored church to be completely disconnected from public wants.

By contrast, the US has a more “free-market” approach to religion. We give churches no support other than tax exempt status. Our churches have to be dynamically engaged with the culture they live in or die. And they do die. Where are the Shakers now? They used to be huge. By contrast, Pentecostals have grown immensely and so have other religious groups.

It seems to me that what Bill O’Reilly and Steve Gibson are advocating is more akin to state sponsorship of churches than anything else. In this case, of course, it’s more pressuring companies than passing laws, but, what’s the best case scenario if the general culture listens to them? Employees of various stores will say “Merry Christmas” whether they are Christian or not. More stores will have “Merry Christmas” signs instead of “Happy Holidays” signs. This won’t represent an honest desire to honor Christ. It will just be a realistic approach to avoiding a boycott.

I’m trying hard to think of anything good that can come of it.

Honestly, I don’t think anything bad is going to come of it either since I suspect this issue will evaporate once Christmas passes just like the whole “Christmas is getting too materialistic” concern seems to evaporate every year.

At core, the whole “War on Christmas” thing points to a larger anxiety that Christianity is disappearing from our culture. I don’t know if that’s true. Assuming that church attendance represents some level of commitment to Christianity, I’m told that the percentage of people attending church (around 40%) and the sex ratio (trending female) has been roughly the same for much of the country’s history.

If this is true then the “War on Christmas” is more perception than reality.

On the other hand, it might be that numbers don’t tell the whole story. It may be that Christianity is getting less influential and less important to the people who profess it. If so, pushing stores to continue saying “Merry Christmas” strikes me as more of a band-aid than a solution. If people believe in Christ, then it doesn’t matter whether the religion’s holidays are part of public life or not. If people don’t believe, you’re doomed from the start.

It’s in reference to things like this that I envy Orthodox Christians. They use a different calendar for determining when they celebrate religious holidays. As a result, there’s no confusion between what’s going on in public life and what they celebrate religiously. They get to have a Santa Christmas and a “real” one a few weeks later.

It makes obvious what I think is the real truth of things–the public Christmas has little if anything to do with Christianity. It’s a civil, commercial holiday that piggybacks on the religious holiday. I’m inclined to enjoy it for what it is and try not to confuse it with the celebration of Christ’s birth that goes on at the same time.

Posted by Jim at December 20th, 2005

Those who know my reading tastes know that David Brin in one of my favorite authors. He wrote Startide Rising (winner of a Hugo, a Nebula, and an award from Locus), which was probably my favorite book during high school and college.

Turns out that Brin has a blog.

Recently Brin wrote an article about what he thinks is wrong with both the Republican and Democratic parties these days. I don’t really want to go into it in detail here, but I’d just like to mention that I think it’s interesting.

Posted by Jim at December 18th, 2005

So we went to my boss’ Christmas party tonight, intending to stay for half an hour and leave. We intended to stay only briefly because we brought our kids and it really was an adult gathering. The thing is though, that the kids knew almost everyone, were well behaved, and we felt totally comfortable with them being there.

So we stayed two hours. At the end of two hours, we decided that we definitely must get out of there. With that decision made, we were standing in the dining room and I was talking to someone. The conversation (as I remember it) seemed pretty interesting. One of my daughters came up to me. She was standing in front of the table of food, just where the carpet ended and the wooden floor began.

As I was talking a seemingly endless stream of vomit spewed from her mouth, landing both on the carpet and the wooden floor. While this happened, it seemed that every person in the house magically appeared in the dining room with us–including my boss’ wife–who is my wife’s supervisor’s supervisor.

“Well,” I said to the now crowded room, “now I know why we generally don’t bring kids to this sort of thing.”

And then we started with the paper towels.

Posted by Jim at December 15th, 2005

A few years ago now at Thanksgiving one of my cousins was talking with an uncle of mine about deer hunting. They talked about what he might want to buy in order to start and then I completely derailed the conversation.

I’m not much into hunting, but I’m perfectly willing to inject random observations into people’s lives.

“You know,” I said, “it seems like hunting goes more primitive all the time. It’s kind of a throwback to begin with because it’s not like anyone really needs to shoot deer to put food on the table, but seems like people make it more primitive every time they turn around.”

“You’ve got regular deer season and then you’ve got muzzle loader season and then you’ve got bow season. You know what they ought to have? Atlatl season.”

My uncle (in the same tone that he used to use when I was five or so) said, “If you get deep enough into the woods, I’m sure you can use whatever you want.”

Recently, I was rather amused to learn that people really are working to make atlatl hunting legal in Pennsylvania. Atlatls are sticks that are used to add force and range to a thrown javelin. Its an ancient weapon that has been used all over the world. I first became aware of them when doing research for a paper on the Anasazi.

It’s still pretty bizarre that people are actually considering it though. If it does go through, what can people do to top that? Can you go even more primitive? If you want to, I’ve got a few suggestions.

1. Chase Down Deer with a Flint Knife Season
2. Scare Deer Herds into Running Off a Cliff Season, and finally
3. Teeth and Fingernails Season

Oh, and though this doesn’t fit with the “even more primitive than atlatls” theme, I’ve got just one more suggestion that pays tribute to Wiley Coyote…

4. Anvil Season: I just like to imagine all the hunters hanging around in deer blinds and dropping anvils on things.

Posted by Jim at December 10th, 2005

Those of you who read Jonathan Laughlin’s blog or read the Grand Rapids Press already know about the school situation. Basically, the local Christian school system is going to close one school, move it’s students to other schools and move the school that my daughter (and Jonathan’s kids) go to around 15-30 minutes from here (depending on traffic).

Since hearing the news Kristen or I have been to around 5 meetings (possibly more) on the subject. There’s been some talk about trying to convince the board to move our school (since it will be moved inevitably) someplace closer. Wherever the school moves, it will be housed in a building that is already being occupied by another Christian school.

What’s unfortunate is that the nearby school has less space if our school grows and is in an older building. The school that’s far from here has larger playground space, much more room for our school to grow, and is a much newer building.

Thus the school that the board picked is the better choice except for the location. The location very much increases the chance that people will decide that they don’t want to drive their kids there, possibly killing the school. When you consider that the school has been growing by 20% a year in recent years, you can understand both why one would be concerned about the relative lack of space at the nearby school and how one might be frustrated about the idea of moving the school to an area where it might not grow.

Over the last couple parent meetings, the leadership of the parent group began to ask if there was anyone who had experience in writing and analyzing surveys. As it happens I’ve got a couple degrees in sociology and spent five years working at a market research firm that’s now part of Harris Interactive.

I wasn’t there that night, but Kristen volunteered me.

Thus, in the midst of this whole depressing mess, I got to do something that’s kind of fun. I got to help another parent (a former town planner with similar skills) write a survey. Actually, she had the majority of the survey already written and I made a few suggestions regarding questions and a little on language.

Then we had to write a cover letter for the survey. This was less fun. The goal being to summarize the strengths and weaknesses in such a way that it doesn’t offend anybody or sway people to answer in one direction or the other.

As we were sitting in the school library working, a teacher came in an let us know that the school was locked up and that the alarm would automatically turn on in an hour. This was no big deal since we figured we would be done by then.

Just as we were finishing up the first draft, we realized that the alarm would come on in five minutes. “I wonder,” I commented, ” whether the alarms are synchronized with the clocks on the wall or whether they’re a bit fast?”

We emailed the draft immediately after that. I literally ran across the room to turn off the lights in the library and we left the building.

The goal of the survey (for those of you who are wondering) is to find out what school people would prefer Evergreen move to and what issues cause them to have that preference. Hopefully it will do a good job.

Whether or not it does, I had a good time working on it.

Posted by Jim at December 3rd, 2005

I played Prime Time Adventures with Ed and Joe on Friday night. I’d been curious about it for a while and very much enjoyed it.

Prime Time Adventures is a game that involves creating a story in the style of a dramatic television series. The players and the producer (alias the GM) come up with the series idea and share responsibilities for imagining the events of the game and their resolution.

Our group’s idea was “Crashspace,” a story of college-aged aliens marooned on Earth and rooming with two human students. As an idea, it lends itself to comedy almost as easily as drama.

Having already played (and read) a few Forge influenced games now, I was familiar with the basic thrust of the mechanics. In this case you use cards as a randomizer instead of dice, but you still end up narrating the results of a success or failure. This particular game had some twists on this. For example, you the player don’t necessarily narrate the results of your actions. The player with the highest card narrates the results. it also included another interesting twist, “fan mail,” a system for allowing players to reward other players for doing something clever or amusing during the game.

As someone who’s more interested in creating a story that lasts over multiple episodes than self contained episodes, I was particularly interested that Prime Time Adventures clearly considers the entire season in the process of character creation. At the beginning of the season, you mark your character’s level of importance in each episode. That, in turn, affects how effective your charcter will be controlling the direction of that episode.

I’m still mulling over whether I can draw inspiration or even directly steal from this for my own stuff.

One thing that I dislike is purely personal. As someone who’s primary experience and attraction to gaming is as a GM, I enjoy describing what happens next. As a player, a person still gets to do this, but obviously you get to do this a bit less. In Prime Time Adventures, you only get to narrate the results of a conflict if you’ve got the highest card and in that case, you get to narrate everyone’s actions. This is fine except that I never got the highest card.

In pointing this out, I don’t mean to complain. I had a great time with the game. It’s a game that gives the players a lot of control. You can choose where a scene occurs, what sort of conflict will occur (if any) and even start scenes that have nothing to do with your own character should you feel the urge. It’s also worth saying that you very definitely do get to interact with other players in character and you can set your stakes such that you control the result of a conflict.

I’m just saying I miss the ability to describe my character’s actions as opposed to setting the stakes and making suggestions to the narrator.

This may well go away with more experience of the game. There’s certainly enough in it to explore for a while and one small dislike does not overwhelm the many things that I do like about it.