I’ve Lost my Muse!

I no longer feel like blogging for some reason. Oh well. It seems that it’s time for me to take a sabbatical. I didn’t get a chance to post about it, but work on Soulstorm Legacy is commencing again.

Well, I’m doing a little bit of work on it anyway. I’ve all but given up on ever getting the data from my crashed harddrive back (although I may eventually), so I figured it was time to get back to work. My first task had been an attempt at designing the military battle system.

I got part of it kind of working, but upon finding Carius’s ABS template, I decided to remake my system in a similar way, using Common Events.

Currently I’ve decided to postpone work on the military system and get back to basics so that I don’t get ahead of myself. I’m gathering a new library of resources to replace as much as I can that was lost in the crash. I also started SoulstormWiki on my desktop computer.

SoulstormWiki was my attempt at keeping an offline database of information and ideas pertaining to the project. It uses the same Mediawiki technology as Wikipedia. I’m sure you all know how much I love that. That system sure beats the pants of using a bunch of MS Word documents! I’m thinking of eventually putting a spoiler free version of it online. Keep your eyes peeled.

And speaking of Wikis, there’s another wiki I plan to start. Way back around the beginning of my high school ordeal career the now defunct Tech TV began airing anime, the first series being one called Betterman.

It’s not a popular series, but for some reason I really liked it. I resolved to make a completely comprehensive Betterman fansite encyclopedia thing. I was really thinking about something  along the lines of Wikipedia, which was inspriational even though I didn’t know how Wikipedia worked or even what a Wiki was.

I got pretty far along with making the site’s content and stuff although eventually I lost all my hard work. I’m honestly not sure when or how I lost all the site’s pages and stuff, but I did. Strangely enough I stumbled on the site a few days back.

The parts of the site I uploaded were a lot less complete than the stuff I had saved on my PC, but seeing the fragmentary remains gave me that nostalgic feeling that made me want to go through and actually finish the dang thing! This time of course, it will actually be a true wiki. I admit that this will be something of a low priority thing for me, but hey, at least I’ll actually go through with accomplishing one of my goals in life.

Yeah, so instead of posting here, I’m gonna be messing with RPG Maker related things and maybe the Betterman Wiki.

Image Macros for Forum Debates

If you’ve payed attention to my links page, you’ll have seen that I added a link to the site Fundies Say the Darndest Things there. I was exploring the site and found myself amused by some of the image macros they had there.

I was so inspired that I decided to make some of my own and share them. So the next time you’re arguing with someone online, throw some of these there way. As a courtesy to tag surfers with slow connections I’ve decided to use the “more” tag to hide all but one of the pics. Just click the title of this post to see the whole list of them.

The original hand screaming image was by someone called Vidi from Deviant Art. I just added the text.

View the full post to see some more macros. Oh, and leave a comment here if you ever decide to use one of these.

St. John, the Beloved Desciple, has been Reincarnated… as a Comedian!

I have no clue what I was doing, save to say that I was browsing the internet, when a Google ad caught my eye. Now I’ve seen plenty of strange religious Google ads in my day, but this one stood out. It was a link claiming that John the apostle who rested his head on Christ during the last supper, the beloved desciple, author of several NT books, has been reincarnated… as a comedian… who performs in a Renaissance style swordfighting routine.

Is this one ofChrist’s apostles?

I couldn’t resist checking this one out. The site is called “John of Old, John of New.” The story it tells is really something. Could this actually be the reincarnation of one of Christ’s most prominent servants? In the site’s own words, John (yes ths is his real name) C. Davis tells his story:

Raised in Rehoboth Beach Delaware, John was always different from those around him, including his family. He excelled in areas of art – at age nineteen John was invited to a Renaissance Festival and was captivated by the experience, which led to a twenty-year career as a performer in his comedy / sword-fighting show, Hack and Slash. After the attacks of Sept.11, 2001, John has spent several months every year traveling abroad, entertaining the troops. To date he has perfomed in fifteen countries at over eighty bases.
In 1993 John began having some rather extraordinary experiences; each experience led him to the next until he met a psychic reader named Sharon Prince Wothke. Never having had a ‘reading’ before, John entered into it with some skepticism. Sharon’s face erupted into a smile and declared that he had “walked with Jesus” – the oddity was that John knew he had.

Since that initial reading a total of twelve other psychics have told John the same news – one even came up to him at a crowded convention, grabbed his arm and told him, “They’re telling me to tell you that you were John the Beloved.” After so many ‘psychics’ had told him of his past life John decided he needed more proof and sought out a past life regression therapist and had a regression. The experience was life-changing.

Not knowing much of the Bible, John recalled the day of meeting Jeshua (Jesus) for the first time. He experienced Jeshua’s love without fear and then was shown the seperateness we all experience. John also witnessed the whipping and crucifixion of Jeshua, later reading that John the Beloved was the only Apostle to actually witness these events.

But when John began having his own psychic experiences, witnessing healings, and seeing apparitions, he knew that he needed to tell his stories and share what he had learned.

That’s a really interesting story, but it raises a few questions. And if I could meet John, here’s what I’d ask:

1.) Somewhere in the epistles it is written “for God suffereth a man to live but once, and then there is judgement.” Giving you the benefit of the doubt and assuming that this verse only means that reincarnation is an exception to the general rule of things, why were you reincarnated as opposed to any other historical figure?
2.) Why were you reincarnated here, and now?
3.) Have any of the other apostles been reincarnated? If not, will they?
4.) Why did you have to rely on psychics to tell you of your origin? Why didn’t God reveal it to you?
5.) Why haven’t you become very famous? The apostles in the first century quickly developed vast followings and performed miracles publicly, why haven’t you been so active?
6.) The Church is horribly divided. Since you were so close to Jesus, and to God, why don’t you give us answers to the divisive issues? How close are we to the End? What about the age of the earth and the nature of creation? How should we handle homosexuality? Who should we vote for?

I could probably think of more, but you get the idea. I don’t know what to make of this guy, but the again he doesn’t give much info for an evaluation to be based on. I think there’s a good chance he actually believes himself to be John reborn, but is he?

No, I don’t think so. I think the questions I’ve asked above show my reasons for doubting him. He just doesn’t fit the description of what I’d expect to see in a modern day apostle. For one, the whole reincarnation thing doesn’t exactly fit with the Bible well. Maybe the Bible doesn’t technically rule out reincarnation completely, but I think it’s doubtful that it happens. And for one apostle to be reincarnated without the others being so as well, seems odd.

Then there’s the whole, “he’s not doing anything the other apostles did” thing. Where are his big, public miracles? Why doesn’t he have a following or even a church? His life just doesn’t seem to jive with the Biblical account of the 12.

The clincher though, is of course his biography. It completely goes against the grain of the Bible’s account of all the apostles and prophets. For every one of them they gained their authority by divine revelation. God gives them a vision, or a dream or a sign or something! This guy gets vague messages from some occult loonies and that’s how he learns of his position?! That doesn’t seem kosher! And when he’s told that he “walked with Jesus” that could’ve meant anything! Just think of how many lives Jesus touched. He could have been one of the 5,000 that was fed by the fish and bread. How does he know he’s John?

He knows because of the most accurate way of learning about your distant spiritual past… hypnotic regression! Was that ironic enough for ya? C’mon! This guy hasn’t even tried to make his case for apostlehood sound realistic!

And what’s with the Jeshua nonsense? Yeshua, I can deal with. I’ve heard that despite speaking Aramaic that Christ’s contemporaries gave names in Hebrew. But, Hebrew has no letter ‘J,’ so calling Jesus “Jeshua” thus doesn’t make any sense. I would expect greater accuracy from one of the man’s contemporaries.

I’ve never been one of those Harry Potter hating, occultophobic type Christians, but, uh, isn’t consulting fortune tellers and mystical stuff like that against the Bible? What makes John think that anything they say at all would be true, let alone hold insight into God’s plan for him?

How does he justify this discrepency between his Holy Book and his actual beliefs? Does he even know about it? If he doesn’t know even basic aspects of his Bible, can any religious message he gives be trusted?

I hope, for his own sake that this guy actually thinks he’s John reincarnated. But what do I think? Is he really an apostle reborn? I doubt it. His story just doesn’t fit with the Bible or with common sense expectations of what an apostle would be like.

About Me Comment Response on Theistic Evolution

A dude named Brian Purkiss kindly took the time to reply to my blog’s “About Me” page. He expressed confusion over my dual belief in both God and Evolution. His questions were worthy of a thoughtful reply, and unfortunately it took me a while to compose one. Too long to promptly reply to him. Mr. Purkiss himself may not see this, but his questions are common enough that I feel that I should answer them publicly with a major blog entry in addition to posting a response in the About Me page.

Anyway, as is typical, his comments are in blockquote. Mine in plain text.

That same word was used for Noah and the Ark, some others, and the amount of time that Jesus was in the tomb.

The NT was written in Greek, not Hebrew. Or were you referring to a later translation into that language?

First of all, it seems pretty clear to me that the time in Genesis was truly one literal day, and if not, how can you pick and choose?

It’s not about picking and choosing, it’s about following where evidence leads. And to say that Genesis is “clear” about its time frame being measured in literal days is rediculous.

Genesis 1
The universe is made in 6 days plus a 7th day of rest.

Genesis 2:4
These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens,

Do you see my point? Genesis itself, within a mere two chapter span gives three very contradictory descriptions of time. A day, a week and generations. Literally, these descriptions cannot be reconciled. Either the text is false, or one or more of the timespans given are figurative. There’s no getting around that.

I understand that this doesn’t eliminate YECism from being true, necessarily. After all, it is possible that the later two timespans were the figurative ones. But, the major foundations of YEC Genesis philosophies of interpretation is that the Bible should “interpret itself” and “the Bible says what it means and means what it says.” According to creationists, one should assume a text is literal unless the Bible explicitly states otherwise. 

However, the contradictory time spans given by Genesis shows that these philosophies are misguided. The self-conflicting nature of Genesis itself  is a clear indication that mere literalism is not eough to get at the truth of the passage. This situation demonstrates that we should use reason and yes, sometimes even extrabiblical sources of information in order to understand the Bible. The alternative is confusion when one encounters non-literal passages that are simply cannot be shoe-horned into the literalist perspective..

If in Genesis you believe that it was millions of years for one day, then how long was Noah on the ark and Jesus in the tomb?

Obviously, since there’s no evidence indicating anything other than normal days here, secular or otherwise, they probably were “literal” days. And I put literal in quotes because Jews in the first century had a different conception of days than modern Americans. I forgot the technical details of it, but I do remember that they were considerably shorter than our days. Haven’t you ever wondered how Jesus could have been crucified on Good Friday and Ressurected on Easter Sunday if he was in the tomb for three days?

And when you think about it, it would be strange for God to describe the creation in the universe in terms of days. Different peoples have different conceptions of times and different planets sure as heck have different day lengths! Why would God create the universe in terms of a measurement that is so meaningless in the cosmic scheme of things? Why would God create the universe in spells of creation that correspond to a planet’s rotational period when that planet hasn’t even been made yet? Why would God bother to take so long to create the universe anyway? Why not make it in seven seconds instead of seven days? Why did he make it in the order that he did?

The creationist scenario raises a lot of questions. However, theistic evolution has explanatory power. Since in this scenario God had chosen to use naturalistic method of creation the time span was determined by natural law. The order of life’s creation is also explained by the devleopment of complex organisms from simpler ones by means of evolution. Under the supernatural circumstances of YECism the waters are muddied, but theistic evolution offers clarity.

But putting that aside, it all comes down to “who are you going to trust?” Are you going to trust Science or God?

This is a big, false polarization. If the Bible is true its claims should match up with what is known about the natural world. When one interpretation of scripture contradicts scientific fact, it must be discarded in favor of one that is harmonious with what is known about the world.

 When creationists propose such stark dichotomies, they are not only wrong, but they’re engaging in spiritual and intellectual bullying. I’m not trying to point fingers at you in particular, I’ve heard this kind of things from creationists dozens of times, but for convenience I’ll use “you” to refer to all creationists that give that ultimatum. 

When you say these things, ultimately you are trying to manipulate me using my faith. Your goal is to try to scare me into thinking that if I don’t convert to your views, then I’ve abandoned the Bible and, by implication doomed to hell. Since you already know I’m a believer, I should be easy to bully into accepting your views, right? No. I’m not going to be bullied or manipulated, especially not because of religious faith.

*shrugs*
Those are just some thoughts of mine – take ‘em or leave ‘em.

I’m afraid that I’m going to have to leave them.

How I got into RPG Maker: Prologue, Part 1 (My Earliest Desires to Make Games)

It seems like forever ago when I first got into RPG Maker. Reminiscing here is going to be fun for me. I suppose the story really starts before I even knew what an RPG was.

In fifth grade I had changed elementary schools. At the time I was mostly into paleontology and science, but I was also something of a gamer. Sonic the Hedgehog games were definitely my favorites. At my new school I met this kid named Jim Wnuk.

He was also a Sonic fanboy and we hit it off pretty quick. It seemed like we no sooner met each other than we were creating our own Sonic characters to populate our own fan interpretation of the Sonic universe. It wasn’t long before Jim told me that he was designing “Sonic IV” and was going to send it to Sega to see if they liked the idea enough to make it into a game.

He seemed pretty confidant that they would accept his proposition. That idea absolutely fascinated me. I was young and naive and took him at his word that you could just plan videogames and send them to companies and there was a good chance that they would actually get made.

Needless to say, “Sonic IV” never got off the ground, but just the exposure to the idea of a fan designed video game changed me forever. Since Jim was planning Sonic IV, I though I’d start making the sequel. And so, “Sonic V” was born. Okay, so it was really more of a still-birth than a happy healthy baby, but whatever. I spent my busrides drawing maps of levels and atrocious looking images of those robot vehicles Robotnik uses during bossfights. I’m not sure how long I worked on this, but I don’t think I planned any farther than the second level. My “project” died quickly.

After Sonic V bit the dust, my desire to design games still thrived. I had two major projects that I worked on. One was a platformer based off of 101 Dalmations, the other was also a platformer, although this one was a Tamagatchi game.

It has to be said that these projects were a lot better than my attempt at making a Sonic game. I managed to get about 10 levels into the Dalmations game, and I’m not sure how far I got into the Tamagatchi one. I was getting better, and my creative desire was not diminished.

However, at this point in my life, both as a player and a “developer” I had restricted myslef almost entirely to the platformer genre. I had yet to be exposed to the RPG, but that would change very quickly…

A Creationist Pukes out a Few Verses of Scripture, and My Response

Tiktaalik was an animal from the Devonian period that was discovered a while back. It exhibited many characteristics of both lobe-finned fish and primitive amphibians, not only that but it was discovered from strata dating back to the time where other fish-amphibian transitional organisms have been found. For those reasons scientists considered it to be a true transitional fossil and its discovery made headlines.

Naturally AiG gave their take on it in the typical fashion: taking this fossil with its dubious and intermediate anatomy and trying to pigeonhole it on one side or the other of the evolutionary boundry it straddles. In this case that happened to be the fish-amphibian boundry. They were horribly unsuccessful at this endeavor, which is also fairly typical of their classification attempts.

Anyway, the blogmaster of The Lancelet had posted a critical response to AiG’s crap. In the comments a rather irate creationist, unable to even find one scientific flaw in the blog entry resorted to threats of damnation in order to scare people into agreeing with him.

Seeing creationists abuse scripture makes me so mad that I was unable to keep from writing a response to his comment.

 What the poster, “In His Name” said is in block quotes. My responses are in plain formatting.

In His Name Says:
So where does this leave the philosophers, the scholars, and the world’s brilliant debaters? God has made them all look foolish and has shown their wisdom to be useless nonsense.
I Corinthians 1:20 (NLT)

Abyssal Says:
Where does this leave the “scholars” and “brilliant debaters” at AiG and such places?

In His Name Says:
Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.
Romans 1:22 (NIV)

Abyssal Says:
It’s the Young Earthers to claim to know the entirety of Earth’s early history. Meanwhile real scientists are busy looking for real answers without claiming that their beliefs are “divinely inspired” truth. When scientists disagree they debate evidences. When Young Earthers disagree with other Christians they label them as “compromisers” and play God by making threats against their own fellow believers’ eternal souls. Now which group really sounds like what that Scripture is talking about?

In His Name Says:
It’s your soul, whether you believe you have one or not. You can scoff and call Christians morons who believe in fairy tales. It doesn’t change reality: that you’re headed straight to hell. Laugh it up right now, but I pray that you find the truth before you must stand before a perfect and holy God, guilty, and thus be damned forever.

Abyssal Says:
Wow. Look at the well-reasoned and scientific argument you’ve presented! Oh well, if you can’t convince someone of your views with facts you might as well try to scare them into taking your side. So much for creation “science.”

And what was it Jesus said about “judge not, lest ye shall be judged?” I guess you never made it all the way to Matthew given your preoccupation with Genesis 1.

*sigh* Not all Christians are stupid. Please ignore this guy.

I wasn’t the first one to get to reply to this guy, though. An anonymous poster replied to In His Name’s random and irrelevent scripture with a lovely bit of sarcasm:

Thanks for that In His Name.

I had found this article to be a convincing demonstrations that Tiktaalik shares characteristics of fish and amphibians, and thus provides huge support to evolutionary theory. Now that I have carefully read your reply, I see how wrong that all is. It’s open-minded guys with an in-depth understanding of the issues like you who are steadily undermining the ignorant, biased claims of evilutionists.

P.S. I would like to apologize for implying that In His Name was stupid.

Random Soulstorm Legacy Screenshots (Since I’m on an RPG Maker Kick)

Yeah, since I’ve spent all this time talking about my RPG Maker game, I figured I’d give some screenshots so you at least have an idea of what it would look like in-game. These are all old, but I’m pretty sure they;re representative of the game’s quality before it went on forced hiatus. Enjoy. Comments and Criticism welcome.

Choler and Varsden’s tent in the Nylae Floodplains

View the full post to see more screenshots!

Random Stupid RPG Maker Related Images

Yeah, I’ve been known to waste time by making stuff like the following.

I used this image as a way of greeting new members at several RPG Maker forums I have been a member of. The little dude flying around their is an RPG Maker sprite of yours truly. I’ve been using it as my internet representative for quite some time now.

Yeah, I made an animated Soulstorm Legacy screenshot in the stylings of the “O rly” owls. You will never get the five seconds back that you spent looking at this post. Ever.

Soulstorm Legacy Logo Designed (Graphics Artist Wanted to Remake it)

You may or may not know that I’ve been messing around with RPG Maker for years. Eventually I had to stop (I have a big blog entry waiting to tell that story), but I really want to get back into it. Since most of my RPG Maker stuff is on a headcrashed harddrive in need of severe data recovery, I’ve finally dedicated myself to doing one of the few things I actually can: designing the Soulstorm logo.

It should be noted that variants of this logo will be used throughout the entire series (I’ve always intended Soulstorm Legacy to be part of a trilogy), but this is specifically the Soulstorm Legacy logo. I came up with this concept many months ago, but this is the first time I actually tried to make these ideas into a visible form, apart from doodles in the margins of school notebooks.

And there it is. I really like the concepts I used. The dragons that are eating their own tails are called Ouroboroses, although snakes are often used in the place of dragons. The Ouroboros is a nearly universal symbol of infinity.

Despite this, many early Christians prized the symbol as being representative of the finite nature of physical reality and the self-destructive nature of living after the flesh. I decided to use the Ouroboros based more on the pagan use, that of representing the idea of infinity. However, the Christian use holds a strong appeal for me as well.

A big theme throughout the Soulstorm Trilogy is the idea that evil tends to bring about its own destruction. So I guess I’ll have to say that one Ouroboros represents infinity while the other represents the simultaneous transience of earthly existence. Also notice the shape the two Ouroboroses make. Looks a bit like an infinity symbol more familiar to most of us, doesn’t it? ∞

I also went with the whole, Yin and Yang thing. One dragon’s white, the other black. Their heads are in opposite positions.

I really like the concepts I used (although feedback is welcome), but I don’t really like the way the dragons themselves turned out. I’m not a great artist, especially with computers, so I would really like it if someone could make me a prettier version.

I’ve tried requesting at Deviant Art, but got no response, so I figured I might as well try here. I’d like it if the actual ideas behind the dragons stayed the same, though. Any takers?

P.S. It was months before I ended up seeing the similarities between the Soulstorm Logo and the two famous Yu-Gi-Oh dragons. I’m referring to Red-Eyes Black dragon and Blue-Eyes White Dragon, for those of you who are either old or not nerdy.

Quick Thoughts #1

April 16, 2007

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My dearest sympathies and most heartfelt prayers go out to the students and family who lost friends and loved ones to this most horrible of tragedies. Apart from that, I don’t really know what to say.

P.S. What do you wanna bet that AiG will blame this on the teeaching of evolution in public schools if they haven’t already? (They didn’t have a post on it a few hours ago when I checked.)

P.S.S. They did.

April 4, 2007

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Today my house was vandalized. My drain pipe was ripped from the house, because apparently people around these parts are so desperate to avoid getting a real job that they’ll swipe any stray bit of metal they can find to sell for scrap. It’s bad enough that we have to deal with all the fucking power outage from idiots stealing copper wire from the electric company (and frequently getting killed in the process) but now they’re vandalizing private homes. God I hate West Virginia.