Embassy, by Sam Drake

Since I finished my undergraduate program here recently, I wanted to relaunch this blog. I am a man of sundry and divers interests, so choosing what to start with is a difficult matter. Let's start with a bit of a technical post, to get the ball rolling.

Nazareth

I do most of my blogging from Nazareth, a Dell Latitude D830 mobile workstation. My dad used to use this machine in his business, so it was just laying around before I put it to use. I certainly own more powerful or more compact computers, but I write on Nazareth for a couple reasons. One is the fantastic keyboard, which matters for quite a bit. The other reason is because of the somatic response I've built with it.

There is an entire sector of the tech market dedicated to “distraction free computing.” I have skeptical feelings towards this corner of the market that I will likely share at a later date. However, the consumer demand for something that is not an “everything box,” a slippery germ brick that can literally do everything, is easy to understand. Tools have functions, and approaching the tool is a somatic experience. When you walk up to something like a wood lathe or a loom or a computer in a cubicle at an accounting firm, the body and mind lights up with connections to all the previous times you did the thing. To use a computing metaphor, your brain begins to “load” the wood lathe-associated programs “in to memory.” This is a powerful tool for productivity, and even the simple joy of doing, that disembodied modernity has made itself blind to.

So, I use this machine to write because I've built a somatic relationship between this machine and writing. I chose to build that somatic response with this particular machine because it is limited in important ways and quite capable in others.

I completely maxed out this machine with a first generation Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of ram, which does make for a good experience running a minimal Linux distribution like Debian with XFCE or CrunchBang++, but only if you don't care about battery life. Running the processor wide open like that makes it difficult to leave the desk, which is the whole point of a notebook computer. Power efficiency was just in a different paradigm at the time this machine was made, so if I wanted a useful amount of battery life from it, I was going to need an era appropriate operating system.

Operating Systems

This blog post was nearly called “Blogging in OpenSUSE 11.” Using an operating system that is not actively being developed is not a big problem if you're not connected to the internet, though there are some limitations with hardware this old. You generally only get the software that's on the disk. There's usually a lot of good software on that disk, but finding compatible software for your twenty year old linux distribution on the internet will likely be more trouble than it's worth. Your network connectivity is very limited, even on your home network. Basically all modern hardware assumes that your duogenarian computer and OS combo is nothing more than a gigantic security risk, and will insist you upgrade something before talking to you.

I briefly tried a workflow of composing in OpenOffice (remember OpenOffice?) and using a USB flash drive to bring my work over and publish it from another computer, but this was a giant faff and zero fun at all. I can't publish straight from Windows XP or some kind of Linux c. 2005, so that left those options off my list. I need an operating system that's like something from the Y2K era but still receives security updates, device drivers, etc.

After trying several options, I decided to give Haiku a go. I've run it on this machine before, and it runs very well. It's a featherweight operating system in a lot of ways, which keeps power consumption down. It has the Nextcloud desktop client, which I require. The built in web browser, WebPositive, is completely up to the task of pulling up write.as and posting the blog there. There's actually several choices for a nice markdown editor, with CuteMarkEd serving admirably for this post. Capable, yet limited.

Alternatives

I reserve the right to change my mind in a couple days. As a lowly humanities major with sundry and divers interests, I'm limited in my ability to compile my own software and I require the package maintainers for all the resources that enable the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed. It's very difficult to get in to my Bitwarden vault from this machine, and the operating system seems to think my battery is either full or nearly dead, with nothing in between. Trackpad support is adequate, but touchy.

If I were to move to a different operating system, it would likely have to be a Linux distribution because Windows is Gross. In that case, we'd probably be looking at CrunchBang++ or AntiX, depending on my fancy. I might even try to ditch the Desktop Environment entirely, run Fedora Sway or i3wm. That might even make another good blog post...

In Conclusion

Are you ever tempted to end every blog post with, like, a statement about the human experience? It must be a product of writing so much for the Church, in my case. You should go cobble together some ill-advised string of computing gadgets to make something happen. Compose your screenplay on an Apple IIe, and use a serial wifi modem to send it to the world via telnet! Diagram your next big idea on a Palm Pilot and sync it to whatever version of Red Hat they were on in 2005. Sky's the limit, kid. New stuff is a scam.

This is a devotional that I gave at my job today. Since I'd already written it up, I figured I'd post it on here. Let me know what you think!

Acts 19:11-20, 1 Sam 28:3-19, John 6:60-69

The Bible is full of magic. I was raised, like a lot of you, in a modern age where we believed that magic didn’t exist. Really, nothing supernatural existed at all, except God. Maybe Angels, and probably Demons, but they were somewhere else. Magic potions and spells and ghosts weren’t real, anyone who said they could manipulate them was a liar. That’s not the world that the Bible describes. [Read Acts 19] We may put it all up to superstitious hokum, but the people of the past were not more or less magical than we are. The definition of Magic is that our relationship with the world can be described as a deal or a bargain, “If I do this, they must do that,” whoever they and that is. The ancients carried around little scrolls of magic to protect themselves, we carry around talismans, objects we believe will keep us safe or keep us from being noticed. My sister owns a gun, can’t use it. She feels safe knowing she owns it and it’s in the house. “If I keep a gun in the house, it will keep me safe.” That’s magical thinking. Magic potions and powders exist in our world, certainly. Maybe you all know about a potion that will help you forget, make you forget your anxieties and the shame you feel, make you feel warm and free you from your inhibitions, as long as you keep drinking it. Some people call it “Whiskey.” Maybe you know of a magic powder that makes you feel invincible, happy, like life’s worries and burdens can’t hold you down… until it wears off. People call that one “Cocaine.” Maybe you know a ritual, a place you can go to forget how lonely you are, feel desired and desirable, feel like the big man, as long as you have enough one dollar bills to keep the performers’ attention. A strip club is not so different from a pagan temple to Aphrodite, if we have eyes to see. Many times, we are tempted to magic when God says no. We ask God to take our burdens, and He doesn’t do it the way we want, so we go to the magic potion shop and buy ourselves an immediate solution. We ask God for a good partner, someone to take care of us and that we can take care of, but we get impatient, we decide that we know how to fix this. King Saul felt the same way, towards the end of his reign [in 1 Samuel.] See the problem with magic is not that it deceives us in to wasting our money. That’s a con. We all know cons when they’re happening to someone else, and we’d (hopefully) never go back to a con man when they’ve tricked us once. The liquor store always has customers though. The problem with magic isn’t that it doesn’t work, it’s that it does. At least, for a while. “Sin is pleasurable for a season,” and the hitch with magic is that it cannot last, and it leaves death in it’s wake. Jesus gives Life. Repeat it with me, “Jesus offers Life!” Sometimes we don’t understand how the Jesus way offers life. If we find God’s way confusing, that puts us in good company! [Read John] Notice that Peter, here, doesn’t say “I understand what you mean, Jesus. These other bozos may not, but I do!” He just says “Where else should we go? You alone have the words of life.” Trusting in Jesus is a learned activity. A lot of times, at the beginning, we think that we should follow Jesus because His magic is the best. That’s probably what a lot of Ephesians thought! Jesus offers freedom from magic, from having things our way. This can take a lot of getting used to. Whiskey will make you forget your worries, until it wears off. First it will take your freedom, making you a slave to it. Then it will take your mind, your ability to decide. Eventually, it will take your life. Cocaine, Lust, Meth, huffing tire fire fumes, whatever it is, it gives only death. We know this, instinctively. We are all told it by the Holy Spirit, living and active in this world. He testifies in our hearts that these things want our destruction. Jesus gives Life! Repeat! Jesus offers freedom, and life, outside our expectations. We may reach for cocaine to give us the energy to ignore our burdens, but Jesus tells us to cast our burdens on Him. We run from our past, Jesus redeems the past and future. We resent our loneliness, Jesus adopts us and makes us a member of His family. He does it so much better than we could imagine. He wants to do better for us than we could think to do for ourselves. Magic not only gives us death, it robs us of that greater thing that Jesus wants to do for us. Whether or not they had the right motivation, the people in Ephesus had the right idea. The first step to saying no to magic is to get it out of our lives, and to accept that good thing that God has for us. Maybe you’ve never said yes to God, maybe you need to say yes to God again today. This altar is open, and these people [raise hands] would love to pray with you later if you’re feeling shy.

Chapter 1 is here

“For the humble person, dependence on others is not an embarrassment but a potential source of mutual benefit. Humility, in short, makes us teachable.” Pg 33

This chapter is longer than some of the others, and offers a treatment on humility generally. Starting with the portrayal of Mary, Mother of God in art and tradition, the authors, they connect Mary’s humility with her depiction as “bookish,” either reading or writing in a book. Her humility is connected to her openness to the Word of God. This Painting by John Collier was quite interesting to me. The authors are careful to point out that humility as a virtue is more accurately the absence of the vice, pride.

Defining Humility

“Checking pride’s vanity, humility attunes us to God’s beckoning. It is a path to freedom” pg 38

The Christian virtue of Humility is a negative virtue, it’s the absence of pride or arrogance. The authors draw special attention to Christian thinkers that do not connect humility with “thinking you are lower than a worm,” humility is thinking of yourself accurately. Normally the human inclination is to think too highly of ourselves, so the humble man thinks lower of himself than others, but the core of humility is accuracy and others-centeredness. Humanity frees us from self regard.

Humble Minds

“Humility properly grounds us” Pg 39

The authors dig in a little bit more on the etymology of this word humility and the Greek word used in the New Testament writings. They will point out that the Greek is a compound word that translates to low-mind or lowliness of mind. They draw the comparison to the Latin word transliterated as humility, humilitas has the word humus for a root, “dirt” or “earth”. Biblical humility is not debasing the human nature, but seeing it rightly.

Humility as Social Practice

“In such a context, everyone should be striving to practice 'lowliness of mind,' with the end of growing in to the traits that Paul enumerates at the start of the passage: love, compassion, sympathy, joy, and the sharing of the Spirit.” pgs 41-42

The authors begin their turn in this chapter towards the subject of the book, the establishment and care of communities of faithful writers. Here they point out that the humility of the individual members of the community makes possible the mutual learning of the entire community. Humility is the beginning of a teachable heart, and the humble listener will listen and learn from any source. In effect, there are no wasted opportunities for teaching and learning. This is the community we are freed in to when we accept Christ's offer of freedom from pride.

Jerome as Humble Writer

“Perhaps humility is even more necessary to the scholar who has 'attained learning,' since as we 'master' a subject the temptation only grows to hold our noses up high. Prideful scholars are...not only insufferable, they're bad scholars, since pride narrows their pool of possible teachers.” pg 43

At the end of this chapter, the authors entreat the reader that humility is a continuous virtue to pursue in our writing, and that the best teachers of this are the scripture and the tradition. The authors describe, here and elsewhere, their inspiration by visual art into deeper meditations of scriptural virtue. Whatever the medium, the saints stand ready to speak, and it falls to us to listen.

Personal Reflection

I find the careful attention to the precise definition of humility is refreshing and appropriate for one of the legs of their argument in this book. The image of the humble man as someone open and available to anywhere the Spirit may speak from is one I resonate with and have sought to emulate in the course of my life. I'm eager to get in to the next chapter, which has more of a focus on the communal life of the group of writers.

Read the first part of this series Here

The first section of this book focuses on Humble Listening, the first of the author's three “threshold concepts” for charitable writing. In the first chapter, the authors are inviting us to follow Aquinas in purposefully following Christ in to the study, towards being His students first.

“Aquinas characterizes himself as one in need of instruction, supervision, all kinds of support. In a word, the great scholar understands himself as God's Student. The writer's labor must be, on this account, thoroughly imbued with listening.” Pg 26

Companions in the Study

“Writing is frequently understood as a task we go off and do alone. Aquinas' prayer reminds us that for Christians, however, writing need not — indeed, should not — be a solo act.” Pg 27

Throughout the Christian tradition, when we consider the Doctors of the Church, we often think of them alone in the study, seeking the solitude to do great thinky thoughts and be alone with their greatness. The authors challenge this perception with a couple case studies. St Jerome is depicted in art in his translation of the Latin Vulgate alternatively, in his study alone or, more realistically, working in a room full of the other brothers in the monastic order that he belonged to. In particular the depiction of Nicolas Frances of St Jerome, not just working in community with his contemporaries, but also with the monastic order established in his honor. Some artists depict the scholar with several “no trespassing” signs, but Frances says “You are invited in this work.”

Writing is a Social Activity

“Writing is in fact a dependent activity. Looked at in the right light, our writing reveals our embeddedness in rich webs of human relationships.” Pg 32

The authors wrap up the chapter by reinforcing that in many many different ways, writing is a social activity. At the most basic level, the ideas and phrases we draw on are the product of our immersion in the cultures we were raised in and the works we've read. The notebook or legal pad or computer we write on was created by someone else (likely several someones!). We can attempt to separate ourselves from everyone else and create “sui generis”, springing fully formed from the mind, but such an ideal is not actually possible. For the Christian, this is good news, it means that we can lean in to the social-communal nature that the rest of the faith takes on with our writing.

My Conclusions

• This reinforces the need and the desirability of communal essay writing to me. Something like an essays seminar where peers will pass papers back and forth. I'm working on a proposal for this semester for my program.
• The incorporation of other communal spiritual disciplines with the writing is also interesting to me. I've often seen journaling incorporated with prayer or contemplation, as a reflective exercise, but I've never heard of a writing group beginning with a call to prayer, or a writing seminar fasting together over a week to try and get a new perspective on a draft. Interesting possibilities.

Chapter 2 is here

I had a class this summer that required me to read a whole bunch of the Sermons of John Wesley and interact critically of them. My professor had two motivations. The first was to make another Wesleyan in the program, and in this goal she was more or less successful. Her second goal was to encourage me to find a way to digest these texts that not only fit the shape of my brain, but also allowed me to develop a body of work that I could reference throughout my studies. To that end, the requirement that I “interact critically with the texts” was purposefully open ended.

Over the course I settled in to a format of writing a short, reflexive essay on the given section of reading each time, eventually becoming a set of summaries for me inside of my Obsidian database, written in my own language, for myself as an audience. I'm looking forward to referencing it throughout my time studying the things of God.

In that vein, and in the desire to keep the quill sharp during these couple of weeks between the summer term and the fall semester, I've assigned myself some reading, “Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words” by Richard Hughes Gibson and James Edward Beitler III. I've also given myself the assignment of writing for a mass audience, rather than myself, as a way to, hopefully, grow my writing a bit more. We will see whether that has the intended purpose.

This post will be on the overall book and the introduction to the book. Think of it as a book report, chapter by chapter.

Overview

“Charitable Writing” is written by Composition or Writing professors that are also people of Christian faith, and the audience of the book is others people of Christian faith as well. The title of the book is taken from the traditional translation of the Greek “agape” into the Latin “caritas,” transliterated “charity.” Most modern translators of the word agape choose the English word “love.” “Charitable Writing” can therefore be thought of as “Writing Full of Love.” The goal of the book is to reposition the activity of writing as it's own spiritual discipline, like fasting and prayer, and to introduce three “threshold concepts” to the science of writing. Threshold concepts are a term of art in their field, described by Jan H. F. Meyer and Ray Land as ideas one must learn to take part in academic disciplines. This is described more in the Introductory chapter.

Ch 0 – Introduction

Included in the introduction is an opening meditation on the San Luca Altarpiece by Andrea Mantegna. It takes the form of a polyptych, a collection of portraits arranged in a grid with some significance on the persons chosen, their position and relative size, etc. The author points out that, rightly, Christ is at the top and in the center, but right beneath Christ is a large, central portrait depicting St Luke hard at work writing the gospel which bears his name. The depiction is anachronistic, which the author (rightly, I think) points out for the purpose of dismissing; Luke is writing at a codex, a book form which wasn't invented yet. It's also likely Luke employed a scribe, rather than writing it himself. However, examining the other saints depicted shows them all either holding, reading, or writing books. The Altarpiece depicts the saintly writers that were important to the monks that the polyptych was originally commissioned for. The authors encourage the reader to imagine the polyptych they might construct for themselves, and then to imagine that they occupy one of the spaces, contributing to the great tradition and canon of the Christian faith.

The introductory chapter fleshes out the purpose of the book quite well, I think, and I will use their headings to organize this section.

What is “Charitable Writing”?

“In brief, 'charitable writing' is writing that embodies the distinctive Christian understanding of Love, which used to go by the name 'charity' in English.” Pg 10

The Authors intend to use the entire book to flesh out and complicate this definition, but I will say that I think they're really trying to name and define a spiritual discipline, using the word “charitable” here to distinguish the disciplinary form from the secular practice of “writing.” This distinction can be made among all the Christian spiritual disciplines. Fasting without prayer and contemplation is a crash diet. Prayer without attention to God is mindfulness meditation. Generosity without attendant care and attention to our dependence on God in all things is a self-serving “feel good” activity. “Charitable Writing,” therefore, is writing done in the light and life of God. The rest of the book lines out what that means.

Spiritual Threshold Concepts

“Educational theorists Jan HF Meyer and Ray Land coined the term 'threshold concepts' to describe the ideas that one must learn to take part in academic disciplines, ... For example, a threshold concept from the discipline of mathematics is the notion of complex numbers — that is, numbers that include imaginary elements.” Pg 11

Being teachers themselves, the authors have imported some important jargon to describe the sort of thing that I might have heard referenced as a key learning metric or a “big idea” from a part of learning. The threshold concept is something of a gate and a crossing over point. Imagine a mystery novel, once you learn who the killer is, the rest of the information of the story realigns and finds new meanings, perhaps even the only cohesive meaning. Learning the derivative in Calculus was a major threshold moment for me, and I never made it past my second semester. It reframed and recontextualized everything I did in Algebra. The authors give several examples from their discipline, writing studies:

• Writing is a social and rhetorical activity.
• Writing involves making ethical choices
• Writing speaks to situations through recognizable forms.

The work cited by Adler-Kassner and Wardle, “Naming what we Know,” includes thirty-seven such concepts! The authors wish to use this idea in a cross-disciplinary way to tie two disciplines to each other; in fact the “threshold” described by these threshold concepts is the idea that these two disciplines are intimately connected for the believer. To extend my metaphor, these concepts “stitch” these disciplines together. They are that charitable writers listen humbly, argue lovingly, and keep the time of writing hopefully. Each of these three are enumerated in large sections of the book.

Writing into Virtue

In this section the authors spend quite a bit of time enumerating a concept that is near and dear to my specific discipline (Spiritual Formation), that spiritual practices must be practiced over and over, again and again, for the disciple to become disciplined. This is where, I think, it became clear to me that the authors are arguing for charitable writing as a distinct spiritual discipline, subject to the same logic and practices that the other disciplines are. If we are to become disciplined in our writing, if our writing is to become charitable, if our “agape” will fill our writing, then we must get started now. We must begin to write with charity, we must begin to practice the discipline, we must get to work.

I will confess that it was at this moment in the book that I decided that I needed to continue my practice of writing about what I had read from the summer. I understand my calling at this time to be the calling of a writer, someone who ingests, digests, and creates new texts for the benefit of the Kingdom of God. I don't know that I ever formally entered in to my apprenticeship as a writer, being raised in a wordy household it's likely I came by it honestly. However it happened, an apprentice I am, and whether the apprentice is a carpenter, a mason, a sewist, leather crafter or motorcycle mechanic, the apprentice learns, the apprentice does, the apprentice fails, the apprentice tries again. Over and over. Day after day.

How to Use this Book

The authors here detail that they intend this book to be the first word, not the last. I'm excited for the elucidation of a Christian spiritual discipline that was before unknown to me, and the opportunity to learn. The authors command, “Talk back to this book,” a command which I did not require but will embrace regardless.

A Benediction

At the end of the introduction, the authors remark on the nature of thresholds, and how academics are not the only ones who view and mark them. In my mind these thresholds feel like lights at the end of the tunnel, opportunities to slough off claustrophobic constraints and enter in to a brand new, wide open frontier. I never get tired of that feeling, the openness that characterizes the world in that moment. The authors muse on the fact that a book is, itself, a physical space and the introduction is it's own threshold, inviting the reader in. They end the introduction with a description of the practice of marking a house's threshold or entry with “+ C + M + B +” during epiphany, the season following Christmas. “They stand for the words of the Latin prayer 'Christus mansionem benedicat,' meaning 'May Christ bless this house.' By marking our threshold with this sign, we offer that prayer on your behalf.

Come in, reader. May Christ be your companion here.”

Conclusion

Hopefully the dual format of my personal reading notes also being a blog post is not confusing. Consider it a form of “working in public” more than a form deliberately composed for your consumption. I hope to have a chapter a day on this book, and I'm excited to read it with you tomorrow.

Read the next part Here

So, I have a problem.

I don't know that it's a problem problem. It's a problem for me. I love stuff. In my shriveled little heart, I'm a magpie, grabbing any shiny thing I can. Consumer electronics in particular.

I've never made enough money to really indulge this part of me, which is probably a blessing from the Lord. What I've made, I've tried to be strategic with, with some success., but we're entering a season of negative income. I'm going back to school, and I'll be making half of what I used to. We weren't living that large to begin with.

The program I'm enrolled in, the Christian Spiritual Formation program at Friends University, is highly influenced by a couple past faculty, who have since passed to be with the Lord. Dallas Willard, who wrote Renovation of the Heart (and many others) and Richard Foster, who wrote Celebration of Discipline (and many others). Richard Foster in particular has been one of my favorite authors to read, long before I thought about going back to school. Being able to dig in at this program in my own town is a big treat.

Foster and Willard were big in to emphasizing the point that the human spiritual experience requires a congruity or cooperation between the body, mind and spirit. A Human is a whole person, and the Greek move of breaking these parts of the person apart to understand them better separately misses the necessary context. You can't feed the mind effectively by ignoring the body, you can't serve the body while ignoring the spirit. Even if the only thing you care about is the Spiritual development of your self or your charges (which, to be clear, is still misguided), you will be required to develop the mind and the body to continue to develop the spirit, lest it be weighed down by it's atrophied partners in this life. They loved to develop the spirit, but they spent a lot of time emphasizing the spiritual disciplines to an American Christianity that was/is deficient in it's respect for these things. We don't do a good job teaching our new people (brand new people or new-to-us people) the light and life of the disciplines.

One can and indeed should make a lifelong study of the disciplines, and my treatment here cannot be exhaustive. This is a blog post, not a term paper, and I have other things I want to do with my day. I did want to reflect, though, on one discipline in particular, the discipline of Simplicity.

“Simplicity is an inward reality that results in an outward lifestyle. Both are necessary.” Simplicity is another way to talk about singleness of focus and purpose, directing the mind and heart to the with-God-life. We fight against distractions and competing lords of our life. We say with our actions and our hearts that conformity to Christ is the thing we want to do, and this has meaningful social and economic consequences!

For me, a season of focusing on simplicity most often confronts and conflicts with the magpie living in my heart. It's reflected in my actions as a season of Frugality or Thrift. This is different than a lot of the ways the Western Protestant tradition has taught Thrift, focusing on gluttony or greed as moral defects and Thrift as an ascetic balm against such profligacy. The disciplines are also grace, and the point isn't to deprive and lead a less-life. The point is to follow the path of life, away from death, and for me Simplicity, Frugality, Thrift is the way I say with my body and my mind what my spirit agrees with Christ in: “The Lord is Generous, and I have more than enough.”

Thrift says “The Lord has been generous with my furniture, I have more than enough.” “I have more than enough video games.” “I have more than enough books.” When you're a kid and your parents are trying to teach you contentedment, it feels like a deprivation, a “no”, a clever and roundabout way of keeping you from having the things you want. Such is the nature of children! I think having hobbies is a great thing, and a gift of God. Some people might balk at the idea that a video game involving violence or a book that has real life wizards in it could be called a gift of God, but I have no qualms. I give thanks to God for these things, and recognize their importance in keeping me sane in this world. Having hobbies is good, but hobbies are often a way for me to neglect simplicity, to acquire and gather and keep in the hope of filling the gap in my life. Simplicity is supposed to be the grace from God that frees us from this striving in impossibility.

So, I made a goal. I'm not buying any more games until I finish all the ones I have, and I'm not buying any more narrative books until I read all the ones I have. In pursuit of this goal, I have made a list. I don't know how write.as will render the obsidian markdown for a checklist but I'll just copy/paste the whole thing here:

Gameboy Advance – [ ] Pokémon Emerald – [ ] Pokémon FireRed – [ ] Golden Sun – [ ] Golden Sun, The Lost Age – [ ] Super Mario World: Super Mario Advance 2 – [ ] Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga – [ ] Sonic Advance 2 – [ ] ChuChu Rocket – [ ] Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town Gameboy Color – [ ] Wario Land 3 – [ ] Pokémon Puzzle Challenge – [ ] The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages – [ ] The Legend of Zelda: Links Awakening DX Gameboy – [ ] Super Mario Land – [ ] Pokémon Blue – [ ] Pokémon Pinball Playstation – [ ] Final Fantasy VIII – [ ] Final Fantasy IX PlayStation 2 – [ ] Kingdom Hearts – [ ] Kingdom Hearts II – [ ] Jak and Daxter – [ ] Jak II – [ ] Jak 3 – [ ] Jak X Combat Racing – [ ] Psychonauts – [ ] Ico – [ ] Star Wars Battlefront – [ ] Dark Cloud 2 PlayStation 4 – [ ] Uncharted 4 – [ ] Battlefield 4 – [ ] Battlefield 1 – [ ] Monster Hunter World – [ ] Bloodborne – [ ] Dark Souls III PC – [ ] Apico – [ ] Armored Core VI – [ ] Baldurs Gate 3 – [ ] The Banner Saga – [ ] Cassette Beasts – [ ] Garden Story – [ ] One Step from Eden – [ ] Return of the Obra Dinn – [ ] Cyberpunk 2077 (Hard) – [ ] 9 Years of Shadows – [ ] Alba: A Wildlife Adventure – [ ] Assemble with Care – [ ] Axiom Verge – [ ] Axiom Verge 2 – [ ] Caves of Qud – [ ] Death’s Gambit: Afterlife – [ ] Dust: An Elysian Tale – [ ] Ghost Song – [ ] Half Life 2 – [ ] A Hat in Time – [ ] Jet Set Radio – [ ] Jotun – [ ] Just Cause 2 – [ ] Kao the Kangaroo – [ ] The Knight Witch – [ ] Quake II – [ ] Saints Row: The Third – [ ] Saints Row IV – [ ] Slime Rancher – [ ] The Spirit and the Mouse – [ ] Sundered – [ ] Super Lucky’s Tale – [ ] New Super Lucky’s Tale – [ ] Super Meat Boy – [ ] Torchlight 2 – [ ] Trine 2 – [ ] Tropico 4 – [ ] Void Bastards – [ ] VVVVVV – [ ] Witchy Life Story

TRULY THE LORD HAS BEEN GENEROUS! That's way more than I thought I had at the beginning of the list.

For those of you interested in the rules I've set for myself, the big one is that when I mean I need to finish all these games, I mean I need to play them until I'm finished with them, i.e. I've decided I've extracted all the fun I can with them. I don't force myself to finish books, and I think there's a got to be a least a couple games in there that are duds or dodos and that's why I haven't finished them. I'm also reasonably sure, however, that I got distracted by the abundance of games I have before finishing a lot of these. So we're going to take another stab.

The other rule I have is that this is not a race. If I was a streamer or making youtube content, this would very much lend itself to “HOW QUICKLY CAN I FINISH ALL MY GAMES” type video. I have a small break from school but not a big one, and I'll eventually have to go back to using games to relax for a little bit at the end of the night.

I might just find that I already have all the games I'll ever need. Who knows?

Follow me on Polymaths Social for up to date announcements on when I finish each game.

This is a companion piece to my previous post, “On Obsolete Hardware.”

Right now I'm writing this blog post on the most recently manufactured piece of computer hardware in my household, a Dell XPS 13 made in, I think, 2020. It was originally my wife's computer for school, during a time where she was going to be lugging it back and forth to class and to internship sites, and portability was king. I used a Dell XPS 15, which I bought on Linus Sebastian's recommendation back in 2016 the last time I went to school. In the time between when my wife graduated and now, our needs and wants have shifted, so she now uses my XPS 15, with it's larger screen and better onboard IO, and I use her XPS 13, with it's lighter weight and better battery life.

It's funny how our decisions and preferences change over time. For example, I don't take Linus's recommendation on anything anymore, since he was exposed to me ( and a lot of people) as a productivity and output obsessed Boss, and there is a lot of worker-owned content out there that deserves my support more. Back when I bought that XPS 15, and really when I gave my recommendation to my wife for her XPS 13, I was much more sensitive to, specifically, how “snappy” the computer feels to use. How responsive it is to input, how quickly it renders photos, how smooth the video playback is.

As I reflected in my previous post, this computer is objectively better than CrunchStation or his brother SwayBook (a 2015 Macbook Pro running Debian and Sway) in almost every way. Swaybook probably has the edge on display quality, and CrunchStation probably wins the crown in doorstop potential, but the XPS 13 has them beat on everything else. The CPU performance, in comparison to it's brothers, is particularly good, even though it's “only” an i5 mobile unit.

Yet, it doesn't have a name. I don't have the same history with this computer that I do with the others, even the one I recently handed off to my wife. Having opened it up, once, I've confirmed there's not a lot really to upgrade. The RAM and CPU are soldered on, so there's really just a battery repair or a storage upgrade to consider in the future, and any other repairs that might come up.

There's a.... well maybe a cultural artifact or a consequence of my upbringing that manifests itself as an unspoken and unnoticed instinct to make purchasing decisions based on my personal values. Baked in to this is a couple of problematic identities and behaviors that I don't like taking on, things like an identity as a “consumer” that my capitalistic environment stamped me with as I arrived in this world, things like expressing my personal beliefs by going out and buying something. This has been reflected on in the environmentalist space for years, this sort of “Plastic is not sustainable, recycling is a scam, I'm going to go out and buy glass containers and throw away my plastic ones” when the better thing for the environment is to keep using the plastic containers you already have! Don't go out and buy a new thing, “consume” a new object to express your identity as a “we should consume less” person!

This creates a tension inside my heart. I'm very very interested in the MNT Reform Next platform, an upcoming revision and refinement of their original Reform laptop to, hopefully, make it just a little more luggable. I love how repairable and upgradeable it is. I love how it ships a trackball by default. I love how it's made to last for a decade or more. I would love to buy one.

Can I justify it, though? If I apply the thrift I advocated for last time, can I look at this pile of lovely and useful electronic wizardry, this embarrassment of computing riches the Lord has blessed my household with, and say “Yes, the thing I need is another computer. This will look lovely next to the other ones.”

Do I just say no? Do I rotate it out with something else I don't need anymore? Do we bargain and haggle and negotiate with ourselves so that we can have the thing that we want, or do we just say “No. I have more than enough.” Can we do that in this modern age? Can we recognize it as admirable when it happens?

Maybe I'll get one anyways, just for fun. I don't know what the future holds. If the pricing is anything like the current pricing, it won't be an impulse decision. The thing that keeps me going in circles with Capitalism and Modernism is that the move I just described, to refuse to buy something as an expression of my values, is only marginally better than insisting on buying something as an expression of my values. Both cede the frame to this present evil age, both give weight to my purchasing decisions that make the way I spend my money a very very important part of my moral life and existence.

It's the modernist move, to make religious conviction a matter of how you “personally” “act” to “express” that conviction. If something like the Gospel is true, it's true for everyone, not just me personally. If the Gospel is true, it's true regardless of my actions. If the Gospel is true, it doesn't need me to express belief in it to make it true. That's Paganism.

So don't be surprised if I end up buying a new computer. Just maybe be surprised if it's another unserviceable, un-upgradeable ultrabook. I already have one of those.

I have a particular fascination with “obsolete” hardware.

I'm writing this right now on a Dell Latitude W830 workstation, made for professional use cases c. 2007. The darned thing feels like it's a full inch thick, literally the maximum possible size of computer that would fit in my backpack. Like all loved objects, it has a name, though the name changes based on the operating system running on it at the time. For a while it was HaikuStation, but today it is CrunchStation, since we're using CrunchBang++ as our operating system today. The keyboard is phenomenal, and before I dug it out of my father's closet, it had been laid to rest and ignored for maybe five to seven years.

I've done a few minor upgrades, but the largest one by far was giving Windows the boot. It originally ran Windows XP, and it would run Windows 7 ok, but not with anything like the responsiveness that Debian+ can provide. I swapped the HDD for a SATA SSD early on, swapped the CPU (Because, Hallelujah, this laptop has a socketed CPU!) with one of the nicer compatible ones available, and upgraded the wireless card to something a bit more modern and stable. Hinges needed replacing, that's about the only physical piece of hardware that needed addressing. I would have upgraded the RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB, but it turns out that DDR2 4GB sticks of ram were so rare that they're still $60-100 for a kit of two. That's more than I spent on the whole rest of the computer, though I might still end up doing that upgrade in the future. It's basically the last one to do on this machine.

I think I want to challenge the idea of obsolete computer hardware. This is a common observation in the sustainable computing space, its not the hardware that becomes obsolete, it's the software. What, truly, was stopping me from opening a markdown editor in Windows XP, composing this blog post, and posting it to my write.as page from inside Internet Explorer? Mostly the fact that the internet is a dangerous place for such a necromantic software stack! People don't make security updates for ancient operating systems, and we need that kind of stuff to keep our stuff safe. Nobody is writing a Nextcloud client for XP, XP doesn't support any kind of modern storage formatting standard, I have no idea if Office 365 will open old Office 2007 files in a readable state, the practical problem with this computer that led to it being mothballed for more than half a decade is one of proprietary software support.

The other thing, the thing that is more difficult to combat with a fresh install image of Debian, is the aesthetic preference for a thinner, lighter, “snappier” machine. I won't deny the draw of this kind of thing myself, there's something semi magical about the fact that my normal daily driver, a Dell XPS 13, is smaller, faster, can do more, and (in particular) will blow away CrunchStation in a compilation benchmark. I don't notice it in my backpack. The screen is brighter and sharper. It's a better computer, objectively.

But let's put computing in it's right context. Is my life better because the computer I use is better? Do I need those two minutes of my life back that it saves me when building an app from source? Do I need the small size to make the trip from the parking lot to the coffee shop seat without needing to take a break in between? The one thing I could do with is a better battery, but that's also a convenience item. I'm never more than two strides from a three prong AC outlet in this modern world. I don't even need more RAM, even though there's a deeply built instinct for RAM insecurity in my brain, to gather and hoard RAM (and storage. Is a terabyte enough? No! Where will I keep my 90s Action Movie Collection?) far beyond what is practical. The system, without opening firefox, but with Obsidian open, is running at 1 gb of RAM usage. I'm fine.

If the trackpad was bigger, would I be happier? If the screen were sharper, would I be better able to help those who rely on me? WOULD THE KINGDOM OF GOD BE SERVED BY THINNER DISPLAY BEZELS?

Does computation serve humanity, or does computation expand at humanity's expense?

So I encourage you to cultivate a frugality and thrift with the computers in your life, the kind that would make your grandparents proud. Embrace, Extend, Enliven the “obsolete” in your life.

And for the sake of the world, don't buy another computer unless you can't help it. I'm not looking forward to the summer here when spring started back at the beginning of February.

So I had a wonderful small group meeting last night that made me reflect on a couple things. I want to start with some context, first.

I learned to serve the church in college campus ministry, working with young people that would then shortly move on to the next thing life had for them. We were immersed in what was New, as a student leader and then as a staff person. We were always searching for the new approach, the successful approach, the thing that's working great for that group or the book that that speaker wrote. The turnover in students was incredible and when I look back on this time, I see us chasing our tails a bit, and a bit of the tail wagging the dog. There were many people confidently saying they knew what was Next, which is about the only thing more alluring than what is New. Looking back, they were about as correct as I could have been. Marginally more correct than even odds.

When I left campus ministry (truly, when I grew out of it) I wasn't ready to go to the established, local church. Established churches seem like the land of No for a young person with ideas. “We don't do New here.” I wasn't done with New yet, convinced that Old was the source of our problems, and if New could recover what was Ancient in the church, we might be able to have the best of everything. So we did five years in a local church plant, saw it be born, live it's life, and then die. We were part of the group that brought it in to this world, and part of the group that put it to rest. My appetite for New died with it.

I was left with my conviction that the church needed to do whatever we could to recover the Ancient, the traditions of the Apostolic Age and the generations immediately afterward. I'd read anyone who was still read after a couple hundred years, and almost nobody who'd written a book in the past 50. Old was the problem, and the way out of what was Old would be what was Ancient, a truer and more pure Gospel than the one I had received.

Here's the thing about trying to cut ties with Old. The only reason you've received the Gospel is because of Old. Whether it was your parents or a friend or a neighbor or whoever, they who you received the Gospel from received it from someone else, in an unbroken line all the way back to Jesus of Nazareth. You are here because of Old, even if you despise Old. I'll give you some examples from my own life.

I have my own unhappiness with the dominant form of American Evangelicalism today, which traces its roots to turn of the century Fundamentalism and the phenomenon of yeoman evangelists traveling the country making their living preaching tent revivals, with high pressure calls to repentance and high energy sales tactics from the pulpit. My maternal grandfather, though, was raised in the faith because his father was radically saved as an itinerant hobo at a tent meeting like that, and he became a revivalist himself. My grandfather even met my grandmother while out “on tour” doing the family business. I don't exist the way I am today without those tent revivals I wish we could do without.

I could go on. My dad found Christ during the Moral Majority/Ronald Reagan years. My mom is a single issue pro-life voter. would I rather not be tied to these things? Yes. Yet I am. The Old is my connection to the Ancient, and the benefit the Old has over the New and what's Next is that it's proven, we know how it works and how to do it.

In my small group last night, we had several people who have been serving the Lord far longer than I have even been alive, and who have been part of the church we're now attending for 30+ years. One of the recent things the church has done, in an attempt to recover what's Ancient that I inherently endorsed and loved, has been baptizing believers on Easter Sunday. The Ancient Church used to ONLY baptize new believers on Resurrection Sunday, and only after extensive catechism. I never thought about the practices that something New (as a recovery of what was Ancient) might have displaced, things like musical numbers and drama plays and extensive testimony recitations. Those things, being Old, never registered for me.

The testimony and the longing for the Old in those saints convicted me, that in my anti-modernist heart to find my story not in what's New, but what is Ancient, I had retained my contempt for what's Old. That's a Modernist bias, that the Old is inferior to the New. Truly, the Old is about the only thing that can be faithfully handed down from one generation to the next! I'm not saying that we don't continue to reinterpret, reimagine, to play jazz with the Old in the Now, but to play jazz with the Old is to involve the previous generation, the one that preserved the faith and handed it down to you, in the process of making what is New, together. Far from excluding them from the process, as they often feel, its insisting on bringing them along in to the future, just like Christ insisted on carrying us with him, even when it slowed him down. Even when it got him killed.

So that was just my takeaway from that night. In a church where we've already walked away from what's New, you know, what's the harm in including both the Ancient and also the Merely Old? Christ plays in ten thousand places, after all.

This post was written while blasting the album Omnium Gatherum by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. I apologize in advance.

Sorry for the lack of content lately, folks. I'm working on a longer post that requires some more deliberate drafting and composition, but also I'm not working on the writing super hard and deliberately. Still trying to find the balance between taking this time, for myself, and being available to the family and community for when they need me. I'm sure the Greybeards among you can confirm, the rebalancing is a moving target, and it's never really, you know, “settled”.

That said, I'm going to take a little time today to reflect on a great Mastodon post that I read, and a bit of the reflection my friend Cameron and I had about it. It seemed like a good enough idea to drag out a bit into a thousand words or so.

A direct link to the post in question by Dallas

It's now well documented that #Church attendance is rapidly falling in the US. Even #Evangelical denominations, which were able to stave off the decline for a generation, are now declining rapidly.

Hundreds of theories for the cause of the decline have been presented.

But any theory for why churches have been declining should also be able to explain why virtually EVERY traditional social institution is declining. Membership in everything from the Boy Scouts to the NAACP have been in decline.

These were two things that I had known, but hadn't yet put together in context. And it bent my brain around a bit. For context, for new people, I am from and currently occupy a spiritual tradition that could probably be, more or less, accurately described as adjacent to Evangelical Christianity. We're theologically more diverse than we think we are, but our day to day culture is very often aligned with Evangelicalism, with their celebrities, anxieties and talking points enjoying dominance in our conversations. This isn't my favorite thing, but it makes me broadly literate in the way that Evangelicalism frames it's culture wars, and boy oh boy. The decline in attendance, giving and membership is absolutely laid at the feet of a worldly culture.

This is an “Us v Them” frame that I think is understandable, if regrettable. It's the natural frame for fallen man to fall in to, particularly under stress. The reason our children don't come back to church after they go to college is because of the secularizing influence of state schools, or because we didn't homeschool them. The reason families don't come to church is because of school athletics competing for time, or because both partners are working and don't have time after work to get everyone in the car to Wednesday Bible Study. The reason our empty nesters don't keep coming to church is because we made the whole experience about keeping the kids there etc etc etc. Stop me if you've heard any of these before.

Here's the thing about what Dallas pointed out, though. Whatever it is that's causing the decline in attendance and membership, it's not an attack from the culture against the church. It's a headwind that's affecting both the Church and the culture. We are not suffering under the culture, we are suffering with the culture. Something out there, whether it's a deliberate attack or one of those headwinds that's nobody's fault but everybody's problem, is arrayed against togetherness, belonging, and free association. The enemy is Isolation and Loneliness.

This is a frame that, I think, aligns much more closely to the Heart of Christ. The story of the Incarnation is not to be understood as Christ suffering under the culture, it's best understood as Christ insisting that He will not hold himself above and separate from the suffering of the culture. It's participation in our humanity, taking it on Himself and sharing in it. We are Co-Sufferers with Christ. That's the Crucifixion.

This is the frame that's lost when we cede the frame to Modernism, to think of the struggles of the church as having causes and solutions that exist solely in the individual's conviction and choices. Every solution provided by the Church has predominated along these lines. The solution is biblical literacy, it's home schooling, it's discipleship, it's fighting a ground game in each individual's heart and mind, where success is producing a group of people who cannot fathom leaving the church because the possibility is a non-choice for them.

The solutions left on the table, and often directly maligned, are things like treating the church and the people in it deliberately as a primarily social construct. A pastor who neglects biblical literacy and spends all their time making sure the people in the church are getting along and feel like they belong is derided as a fool and, probably, a liberal. A pastor who neglects the ties that bind the people together and focuses all his time on teaching and literacy from the pulpit will be... well, considered normal by their peers. The Church as Social Club is almost universally derided as a dead and spiritually lifeless construct. Ichabod, The Presence has Departed.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider that when Christ came to us and began His ministry, He started by calling disciples, friends, to Him, and taught them by sharing His whole life with them. Consider how He established His church as a community, a family of faith, not an individual expression of private conviction. We don't have biblical examples of “free range” or “lone wolf” believers, living isolated lives that are still faithful to the scripture and the Gospel. Even St Paul, who spent his whole ministry as an itinerant church planter, wrote over and over how it was his friendships in these communities that sustained his work, it was the people's expression of the love of Christ to him that allowed him to continue on in the work.

Consider that when an Infinite God chose to reveal Himself to mortal man, to make Himself known to His people and, later, His church, He chose to do so either with a one-on-one relationship with a human being, or through narrative in the holy scripture, a narrative that only has any meaning when told in context by a people formed by a lifetime of submission to it. Consider, finally, that you received the faith not from out of nowhere, or from a book, absent any context. Even someone who physically receives the scripture must be taught how to read it. The way the truth has been preserved and the gospel has been shared to you is along an unbroken, hand to hand line of faithful believers. You are connected directly to Christ, not by a cord built (only) of knowledge, or faith, or belief, but by a cord built of human relationships.

“A voice, crying in the Wilderness, 'Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord'.” The Way of the Lord, the way Christ moves through creation and reconquers it in His name, is the friendships and family relationships we have. Preserving that net that binds us together, with seemingly mundane events like cake walks, movie nights, phone trees and card drives, is vitally, critically important pastoral work, and the church would not and will not exist without it.

We're not just a social club, but we certainly are, among other things, a social construct. Maybe that common cause with the social ills of the wider, secular culture will cause us to focus just a little bit more on the real cause of all our ailments, and act as a real force of healing for our whole nation. Man can dream.

This post is part of #100DaysToOffload, a challenge to blog a hundred days in a year hosted by Kev Quirk. This is post #13