In human history, in the polytheistic societies like ancient Egypt and Greece, it was generally expected that someone would worship one primary god (usually a god mandated as a city's patron or as the favoured god of the current head of state) and then also offer lesser veneration to whatever other gods a person might feel the need to appease. Similarly, in the more god-filled gaming worlds, it's quite common for people to worship multiple gods. A fisherman, for example, might classically be a worshiper of the local sun god first and foremost, but give an offering to the god of the sea before going out each day. This pragmatic appraoch to worship is actually quite logical... you wouldn't consult a police officer to help with your taxes or a lawyer to perform your open-heart surgery, so why shouldn't you go to the gods best suited to aid you in a given situation? Sure, the modern gods made a big deal of including Everything in their portfolios, but it's precisely that kind of overacheiving which led to the Imposition of Disbelief and the end of the Age of Miracles.

It's precisely this kind of logic which led me to Silinism. Sure, the Judeo-Christian god is an impressive figure and all, but really, with an entire universe to care for and at least three full religions to be the patron for, each of which has vatsly different desires and world views, you can't expect personal attention. To get a really personal touch from your god, you need to look at the small-time gods. McDonald's doesn't care about the individual customer, but your local mom-and-pop restaurant does. The bible outright tells us that there are multiple gods, and while the big one insists that no othergods are placed as being more important, nowhere are you commanded not to pick and choose other gods as needed. As I see it, it's my way of helping lighten the big god's load while also ensuring a better quality of service for myself. Everybody benefits except for my rabbi, which is why I don't tell him this kind of thing.

Small gods tend to put up wherever there's belief for them. A lot of events in history and mythology are explicable by the ancient theory that gods come to exist in response to there being sufficiant belief in them. People like myself, who have the ability to ernestly believe nearly anything if they put their mind to it, have an awesome power and an awesome responsibility. We can create gods and, sometimes, even see measureable effects of their presence, but this means we have a responsibility to not create too many gods and to not create any gods who are going to cause too much trouble. The last three times somebody invented a really ambitious god, after all, we got two bibles and a koran worth of trouble for it.

For the very first time ever (really -- I've never told anybody this full list, alone set it down in text), we present the basically full list of gods who I venerate, and the kind of services they provide. Don't think of as blaspheming... think of it as a list of service providers.

Yaveh
The Jewish god (not really, in my personal opinion, quite the same thing as the Christian and Muslim gods). I may not be a religious Jew, but I choose to beleive in this one just on general principle, i.e., because it matters to some of the people around me and because it improves my likelihood of getting a good afterlife if it turns out the Jews were right. I don't *worship* this god, per se, and in fact I've got quite a lot of issues we need to work out some day, but I do believe.

Forsteri
The main god in my life. Forsteri was created by Eric 3.0, and so predates my current existence but not my actual life. Forsteri, known as the Great Penguin, is the primary god of the Silinist church and is the patron of those who follow the Path of Forsteri, the less religious/more philosophical Silinist path of enlightenment. As far as I'm concerned, I've scientifically verified Forsteri's existence and ability to cause small miracles, using valid hypotheses and H-noughts to form testable predictions which could be judged by quantifiable data. Being devoutly religious is kind of like being in love, in that it's a sensation which no one can imagine until they've experienced it. Forsteri receives the majority of my worship and is the god I call upon for most purposes, such as healing and luck. Forsteri's name is usually invoked for positive things, such as expressions of awe ("by Forsteri!") or surprise ("what in Forsteri's name was that?"), and particularly for expressions of happiness or relief ("thank Forsteri!"). Forsteri is also the god I call upon when I want to curse someone... the Curse of the Talon and Curse of the Tree take effect with a greater-than-chance probability and have done some pretty devastating things to people.

Eris
Eris, aka Discord, is the Greek goddess of chaos as reimagined in the 1970's by the authors of the Illuminatus Trilogy and the Principia Discordia. I remember being quite surprised when I first realised I'd started believing in Eris one day... it just kind of happened so gradually that I didn't notice until I was religious. It helps that worshiping Eris is both easy and pleasant, since the Goddess basically just asks that we confuse the mundanes, try to make the world a better place, and generally enjoy ourselves. People who've studied the few Greek myths which Eris appears in will quickly say that this is quite different from the petty, vindictive, and evil goddess she was originally imagined as, but modern Discordians chalk this up to bad press coupled with the Greeks not being in a position to really appreciate chaos, since chaos for us is humour and gaming while chaos for them was houses burning down and plagues wiping out cities. I most commonly invoke Eris when I need to do something improbable or particularly ridiculous, and in my experience, the Goddess watches out for her own. Modern scholars have also suggested that Eris has evolved into something of a goddess of love in addition to chaos given the current absence of Aphrodite and her ilk, and certainly, the women I've cared for most have all tended to have many of the features attributed to Eris, both in terms of personality and appearance. Love thy god indeed.

Plaugh
A couple of people have noticed that in the last month or so that I've been using the word Plaugh more often than before. Created by Craig Shaw Gardner in his series of six novels featuring the wizard Ebenezum and the apprentice Wuntvor (and later stolen by me for my D&D games), Plaugh is the god of mediocrity, whose moderate grandeur and generally sufficient power is always suitably magnificent. I don't actually worship Plaugh, but I offer him occasional veneration just to ensure that, when situations are looking really mediocre, I can get a little nudge to improve things. In other cases, though, I mostly invoke the name of Plaugh as a curse word: what the Plaugh were you thinking; oh Plaugh; Plaugh this; and so forth.

The Game Gods
In their own way, every gamer venerates the game gods. The mysterious forces which regulate the roll of the dice and the dc of the saving throw are fickle, random spirits who will side with someone one moment and turn against them the next. The game gods probably don't have any sort of will-directed conciousness, but their presence or absence, for good or ill, is often far too evident. Every gamer with a ritual for their die rolls or who looks up at the sky when they need a natural twenty is, in their own way, making offerings to the game gods.

The Weasel Spirit
Finally, not really a god, is the Weasel Spirit. My totem animal is the weasel and, as such, I give regular offerings to the great spirit from time to time. Whether it's giving some food to a squirrel, preaching the glory of weasels, or just giving in to mustelishock in the face of a new toy, I welcome the weasel into my heart frquently, and thus keep it with me. I wouldn't say the great weasel spirit watches over me exactly... totem animals are funny that way... but I feel good having it around and it gives me a little extra reserve of energy to draw upon whenever I need to do something really weasely.

There are about 30 Silinist worldwide, none of whom believe precisely as I do, so a complete Silinist pantheon would probably include other cosmic constructs such as the Great Recursive Acronym GRAG or the Traffic Light of Fate, but since they're not forces which I personally venerate or whose creation I had anything to do with, they don't really need to be expanded upon here.

Don Adams, we hardly knew ye. You gave much to the world, and you have more than earned your rest. We pray that you are, even now, at your eternal reward... and loving it.

Curiously, I'm not enjoying cutting up human bodies as much as I expected to.

For the benefit of any individuals reading this who are associated with law enforcement agencies, I mean cutting them up as part of my anatomy classes, and not, for example, just in my spare time. Don't get me wrong, I feel priviledged to have the chance to work on a human body in my anatomy classes; McGill is one of the few universities left in North America where all studnets work on an actual human cadaver, and I think this is a valuable tool in the learning process. I also feel priviledged just because it's fun to cut up humans -- lots of gamers talk about flaying flesh from bones, but I've gotten to actually try it. And, in the end, it just hasn't been as much fun as I might have hoped. There is a certain thrill to holding a human pectoral muscle in your hands (and boy, are they floppy), but it's a lot of work to get through the yucky, annoying stuff down to the fun bits. And I can still taste the formaldehyde 24 hours later, because it sticks to the inside of the nose.

"Think of your cadaver as a human being," the instructors say. "Do not think of him or her as just a learning tool. They are human bodies and should be treated with respect." Then they cover the face and assign every cadaver a number so that we don't accidentally learn anything about who they were.

I'm teasing the program a little when I write that. Each group of 4 students gets a single cadaver to work on and we use the same body for the entire year, thanks to the miracle of preservative fluids. Everything we cut away stays with the body; nothing just gets thrown out callously. At the end of the year, there's even an elaborate memorial service for all the volunteers who, as it were, donated their bodies to science, and the relatives of the dear departed come to the school to join the students in honouring them. Poetry, written by the students, is read. It's all quite moving, I'm told, and helps the students put into perspective that they never work on slabs of meat -- they work on people. But they really do cover up the face and assign each body a number in the meantime.

I'd be somewhat interested in knowing what kind of person donates their body to a medical school's anatomy program. There can't be many who do so, because all but a handful of schools have stopped doing true dissections. Nobody who's devoutly Jewish is being worked on, because it would be a sin for them to authorize the damaging of their body, and similarly, no one who's very attached to their physical shell is likely to sign up, because, even assuming that every single medical students treats their cadaver properly (yes, I did treat mine with care and respect), the fact remains that most of the class is just learning how to use a scalpel on flesh and all the volunteers do get rather mangled as mistakes happen. Before the first lab period, they showed us an excerpt from a letter written by one of the volunteers (before they died, obviously). The volunteer wrote that when they died, they believed their body would be nothing more than an empty shell, and rather than just let it be party time for all the little wormies, they wanted their body to go to a worthy cause, to advancing knowledge, and to helping make somebody (or, with our bigger-than-ever class, four somebodies) into a better doctor.

Being that I expect to end up in psychiatry, opthamology, or anaesthesiology, I probably won't need to know how to cut up bodies for anything except exams, but it seems quite logical that every doctor needs to have a better-than-average knowledge of the body and how it all fits together. I'll never find myself restiching someone's pectoral major back to their clavicle (See, I memorized what bones that one links to already! Or does it link to the shoulder? sigh...), but it's always useful to understand which muscles are involved in what, what damage to them means for other muscles, and if nothing else, what movements I can do during which excercies to increase the size of my own (insert muscle here). The pectoral muscle is strengthened by push ups and bench-pressing, and among other things, is one of the ones which are helpful when trying to bring home groceries or help a friend move their couch. It's not quite as important as the bicep or tricep for the kind of things I do in daily life, but it's still a very useful muscle. At least, I assume that's the case... I haven't learned bicep and tricep yet and don't want to make assumptions.

I *am* looking forward to working on the digestive tract. I want to see what that sucker looks like after all the trouble it's caused me.

Now to go wash my hands a few more times.

Some people ask me why I'd declare war on the Universe as I did not long ago. There are two reasons. First, as Ghandi said, we all have to be the change we wish to see happen around us. If you want the world to change, basically, you have to work for it to happen, and you have to be an inspiration for that change. Second, though, is summed up by recent events. The declaration of war was made public on September 12th (though the Universe no doubt already knew I'd written it a few days before). Within a week, I was writing an exam which was made tricky because about a quarter of the 200 person class was coughing uncontrollably. By the 21st, I was ill myself, and have since been feeling worse than I have been in months and months. I know that I know how to avoid most common sources of illness, and it wasn't the first cold weather of the season which reduced my immune system. It is my ernest belief that the Universe conspired to infect an entire grade full of medical students just to get me sick... a merciless first strike against its newfound foe. I get sick about once a year on average; for it to happen a week after I formally declared war on the Universe is too big a concidence to be acceptable. Especially when I'm feeling this miserable.

I declared war on the Universe because this is exactly the sort of evil, underhanded tactic that the Universe uses to get to us. It couldn't get me with a virus because I have goo health habits and avoid most sources of sickness, but it knew that if it could infect enough people around me, one of them would manage to infect me. The Universe's servants call this "collateral damage." Or "acceptable losses." This why I'm at war with the Universe... it harms non-combatants to get at its enemies, heedless of whether those harmed are other enemies or its own unwavering supporters.

This round goes to the Universe. I'm taking a zinc lozenge and going to bed three hours early. Hostilities resume tommorow.

Whenever I'm having trouble thinking of what I want to write about, I open Google and type is the word "quotes" followed by two unrelated names. This typically brings me the quote collection of some random person and provides me with no small amount of entertainment, often enlightenment, and more often than not, a topic. Not too long ago, I added the names "Calvin" and "Kosh" and did indeed find myself reading the page of a slightly depressing, gamer-like individual. Among a variety of quotations, mostly related to how miserable life is (although, to be fair, with a general lighthearted tone to it all), this user had also posted various dictionary definitions of words. I learned a few things I never knew before.

Webster's dictionary defines "to conspire" as "to act in harmony toward a common end." I read it. I read it again. I went to the webster website to make sure that's what it said. Indeed, lo and behold, this is the definition. Actually, it was the second definition, the first one being "to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act," but I'm going to choose to ignore that right now.

To conspire, the dictionary says, is to act in harmony. Not merely in unison, but harmony... like the bible, the dictionary never uses a word which is unecessary. Looking deeper, I found that the word is, in fact, derived from the Latin, conspirare, to be in harmony, derived from the phrase "to breathe together." I find this a beautiful sentiment. When I think on conspire, I usually think of it in more negative terms, much as, in fact, the dictionary itself does. But it has a second meaning, and a far more meaningful one. To conspire is not merely to work together, or to be united in a common goal, or to plot secretly... it is to be in harmony with another mind. To conspire is to for two or more minds to be one on a deep and personal level. It means that one can never truly be lonely if one has co-conspirators. It means that one can never be truly alone as long as one other person in the world will look them in the eye and scheme alongside them. This is a form of connection, a relationship, an almost spiritual bond which non-conspirators can never hope to properly appreciate. It is to take two lives, two hearts, and unite them into something beautiful... a harmonious chord of music, a harmony of light and colour and form to elicit tears from the great Masters of Art themselves.

Consider: conspire is not the only word to be derived from the same root. Biologists are fond of the word "conspecific." The word means simply that two individuals are from the same species. But they are not called simply "of the same species." No, they are called conspecifics because this implies a deeper level of connection than species. Species is an indeterminate label, whose definition is fluid and unclear, applied poorly even by those best qualified to determine where the lines between species exist. But conspecifics are clearly individuals who share a connection. They have similar physical structures, similar patterns of behaviour, similar ecological niches, and similar life histories. They are conspecific... in a manner of speaking, they exist in a form of harmony far closer than merely being the same species.

For my part, few and far between are the people I care for and have never schemed alongside. Even I had no idea the capacity for such intimacy existed within my soul.

I conspire. I enjoy conspiring. I am a schemer above and beyond almost any other label which could be applied to me... perhaps this is why I am at such harmony with myself? The people around me who suffer through their lives and who struggle from day to day simply do not scheme enough, or perhaps, they do not scheme about the right things, and thus, they cannot possibly be in harmony with themselves. The people I know who are unable to form truly close relationships tend to be some of the least schemey people I know... or at least, are very bad at making the schemes they make... and so have never been at harmony with those around them. But I, I and those closest to me, we are all schemers. We scheme alone... we scheme together. We are thus in harmony. You can tell the people I like from those I dislike, not by whether or not I'm nice to them, but whether I scheme with them, and those I scheme with are those I am most in harmony with. There are some I do not scheme with because they have not reached my level of schemerhood, but I strive constantly to teach them to scheme, and thus, try to become in harmony with them. Frequently, they do not understand that my offer to allow them to conspire alongside me is among the most profound gifts I can offer a human. It is, after all, the offer for them to live in harmony with me, and perhaps, with themselves.

This applies not merely to deceivers. I can look upon those I know, both who I like and who I dislike, and observe them when they are with their best friends. In pblic, and even alone, an individual may be the most honest and upright, a veritable inheritor of the Direach name so to speak, but put them with their best friends and watch... soon, not far in the future at all, they will conspire. Oh, how they will conspire. They will conspire more than they will plan or discuss. Everything becomes a conspiracy, everything at all. And they are in harmony while they conspire. It is possible that this is merely the people I am close enough to observe... people who choose to have a deceiver like myself close to them... but consider two points. First, it is not merely those I approve of who conspire perpetually. Second, the vast majority of people in the world may not conspire, but quite clearly, they are also not in harmony.

I dream of the day when all humanity shall know this harmony. In fact, I conspire towards it.

What is about dice, exactly, which so captures the gamer's imagination? One of the first things most gamers develop is an irrational love of dice. This is presumably a cultural thing rather than a genetic or societal phenomenon, but none-the-less, across the world, new gamers will usually get quite excited when they buy their first set of dice. Indeed, a first set of gaming dice is frequently seen as a rite of passage for the neogamer, and more experienced gamers will crowd around the neogamer, praising their choice of dice and (if appropriate) dice-bag, and much rolling of the dice, to see if they're lucky, follows.

Most gamers casually overlook the fact that their dice cause them as much if not more agony than glory. This is, perhaps, an example of the implicit love of chaos within our souls... the dice serve themselves, and not us, but we love them anyway. In a way, our dice are like our children: we pay for them and care for them, and we lavish affection on them even when they refuse to do what they're told and cause untold damage to life, limb, and property.

I took the time recently to browse a catalogue of novelty dice. It was the catalogue of a wholesale distributor who doesn't sell to the public, so I couldn't have bought anything easily anyway, but it shocked me how many things I wanted just because they involved dice. Any number of distributors exist who will happily sell you the usual schlock: weighted dice (you can get d6’s that roll any value, pairs of d6’s weighted to get 7’s and 11’s, and packs of 3d6, called the character builders, designed to roll all sixes), funny-shaped dice, dice made from bone (they rarely specify what species), and all the other gags we know and covet. I practically toreadored out just looking at the various shiny dice, and I have fallen in love with a set of matte-black and silver dice cufflinks. Never mind that I've always had something of a tendency towards an "it must be mine!" reaction... this was just silly. Silly or not, though, I want those cuff-links, and the fact that I have only worn cufflinks once in my life doesn’t enter into it. I wanted the rigged dice. And the dice Christmas tree ornaments. And the decimal dice. And the dice with little weasels on them instead of 1's. And most of that catalogue, to be honest.

The second Question of the Universe is what do you want, and the first corollary question is why do you want it. Such lofty philosophical ideals fall apart in the face of dice... there's just no justifying or explaining it. Have you ever seen Koplow Games' glow in the dark Block? 200 shiny/glowy d6's arranged in a massive cube of stochastic goodness. It costs a fortune and I already have all the d6's I need, but damn if I don't want to be playing with it right now. And then there's a 16-inch foam d6... it's not just a die, it's also furniture.

I'm a chaos worshipper... perhaps I'm entitled to love dice as much as I do. It's probably quite understandable for me to want to dress in dice-related clothes and decorate my house and workplace with dice. And it's perfectly normal for any weasel like myself to want a weighted d20 to keep in their bag, not to abuse but just for emergencies, when you need it most, only once every few sessions. Yes, I think that probably does explain it for me... but then how the hell do the companies that produce these things stay in business when I haven't bought anything yet? The Goddess must indeed smile upon those who forge her chance cubes.

I'm scared. Scared and dice-hungry.

Why don't I have a 30-sided die? I know I could find a use for it, and I know places that sell them cheap. And why don't I own a d24? I could use it for all sorts of things, like deciding what time of day to do stuff. And for a creature like myself, it makes a lot of sense to have a d6 where the sides read who, what, when, where, how, and why... heck, maybe I can get a custom d6 that'll help me decide when to ask someone who they are and when to ask why they're here! I'll need containers to store all these dice, but dice bags and dice containers are an industry in and of themselves too, so that won't be hard to find. I already own a novelty tube of giant 4-inch plush dice, *including* a percentile d10, but as everyone knows, owning one plush toy of a given object is no reason not to own more of them. They must be mine!

Sometimes I worry that the only reason I really want to be a doctor is so that I'll have enough money to buy all the dice I could possibly want. This is unrealistic only in so far as that I'll have to save some money for the gaming supplies to use them with.

The appeal of dice is mysterious. It’s part of the magic of gaming in and of itself. We love our dice, even when they’re unkind to us. We love our dice because they simultaneously give us control and lack of control over events. They make things random, giving us excitement, but they give us predictability in knowing that when we get the random result, it’s going to have to beat a given difficulty, adding whatever bonuses. It’s a sense of security, an expression of all the best aspects of gaming all compressed into a few grams of plastic. They’re not just dice... they’re life itself. And sometimes death, too.

Worship the dice, for the dice dictate our future. Chance for the chance god! Dice for the dice throne!

Assuming they roll well.

It's been a while since I really answered any questions here... it's been a while since I was sent any, mind you... but two people just in the last two weeks have asked me about this, and so it seems wholly appropriate to go back to what the main topic of this Journal was always meant to be: answering people's questions about me, thereby making people happy and enlarging my own ego all at once.

Edgar Allan Poe hated being called Edgar because he was named after his hated step-father. Howard Phillip Lovecraft had nothing but contempt for games and felt that people who played them wasted their time on frivolous, wasteful pursuits. Socrates dreaded the prospect that the techniques of thought he eununciated might get used for unjust pursuits. Sir Alec Guiness was so upset by his success in Star Wars overshadowing his more dramatic, better roles that he refused to even discuss the films with fans. Each of these people has had a profound effect on the world in general and on gamer culture in particular, and in each of their cases, if we wrapped a little copper wire around them, we could generate electricity from them spinning in their graves.

The morals which we might learn from this are many and varied, but the one I choose to learn is this: the legacies we leave are rarely the ones we intended. Few are the people who go down in history on purpose, for example. Consider the ordinary person as a less extreme case than the world-changer. Few people have the benefit of knowing the exact moment when they'll die; they are thus unlikely to have said everything they needed to say to the people around them at the end. This is further complicated by the manner of one's death; when one dies after a lengthy mental or physical illness, it's often hard for the survivors to remember the person as they were before. To secure against these potential abuses of legacy and memory, there are two logical alternatives. The first is to not die, which carries its own set of special challenges. The second choice is to leave some sort of concrete document which those who survive oneself will be able to efer to for final instructions, last messages, and so forth. Most people leave wills when they die which give instructions as to the disposition of their Stuff; it is wholly logical to have a document which arranges for the dispositions of memories, duties, and thoughts as well.

Psychologists have suggested that most people have incredible difficulty contemplating their own deaths, but that if a person can learn to think of their own deaths in a calm manner, it's one of the best predictors of a peaceful end. Research has actually suggested that people as young as their teens should begin considering what effects their deaths might have on the world around them... hopefully, by the time they actually do die, ideally about 80 years later, they'll be spiritually prepared for it and able to accept it. More importantly, if you can learn to contemplate your own death in a calm manner, you're able to take steps to ensure that death isn't the end for your schemes and that the legacy you leave is something close to what you'd like it to be.

The Apotheosis File has been mentioned a total of 1 time in this Journal in the past, and even then it got only a quick, passing mention without explaining what it is. It's something I've rarely spoken to people about, and even among those closest to me, only about half know what it is, and only half of them have more than a very vauge idea what the contents might be. As everyone around me knows, I have control issues, and the Apotheosis File is my way of trying to take control of the end of my life. A hidden, password protected word document whose location and access codes are known to only a tiny group of people, the Apotheosis File exists in the event of my untimely death, and among other things, contains the last messages I want sent out to the people important to me, lays out what items of my Stuff are to be distributed to the people I liked and how much Stuff they deserve to get, lists the passwords to my various websites and names the people who I want to be given control of them, and contains my pre-written eulogy. It's a fascinating read and I mke a point of accessing it at least once a month to make sure that it still says *exactly* what I want it to say; I dare say there isn't a single other document in existence which I've rewritten quite so many times.

Some might suggest that it's morbid to spend time contemplating one's own death, particularly at my age when I am, quite literally, in the best shape and health that I will ever be, barring the aquisition of superpowers. I'm inclined to disagree, however. To be honest, I am typically left feeling a bit depressed every time I work on the File, but that's normal and healthy. Few people are comfortable contemplating the simple fact that we're never sure how long we're going to exist. I'm a paranoid, cowardly weasel; I'm acutely aware at all times of the variety of things in the world which could harm me. Rather than become fixated upon impending doom and become imprisonned by it, I choose to face down death on a regular basis and to have the knowledge that, whatever happens to me, I've made all the preparations I could reasonably make. If I'm killed in an accident on the way to school tommorow, the people I care about will receive the messages that I would want them to receive and the Empire has a better-than-even chance of outlasting me in the hands of other individuals. Secure in this knowledge, I'm free to live happily without fear of death. I've done everything I can do get ready for it, after all.

One obvious question people feel inclined to ask is 1) are they one of the people for whom a message is waiting and 2) can they read it before anything happens to me. Only three people alive know for certain both that I keep the File and that they're in it... everyone else, as far as I'm concerned, can live with the suspense. Similarly, only three people in the world (though interestingly, they're not the same three people) have enough control over me that, if they asked to see what I'd written to them, I would show it to them, but on the other hand, these are people who i know would never ask me to show them such a thing. If they ever did, there's every chance that they would prove themselves, by default, unworthy of the answer.

The true irony of keeping such a document is best understood via the ancient riddle, which sass that a coffin is what the maker doesn't want, the buyer doesn't use and the user doesn't see. Similarly, a document like the Apotheosis File is generated with the expressed intent that no one is going to read it for a very long time. In my case, if all goes according to plan, the File will not be seen by anyone except me for at least 60 years, and even then, there's a significant internal debate as to whether or not I hope any of the people currently listed within it will be around to see what I wrote to them.

And after an Entry lke that, I need to go read some comic books in a brightly lit room now.

To: The Universe and its Rulers
Subject: Declaration of War

To the Universe and its inhabitants,
This is your formal notice that war has been declared upon you. I write on behalf of the countless sentients daily inconvenienced and harmed by your actions and antics. Time and again you have failed to respond to diplomatic overtures and have persisted in your damaging activities. You have left us no recourse but to declare war upon you and resolve this problem by the most direct method possible.

We, the enemies of the flawed and apparently deliberately perverse Universe, shall be using a variety of weapons and tactics. Because we abhor violence, we shall first strive to use economic and social means to correct the errors of your ways. Effective immediately, we place an embargo upon you and all who sympathise with your actions. Wherever poossible, we shall refrain from existing within you and we shall strive to block all access which your various clients, contributors, and slaves have to you. We shall spend as much time gaming as possible to ensure that you receive no profit or trade from us. Given time, we are confident that this embargo will begin to strain your resources.

In the event that our embargoes are not sufficient to force you to comply with our demands, stronger measures will be taken. This is war, and we will not shy away from the actions necessary to end your tyrranical reign. If you make it necessary, we shall begin targeting strategic locations, including but not limited to your military installations, centers of government, and, if necessary over times, your economic and social centers. We hope to carry out this war targeting only what we have to target, but as you have never shown any discretion in the sites which you target with your own attacks, we may be forced to act with the same indescriminateness.

We kindly request that, as we do not know precisely where your leaders currently reside, you promptly provide us with their names and addresses. This will enable us to more effectively target them, and will save the inconvenience for all sides if the only targets available to us are the general inhabitants of your land. We would prefer to avoid doing this, as we do not condone the strikes against civilians which you yourself have always favoured. Please provide us with this information as soon as possible.

We have various demands which, until they are met, make the hope of peace an impossibility. First and foremost is that the current rulers of the Universe have proven themselves incompetent and a danger to themselves and others. The current structure of the Universe has consistently placed the very worst candidates for rule in positions of power and has allowed them to cause all manner of harm without placing them under any supervision whatsoever. Even a cursory examination of the state of the population centers of the Universe will reveal the sorry state which this method of rulership has brought the Universe to. The Universe's current administration must be removed from power and a more enlightened, benevolent, and comprehensible system of rulership must be installed. The new government must be made responsible to the Universe's inhabitants to ensure fair rule, accountable to those forced to live within the Universe. Once the new government has been established, it will most likely be necessary to try the current rulership on charges of gross incompetence, stupidity, inability to rule, disregard for human (and other sentient) rights, war crimes, nepotism, and numerous other crimes to be determined by a carefully and justly selected body of inquiry. The crimes for which the current rulers of the Universe appear to be guilty demand the harshest penalties according to most any form of laws under which they will be tried. While we would prefer that Wilde-Heinleinian law is used to try the villains in power, we will be open to negotiations on this point once the rulers have been imprisoned safely. We will consider allowing the inquiry and trial to operate under international law, human law, or moral law; however, the primary legal system of universal law is unacceptable, on the grounds of it being the legal system under which the crimes of the current administartion have gone unpunished.

Be advised that we deny your legal and moral claim to rule and refuse to acknowledge your authority. We shall refuse to submit to your rule and shall appoint our own leaders, who are not dependent upon the Universe. Effective immediately, we repeal all of your unjust laws. We shall obey only those laws which we find are fair and just to all sentients and which do not, as most of your short-sighted laws currently do, harm, impoverish, and inconvenience so many. Until such time as you formally annul these laws, there can be no hope for peace between us. To begin with, we demand that you repeal the current repressive laws of gravity, thermodynamics, human nature, temporal linearity, irony, and space/time. We will consider negotations to operate under relaxed forms of these laws but refuse to abide by the current forms which these laws take.

On the matter of justice, there can be no compromise. As long as the Universe remains a fundamentally unjust and poorly run system, we will be forced to continue our war. We will take whatever steps are necessary to bring justice to the Universe; we shall not act unjustly ourselves, but the limits of justice shall be wide indeed in the persecution of the unjust. The rulers of the Universe may rest assured that they and their forces shall be treated with greater kindness, mercy, and justice than they have ever treated us. None-the-less, they shall be removed from power.

This declaration of war comes into effect immediately and shall continue until our demands have been satisfied. You shall receive no further notices of our intentions save for action. We urge you strongly to see reason and end this war quickly, before more innocent inhabitants of the Universe are harmed, both by the actions which we will be forced to take and by the continuing incompetence, stupidity, and disregard for life and sanity which has been the hallmark of the Universe up until now.

Your once and future enemy,
Eric Lis
Writing on behalf of the Aerican Empire,
the Silinists,
the Gamers of Earth,
and enlightened beings throughout the Universe.

Be seeing you.

This will be the first year of my existence in which my annual apology letter will be written in an entirely different month from my rebirthday.

My rebirthday is, of course, tommorow, September 10th, whereas Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, doesn’t arrive this year until early October, and the ten days of penance occur between then and Yom Kippur a week and a half later. It’s been very pleasing these past few years to have the chance (some might say obligation while others might say excuse) to meditate upon my sins of the past year at basically the same time as I celebrate my replacement of Eric 3.0; it’s wholly appropriate that, as we contemplate who we are and how we came to be, we consider the things we do and how many of them ought to be apologized for. Sadly, this year, the two events will not coincide. I blame this primarily on the structure of the Jewish lunar calendar and the suckers-for-punishment who created it. The Gregorians added only a single day to their calendar on leap years, but the Jews, always eager for a challenge, stick an entire month onto theirs.

This is not to say that I will therefore go my rebirthday without considering who I am or how I’ve sinned. I spend a little time each day considering my recent sins… sometimes to understand what I’ve done wrong, other times just for a laugh. On my rebirthday especially, my meditations tend very much to center upon what my life has been like in the past year, and my sins have always focused quite centrally on that kind of thing. Each year of my existence could reasonably be characterized by the types of sins I committed during it -- causing others pain in the course of my recreation, corruption of those around me, the deliberate antagonizing of people who got on my nerves, the enforcement of chaos onto otherwise ordered lives, driving, and this past year... well, you can all wait a month to find out what I decide this year’s seminal sin-type was. I usually choose to focus more on the positive things of a past year, such as the ways in which I’ve grown, the lives I’ve changed for the better, and the games I’ve run or been in, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t spend at least a minimum of processing power cataloguing and considering my sins. This year, I won’t have a reason to do that, as I have in previous years, which I suppose means that I’ll have to do it on my own time. None-the-less, none of you will be getting any big apologies until October comes around.

As I prepare to begin my seventh year of existence, one issue with which I will have to grapple is, what is my version number? We rarely have the capacity to recognize the defining moments of our lives as they happen -- I only decided that my last rebirth had been on September 10th, 1999, when I was well into 2001. I had known almost immediately that the chrysalis moment was significant, but it is only with time and self-observation that we can understand just how profoundly a moment changes us. This past year has seen perhaps more of the classically life-altering moments come and go in my life than any year since... well, since my last rebirth, really. In the past year, I’ve completed an honours thesis good enough to print in academic circles, kept this Journal (and thus stumbled upon many interesting thought I didn’t know I had), fallen in love, graduated from a prestigious and world-renowned university, entered medical school, worked full time for more than two weeks for the first time in my life, been the president of a games club, ended a three-year-long D&D game on purpose... It’s quite a list by any standards. Curiously, looking back, I don’t really feel that any of these events have been significant enough in shaping me to prompt my erasure and replacement by Eric 5.0. For that matter, I don’t even feel that I’ve grown into Eric 4.2. These events in my life have been significant, meaningful, and world-altering, but to my best understanding, I appear to still be me, for better or for worse. It is worth pointing out, of course, that, as observed above, I might not have noticed the change yet, and that this time next year my replacement may be regaling you all with the exact date and time which he has calculated was the moment of my death and his creation. It is equally possible, though, that I’m simply not as protean a soul as I once was, and given that my last rebirth happened about midway between my 17th and 18th birthdays, this seems like a very possible hypothesis.

Psychological research suggests that a person’s basic personality is set by the age of 18-25, and that once a person’s personality crystallizes and stabilizes, it will remain static for 10 or 20 or even 50 years without any major changes. If this is so, then I might not ever be replaced by a more advanced version of myself. This is a possibility about which I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, in terms of personalities, relative to basically anybody else I know, I think I pretty much lucked-out. On the other hand, tomorrow marks the end of my sixth-year of obsessive striving for self-improvement; the possibility that I may remain, as Popeye says, what I am, is a bit daunting.

Of course, we fnord learn to live with little things like that. There *is* a little part of me that says I haven’t evolved because there’s no higher level to reach, but this year, at least, the bulk of me knows better.

I’ve still got all the little doors in my head. Virrar and Ragon are still sitting on my shoulders, and if anything, they have more company now than they did this time last year. I still take just a bit too much pleasure in inflicting pain of people I don’t like, but I also still insist that I’m basically a neutral good person. I’m still a gamer, even if I’m not gaming so much right now, and I still love my killer penguin death squad even if my Necrons don’t see much action nowadays. I still enjoy buying toys... and playing with them. And even though the Goddess has become a bigger part of my life this past year, I’m more dedicated to Forsteri and the Path than ever before. I am, to put it bluntly, still me.

There are worse fates.

Few people appreciate the true brilliance of Shakespeare as it relates to the modern day. The plays of Shakespeare have, this past century, gone from being the pride of human art to being works which students are forced to read and analyze, which has turned them from art to punishment, practically slavery. This is the tragedy of English literature: when it is studied, it loses its majesty. When I attended John Abbott College, I saw that one of the English classes there actually taught the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which horrified me to some degree.

To discuss Shakespeare, we first have to consider certain points. First, we shall disregard all the legends and stories as to whether or not Bill himself wrote his works or whether he even existed... none of that matters if we're interested in the worth of his plays and not the worth of the man. Second, it's important that we consider that, in a public to whom literacy is increasingly something that happens to other people, few people would ever read the works of Shakespeare if they weren't forced too, and that perhaps justifies the value of forcing people to read it. Imagine the degredation which our society would see if people had never seen the great dramatic scenes, such as the great "what time is it?" argument from Hamlet.

HAMLET: What hour now?
HORATIO: I think it lacks of twelve.
HAMLET: No, it is struck.
HORATIO: Indeed? I heard it not.
HAMLET: The failings of thy ears are scarcely my concern. Tis past the mid of the night.
HORATIO: Tisn't.
HAMLET: Tis.
HORATIO: Tisn't.
HAMLET: Tis, thou blackguard!

Among his other conntributions to society, Shakespeare enriched the English language, eprsonally inventing hundreds of words when he couldn't find ones that had the precise nuance he sought. Some criticize Shakespeare's inventing a word rather than using a real one, while others, such as Lewis Carrol, embraced the exact same technique to great effect. Perhaps the greatest of Shakespeare's language adaptations was his division of the word "hey" into countless sublte aput-like derivatives.

Shakespearean	English
Forsooth	Hey!
Base villain	Hey!
Bob	Hey!
Prithee	Hey!
Fie	Hey!

We worry that watching television will blind children to the effects and aftermath of violence, but in my opinion, watching Mercutio die is only going to persuade young readers that if they stab their friends, they'll have a good hour or two to go find help.

HAMLET: I am dead, Horatio.
HORATIO: My prince, thou mustn't!
HAMLET: O good Horatio, what a wounded name, Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart Absent thee from felicity awhile, And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story.
HORATIO: Thy story I shall tell, thy glory shall live eternally!
HAMLET: O, I die, Horatio!
HORATIO: Actually, thou dost keep saying that...
HAMLET: The potent poison quite o'er-crows my spirit: I cannot live to hear the news from England.
HORATIO: Yeah, okay.
HAMLET: But I do prophesy the election lights On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice.
HORATIO: Your very slowly dying voice. Look, can we get on with...
HAMLET: So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less Which have solicited.
HORATIO: Does anybody have a bit more of that poison? Anyone?
HAMLET: The rest is silence.
HORATIO: Well it sure hasn't been until now!

Of course, one does have to wonder about the intellects of the people of Shakespeares day. These were plays where the action was usually fairly obvious, and none-the-less, Shakespeare seems to have felt that unless he had a running play-by-play at all times, the audience might forget what was happening. This is the only realistic explanation of why, every time a character crosses the room, we receive a speech. The nearest analogue to this sort of thing was Serpentor, with his tag-line of "this I command" which he would use just in case someone failed to realise that he was, in fact, commanding, and that it was him issuing the command.

Othello: This is me, Othello, and I'm crossing the room now. I'm crossing it. I'm about halfway across now. Almost there. I'm on the other side of the room now. Did I mention that my name is Othello?

Shakespeare is known for having written three types of plays: comedies, tragedies, and whatthehellwasthats. Shakespeare's comedies include possibly the most famous play of all time, Romeo and Juliet. This play is often miscited as being a tragedy, but is actually meant to be a joyous, happy tale of stupid people dying before they have the opportunity to breed. Romeo and Juliet is an essential play for our times because of its fundamental message, which is, "you're in lust, not love, you idiot, put down that dagger and stop trying to stab everyone." This is, of course, a message which the highscool students who most commonly read this play desperatly need to hear at that time of their lives. Only one character ends up happy at the end of Romeo and Juliet: the assassin who gets hired to kill Romeo and who can collect his fee at the end without so much as drawing his garrotte. Another of Shakespeare's comedies is the play Othello. Like in Romeo and Juliet, pretty much everybody ends up totally screwed by the end. What makes this play a comedy, however, is the central character of Iago, who sucessfully manages to mess up everybody else and come out on top. Like modern fiction, Shakespeare's work frequently sees the weasel as the only character to be at all sucessful by the end. In contrast, Shakespeares also wrote tragedies. These plays are not derived from the english word for tragedy, which means "something sad," but from the ancient Greek work trageddus, which translates loosely as "everybody of any importance ends up stone dead." The loss of an entire cast is actually a common theme in Shakespeare's plays; the distinction between his comedies and tragedies frequently comes down to a simple question of the body count. Finally, about 1/3 of Shakespeare's work can be classified as whatthehellwasthat, which includes such plays as A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Taming of the Shrew, which are characterized by their fantastical scenes, their epic storylines, and their utter lack of sense. Unlike the comedy and the tragedy, the whatthehellwasthat can be classified because, while it begins as an engaging story, by the end, it has ceased to make any kind of sense at all. Just as Shakespeare pioneered many tricks of the stage still used today, so too is the bard reputed to have observed, "if they did not understand it, they will pay to see it a second time in case that helps."

One commonly criticised aspect of Shakespeare's work, of course, is the manner in which plays don't conclude so much as just suddenly stop.

When I was very young, I was terrified of dragons. This was a powerful and very irrational fear. I would have nightmares about them; I would have to leave the room when Seseame Street aired a frequently-replayed sketch about a big yellow and orange dragon; I was practically traumatized by the horrible Disney film, Pete's Dragon. I grew out of this fear eventually, obviously, and in point of fact am today quite fascinated with dracology, dragons, and saurian monsters in general. There isn't a lesson to this thought, so to speak... but I've been meditating a lot on the subject of fear in the last couple of months for reasons which ought to be quite obvious to most of the people who know me, and I feel that it's worth our while to occasionally stop to consider the things we fear, the things we once fear, and the things we're likely to fear one day.

Observation 1: I am very curious how many people grow to find that things they once found fearsome are now inherently fascinating. Childhgood fears may be a developing mind's way of coping with the unaccustomed feeling of "interesting." More likely, it's a sort of subconcious spiting of the universe... "you made me afraid of this, so now I'm going to become very interested in it and learn a lot about it."

I, personally, am afraid of quite a lot of things. I'm rather a great coward at heart... nearly everything terrifies me to one degree or another. Obviously, this doesn't stop me from leading a productive, sucessful, and happy life. I'm afraid of staying home and of going out, for example, but I do both frequently. Much to my annoyance, fear is the one and only feeling which has been a constant for me in my years of varrying levels of hypoaffectivity, lessening only in the last year or two as I've become increasingly adept at some of the higher level mental abilities available to me through the Path of Forsteri. Not so long ago, I had a crippling fear of snakes and could scarecly stand to even imagine one, whereas nowadays I can quite happily look at them, read about them, stand next to them... I haven't become any less afraid, but I have become better able to not care. I have mixed feelings about this as an adaptive strategy, but one takes what one can get.

Observation 2: In my experience, the people most prone to fear are those with the most powerful imaginations. Kids are more afraid than adults because they haven't yet lost their imaginations. Gamers are more prone to fear than mundanes because they spend a lot of time iamginin things that scare them, and practice makes perfect. I, and a few others I could name, show more fear than those around them because they have hyperactive imaginations and, even when they know a fear is unrealistic, they can't stop themselves from imagining their fear coming true in exacting and gruesome detail.

I would say that probably, my greatest fears at this time in my life are threefold: philosophical degeneration, loss of mental faculties, and being devoured by werewolves. The last is the easiest to explain: I get a little uncomfortable about the idea of being torn apart and devoured while still alive, and werewolves combine all the painful, pointy features of any other dedaly animal without the inherent niftyness or interestingness of other types of monsters. I've mentionned this fear in previous Entries, so I won't waste any more time discussing it in this one, except to say that, like all my fears, I've been getting over it more and more in the last year, and have just recently watched several werewolf movies without so much as a feeling of discomfort. The other two are probably among the most stereotypical fears for people in my general age and situation, which makes them a little embarassing... an iconoclast like myself sudders at the idea of fearing the same thing as normal people.

Observation 3: My paternal grandfather suffered from neural vascular calcification; calcium was taken in by the blood vessels of his brain, resulting in a slow, progressive, and unstoppable loss of faculties on his part, starting with physical degredation, proceeding to mental deificiencies, and finally resulting in permanent hospitalization and death. One of the main factors in this process was his body's progressive inability to absorb vitamin B12, necessary for proper functioning of the brain. B12 is also the vitamin which my unique physiology is unable to absorb from food; I received it by injection once a month for the first 12 years of my life and then no longer had to, either because my body had started to produce it on its own or because my interal organs had evolved to absorb it through tissues normally unable to do so (my doctors weren't sure which and couldn't effectively test it). Nobody is entirely sure how I process vitamin B12 today, but odds are good that some of the same genes that resulted in my grandfather losing the ability to absorb it effectively were the cause of my never being able to absorb it. It's entirely possible that whatever manner I use to get the vitamin could easily stop working -- any day now, in fact.

I am not a physical entity; I am a mental entity who just happens to use a physical body to get things done, purely out of a sense of pragmatism. I tend to think i'm quite justified to fear the loss of my prodigious mental faculties, since I don't have much in the way of physical talents to fall back on. Philosophical degeneration could come in two forms: either I might one day stop feeling the need to ponder things philosophically (which would basically be the end of my existence as Eric 4.1, and not in a good way), or I might lose the capacity to consider things philosophically (which would just be embarassing). My talents at philosophy, or sophistry at the very least, are my single greatest skill and are also the source of every other skill I have, whether that's my knack at deceit or my ability to run a game.

Observation 4: How do you write a game that players will find compelling, exciting, and disturbing? Simple. Just consider your own fears and then subject the players to them. I got some very good use of the old "pit of snakes" routine back in the day; it genuinely freaked my players out several times.

The idea of losing my intelligence scares me for basically the same reasons as the fear of losing my philosophical outlook at things... it would take away the only thing I do well. Even the physical things I do well are based largely in the thoughts I have while doing them. I've encountered many situations which I wasn't smart enough to solve, but I've never, ever felt that I wasn't smart enough in general, and ideally, I never will. If I do, I just hope it happens quickly enough that I don't have to spend much time ruminating about it.

Observation 5: If your worst fears are things that either A) can't possibly happen to you or B) probably won't happen to you for another 60 years, you're actually pretty well off.

Observation 6: As long as you have the capacity to write an excessive number of words about your fear of losing your mental powers, you probably haven't started losing them yet.