The life of every individual can be reasonably broken down into leisure, work, activities of daily living, and sleep. These categories are fairly self-explanatory, and together can be used to divide up someone's entire day to understand how they think and act, and if applied to many days, gives insight into the person as a whole. For most individuals, a profitable and fulfilling life involves finding proper balance between the categories. As with any precious resource, demand exceeds supply, and few are the people who have enough hours in the day to fulfill all of their needs and wants. Most of us sacrifice at least some sleep and some leisure; few are the souls strong enough to keep from sacrificing some of their work if they're given the chance, and many people skip breakfast or lunch due to lack of time, thus forsaking activities of daily living. Various balance points exist, and the place where people set these balances tells you a great deal about them. One of these balance points is known as the Hedonist Point; the Hedonist Point is the level of activity at which an individual takes a stand and refuses under any circumstances to sacrifice any more of their leisure, no matter the cost to sleep, or work, or health. Most individuals never hit a Hedonist Point in their lives after leaving childhood, but the lives of drug abusers, alcoholics, and students who fail their classes because they refuse to stop partying are all marked by their finding their Hedonist Point, and by how they adapt to it.

I hit my Hedonist Point early this semester. That's why I'm not doing very well in medical school.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not failing my classes. I'm not even doing that badly. To pass an exam in my school requires a 60% after each final exam (there are eight such exams in the 18 months of lectures) and an average 65% at the end of each semester, and to date, having written the first two exams, I'm comfortably above the magic 65%, if not by much. It's a pass fail system... I could pass with a 65.01% and nobody outside of the school will ever know, as long as I pass. *I'll* know, of course, but I learned long ago to accept my best and not stress over details.

The Hedonist Point enters into things in terms of studying. Medical school is all baout studying... most of my classmates do little else. I've never been a good studier myself, and fortunately, my magnificant brain has always allowed me to get away with that. In subjects for which I have a natural knack, such as psychology, English, political science, philosophy, most branches of history and so forth, if I attend my lectures, take decent notes, review those notes once in the weekend before the exam and skim the relevant textbook chapters, I'll be at the top of the class; I'll have worked for it and earned it, but I won't have worked as hard as most of my classmates would have to to get the same mark. This doesn't hold true for topics for which i lack that intuitive talent, though, such as, among other things, biochemistry, physiology, anatomy, and microbiology, which is basically all I'm being tested on between August 2005 and December 2006. When I wrote the GRE's in psychology, I scored 99th percentile, and to get that all I did was, in my spare time, read an introduction to psychology textbook from cover to cover the week before and let that knowledge supplement the stuff I already knew. I can't do that with my current classes -- for whatever reason, the material just doesn't sink in as easily.

I am, as I've told many disbelieving people, a hedonist. This seems odd to most people, being that I don't drink, smoke, self-medicate, or do any of the other reckless things most people associate with hedonism. I am, however, a hedonist in the sense that nearly everything I do is in the cause of my own entertainment, either in the short term (like reading comic books) or the long term (attending medical school now to ensure that, in seven years when I start to have free time again, I can afford all the comics I want). Most most of my incarnation, I lived by Haggert's Law: "I will keep nothing near me which does not make me happy." Thus, going into my first exam in medicine, I knew, for a fact, that I'd studied significantly less than my fellow students for the test. This was revealed in the marks, where I scored near (but, of course, not at) the bottom of the class. I passed with a decent mark, but the bulk of my class did better than me, and out of ego alone, that was intolerable.

So, come the time for the second exam, I *worked*. I actually missed a game session to study, and those of you near me will understand that this is actually a huge thing for me to do.

Despite hours of intense work and genuine learning, I still barely passed the exam. But instead of getting a higher grade than 10 other students, this time I got a higher grade than 50 others. That still places me firmly in the bottom quarter of my class, but it's a step forward. I didn't expect to see even a 10% increase in my test scores overnight, or even in the first semester. Not only am I learning a lot of biology that most of the studnets in my class know better than me, I'm also having to learn to study practically from first principles, simply by virtue of the fact that none of my previous classes have made me have to.

My ego is soothed considerably by several factors. First, I am admittedly being shown up by most of the other students, but realistically, these other students are all in medicine for a reason, and even being in the bottom quarter doesn't make me feel stupid. Second, it's a simple fact that I'm seeing for the first time what a lot of these students have seen once or twice already, and I'm doing fairly well in that light. Lastly, I am not now and have never been a perfectionist... I have no emotional need, or even desire, to have 90's in all my classes if my future workplaces won't know it. Given these factors, I am at my hedonist Point; I am willing to give up much of my leisure but, at a certain point, there comes a time when reading that comic book means more to me than an extra 20 minutes of studying. Or, as the case may be, five or six comics, or an episode of MST3k, or seeing my friends on Tuesday and Saturday every week. I can get away with it without academic harm, and more importantly, I'm just not prepared to give up that much hedonism.

One of the keys of balance, of course, is that a balance point is perpetually moving. I had hit a Hedonist Point before the first exam and, when I wasn't satisfied with my grade, my Hedonist Point rapidly shifted to a new balance, wherein I studied a lot more. Since I barely passed this exam too, my Hedonist Point will no doubt shift even more towards more studying and less Fantastic Four. For the moment, unlike most of my classmates, it hasn't shifted too far, and I'm still attending my game this week, still seeing friends for pie this weekend, and still taking the time to write this instead of reviewing today's lectures of the hormonal changes that drive puberty. After the third exam 23 days from now, the gods only know where the balance point will be. I am few things if not adaptable, as wel as hedonistic.

And now, instead of going to study, I will go watch my brother play Star Wars Battlefront II, because it'll make me happy. That's reason enough for me, for tonight at least.

When I wrote about my brief period of monsterlessness last month, I mentioned, in passing, a previous time when one of my Avatars met their Final Death. Since then, I've actually gotten three or four requests for that story, so since I don't have much else to write about right now, and there are no interesting holidays on my calendar for another 20 days or so, now seems like as good a time as any.

I'm not prepared to give a full list of the Avatars who existed at the dawn of my current incarnation, partially because there are some that, even today, I don't want people to know about, and partially because I no longer remember that far back with accuracy and I don't want to start filling in the blanks with what I imagine is probably the truth. The bit about my memory won't shock people -- I have trouble remembering last week, so forget September 1999. The other point, I suspect, may seem a bit stranger to readers... since I speak so openly of Avatars such as the Monster and the Villain, what kind of horror would something have to entail before I refuse to comment on it? The truth, alas, is far less ominous and dramatic. For example, there are a couple of false identities I've been maintaining for years that I still get some use out of, and I don't want to admit publically that I'm them, while in other cases, the Avatars are just silly and I don't feel inclined to say much about them. The only horrific things I have inside me are things I've always been quite open talking about... it's the best way to ensure they aren't doing things while you aren't watching.

So anyway...

I came online with, as I have observed, with something in the vicinity of 6 Avatars. These were Ragon, Virrar, and Sebastian, all characters from games, a couple of others who are no longer very prominent within me, and finally, a Driver. The Driver was, quite simply, the part of me that would take over when I was driving. At the time, I didn't drive much -- as little as possible, in fact -- and when i was behind the wheel, I would generally feel that I was somebody else. This is not a rare feeling, it seems, as psychological research suggests that most people think they have completly different behaviours, thoughts, and reactions to things when they are driving or not. The Driver was a calm, collected individual, very cautious and very rule-abiding. He utterly lacked my nasty streak, and was rather more patient than I was in most ways.

Like the other Avatars, the Driver predated my rebirth. I'd begun learning to drive in late high school, as did most of my peers at the time, and while I took public transit my whole three years at John Abbott, I did occasionally drive when parties or, sometimes, games came about. The Driver lived comfortably for about 3 years, serving me well, getting me where I needed to go, and generally being quiet at those times when he wasn't needed, which was a fairly big difference between him and the other Avatars, who generally would only shut up when their arguments degenerated into physical violence. The Driver was actually becoming a somewhat influential Avatar the summer before I started studying at Concordia, when I worked in a laboratory at Loyola and started driving to school daily. His methodical and patient approach to problem solving served me well in a laboratory setting.

In the first month of classes starting, call it late August or early September of 2002, I had my first and only major car accident. I have heard legends that, outside of Montreal, at least in most cities of less than 2 million people, most people actualyl drive well. They keep to speed limits and do not endanger everyone around them for amusement. In Montreal, however, as in such famous cities as New York, London, Jerusalem, and probably most major metropolitan areas, driving is, by necessity, idiotic. A good driver is forced to drive above speed limits because to do otherwise is itself unsafe. I was proceeding down one of the major streets near the university (St-Jaques, for the benefit of people who know it, right across the street for Picasso and the Super C, heading towards the entrance to highway 20). At a speed of 60 kilometers an hour (it's a 50 zone... by Montreal standards I was going at just the right speed and if you'd asked the smeg-head behind me I was going 20 klicks too slow) I approached a traffic light where the street meets the exit from a shopping center. I had a green light, and so I was driving along quite contendly, when another vehicle exited the grocery store. Newton got his word in edgewise, suffice it to say. No one was hurt in the incident; this is the most important thing. For my vehicle, it was a head on collision, and the combined protection of the power of Forsteri and the whole engineering of my car meant my vehicle escaped without so much as a scratch. For the other vehicle, on the other hand, it was a passenger-side collision... I left an imprint going nearly a foot into the side of the vehicle. Discussion between myself and the other driver revealsed they had been at fault, apparently not even realizing there was a traffic light at that corner. I reported the event to the police and my insurance dutifully and, aside from thinking about it now and then, it hasn't affected my life since, although I do pay rather more attention when I come up to intersections.

As an interesting aside into my personality and thought procecess, I hurt people daily without remorse but I have never gotten over the guilt I feel for this event. The other driver was a young woman, an immigrant in her early 20's, driving a borrowed car. She could not possibly have had the money to repair it, and the gods only know how she was going to explain it to the person she'd borrowed the car from. I never spoke to her again after that day (by her choice) so I don't know how her side of the story ends. However, I know that my memory is poor and my imagination very powerful, and I often remember details that are different from how events actually happened. I remember seeing that I had a green light, but the other driver didn't even realise there was a light and so couldn't report if she had seen red or green. Rationally, I believe that I truly wasn't at fault, but deep down in the depths of my inhuman soul I will never be 100% sure that it wasn't really me who screwed up. I will probably never be able to get rid of that last lingering doubt that, in the final analysis, I was the Idiot in that situation. I live with this knowledge rather less easily than one might guess. That's why I try to be such a good driver nowadays, and probably also why I get so angry with people who drive poorly.

Getting back to how all this relates to my Avatars: On the drive home after the accident, i was jittery. My time sense felt twisted and my reflexes were completly off. It's a shocking thing to have your first accident, to say nothing of the knowledge that you've just handed somebody a major blow to their lifestyle. The Driver was scarred by the event, and had practically lost all ability to function, as he fell to panic, second guessing, and general shock-related incompetence. I nearly had two more fender-benders getting home as a result. As I neared my house, sitting at a red light and unable to take control of myself, the situation was rectified in what is, perhaps, one of the most illustrative examples of my Avatars. I could easily visualize the Driver within my mind, mumbling to himself incoherently and rocking back and forth quietly, and had in fact been unable to banish the image from my mind. Into this image strode the Avatar who, in the final analysis, has always been the most capable of all of my problem solvers: Virrar, the Villain. I can't recall the exact dialogue that follows, but if I were writing Virrar saying it in a game, which is arguably how he gets all of his dialogue anyway, it would have been:

"Driver: You have failed in your duties to protect our vessel. You have demonstrated gross incompetence. This is unfortunate. If you are not capable of fulfilling your duties you will be replaced with someone who can."

My anxiety dying with the Driver, I was able to drive home safely enough, though looking back i think I continued to draw upon Virrar himself to steady my nerves.

It's been over three years since then. The incident with Ragon not long ago is the only other time that an Avatar has "died," although several have simply slowly faded away from disuse or redundancy. I have never created a new Driver, and have since done all my driving myself, which may be another reason I dislike it so much. And that's the whole story.

Today's Entry is brought to you in part by Tom Smith's "The Illuminati Polka."

As most of us are aware, there's currently a respectable sized protopanic related to the spread of bird flu throughout the world. This terror response is semi-valid on the part of most people... epidemiological psychohistory tells us that, sooner or later, a big flu outbreak will hit and kill many people, but the general consensus among the doctors I speak to is that this one won't be it. That said, most people don't have the medical training to evaluate this kind of thing (heck, *I* don't know enough about it, so Fred the Drunk American isn't going to sort fact from fiction) and the media has decided that a little panic is in our best interests, so our course is pretty well set.

Nothing in life is that simple, though. We can chalk this up to doctors' caution being used by the media to create public fear, or we can look deeper, for the vast, insidious conspiracy that's behind it. And keep looking until we've looked hard enough to find one.

When you want to race a conspiracy, you have two options. You can either start at the beginning, from the originators, and work out how they did or, or start at the result, and figure out who started it. In this case, we aren't starting off with any clues as to the people behind everything, so we have to start at the end. Consider the facts at our disposal. 1) There is a bird flu. This is a scientific fact. It is dangerous... not as dangerous as some people think, but it, like most flues, does have the potential to kill. 2) The people who are most affected by the panic at this stage are poulty producers and others who make their livings with birds. 3) If the virus spreads to humans on a large scale, the people who will profit the most in the short term are the pharmaceutical companies. In fact, they're profiting plenty now. Longer term, right-wing government officials stand to profit, if there is no pandemic, from a populace which has been driven by yet one more panic to the point where they are willing to sacrifice more freedoms. If there actually is a pandemic, the same people profit, because the mounting body count will hit the low-income people worst and widen class divisions, while the reduction in population will make the survivors easier to manage.

We see the beginnings of the conspiracy shaping up already, and we've only finished the second paragraph. Just goes to show.

So, the last stage in the conspiracy is obviously world cdomiantion. That's not much of a surprise; we take it as a given that that's the goal of all decent conspiracies. In the spreading pandemic, the world's governments collapse and right-wing milutaristic dictators come to power by blackmailing the populace into submission, a "vote for me or die of the plague" scenario. I'm going to blame the American Republicans or the Canadian Conservatives for this specifically, since the plot is obviously widespread and international, but they are undoutedly involved, although the publically-known party leaders probably aren't even aware of it. In all probability, we're looking at an international cabal of "powers-behind-the-throne" who will seive open power when the time comes. In turn, this cabal is obviously composed, not of politicians, but of powerful business lords, who, as we all know, are generally evil, right-wing monsters anyway. Again, I won't try to guess which particular business lords are responsible at this stage, partly because there's no shortage of suspects and partly because I don't want them to stumble onto this when they type their names into Google on a lazy Sunday afternoon.

A vital part of this conspiracy is the viral vector being used. This is a slow, careful plan... if you simply release a virus into the public, everything falls apart, but if it's transmitted slowly and in a controlled manner by animals, you can modulate the level of panic easily. The fact that they are using birds tells us two things. First, the rulers of the evil cabal have chocen birds because they hate birds and they see the birds dying of the flu to be an added bonusof their evil plot. This suggests that the oil transport companies are involved (we all know what they think of birds, especially sea birds). They also have the resources the smuggle birds from one continent to another without arousing suspicion when the time for the outbreak comes. The second thing we now know is that they must have some way to control the birds when the time comes, to ensure the only people infected are those they want to infect. For this, they need one of two things: either a controlling interest in the world's birdseed supply, or some sort of bird-mind-control-hypno-laser. I'd wager it's the second one, because different species of birds favour different types of seeds and you would have to spread too many types of seeds over an area to bring the birds where you need them. The bird mind control ray is just more logical.

As you can see, the deeper we get to this conspiracy, the more dark and nefarious it gets, and the wider the tentacular implications extend.

Now, we have to ask ourselves, where did the evil cabal get their mind control laser? Since the real world is defficient in James Bond Villains, we must assume they had it built; the evil companies already have the best scientists on their hidden island, after all. Presumably, to ensure that they had access to the very best equipment, IUPAC is deeply involved in the conspiracy, probably by the simple expedient of grant money. Similarly, the evil cabal needs some world authorities on avian physiology to have built their laser, so they probably control some of the major bird research stations. Since these research stations are generally located in countries such as Costa Rica and Venuzuela, where the oil companies just happen to have major stakes anyway, this makes perfect sense. For convenience sake, the laser physicists were probably brought to a secluded Carribean island to perform their research, and since the mind control ray emitter is probably quite large, it was probably built on that island and is still there. Bringing the scientists to this island not only gave them an out of the way place to work where they could send ships without raising suspicions, but also provided them with the warm, sunny climate as yet another job incentive to offer their scientists.

So, we now have an idea of who is responsible, we have a motive, we have a method, and we have traced their resources and probably also their base of operations. Having worked backwards with Holmesian cunning, we can now look forwards again and try to predict what course the conspiracy will take. To date, a small number of people in Asia have died of the bird flu, the first early cases are being found in Canadian birds (in a British Columbia duck farm, naturally... the pattern fits so perfectly!). The pharmaceutical companies have made their initial profits off of tamiflu and other drugs (they will, after all, need a solid financial basis for the later steps of the plot), and now that the first snows have begun reaching Montreal and will, in anoter few weeks, be migrating South to New York and Washington, the flu season is about to hit and the timing will be right for their plans to come to fruition. We can anticipate several likely events. The first few weeks of winter will pass uneventfully -- most of December, in fact. Only a week or so before Christmas, the first flu cases will begin to manifest. This will have the maximum impact because, first, families coming together will mean maximum emotional impact of the sickness on the victims' loved ones, and second, most of those infected will put off going to the hospital until after New years, giving the virus time to incubate and infect. People will get somewhat suspicious during December that so few birds have migrated South from the region of the U.S./Canada border and analagous areas in Europe, but no major attention will be paid to this until too late. By New Years, thanks to family dinners, hospital waiting times due to doctors on holidays, and crowded malls, the virus will have spread to nearly 1 in 10 of all people, and will be spreading exponentially. The world economies will begin to stumble by the first week of January when thousands, perhaps millions of people fail to return to work following their winter vacations, because they are too sick. By mid January, the body count will have begun to attract attention, all the more so because children and the elderly will be the ones most likely to die (did you think it a coincidence that most of the business lords are middle age?). By early February, the death toll will exceed one million and mass panic will begin to spread... anything that happens next is immaterial, since it will already be far to late to stop the conspiracy. If we are very lucky, our future will read like a Matthew Woodring Stover novel, and if we are unlucky, it will read like a game of Mutant Chronicles.

The conspiracy has not yet begun to fully mobilize, and is in delicate stages. They are most likely still recruiting the people they will need to rule the world in the wake of the virus and as such their operations will be vulnerable. If we are to change how things will go, we must act decisively and we must act NOW! And on that note, I have one message for the evil cabal, who is surely reading this even as I type it, let alone post in online.

Can I join?

Eric's note: You know, I have the weirdest feeling like today was actually supposed to be a holiday Entry of some kind. Well, I'm sure I'll remember.

It's the age old question: do I hate too much or not enough?

I've known for a good two or three years that I have trouble with anger. My problem... well, one of my problems, let's be honest... is that I take every stupid person personally. Each and every idiot I encounter in my daily life is a stressor that I can't help take personally. Part of it is that I feel I deserve to have the power to smite these stupid people, and I don't, so their continuing stupidity is a reminder to me that I'm not sufficiently powerful. The other part of it is that I just find stupidity annoying, and since the Universe and I are on rather strained terms nowadays, I can't easily forgive the number of stupid people who are out there. This in and of itself wouldn't be too big a problem except when it comes to driving... people who are otherwise intelligent and moral people become incredibly stupid when they drive, and Montreal has been rated by international organizations to be among the worst cities on Earth in terms of really stupid people. I used to believe that I hated these stupid people, but the truth is, they individually lack the ability to make me truly hate them, and together, they're too faceless to really hate effectively. I'm forced to admit that they really just get me angry, which I don't like.

Let me take a second to differentiate between anger and hate, because I personally classify them as being two different things. The basic version: hate is good and anger is bad. As with everything else, it's nice and straightforward until you try to explain it. This is a topic I've addressed briefly in this Journal a few times, notably back in August of this year and a few times before that. I've never really fully gone into what the difference is, in my mind, between hate and anger, or why I approve of one and dislike the other.

The major difference between the to is, in my mind, kind of like a chemical reaction. Anger is an endothermic reaction; to make it work,you have to supply energy to it. Anger is a draining feeling, constantly pulling at your strength. On the other hand, hatred can be likened to an exothermic reaction, which produces energy. Hate does not take energy to maintain it, the way anger does... hate provides you with energy. Anger is a weakness, a luxury for those who seek it but something to be avoided by others, who don't have the resources yto spend on it. Hate, however, is a much nicer feeling, something which can drive us to ever better things, make us stronger, faster, and better. The trick is learning to differentiate them, learning to keep them separate, and, as in all things, learning to find a proper balance of all feelings so that they strengthen you, make you better, but not control you or drive you to unfortunate actions.

When I get angry, it's frustrating to me. If I get angry at other drivers on the road, I can't do anything about it. I cna't take my anger out on them, or seek vengeance, or even take satisfaction in knowing they'll pay for their crimes in the future (except that they probably expend more gas than I do, which is only scant consolation). This leaves the anger only one thing to burn: me. I dislike anger because the situations which cause me anger, which are, I dare say, fairly rare compared to a more affective person than myself, are situations in which the anger gives me no profit but takes a lot out of me. In recent years, anger has taken up far too much of my strength and left me with absolutely nothing in return, and this is why I've been trying so hard not to feel angry for a long time. This isn't easy for me... I may feel less emotion than most of the people around me, but when i do feel, it's very hard for me to surpress the feeling. My experimentation suggests I have only two real choices: become corrupt myself, and hope that I can no longer hate them when i'm like them, or slowly and painfully use cognitive behavioural techniques to rewrite my own mind. Since I'm not prepared to become any more like the genescrapes than I absolutely have to, I've found that the CBT actually does help somewhat.

Psychology has demonstrated the power of what they call auomatic thoughts. When someone observes something, they have an automatic thought about it which is often unconcious but which, with a little awareness, we can be made aware of. Automatic thoughts have been implicated as being a major factor in depression, for example, because a person who has an overabundance of negative automatic thoughts... ascribes a negativemeaning to everything they see, automatically... is going to have a very depressing worldview. There's evidence that people are most inclined to believe whatever the first thought they have about a given topic is, even if that thought is a concious and deliberate one. The essence of automatic thought therapy is to teach someone, first to recognise their automatic thoughts, then recognise which of them are maladaptive, and finally to begin trying to have a different autpmatic thought. it's a difficult and time-consuming process and its effectiveness is debatable, but for lack of other options, I've been trying it. In essence, rather than the automatic thought of "that makes me angry" when I see someone do something stupid, I make an effort to have my first thought be "it doesn't matter." Arguably, fostering a sense of meaninglessness and inevitability isn't much healthier than anger, but at least it feels a little more pleasant, and if this thought ends up being unpleasant, it'll be equally easy for me to pick another one to try to program myself with. At the current stage, I've only been trying this reprogramming for a couple of weeks, it's it's still very much an unfinished process, but I already feel more able top drive without it utterly destroying my mood.

That covers anger. Anger is Not Happymaking.

Hate, in my opinion, is very different from anger. This may be helpfully illustrated by the difference, in psychology terminology, between a feeling and an emotion. A feeling is a brief, transient thing, triggered by a simple stimulus (usually) and with a fairly short duration. It can be very powerful, even overwhelming, but vanishes quickly. A feeling often leaves a person feeling somewhat drained, either because of direct investment of energy or due to adrenaline letdown. An emotion, on the other hand, is usually a more complex sensation, harder to describe and more individualized in its expression. An emotion may be long term, and may last decades in the case of some emotions. An emotion usually doesn't leave someone drained directly but may have profound effects on their behaviour and energy level because of the actions associated with it or the general mood states. By a system like this, anger might be caleld a feeling -- it's a brief, intense response to a stimulus -- and hate might be termed an emotion -- it's a long term, complex sensation. Anger entails a brief burst of mental activity, but hate is a slower, more quiet process, which alters, not one's thoughts, but one's way of thinking.

Whereas anger is a draining thing, which costs energy, hate is a longer term mood state and, depending on how it's used, can either drain or supply energy. Poorly managed, unbalanced hate might be little more than continuous anger, and I freely admit I've known people who existed in a state like that (and have, in fact, encouraged the develoment of this debilitating condition in some people in the past). Properly managed, lovingly nurtured, cared for and kept properly fed, watched over to ensure it doesn't grow beyond its bounds, hate is one of the most beautiful sensations known to the world. It inspires. It drives. It feeds. We've all heard stories of individuals who perform feats of strength driven by love or fear... such stories are all the more common for people driven by hate.

The challenge of hate is that most people lack the capacity to understand their hate. Like anything else, hate, allowed to grow out of control, does more harm than good. A person who loses control of their hate can all too easily lose control and commit acts that are, not only hurtful, but also stupid, and this is inexcusable. With time, practice, and dedication, however, one can learn to manage hate in a healthy manner. Hate can be kept small and healthy -- a hearth, rather than a forest fire -- and in that state, it brings warmth, happiness, strength, control, and clarity of thought. The difficulty here, as in all things, is finding the peroper balance.

And so, in recent weeks, when I have found my mood often lower than I would like, my energy levels depleted, and my hopes for the future feeling moderately doom-ish, I have to ask myself: have I been draining myself with too much hate or failing to feed myself enough? I've rocked between these two extremes non-stop for longer than I've been Eric 4.0, and while I've made progress, I have yet to find a good balance, largely because it can take a long time to decide that the effects are more harmful than helpful.

I have thus resolved to try to change my thinking for the near future. I will be endeavoring to be angry less... to change the thoughts that are caused by stupid people... and meanwhile, I will be allowing myself to hate more. In the last year and a half, or so, I've been trying to hate less, to see how well that worked for me, and while it was effective for a time, it never felt quite right and now, I'm forced to conclude, it just wasn't balanced. In the coming weeks, I will be allowing myself to draw upon my memories of the past, my feelings about the present, and my general world view. And I will Hate. I'm not going to start hating anything or anyone knew, who I didn't hate before... I'm just going to be making an effort to draw upon my hate more to help me get stuff done, whereas I might otherwise have drawn upon motivation, enthusiasm, or stored dietary sugars.

In all probability, this should cause no outward change in my behaviour at all... I have spent years surrounding myself almost exclusively with people I genuinely like, and nobody I hate is anywhere near me at this time in my life. There is not a single person in the world about whom I don't hate something, mind you, and even in those people I feel closest to, there is always at least one thing about them I truly and deeply hate, but every person I have near me currently is a positive influence on me and not a negative on, in my opinion. No, rather than an outward change, if this new balance of hate is superior to the balance I have tried to establish in the past, I will have more energy, I will generally be happier, I will have the ability to work harder to acheive my goals, and I will, just generally, be better, in my own opinion at least. If it doesn't work, I'll stop and try something else... that's the purpose of conducting experiments in the first place.

Here's to the people we despise, therefore... long may their own inept, bumbling stupidity drive us to better ourselves. And may they be crushed painfully by very heavy falling objects.

While going through some of my old files the other day, I cam across some old notes from various games. It's not often that I keep actual hard copy notes for the games I run, but I always try to keep enough written down that, if I want to remember the games in 20 years, I'll have the important details at hand. Among these notes, for example, I found scribbled character concepts for many NPCs I'd considered using in various games, plot lines I never got to try, cities the characters never needed to visit, and so sforth. For Saga of the Chronomancer, which ended on time, the stuff that got left out usually deserved to be left out, whereas for other games of mind, such as D&B: The Ragon War, which ended at a good time but while I still had planned storylines, some stuff that I never got to use was, in my opinion, good material, and I've filed away some story ideas that i might use in future 1-shots.

Speaking of one-shots, those of you reading this may e interested to know that I hope to schedule a one-shot game of some sort on or around december 29th. Before I make any form commitments, I'll need to wait a week to learn what my class schedule will be like around then, but I *do* want to run a game of some kind on the 29th. I'm accepting suggestions for game systems and letters from players saying they want in.

Getting back on track: Among the other notes I found were the original plans for Naglfr's Tower, encountered by my players during the second-year storyline of Saga of the Chronomancer. Every evil wizard needs a tower -- it's one of the Immutable Laws of fantasy -- and I was quite proud of my design for this one. Sadly,I tend to make up a lot of my games mostly on the spot, and as such the notes I still have are woefully incomplete and my memory isn't good enough to fill in the details of, for example, what types of dried goods were in the fourth room on the second floor. Luckily, I don't think the details of the specific floor-plan would be of much interest to my readers anyway, and so I present some of the original ideas thsat went into the tower, rewritten now just enough for this to qualify as an original Entry in my own mind.

In selecting his home base, Naglfr had several advantages which he made full use out of to construct a tower inaccessible to random do-gooders. Able to cross planar boundaries more or less at will, Naglfr naturally chose to build his tower on an unpopulated plane, far from where he might be stumbled across by anything multicellular. Second, not requiring food, warmth, or atmosphere to live, Naglfr could select the most inhospitable environments to provide him with natural security. The Chronomancer thus investigated the broken planes, shattered remains of worlds who had met their end and where the world, and often the very natural laws, had broken down. One such world Naglfr found was the lifeless hulk left by the depradations of an centuries-dead god of decay who had, at the last, devoured the plane's sun and slew the other gods of the world. When Naglfr found the world, its temperature had dropped far below the range of life, and indeed, the entire plane had become an ocean world, with seas composed of liquid hydrogen. Any creature not protected by powerful magics would die within instants of entering the plane, frozen solid, asphyxiated, lost in the lightless depths, or otherwise removed from being a threat to the Chronomancer's plans. As an additional benefit, the world's physical laws had been damaged by the godly conflict in the past; objects could reach a maximum speed of less than ten kilometers per hour, after which the excess kinetic energy would spontaneously transmute to sound instead of force. Any foe of the Chronomancer who found his plane, , survived its surface, and located him upon it would have to contend with the inability to move faster than a jog, whith their missle weapons rendered useless, their swords rendered slow and comical, and their spellcasting difficult at best. He would, furthermore, hear them coming. The plane suited Naglfr's needs perfectly.

On this plane, Naglfr created a vast bubble of atmosphere, large enough to contain his tower and a mile of terrain around it. The bubble kept out the bitter cold, maintaining a slightly cool oxygenated air. Little moisture was allowed in, the better to protect the Chronomancer's vast library. The surface itself he left barren and lifeless, as he had no need for plants and animals. At the venter of the bubble, Naglfr constructed his tower from the very stone of the plane. The tower rose twelve stories into the sky, its vast weight supported easily by the plane's altered forces. Moving upwards and downwards through soace was as effortless as walking across a floor to the Chronomancer, and so the tower was built vertically rather than spread out horizontally, without stairs or other climbable surfaces. Each floor of the tower was identical in layout, with four rooms, one opening through a door in each cardinal direction. The tower was protected by powerful spells blocking teleportation within its walls and defeating scrying. Naglfr's animated guards and chronomantic traps would make short work of most any invader who passed into his home.

The bulk of the rooms were taken up as storage chambers. Naglfr's sorcery had transcended most of the limits faced by mortal spellcasters but he still required material components for many spells, often in enormous quantities or of great values. Entire chambers werte taken up by papers and writing supplies, which he would fill in bursts of months at a time, recording histories, postulating changes to events, and recording the results of observations and experiments. A few small rooms were taken up by the stuff of life, for the Chronomancer would at times welcome one of his servants or another pawn to hsi tower and would offer them the things which a mortal might need to live. One door led to his dungeon, a mere four cells with few amenities; the Chronomancer rarely had a need of prisoners, and in his time in the tower kept only a handful of inmates. In one cell, though, Naglfr placed the mind-shattered remains of his former apprentice, and left him there where Paambiltimigbal could do no harm to himself or others.

The chronomancer himself would use only six rooms for the most part. He kept a modest bedchamber, for though he had no need of sleep it pleased him to have a room of his own in which he could retire and meditate. His laboratory, which contained equipment and experiments only the most knowledgable of wizards could even begin to comprehend, saw frequent use, though this chamber was used mostly for mundane castings, as Naglfr's truly powerful magic and experimentation would be conducted on other planes, where he sought to alter the timelines.

Two rooms, Naglfr set aside for his lust for knowledge, which equaled his need for power. His library spanned three full floors of his tower, and contained untold thousands of books collected from different times in history. Most of these books contained historical records of hundreds of planes, while other sections of the library covered magical texts, treatises on the theory of chronomancy, and, encoded and protected, Naglfr's own journals of his work. A small section of the library, holding only a few books carefully preserved, contained the few surviving works of art and poetry from Naglfr's home plane. In contrast to his library, where knowledge was static and unchanging, Naglfr maintained his magical recording chamber. A vast magical scrying crystal occupied one full wall of this room, and immense magical crystals grew from the floor. The crystals were magically-charged repositories of data, and through the scrying crystal, Nagflr could observe events most anywhere in the multiverse and record those he wished to nkow more about. Using this chamber, Naglfr recorded entire lifespans of the individuals he intended to use to alter the timelines, as well as comprehensive histories of citizens, countries, and even entire nations. The vast amount of knowledge at the Chronomancer's disposal came largely from this room.

Finally, one small room on the top floor of the tower, Naglfr would never enter. Within it, he had crafted a vast illusion, replicating the view from atop his old, two-storey tower on the plane of his birth, where he had lived as a mortal. Within this single roo, the air was warm and bright, and the sun shone upon great healthy trees and a sprawling meadow. It was a chamber of joy and life on a dead and frozen world, and in eight hundred years Naglfr never set foot beyond the rooms threshold save the day that he crafted the illusion. It was the last lingering relic of his life as Rufshaad, and none but the Chronomancer knew if he could not bear to enter the room because he had not yet earned it by saving his world or if, deep down in his soul, where even he could not see it, Naglfr could not bear the thought of despoiling the memory of his world with his own evil presence.

And those are my notes, fleshed out a bit and turned into complete sentences. The tower ended up being modified for the game itself, and some elements ended up being moved to another fortress entirely, but I really enjoyed coming up with this one and it was fun to use. Seeing the look on my players' faces as they realised they'd teleported into a world so cold that the hydrogen had liquified, for example, was marvelous... I was merciful and ruled that, illogically, they didn't simply die instantaneously, but they didn't come back until they'd found some amulets of adaptation. Moments like that are what storytellers live for, I think... so many of the story we read (and play in) are reminiscent of other books and movies, it's sometimes hard to feel that you've done something the players didn't really see coming. Knowing that you pulled a trick on your players that they've never had done to them before is immensely rewarding as well as fun.

I have been known in the past to hit people who say that Star Trek is better than Babylon 5.

It's a curious thing, but I know of at least two people, besides me, who have spent much of the recent past systematically watching season 2 of Babylon 5. These people are scattered in different cities, and are both old friends of mine, and by sheer chance have been watching the same episodes as me. Two of the three of us have been watching the episodes again in part because we're exposing neophytes to the series for the first time (and in both cases, the're falling in love with it, naturally). Now, I've never needed an excuse to watch babylon 5 -- I've seen most of the 110 episodes at least three times and every episode at least twice -- but in this particular case, I'm watching the series with my girlfriend who's never seen it before, so it's a doubly good use of my time. It's a good thing she's enjoying the series, too, since I probably wouldn't be able to have a long-term relationship with someone who didn't like Babylon 5... I wish I was joking. When a girl who's tired and sick refuses to go home until she's gotten to see what Kosh looks lie outside of his encounter suit, I know she's a woman after my own heart.

More important than streaking angels, however, was that the other night, we watched "Comes the Inquisitor." This is one of my very favouritest episodes of the entire series, which actually says quite a lot. Most of the people I know who have watched the series hold this episode in very high regard, and rightly so, but I love this episode for my own personal reasons, which ought to be immediately apparent to anyone who both knows me and has seen the show. It would not be innacurate to suggest that Wayne Alexander played a formative role in my current existence. One might even say that he helped me decide who I am.

For the benefit of people whose educations have been woefully deprived of Babylon 5, I shall mercifully give a bit of background about the episode in question. For my purposes, you don't need to know anything at all about the show, the characters, the plot, the metaplot, science fiction, or much of anything else at all. What matters is that a four hundred year old Victorian gentleman in a well-tailored suit with black, gem-headed cane giving him formidable powers and abilities asks people who they are and tortures them when their answers don't satisfy him. The Inquisitor, Sebastian, physically bears a not-so-surprising similarity to the images and archtypes at the core of my self-image. More importantly, his questions ought to sound quite familiar to anyone who has had a real conversation with me. Sebastian is also played by a man who gave up a career in neurosurgery to act instead, which resonates quite strongly with me nowadays.

I'm still debating if there's going to be any point to this besides informing you all of what I was watching on TV recently. If a point develops, you'll be the first to know.

One of the real advantages of having one's identity formed so much by elements of popular culture, as is common among gamers, is that one can in a sense share the defining moments of one's life with someone else, reliving them and meditating anew upon their significance. If the basis of my identity was a philosophy or a faith, I couldn't effectively share that with someone else. There are a respectable number of Forsteri worshippers besides me, but none of them live anywhere near me and each came to the Path in a very different way; if my faith was the most important part of who I was, I couldn't possibly share it (or at least, the feeling of finding it) with someone else because I couldn't relive the moments when I discovered faith. On the other hand, the self-obsession and inquisitiveness which drive me today are grounded firmly, more than anything else, in Babylon 5, which means that I can literally share some of the defining moments of my life with someone else just by watching the show with them. If this is someone who has never seen the show before, that's so much the better, because they won't have any preconceptions about it or any previously held opinions about particular episodes and characters. "Comes the Inquisitor" is more than just being 42 minutes (did we all catch another number recurrence there?) of entertainment -- it's going back to the heart of Who I Am and how I became that way, and sharing that self-defining memory with another person. It's a very special and powerful moment, for me at least. And, since we haven't even started watching season 3 yet, I've got some of the best of those moments still to come!

And when at last we finish watching Babylon 5, there's Earthworm Jim and Freakazoid.

This past week, I found myself at Concordia waiting for a game to start. I had a good hour before my game was slated to begin, and during that hour, another game was already running, which I had no desire to sit in on, both because I didn't want to impose and because the game itself didn't really grab my interest. One of the great pleasures of the Games Club has always been its proximity to the library, so since I didn't really feel like taking a walk to the local gaming shop (which would only have killed half an hour anyway, including the time I'd spend gazing longingly at all the Stuff), I went into the Stacks and looked for something I hadn't read before. Now, Concordia has a remarkable library but it's sorely limited in terms of non-academic reading. There's some Discworld stuff on the shelves, for example, but it's only plays, and all adaptations of novels I'd read. They had only one entry in their system for Neil Gaiman, and it was a film he'd taken part in as opposed to a book or something. The library does carry several prestigious journals of parapsychology, but they haven't receiived any new issues since the early 80's and I've alreday read most of what they do have. Finally, the library's modest collection of Woody Allen books, which I've enjoyed in the past and would have happily reread, were all currently out or stolen. I was carrying around 2 novels of my own plus school notes which I could have read, but I wanted something I couldn't have opened up at the games club. Fortunately, when all else fails, I can always count on Concordia's library to have one of the great bastions of literature which I can fall back on no matter what, and which, even in my darkest moods (which this most assuredly was not; I'd been having a lovely day balancing studying with watching Babylon 5) has the capacity to bring a little, contented smile to my face.

So I spent an hour reading some of my favourite stories from The House on Pooh Corner. This is the very definition of "time well spent."

Oddly enough, I don't actually own a paper copy of a single story by A.A. Milne, despite the fact that I freely admit that he's one of the finest writers to ever live. I've always intended to get a real, decent paper copy of one of the many printings of the complete stories (and possibly also the poems) and while I've actually bought the extra-nifty 600-page 75th anniversary Complete Tales and Poems for someone else as a birthday gift, I've never gotten around to getting a copy for myself. Every now and then I take a look online for a good, cheap copy, but whereas a careful surfer can find Discworld and Warhammer novels in perfect condition for a buck apiece, with Winnie the Pooh, you get what you pay for, and I'm not prepared to pay more than 10 dollars or so for my own copy, even if it does come with the original Shepard illustrations. I do, after all, have all four books in pdf, but like my Principia Discordia, this is one of those cases where there's something about having the book in real paper that's extra special.

It may come as a surprise to some people to know that I have a deep and abiding love of the whole Winnie the Pooh mythos (some might say, pantheon). My tastes in humour tend to run towards either the highly educated wit, the infliction of comical pain, the Pythonic absurdity, or all of the above, generally, and on the surface, Milne's works are none of these. They aren't any of those things deep down, either. Milne's work is happy, even sappy, and because so much of his work exists in the form of poem, the one art form which I almost universally fail to appreciate, anyone who knows my general tastes could be forgiven for assuming that I have, at best, a casual disregard for Pooh et al. The fact is that while I normally hate the sickening sweetness of most childrens' stories, *especially* ones filled with songs laden with nonsense lyrics, Milne's work has always had some extra, mysterious quality that no one has ever been able to understand, explain, or replicate. No other author could have made Pooh endearing... our loyalty to him aside, the fact remains that, in the stories, he's as dumb as a rock. No other author could have made Piglet seem cute or could have stuck an ambiguously homosexual character into a child's storybook in the early 20th century. No other author could have gotten away with making Eyeore quite so arrogant and condescending without offending parents, if not children. And, of course, no other author could have created Tigger without us wanting to strangle him. It isn't that Milne's stories have a childlike innocence to them (which they really, really don't if you read them carefully) or that they're universally happy (which they very certainly are not). Milne, some only a tiny number of authors in history, infuses his work with something indefinable that makes people who read it see it as good, despite all common sense otherwise. I defy you to find another author, save perhaps Gaiman himself, whose very writing style is so able to grab a hold of the reader, independent of what is being written about.

One thing that I ought to specify is that these admittedly strong opinions do not come, as they would in most people, from my having grown up on Pooh stories. I saw some of the cartoons when I was younger but never really got into them. I read a handful of the stories when I was very young, but failed utterly to appreciate them (after all, they had no fight scenes, let alone lightsabers). As I grew older, I developed an appreciation for Tigger's bouncyness and general instability, but the other characters always rather got on my nerves. It has only been in the last four years or so that, as with so many things, I really developed an appreciation for the stories. I've observed in the past that kids' shows are wasted on kids, and I stand by this as being just as true here. No three year old can be expected to appreciate the depth, subtlety, and nuance of these stories... if you want to really see if you like Winnie the Pooh, you have to reread the stories when you're older and have a knwledge about your culture against which to compare them. Only then are you qualified to say if you like Milne's characters, and if you don't like them, don't tell me, because I'll have to hurt you.

I take it as a given, of course, that most people today have at least a passing familiarity with the major Pooh characters. They may now be familiar with Small the Beetle or the ferocious and enigmatic woozles, but they at least know of the four characters listed above. Tragically, most people have never read the stories themselves, but have gotten everything they know about Winnie the Pooh from the various Disney cartoons which, though usually fun, lack much of the charm and all of the power of the storybooks. Consider Tigger, probably the single most popular of all Hundred Acre Woods characters. In the cartoons, Tigger's first appearance involves lots of bouncing and singing. In the book, Tigger's first appearance is nothing more exciting than a slow walk from house to house trying to find a food Tigger enjoys. No one argues what, precisely, is wonderful about Tiggers. None the less, the storybook version is quite a lot more charming than the cartoons. But I couldn't possibly explain why.

How are the stories different from the cartoons? Tigger is not the only one presented differently. Eyeore is the favourite character of most people I know, because they empathise with his sadness and Zen-like acceptance of All Things. I contrast, I like Eyeore because, not only does he consider himself smarter than the other characters (except Christopher Robin), he tells them this, to their faces. Eyeore does not merely tell Pooh that Pooh is not as smart -- he tells Pooh, outright, that Pooh is an indiot. Frequently. Pooh himself is different from his cartoon incarnation; he's just as stupid as Eye says, stupid enough that he fails to recognise that he is being insulted when it happens. In the original stories, Pooh is so stupid that it's quite a wonder he can speak English, and in fact, he only does so with considerable difficulty. Despite this, he's a charming enough character that even I, a vocal and unrepenetent Darwinist in the area of intelligence, have a warm and squishy place in my heart for Pooh Bear. There is no logic to this, just the sheer power of the stories.

So all of you who have never read the original Milne books should go out and try them. Be patient if they don't charm you at first. You can find the books online, but this is one of the rare cases when you really should have them bound in your hands, and if at all possible, with the original ilustrations and watercolours. The stories of Winnie the Pooh are quite special and in my opinion truly unique. Yes, they are sorely lacking in ninjas and giant robots and, while they do have killer weasels, you never see them, but what truly sets these books apart from other works is that A.A. Milne's stories don't need them.

For today's Entry, I had briefly considered writing about depression, how it has epidemiological properties very much like any infectious disease, how it can affect our lives when more than 50% of those close to us suffer from some form of emotional disorder, and how everyone, even those who generally really enjoy being themselvs, can have an off week or two. It's come to my attention, though, that despite the length of time for which I've been writing this Journal, and the high level of trust I have for people who read this relative to most of the people who don't, I really don't have it in me to self-disclose about that kind of thing, and besides, it wouldn't have been very funny. Instead, let's talk about sound effects.

Webster's defines "onomatopoeia" as 1: the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it (as buzz, hiss) and 2: the use of words whose sound suggests the sense. It's derived from the Greek words for "name" and "make" (which, interestingly, shares the same root as the word "poet", suggesting that the derivation of the word poet may be "I make stuff" or "a guy who makes stuff"). The definition of the word sounds more complex than it is -- simply, put, it means a word which sounds like wht it means. For example, "bed" is not an onomatopoeia, because the word is short and hard and does not sound soft, fluffy, and comfy. In contrast, squish is an onomatopoeia, because the very sound of the word suggests something small and fluid filled being compressed until it bursts and the whole mass being smooshed between toes. The word bed does not sound like a bed, but the word squish sounds like something squishy. This is less circular logic than it initially sounds, because "bed" is derived from Latin and Greek words (for resting place and, before that, the verb "to dig") whereas squish is derived from the word squash, which is derived from German but has evolved because, quite simply, people in history thought it was a very descriptive term for the sound made by their mace when they crushed, put down, supressed, flattened out, squeezed, pressed, and all the other verbs which are effectively synonyms of squish itself.

Now, I take it as a given that pretty much everybody who reads this is familiar with the old Batman TV show from the 60's. Even if you haven't ever seen the show (or, god forbid, the feature film, the one with the inexplicably exploding sharks), you probably know about some of the many things which have made the show go down in history, such as Frank Gorshin's laugh, Adam West's evocative performances, and, of course, the sound effects during the fight scenes. If you look at other fight-filled shows from the time, such as Get Smart or The Prisoner, which were by and large expected to appeal to very similar audiences, combat scenes are generally done with fairly low-key sound effects. My guess would be that this was based on people's sensibilities being more delicate back then -- nobody had yet been desensitized with the exagerated punch-noises that began to emerge in the detective shows of the 70's. What made Batman unique was that, instead of simply playing a canned sound of the satisfying crack of mano a cabeza bone on bone, they put splash panels right on the tv screen, in the most garish colours possible, and played a dramatic chord.

Interjection: For the benefit of those who don't read comics and sociological texts about comics, a splash panel is what you call it when an entire panel is taken up by one visual or sound. In this case, taking up the entire TV screen with an explosion and the word "pow" constitutes somebody's actually fairly creative attempt to convert the effect of a splash panel into a live media. Nowadays it looks pretty stupid, but as a theoretical method of making the show feel more like a comic, it was really quite brilliant.

The point of all that is that they didn't just put any ol' sound effects into those explosions. For the most part, they tried to use words which accurately reflected the sound you would be hearing if you were in the room with the pugilists. Words like wham and pow are very basic onomatopoeia, perhaps with just a bit or artistic liscence. Such logic doesn't justify the creators of the Batman show occasionally throwing the word "zap" into the fight scenes; I attribute this either to Batman having a taser hidden in his glove or to that being what a "wham" sounds like if you're on the receiving end and the punch causes brain damage to your auditory cortex.

This brings us to the sound effects of the modern day and, more importantly real life. We may not have the advantage of film editors who are able to cut'n'paste big, splashy graphics into the middle of our lives, but there are, none the less, certain onomatopoeitic words which we can encounter in more or less daily life. Quite a lot of words are derived from onomatopoeitic roots. The word hacker, for example, is derived from the sound made by someone typing at high speed at an old keyboard. Mor eimportant than that, however, is one of my very favourite of all words: thump. Webster's dictionary actually has a definition for thump, which I find oddly surprising and disconcerting when I suppose I really ought not to. They tell us that thump is defined as "a blow or knock with or as if with something blunt or heavy; also: the sound made by such a blow. To strike or beat with or as if with something thick or heavy so as to cause a dull sound, to pound, knock, whip, or thrash, and to produce (music) mechanically or in a mechanical manner." The definition is about 50% good, in my opinion. On another fun note, try typing some of these words into a thesaurus some time -- it's amazing how many words in the English language have the basic meaning of "to beat soundly with or as if with a stick."

Thump is a very special word, and not just because it means what it sounds like. Thump is the sound of many forms of happiness, be it the dropping of a heavy book on the floor or the falling of an enemy's body. The thump is among the most satisfying of all sounds to the human ear, as well as being very fun to say. Conduct this simple experiment: Select a class, office, or other room where a rival or enemy of yours tends to walk by you. Wait until they are walking by and appear distracted. As they walk by, trip them. Under ideal circumstances -- i.e., assuming the person in question hasn't been taught how to fall safely -- they will make a distinctive sound when they hit the floor. This sound is known as a "thump." In the event that your subject has good reflexes or has been taught how to absorb the impact of falls, you should proceed to stripe them repeatedly with something large and heavy before they havetime to regain their footing. Once they have been rendered compliant, there is the added benefit of you being able to lift them and drop them on the floor repeatedly, allowing you to replicate your experiment under a variety of conditions. Using advamced techniques, you may attempt to create variant sound effects, such as the thud, the crack, and perhaps even the elusive thunk, but most people attempting this experiment for the first few times will most easily capture a strong, resonant thump.

Thump is actually a catch-all term for a variety of very similar sounds. Ideally, a thump is a deep, resonant sound which persists for just over one second in a standard room temperature and pressure environment, and is most easily evoked by one hard substance colliding with one moderately hard substance. Because of the precise frequency of the sound, it exists at almost the precise range for which human hearing has maximally evolved; this makes a thump very easy to hear and very pleasant to most listeners. Most importantly, though, when one hears a thump, one knows beyond doubt that something has been thumped. This is because the sound itself and the mood, the idea, the very texture and flavour of the sound are all perfectly summed up by the English word thump itself. Even among other onomatopoeic words, the word thump is special in how well it captures the concept it attempts to describe. Of all words in English, only a handful of very special words, such as noodle and fnord, are more onomatopoeic.

The other day, someone asked me what really interesting sins, excluding murder, I'd gone my whole life without ever comitting. Despite my occasional claims otherwise, I've never really committed apostacy, and I have never, even once, deliberately broken up a couple, but neither of those are particularly interesting sins. The most interesting sin that I've never comitted is actually simony, although why I've never comitted this one is actually beyond me.

Simony, Webster tells us, is the act of buying or selling an office within the church. It's also often applied to the buying and selling of holy relics, or selling items which aren't holy but claiming that they are. The general idea here is that it's not nice to make a profit off of something holy and it's not nice to treat holy things like merchandise. This is just one of the many sins which come to us from the name of Simon Magus, another popular one being magic in general. In the bible, Magus is a sorcerer who is converted to That Other Religion and, not quite grasping the concept behind it, tries to buy a blessing from one of the apostles. I've never been entirely sure if Magus is supposed to be cast as a sympathetic or unsympathetic character, but my general opinion is that he was just an idiot, magecraft aside. It's also somewhat interesting to observe that in the bible itself, he's only referred to as Simon, but it's generally accepted that his last name was Magus; I've always been fascinated by the way that totally inexplicable additions get added to the holy texts of religions so easily.

Enthusiasts of Melmackian culture may also recognize simony (or, more precisely, simonization) as the technique used to slay a hampire, wherein one poisons the spice-sensitive monster by infusing one's blood with parsely, sage, rosemary and thyme. Sadly, such things are not the topic of today's Entry, but if I ever get around to actually running WoD: HALF, then this may be useful knowledge to have.

The most common forms of simony in current times is the buying and selling of religious objects, rather than jobs and offices. I do tend to assume that there's a lot of buying and selling of high offices in the Church, but nowadays there just aren't enough powerful positions in the world to make the amount of buying and selling really significant. On the other hand, the world market for "genuinely" holy Stuff, be they ancient icons or jeweled crosses, is quite vast, and there's a respectable profit to be made selling such things if one can get a supply to meet the demand. The tricky part here is the relatively small number of holy relics whih are still around nowadays -- few and far between are the corpses of saints whose finger bones haven't already been stolen over the long centuries, and the really valuable religious memorabilia is today held by either wealthy collectors or museums. Obviously, the difficulty of getting into the simony business is keeping people from comitting the sin more than any actual morals are.

This leaves young, go-getting entrepreneurs with one option: make their own holy Stuff. It's harder to find real buyers for your shroud if someone's image is drawn on in crayon instead of divine intervention, but someone, somewhere, will pay you for it, and if you can find that person, then you have what it takes to be a truly great salesperson already.

In keeping with this thinking, I'm putting the following items up for sale. If interested, contact me at your leisure. Payment in cash only, please, and in small bills. Prices are negotiable but will not be haggled below the "unreasonable" range.

Forsteri's Pebble: This small rock comes guaranteed personally blessed by the priests of the Great Penguin. All Pebbles come with a certificate of authenticity and have spent at least 42 hours on holy ground within Imperial territory. Each Pebble has a unique shape and is utterly unlike any other rock anywhere on this or any other planet. Forsteri's Pebbles will be shipped out freshly immersed in holy water, blessed, prayed over, and used to bookmark the entry for "vampire" in a D20 monster book.

The Holy Brick: A brick embodying the holiness of both creation and destruction, this hallowed brick is guaranteed to have been used both to build a small wall and to smash an action figure to tiny bits. Each Holy Brick will be reconsecrated through breaking something within 24 hours of it being shipped to you. Your Holy Brick has been enchanted with the ability to Smite Small Insect once each day and will serve you well no matter what use you try to put it to (except as a flotation device, anti-gravity unit, or source of nutrition). For a small extra fee, your Holy Brick will be shipped to you along with the broken remains of the toy it was used to break.

Ashes of the Plush Martyr: Previous orders for this item have been calcelled due to a misprint in previous sales brochures and a threatened lawsuit by Marty, who works in the marketing department. This new issue of the Ashes of the Plush Martyr is a small measure of the ashes of a genuine stuffed toy who, before its incineration, embodied the spirit of its faith and was burned by non-believers rather than recant its beliefs. Ashes will arrive in your hands practically still warm from the martyrdom. Prices vary according to the weight of ash desired; the martyr's remains will be carefully and lovingly arranged to look like flowers for a moderate extra fee.

Cleric's Hair: For a fraction of what you would pay for a similar relic from a long-dead priest, you can now purchase hair guaranteed to have come from the head of a current or past High Priest of the faith. Single hairs will be blessed, attached to holy paper with a consecrated wax seal, and carefully sealed in plastic to ensure their safety. Small locks of hair are available at lower prices the more strands you purchase; limit of 5 strands per customer.

Ordination: Previously, ordination within the Church of Forsteri was a long, difficult process requiring that an applicant undergo intensive training and demonstrate an advanced knowledge of philosophy, religion, history, popular culture, and moral thinking. Now, you can receive the same ordination by writing a short exam and paying for the cost of your ordination ritual. Ten minutes of work and a modest fee can earn you a place in the clericdom of Forsteri, bringing you prestige, glory, honour, and possibly even the ability to repel the undead. Actual belief in Forsteri is an asset and but not required; cost of ordination varries with test scores.

If this actually works, I'll be publishing a much longer list of offers in the future. Buy now, while supplies last and before law enforcement organizations find this page!

If you were to ask him, Aristophanes would tell you that the essence of comedy is the exaggeration of everyday events into improbable situations. You wouldn't understand that he was telling you this, of course, because you don't speak ancient Greek, but the important thing is that he'd be trying to explain it, and it's the thought that counts.

It is incumbent upon we who seek to make others laugh to ponder, from time to time, the nature of humour. There are so many different forms of comedy in existence that, as I observed in one of the very first Entries in this Journal, it's not even really accurate to group offorms of funny into a single category such as humour, because there are such vast differences between them that they are basically different things. It's said that the Inuit have a huge number of words for snow, all from the root word "aput," because snow is such a huge part of their lives that the subtlle differentiations of different types of slush can have a profound effect upon their days. Similarly, humour is so vast, rich, and diverse in our lives, and so important to it, that it's actually rather strange that our language has so few words for humour. Of course, we might differentiate between jokes that are clever, amusing, funny, hilarious, and so forth, but these words fail to capture, for example, the remarkable difference between the humour of a Bill Paxton dramatic role, the humour of Tom Smith's "Seven Drunken Nights in Space," the humour of Earthworm Jim, the humour of Robert Hays in Airplane, and the humour of someone falling down a staircase and breaking their leg. These are all things that elicit laughter (not necessarily all from the same person), but are such different things that grouping them all under the label of "comedy" seems to me to be not only disrespectful but also anthropologically short-sighted.

I suspect that there may be a master's thesis hidden in the preceeding paragraph, but sadly, it's not in my field. If anybody reading this is looking for topics for a grant application, though, I expect to see my name in the acknowledgements after you publish.

Comedy, in the modern form, was invented by the Greeks, just like most other things valuable to Western culture. Comedy evolved convergently elsewhere, of course, but Greece is where we first see the deliberate crafting of a story with the intent to make an audience laugh and enjoy themselves. From Greece, the practice spread to Egypt, Europe, Asia and so forth. Before about the 5th or perhaps 6th century BCE, comedy, for all intents and purposes, didn't exist. There were travelling bards who tried to bring about laughter, but it wasn't really a widespread practice. The dominant form of entertainment was tragedy, as is evident from most of the Greek myths, and tragedy was the only form of emotion-evoking art in existence. There was, of course, gladitorial combat, which might be classified as the earliest attampts at comedy, but we prefer not to get into the implications of how modern culture reflects ancient arenas, because it's depressing.

It is noteworthy, particularly to gamers, that the very first form of comedy ever devised by the Greeks was parody. Ancient Greek society revolved in large part around the theatre and the poets -- basically, the entertainers. The great playwrites were some of the most powerful people back then, and huge competitions would be held wherein two well-known authors would both put on plays and see who got the strongest audience favour. It's unclear exactly who first devised comedy, but it appears to have evolved, not out of an attempt to make the audience laugh, but as an attempt to make the opposing author look bad. In essence, the earliest in history comedies appear to have been nothing more than stories where one author would put one of their rivals in as the main character and then cause all manner of terrible things to happen to him. Nobody had yet invented the subtle use of wordplay -- nobody had yet invented the pratfall -- but, by totally exagerating otherwise normal situations to the point of ridiculousness, the comedians discovered that people would laugh at the sheer absurdity of the story (and, more importantly, would somehow be swayed by this that the rival author really was as stupid as portrayed in the play). In this sense, The Naked Gun and Get Smart are closer to being pure and true comedy than most stand up performers, because they take preconceived cultural notions and images and exagerate them until they become silly and funny.

Culture, of course, evolves in a Lamarckian fashion as well as a Darwinian one, and so too humour evolved. By the time of Socrates, sarcasm and irony had clearly been invented, and had in fact nearly reached the same richness that it had today. Ancient Greek, as a language, was less conducive to sarcasm, wordplay and so forth, but modern languages have evolved with such things in mind, and this is the only factor which makes irony easier to wield today than back then. Similarly, the exaggerated daily situtions rapidly evolved as authors tried to exagerate more and more situations, and thus happened upon the invention of toilet humour, physical humour, junrujy comedy and the prop act. It is interesting to note that all historical evidence suggests that the burp joke evolved *after* the invention of the sophisticated verbal rebuke; despite all logic, South Park is a more evolved and developed form of humour than Monty Python, and sodomy jokes are more modern than paragraph-long wordplays on someone's name. Whatever an author saw made people laugh got used in the next play and by the other authors who were watching, and thus comedy spread far and wide quickly.

What implications does it have for us, then, to understand the origin of comedy? First and foremost, one should never underestimate the value of knowing what people used to think was funny, just because it's usually still things people think are funny. Sure, modern plays are lesslikely to have Zeus appear at the end to offer moral condemnation of the villain, but other than that, the things we laugh at aren't much different than the things the Greeks were laughing at 2500 years ago. As any comedian will tell you, if you want to make someone laugh, do whatever the comedian who was on before you did.... just don't let the audience catch on that it's the same joke. The Greeks found that a few things consistently made people laugh, and the first and foremost was simply the violation of expectations. People form expectations of where an idea or story is going to go, and if you can go in another direction at the right moment, their brains can't make sense of the information. Unable to properly process the data, they respond to the cognitive dissonance by laughing. This is the basis for why exagerating daily events is funny -- people will watch and recognise that the situation is nonsensical relative to their own understanding of the world and process that as "funny." This is why it takes babies time to learn what's funny; before they can laugh, they have to experience enough of the universe to understand that something Should Not Be.

Of course, the Greeks also learned that people who are faced with things that horrify and disgust them will laugh to cover up their feelings of discomfort, and that's how we evolved injury-based comedy. Like the gladiatorial combats, though, we probably shouldn't dwell too much on that.