I had the misfortune this afternoon to learn that today, the 23rd of January, is apparently National Handwriting Day. This is, to say the least, not a date on my personal calendar. The day was apparently chosen because this is the anniversary of the birthday of John Hancock, the man whose greatest claim to a place in history was that he signed his name larger than his friends. On this day, which is unsurprisingly celebrated mostly by primary school teachers, we are supposed to consider our handwriting, meditate upon the sense of intimacy and connection which comes from a handwritten letter, and contemplate that contrary to whatever the IT specialists tell us, technology has not yet rendered handwriting obsolete. While I agree that good handwriting is important and that it won't be obsolete until we've evolved away our hands, I don't really see the point of having a day dedicated to this. I particularly don't like what I heard one person say about the day, which to paraphrase read approximately "if you haven't got good handwriting it's a sign of low intelligence and lack of time spent thinking about what you want to say." In at least one way, there may be some truth to that; in the time it takes this fellow to write that soundbyte, I'll probably have finished writing this Entry.

A word first about John Hancock himself, because this is an interesting fellow who arguably does deserve some historical recognition, and if there's to be a day based on him, all the little younglings ought to at least know that it's his birthday. Hancock was not a major figure in the American revolution for the most part, famous mostly for providing funds and logistic support to the more militant and thus better-remembered revolutionaries. He is believed to have been instrumental in the Boston Tea Party, not for attending but for being one of the first merchants to boycott British imports. Most importantly, Hancock is a wonderful example of historical chutzpah. His name is eponymous with the word "signature" because his is the very first signature on the American Declaration of Independence, and is written in particularly large, clear, and legible letters. According to legend, Hancock took great care when signing his name and made a point of writing it as best he possibly could, so that when the King of England received the document, he would not have any trouble reading whose name came first. You have to admire that sort of thinking.

So anyway...

I have terrible handwriting. This may or may not be a redundant thing for me to say, since I'm studying medicine and there's enough truth to the old joke about doctors that half of our teachers make that joke sooner or later. As I learned back in grade school, though, my handwriting is unusually bad; even compared to the worst writing my teachers ever saw, mine has always stood out as something special and noteworthy. In all likelihood, everyone reading this who had an English language education (and probably most other ones, but I can't say for sure) had to do exercises in grade school where they copied the same letter over and over again, either to practice their writing or to help them learn cursive. I vividly recall one of my professors in an early grade handing me back a sheet and telling me, "I've never had to ask anyone this before, but please throw this out and start again." In high school, one English teacher actually bought me a series of different-sized felt-tip pens and asked me to experiment with using them in our essays just in case one of them was conducive to me writing legibly; in the end, what she got were scribbles of various thicknesses and one page which she thought I had made by dripping ink droplets onto the paper. In cegep, I once received special dispensation from a professor to be the only student who was allowed to write our written-in-class term-paper on a computer, because she knew she would never be able to read it otherwise. Nowadays, teachers are rarely bothered by my handwritting, but rarely am I ever asked by a fellow student if they can borrow or copy my notes; every once in a while, I will actually be asked what alphabet I take my notes in.

Whatever the fellow misquoted above my think, though, I've got two excellent reasons for my handwritting. First, as the quote above says, I do, indeed, rarely stop to think about what I want to say, at least in any form he would recognise. I process information at about twice the speed of the average human, based on my observations, which is why I pick up data easily, come up with witty responses so fast, and can follow two or even three conversations at the same time. Add to that the fact that writing comes so easily and naturally to me that I rarely *have* to think about what I'm putting down, and really, there's nothing in the world to make me slow down and write carefully. At the speed I process, I often have to slow down my thoughts just to keep from getting too far ahead of my hands, and I'll often be halfway through a sentence when I start to unconciously write down the next sentence I have planned. Who has the time to worry about their handwriting when by the time they're writing a word they're already cognitively halfway down the line and scribbling furiously just to catch up?

The second excuse I have for my writing is that my hands shake. There's a medical reason for this, in fact -- hereditary hand tremor, actually a fairly common condition which usually doesn't appear in an individual before middle age. My father's hands shake -- he sometimes has to hold his hand steady when he signs his name -- and both of his parents always had very shaky hands (which did not stop my grandfather from being a master tailor well into his eighties, naturally). Interestingly, hand tremor is usually absent in people when their hands are not being used and only becomes apparent and disruptive when they try to do fine motor work, with the classical example being holding a cup of hot coffee or tea. I never do anything the normal way, though, so unsurprisingly my hands shake worst when I'm *not* doing anything with them, and they shake less (although they never stop) if I try writing. Clearly, the hereditary tremor has no implications for cognitive function, although I do have two or three other little neurological oddities which could conceivably be linked to it. There are all sorts of little tricks one can do to stop a shaky hand, such as exhale while doing detailed movements, but for all intents and purposes I can't draw a straight line if my life depends on it. Interestingly, because hereditary hand tremor is such a common condition, it's probably going to be a billion-dollar drug industry in another five years; my father's tried some medications which are designed to reduce tremors and they do seem to work without any noticable side effects. Still, suffice it to say, "surgeon" is not a realistic career choice for me, and in the meantime, I'm discriminated against by grade school teachers and people who celebrate National Handwriting Day.

What makes it funny to me is that the people who are probably spending the most time hearing about NHD, such as primary school children, are probably the ones who appreciate it the very least, since they're hearing about it in conjuctions with such phrases as "now we're going to do a fun exercise, so take out your pencils and paper." In contrast, there are people like me, who have handwriting so horrible that Satan copies it to make the emergency exist signs in Hell, and we're the ones who really appreciate the value of good handwriting, because we take notes at seventy words per minute longhand. Good handwriting takes *time*... who wants to wager that there wasn't a lineup behind John Hancock while other signatories waited for him to finish adding a flourish to an "H"? Good handwriting also takes focus and effort, and when you're trying to write down what you're hearing, internalize the idea, and contemplate any possible implications all at the same time, even I haven't got many cognitive resources to waste worrying if my a's look like o's (or, for that matter, d, b, c, p, q, g, j, u, v, x, and t's.). I probably could have better handwriting if I put the effort into it, and in the future when the things I write will have to be legible to other people I'm sure I'll put the effort in and maybe even ritualistically sacrifice an eraser on January 23rd, but for now I've got better things to do.

Possibly the single most remarkable thing about medicine is that you have the opportunity to see things few humans ever observe, or at least, don't see from a position they get to appreciate. Case in point was today's "field trip" to a local gastroenterology department, where, in groups of five, students all had the opportunity to observe a gastroscopy -- wherein a camera is inserted down someone's throat to examine the esophagus, stomach, and duodenum -- and a colonoscopy -- which is used to examine the bowels. This was hardly the first time that I'd seen these procedures performed, but each time is a new experience and I took some different observations this time versus last time. Last time, for example, the most interesting thing i observed was that the topical anaesthetic used by the doctor was produced by the company I had spent the preceeding summer working for. This year, the most interesting observation was that the doctor mindwiped the patient after the procedure.

I'll give people a moment to debate how figuratively I'm speaking.

Because having a camera inserted two or three feet along any body orifice can be moderately unpleasant, the colonoscopy procedure is generally accompanied by painkillers. A variety of drugs may be used to help the patient cope with discomfort. Depending on the doctor's prefence, almost any pain-killer might be used, but most of the drugs used share two common traits. First, they reduce the amount of pain which a patient experiences; based on the noises of discomfort which I've heard coming from patients, most of them don't do this very well. The second effect is the interesting one: most drugs administered during colonoscopy cause retrograde amnesia, preventing the memories formed during the colonoscopy from being stored in long-term memory. The patient may be in a tremendous amount of pain during the procedure, but afterwards they'll remember none of it. Current medical thinking is that this ends up being pretty much the same thing, since humans define their life through hindsight and not, usually, at the present moment. It was with some considerable surprise that I found myself experiencing a negative emotional reaction when I had this theory explained to me -- or possibly, my reaction was to the way the doctor dismissed the patient's discomfort by turning to the students, chuckling, and saying "it doesn't matter, he probably won't remember any of this anyway."

I'm the first to admit that my ethics are, perhaps, a tad lax. I lie and cheat my way through life quite happily, and the only reason I don't add theft to the list is that I worry that I might start to develop feelings of guilt in the future and prefer not to take the chance. I don't advocate going out of one's way to hurt others, but I've done it myself when it's been deserved. I don't place much intrinsic value on human life or freedoms, and, deep down, part of the root of my wanting to rule the world is a desire to stamp my boot on all of you. I don't object to mind control per se; I don't think we ought to deprive people of free will, but if I were a telepath I'd certainly take the occasional liberty with others' brains. Curiously, though, I today had a gut reaction that I was seeing something which was "wrong" in a not-wholly definable sense; something about the idea of erasing a patient's memories as a form of post-hoc pain-relief struck me as, not necessarily, Evil, but certainly not paladinic. The absurdity of this situation is compounded by the classmates I was with; I know for certain that several of the people who were there are bright, caring, intrinsically merciful and human-loving Good Souls, but they seemed to see nothing at all wrong with mindwiping this helpless human. Maybe I'm not cold and unemotional, I'm just contrary.

It is, of course, worth considering this from the patient's perspective. The patient almost certainly does not want to remember how painful the colonoscopy was. Most patients probably don't want to remember having had a colonoscopy at all, given the aversion most people have to the idea. You can interview two people who have undergone this sort of procedure and almost invariably, the one who was in pain but remembers nothing will report that they had a more pleasant experience than the person who felt no pain but remember vividly the sensation of having a prehensile length of rubber slithering through their guts. I wouldn't say that I take issue with the mindwipe, therefore, or at least, not in and of itself. In part, I take issue with the idea of using a mindwipe as an alternative to pain alleviation -- although this isn't really the point at issue either, since any drug that causes retrograde amnesia is probably also an analgesic (no pun intended) and so is reducing the patient's pain quite a bit below what it would be without medication. In point of fact, I must point out that the drugs did do a pretty good job of knocking the patient out, and while he was clearly in pain during the procedure, he also appeared to be unconcious through much of it.

At heart, I think the part I took issue with was the way the doctor laughed off the patient's discomfort and told *us* that he wouldn't remember anything; he didn't bother adressing that to the patient or, for that matter, saying it in the patient's native French, which the doctor switched to when speaking to the patient. Dear god, what if they really *are* teaching me to be empathic? I have to get out of this program while it's still reversible...

Conclusion: Do I take issue with causing the patient pain? No, not really, given that it was for good reason and, in any case, I didn't know who he was and so his pain doesn't mean much to me one way or another. Do I take issue with mind control and memory-wipes? Not particularly, no, and in fact I'm a big proponent of their use for the right causes, and I personally hope to indulge in them in the future. Do I take issue with using drugs that prevent memory formation rather than more completly block pain? Heck, no, since that seems to be the way most patients prefer it, and since the drug does kill all the pain it can too, at least what pain remains isn't there for lack of trying to alleviate it.

I take issue with doctors who act like jerks. I feel better having reached this conclusion, since I've always hated people who act like jerks, medically-trained or otherwise. Now that I have that out of the way, I can go back to imagining how I would torture people who drive badly.

I've observed in the past that as near as I can tell I'm the most religious person in my primary social circle. Depending on one's point of view, this may or may not be quite a claim on my part, and whether this is something to aspire to or not is equally subjective. Tonight, we take a moment to consider what precisely religiousness is, how it might be measurable, and whether I am, indeed, full of it.

My dear friend Webster gives us a handful of usefull definitions to start from. First, Webster defines "religious" as "1: relating to or manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality or deity; 2: of, relating to, or devoted to religious beliefs or observances; 3 a : scrupulously and conscientiously faithful." It is interesting to consider that this definition encompasses two distinct categories of faith: belief in a reality/deity and belief in an organization/belief. The definition, presumably, strives to encompass concepts such as spirituality, which don't necessarily involve faith in a particular deity or even paradigm, and modern religious people, who might attend their place of worship unfailingly but not actually believe in what they profess. To give that some context, we should note that Webster defines religion itself as including not only the common god-based worship but also personal, individualized religious philosophies -- an admirable bit of circular logic, but it does provide a useful starting point. Let's suggest that, for simplicity, "religion" includes god(s)-worship and analagous non-deity systems (spirit and ancestor worship, pantheism, animism, and yes, even the modern theoretically non-religious spiritualisms). Tempted though I might be to do otherwise, I choose not to put scientism into the category of religion, for two reasons. First, as irrational as some proponents of scientism are known to sometimes get, there is, by modern standards, more proof and support for scientism as "truth" than there is for most faiths. Second, for rhetorical purposes, it's easier for me to prove my point this way.

Psychology, of course, has long since tried to bring religion under its auspices, and for years has strived to find a way to measure "religiosity," a catch-all term for belief in anything generally inexplicable. There have been efforts made to separate "religion" -- deity worship -- from "pagans" -- nature and spirit worship -- and "nutjobs" -- crystal-lovers and Shirley McClaine. These efforts have generally come to naught, however, and these days few researchers into this area worry overmuch about whether their questionnaire measures faith in god or faith in the moon. What the questionnaire-writers do worry about, however, is whether their questionnaire measures "I love god!" or "I go to church and take naps," and the mesurements used these days are actually very good at separating those two. To psychologists, both of these qualify as forms of religiosity, and they actually have very similar health benefits and stressors, but they are still regarded as distinct. Now, I might reasonably say that I'm Jewish, because I identify with the Jewish culture, or I might say that I'm not Jewish, because I don't worship the Jewish god; by that sort of standard, I'm going to assume for the purposes of this one essay that I'm not properly Jewish and, by the same token, the athiest who takes weekly communion isn't really Catholic. That's not a pejorative separation, of course, just a sensible one; you can't measure strength of faith based solely on church attendence if you compare faiths that don't all have churches.

There are two small but interesting asides to toss in at this point. First, Webster has its own definition of religiosity, which reads "religious, especially: excessively, obtrusively," which is rather different from the definition taken by psychologists. Second, as I've observed in this Journal before (although not in about 2 years), psychologists have always had trouble separating people who score high on "I believe in god" from people who score high on "I see purple wombats in my bathtub." After all, they're both going to check "yes" to a lot of questions that make them sound crazy, like "all of my actions are watched by forces beyond my control" and "my getting good luck in the future depends on me lighting candles from left to right and never right to left."

So, to quickly summarize our working definition: a religious person is someone who earnestly believes that there is some higher power, force, effect, or concept and who chooses to perform as many of the rites, rituals, or prayers associated with that paradigm as possible. We exclude atheists (though their belief may be just as powerful and just as irrational, they don't per se believe in anything specific) and agnostics (who, being uncertain, by definition probably do not have any single powerful belief). We further exclude people who perform rituals without belief in the forces or rationale behind them; they worship, if anything, only a cultural institution, which is good for both mind and soul but irrelevant for our purposes tonight.

Now, from age four to seventeen, I was enrolled in religious school. Not even counting being born in a repectably faithful household, with four genuinely devotedly religious grandparents encouraging celebration of the holidays, for more than half of my life-span I was surrounded by people who were very religious. We can choose to assume that most of my classmates in these schools were not "genuinely" religious, although with the benefit of hindsight and a lot of "where are they now" research I can reassure my readers that, in point of fact, better than half of my formers classmates probably ended up earnestly faithful, if not ultra-orthodox. This is, however, largely irrelevant, because we're talking about my social circle, which really includes only two of the people I met during those years. In the last seven or eight years, the people I've associated with have been almost exclusively non-religious. Most have been agnostics, and few have been atheists, and the majority have merely never bothered to stop to think about such things. Of the ones who have had religion, most of them have been laypeople only -- they practice a little bit of the faith here and there, but on the whole, they don't really feel it. We do have to take a moment to consider that there's an inherent sampling bias to this argument; if I had chosen to spend my afternoons in religious clubs rather than newspapers and gamesclubs during my college years, I would undoubtedly have known more religious people. My response to this, of course, is that given who and what I am, there's no reason in the world why I would want to hang around clubs based on those themes; their religions have nothing to do with mine. The central crux which I find continually surprising is not the absence of religious people around me, but simply the fact that so few of the people I did end up associating with are strongly religious.

For the argument to stand, of course, sooner or later I have to demonstrate not just that others = low but also I = high. There's an old trick which is sometimes used when assessing someone's mental state, which is to ask the person to relate two facts, one which they know is true and one which they know is false. The person is then asked to consider how it felt to say each fact -- did it feel differently to say a true thing versus a false thing, in essence. Most people will report that they can sense a difference when they compare, for example, "cheese is made from milk" with "baseballs are made from asparagus;" the mind has an inherent grasp of when it's saying things that make no sense. Most people don't feel particularly strongly one way or the other when they say "I am religious" because most people don't consider it a statement which is *strongly* true or false. In my case, of course, saying that "I have strong faith" feels as true to me as "I hate telephones" and "I like weasels." The test breaks down a bit in my case, though, since I can also feel as though I'm telling the absolute truth when I say "most hamsters are stuffed with dynamite," which is why I'm a very good liar.

Am I religious? Let's break it down. Do I believe in god? Yes, several; depending on the day and my mood, as many as ten or twelve. Do I worship god? Yes, two of them. Do I believe I have observed evidence of god? Yes, numerous times; you get small miracles from small gods, but miracles none-the-less. Do I observe the rituals of my faith? Yes, quite reliably. Do I observe these rituals for their own sake or because of their meaning? I observe them because of their connection to my gods; without the gods, the rituals would be irrelevant. Do I have irrational and persistent sense that my religion is true? Obviously so. According to psychological definitions, I'm religious -- almost delusionally so, in fact. According to Webster I'm religious -- excessively and obtrusively at times, in fact. Most importantly, to my perspective at least, I seem to have a consistently more reliable, unshakeable, and perceptible sense of my own religious faith that other people, so from my subjective point of view, it certainly seems that I have more faith than those around me.

None of this would be quite as entertaining to me if I hadn't made up one god and come to worship the other because of Her firm stance on the subject of hot-dog buns.

As one interesting corrolary to all this, given that I'm the originator of a religion, there have yet to be any other people who have believed in it as devoutly or held to its tennets as perfectly as I have. I am, indeed, the single most devoutly religious member of my faith. I'm a religious fundamentalist (as defined by Mr. Webster, "one with an attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles"). There's some academic disagreement as to what exactly a fundamentalist is -- Wikipedia, notably, argues that a fundamentalist is someone who desires a return to ancient religious values in favour of modern secular ones, whereas the true Fundamentalist movement is a branch of Protestantim which believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible -- but I'll go with Webster on this one, in part because Wiki isn't going to have a more authoritative definition than the dictionary and in part because it's funnier. I don't believe that my faith is the only true path or that the practitioners of all other faiths are fools and damned, but I'm defintely the most strict and purist Silinist who's ever lived.

It's a lot of fun to be religious. Or maybe it's only fun for me. Holy fnords for everyone!

Given that the first playtesting session of Tea And Arguments Night is now in the process of being planned, it seems like a good time to put up the first draft of the rules for the evening, so that the current invitees (all of whom but one read this Journal) and future invitees (most of whom probably read this, and if they don't, it's their own fault) have a chance to read, ponder, suggest, critique, mock, flame, deride, worship, and otherwise access them. Ideally, there would be as few rules as possible for this sort of thing, for three reasons. First, when planning a night dedicated to intelligent and clever argument, one would in the first place be inviting people who are able to conduct themselves well without having rules restricting them. Second, I've always found rules to be generally confining, limiting, and unecessary in most situations. Third, few things restrict imagination as much as rules do; ask any D&D player who's ever tried to run up the tail of a dragon and stab it in the eye. Still, used properly, a small number of rules add richness and depth to a game without limiting what the players can do, and this is a perfect illustrative situation of how a balance in all things in excess, including otherwise beautiful chaos, can be better than excess. A little bit of order facilitates people being chaotic in the best possible way.

Outline:
Tea And Arguments Night is a game for six players (this number very much open to negotiation, but given that this will be the first ever trial run, we'll start simple). All players should be over-educated in at least two areas of knowledge, either formally or through their own efforts, and the game is facilitated if a wide array of knowledges are brought to the table. Ideally, every player would have at least one field of knowledge in which they exceed all other players, but since this may be difficult to arrange, it is not necessary. All players attending should be on good and friendly terms with each other or be people likely to get along easily; pre-existing or expected animosities should be avoided.

Set-Up:
The selected playing area should meet several criteria. There should be comfortable seating for all attending, with multiple choices of seating (hard chairs, couches and soft cushy seats, etc) so that everyone can be comfortable regardless of their preference. Lighting should be variable, as depending on the mood and time of night, more or less illumination may be desirable. A large table should be available, around which players can sit facing each other. The playing area should be quiet but with the availability of light background noise if desired (a music player, nearby quiet traffic, etc). The setting should provide an atmosphere in which all attendees feel comfortable.

All players should bring a small number of things to Tea and Arguments Night. First, all players are expected to provide for themselves (or arrange to have provided by someone else) enough tea, coffee, hot chocolate, or other similar beverage, along with a favourite mug if desired and any necessary extras, such as marshmallows or uncommon ingredients. All players should contribute between three and five argument seeds (see below). Players are encouraged to bring any tools, personal tokens or comfort items (a favoured stuffed toy, pencil and paper, dice, laptop) which will facilitate their arguing. Players are encouraged to bring some sort of snack food and, if the game takes place early in the evening, food or money to contribute towards dinner.

Argument Seeds:
Prior to beginning Tea and Arguments Night, the arguments should be pre-arranged. It is encouraged that players are given the ability to suggest argument topics freely. Some players may wish to provide innocuous topics while other players may wish to deliberately trigger arguments about impolite or taboo topics. To facilitate this and to give players freedom, the argument seeds should be assembled anonymously. Before arriving at Tea and Arguments Night, all arguments should be printed in twelve-point Times New Roman font, in black ink. Ideally, all argument seeds should be collected by a single player and printed out by that player, to maximize anonymity and deniability, but if this is not feasible than all players can print out and ideally cut out their argument seeds themselves. When the Night begins, all argument seeds can then be put into a container and drawn out at random, or players can sort through the available seeds and choose ones which appeal. Players can certainly choose a new argument from one not already in the seed pile; the pile is not there to restrict topics, but to provide a ready list of interesting topics and ensure that the evening progresses easily. Argument seeds should be short, clearly worded, sufficiently provocative as to provoke argument without causing insult, and fairly open-ended. Ideally, some imagination will go into each seed. All players should bear in mind that the seeds are intended to deliberately provoke argument. Nothing stops players from taking an argument seed and diverting on an apparently unrelated tangent. Sample argument seeds include:

• (insert noun here) should be outlawed.
• (insert war here) is/was (insert just or unjust).
• Humans have the right to modify (animal/plant/planet/universe).
• (insert philosopher here) was a moron.
• (insert technology/website here) is bad.

• Small plastic devil horns or a red pitchfork: Players who wish to argue socially undesirable opinions may elect to wear/carry this prop. The prop signifies that the player might be playing devil's advocate and should not be blamed for opinions they express. The player does not *have* to express a false opinion while holding the prop, and so players who might otherwise be ashamed to argue certain points of view should feel more free to do so. Players are encouraged to use the prop to stimulate discussion, provoke another player, or even simply enjoy the chance to display some unconventional ethics.
• Angel/halo: While holding this prop, a player may use the argument "because god said so" as a valid and rational reply during the discussion of one topic. Players are stringly discouraged from using this prop for more than one topic, but the option is available for players who feel strongly about a given topic but have no "logical" justification for it. The prop does not prevent other religiously-inclined players from attacking the religious basis for an argument.
• Carboard tube: Inevitably, over the course of any particularly satisfying argument, players will have the occasionally urge to hit another player. This prop is provided for catharsis, and should be used sparingly and with care.

A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day.
Calvin
I did not cheat. I expanded the context of the game.
G’Kar
I hate when I go to movies with kids in the audience, because there's always someone there that tells me I can't kill them when they get loud. Who makes up these rules anyway?
Max Eilerson
If anyone objects to any statement I make, I am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also to deny under oath that I ever made it.
Tom Lehrer

Game: Covenant of Consequences (Vampire: The Masquerade)
Concept: Security Consultant
Age: 81
Apparent Age: Late 30's
Clan: Setite

Background: Anton Litinov was born in Soviet Russia early in the reign of Josef Stalin to a household of moderate comfort and minor influence. Born and raised by a Russian father and German mother while the Great War was still fresh in the minds of all, the twin and very much linked concepts of security and politics dominated Anton's early life and education. As a boy, he found he had a gift for seeing holes in security, and used this as a young boy to get away with apples and pastries, while an adolescent to visit lady-friends under cover of night, and while and adult to find, follow, and investigate enemies of the State. Anton's intuitive grasp of political webs allowed him to rise quickly, at first, through the ranks of various policing forces, but his impatience with the games and maneuvering necessitated by politics prevented him from rising to a position of real power or safety. Languising for years in investigative roles, Anton watched with growing discontent the abuses comitted against his fellow citizens, which seemed to become both more spurious and more brutal with each year. World War Two passed him by with only a handful of near-death experiences, Stalin died, and as the evolving Soviet Union (and, it seemed, the world as a whole) continued to deteriorate, Anton became progressively both more vocally humanist and more depressed.

In the autumn of 1955, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, Anton resolved to end his own life in the company of forty pounds of plastic explosive and a roomful of Sovient governmental officials. Suspicion of his plans led to two forces deciding to end his life, and fortunately for Anton, his superiors did not get to him first.

Among the police of the USSR, the existence of vampires was less than open knowledge but more than a rumour. Most of those serving in the fifties had heard stories of, or witnessed first-hand, the fearsome warriors who did battle in the streets of Moscow or elsewhere wielding strength no human was meant to have. Exsanguinated bodies were found weekly in the prisons, to be disposed of without any inconvenient questions being answered. Anton had been hearing stories of the secret masters for twenty years and had believed them for fifteen, and so it was with relatively little shock that he greeted the emissaries of one such ancient. Anton was warned that his superiors knew of his plans and would come for him at dawn; the emissary offered him the choice to stay and meet his fate, flee and hope to escape, or join in service of the emissary's master. Anton chose to embrace eternity.

Anton was embraced by Veles Setovich and joined the ranks of the Setites, albeit in the service of one of that clan's most unusual elders. In sharp contrast to the manipulative, deceitful, and in many lights outright evil of that clan, Veles had come to embrace Humanity as an end unto itself centuries ago, and sought far and wide others who valued freedom, ethics, and decency. Veles had observed Anton for years, waiting for the best opportunity to induct him into service and put his skills (and beliefs) to use. A millenia-old pacifist would make all too tempting a target to young and hungry kindred, and so Veles required highly proficient security specialists. Anton found the work pleasing and the company excellent, and his first decade of training and study with Veles and his other childer passe quickly.

Current Sketch: Anton has served Veles faithfully for just over fifty years now. During that time he has changed in many ways. While he has not adopted his sire's pacifistic ways, Anton believes deeply in protecting humanity from unecessary kindred depredations. While he has only come to directly to blows a very few times over such matters, more than one arrogant neonate has met his final death to a modest explosive Anton left in his haven before leaving town. Anton has found, not quite religion, but certainly belief in the last fifty years; having been shown the truth of vampires, werewolves, demons, and many other beasts of Russian folklore, accepting the possibility of other forces was only a small leap. Anton has investigated numerous faiths and is well on the way to becoming a faithful muslim, a path he considers, only partially ironically, to be in tribute to his clan's Egyptian roots. He has made the pilgrimage to mecca (at the risk of his own life, given both his kindred nature and the fact that he was not one of the faithful at the time) and has corresponded at length with aquaintances among the ranks of the Assamites.

In the early months of 2007, Veles received a peculiar invitation to journey to Montreal and speak, on behalf of the Humanity In Immortality Society, to the city's undead. Veles travels little these nights, but has been giving serious consideration to attending. He has dispatched Anton to Montreal to meet the powerful kindred of the city, investigate the security of the accomodations, and determine if it would be safe to make the trip. He has brought with him one of the Eyes of Veles, a ghouled snake with near-human intelligence which, through sorcery, allows Veles to see anything the snake does.

Appearance: Anton Al-Hajj Velesovich Litinov is a Slavic-looking man who looks a few years older than he should given the age of his embrace. Medium sized and unremarkable, Anton carries himself somewhat stiffly when surrounded by kindred he does not know and who may be a risk to his master. When among mortals, Anton relaxes considerably and blends in nearly perfectly. When among kindred only, particularly while in Montreal, the Eye of Veles slithers from Anton's pocket and curls around his shoulder, peering curiously at whoever Anton speaks to. Anton wears simple and comfortable clothes which allow him to fit in with the better-dressed crowd while not impeding his movement or freedom.

Roleplaying Notes: You are, first and foremost, a servant of Veles, probably one of the wisest men ever to live and certainly one of the finest vampires. You would give your life to save his, which is fortunate, since that's essentially your job description. While you are abroad doing his work, you should allow nothing to distract you. Do not trust any kindred; any one of them could be a political mastermind intent only on persuading you to give him information and then using it to destroy your master. Meet the power brokers, investigate how well they intend to protect Veles, let the Eye observe them, and do your job. You're here to assess, not socialize.

Growing up in Russia made you superstitious; becoming undead only cemented it. When you visit a new building, make certain to greet the jedushka di muvedushka, to stay in its good graces. If someone stares at you for too long, make a ward against the evil eye. When people take the name of god in vain, make a quick blessing.

Carry a toy snake, and have it on your person; ideally, poking out of your collar andlounging on your shoulder or something. Pat it occasionally, and murmur to it affectionately. When in doubt, talk to it and assure anyone around you that your master speaks through it. Refuse to allow anyone to hold it, and claim this is for their own protection; do not tell them why.

What's interesting about you: Nothing. You're an expendable Ko'Dath and your whole reason for existing is to appear in one gaming session as a prelude to a more important NPC. That's unlife.

My fourth annual December 29th one-shot game this year was Existoon!, a cartooniverse RPG using d20 rules scavenged from a dozen core systems and drawing heavily on Dungeons and Dragons and A Game Of Thrones d20. In Existoon!, players took on the roles of cartoon characters from various genres and series who are somehow transported into mundane reality and must deduce how they were brought over -- and reverse it -- before they lose their ability to resist the laws of physics and, at best, are reduced to normal humans and, at worst, die horribly. Although in typical fashion, looking back now, I can remember mostly things that I did wrong and could have done better, the game itself was a big sucess and the game room very nearly shook with laughter for several hours. The game itself started late, but ran short by nearly an hour and ended up finishing right on time, which just goes to show how everything tends to work out if you keep your wits about you.

Now, enjoy reading some of the super-secret background material prepared for the game, and keep watching this space for news on what next year's Games Day one-shot will be.

The House Rules: Wacky Points and Sphere of Influence: Your character has come into the real world from a universe of alternate physical laws. You project around yourself a Sphere of Influence, a perfect sphere where the laws on your native reality supersede those of the world you are in. Your Sphere of Influence determines how far from you your variant physics extend and in most cases limits how far away from an effect you can travel before normal reality reasserts itself. Your Sphere of Influence has a radius equal to 3 feet multiplied by your Wacky Points; if two characters with Wacky Points are in the same area, the character with more Wacky Points controls the natural laws. You begin the game with 10 Wacky Points and you lose one Wacky Point every hour that passes in-game.

Your existence depends on your Sphere of Influence and your Wacky Points. In addition to spending Wacky Points to manifest the more absurd laws of physics from your world, your Wacky Points measure how well you control the world around you. If your Wacky Points fall to 1, you can affect only yourself and objects you hold or carry. If your Wacky Points fall to 0, you can no longer sustain your unreality and reality's natural laws overwhelm you. For many characters, if their Wacky Score falls to 0, they revert to a mundane, unintelligent animal. In addition to being spent to activate powerful effects, Wacky Points disappear with time as the power of your own reality fades. A character's power and life depend on finding ways to maintain a high Wacky score.

Wacky Points are earned by performing actions which are particularly fitting for your character or which particularly superimpose your own reality on the real world. There is no upper limit to the number of Wacky Points a character can have. Uses of Points vary depending on the reality from a character comes. Examples of unreality effects which might require spending one or more Wacky Points:
-Defy gravity until such time as you look down
-Paint a functioning door on a wall
-Increase the damage of an attack by spending rounds posing first
-Create a functioning time-machine using a cardboard box and a marker
-Reach into a full book-case and pull out the one book required for the situation, or the one book which opens the secret passage
-Enable the character with 0 ranks of "Drive" to instinctively be able to pilot a giant robotic sea-serpent (or airplane, or whatever)
-Transform damage from "gunshot to the head" to "flesh wound"

The Backstory: April 2007, Generic North American City: Brilliant but eccentric physicist Dr. Charles Windy invents the Animator, a device capable of giving life to characters from cartoons. The work of thirty years of continuous work and research, the Animator temporarily alters reality within a limited area, creating an effect which Windy names the "Wacky Field." Within this zone, the laws of physics are suspended and the impossible can thrive. Understandably, the Wacky Field requires a tremendous amount of energy to operate, and so can operate for only a limited time; left on its own, a generated Wacky Field inevitably loses power and fades away.

After some experimentation with the Animator, Windy applies it to the same pursuit to which all human technologies are eventually put: dating. Having long had a crush on the heroine from the old TV show, James Bond Junior, Windy sets up the Animator, pops in a DVD, waits for a good shot, and fires the ray. He rolls a 1. Instead of the young heroine, Windy Animates Werner Stefanos Blofeld, son of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, criminal mastermind, master of SPECTRE, the only villain ever to fight his eponymous nemesis to a standstill. It takes Blofeld a little over five minutes to comprehend what has happened and what sort of potential the Animator presents. Through a combination of persuasion and threats, Blofeld convinces Windy to help him use the Animator, and Blofeld brings through several manipulable individuals from different universes. When Windy begins to resist, Blofeld summarily executes the physicist, shooting him twice in the back of the head. With his last breath, Windy triggers the Animator to fire a random burst at the multi-screen television, bringing forth six individuals from random screenshots.

The Happy Ending: The characters find and defeat Blofeld's lieutenants, following the trail to the corpse of Dr. Windy and Blofeld himself. In the battle which ensues, Blofeld is mortally wounded. Dying, he enacts his Scorched Earth plan and brings Godzilla into the world using the Animator; the King of Monsters is narrowly defeated using the power of ACME. The characters locate the Animator in the rubble; in finest cartoon tradition, it can be reversed by switching the polarities on the battery. The characters return home to their native universes (basically) and, at the end of the episode, everything is back exactly where it was.

The NPCs:
Dr. Charles Windy: Born in middle-class North America, Charles Windy was raised on cartoons. It was the golden age of Hannah Barberra, and Windy spent his childhood living vicariously in a thousand universes, each more nonsensical than the last. By the age of fourteen, he had learned with finality that the real world did not work like cartoons, and he knew that he wanted to dedicate his life to fixing what he saw as a terrible flaw in how the world worked. Windy dedicated himself to the study of physics -- the more improbable, the better. From high school, he entered a bachelor's degree in physics, and from there, obtained his PhD with his thesis on effects within quantum mechanics which violate formal Newtonian conceptions of reality.

Even before finishing high school Windy had begun to research his life's work, a device he called the Animator which he believed would be able to break down the laws of physics and make his world more like the ones he dreamed of nightly. The work took Windy the better part of thirty years to complete, during which time he did little else. Tangential research kept enough funding rolling that he could live and continue work on the Animator, and all other concerns were secondary. At last, Windy built what appeared to be a working Animator, and with some basic tests he proved he could now bring simple materials out of his television and into his laboratory. For years Windy had nursed a secret crush on Tracy Milbanks, the heroine of one of his favourite shows, and so for his first attempt to bring across a living human, windy's selected one of his favourite recordings. Working on his fourtieth hour without sleep, Windy activated the Animator and completly failed to hit the correct target, instead giving life and substance to that show's arch villain. Windy's remaining lifespan was measured in hours; he soon outlived his usefulness and was murdered in cold blood.

Werner Stefanos Blofeld: In the original James Bond film series, the most brilliant mastermind and most evil villain was Ernst Stavro Blofeld, slayer of Bond's wife and leader of one of the most feared criminal organizations in the world. He was, if anything, outdone by his son in the cartoon spin-off. Brilliant, Charismatic, and utterly ruthless, the younger Blofeld took the reigns of his father's organization after the elder Blofeld's death, and having learned from the mistakes of many of the two Bonds' foes, Werner took for his own the devices and death machines and improved upon each. His hands he replaced with the deadly bionic arms and claws of Dr. No, improving their dexterity with more modern mechanisms and servos. Into these arms he installed the portable Moonraker lasers of Hugo Drax and a host of other powerful weapons. His body he shielded with the most advanced light-armour available to him in a universe where few bullets ever touch the skin of a hero, and even his cat was upgraded, as Blofeld replaced his father's Persians with his own Abyssinians.

When he emerged into reality, Blofeld quickly grasped the implications. First, he contemplated what it meant to be in a world where he obeyed different physics from anyone else, but more importantly, in this world, there would be no super-spies to thwart his plans, and even if there were, the spies of this world were all too mortal. He soon found that he was limited in the radius he could affect and that, with each hour, whatever force powered that radius grew weaker. It took him little experimentation to determine that with ever act of evil he perpetrated, his radius of power increased, and thus he determined how we would be able to remain empowered easily enough. Step one of his plans for conquest, therefore, required that he commit, not merely evil, but some evil so horrendous that it would extend his power over miles, over the whole city, perhaps even across the face of the planet. Going back to his roots, Blofeld began to draw up plans for a nuclear-powered orbital laser, and to construct such a thing, he would need expendable lackeys whose own radii of power were conducive to death rays. Pressed for time, Blofeld began to bring forth his first wave of lieutenants. Nothing could stop him now...

Tall, slim, and imposing, Blofeld's dark hair matches his night-black Nehru jacket and black cat. A cruel sneer curls one corner of his mouth at all times, partially due to his contempt for the world but largely because of the vicious scar which runs vertically along his face from temple to chin. His bionic hands are forged of some red metal, detailed with pure gold, and spikes decorate the knuckles. The backs of his forearms are sliding panels from which his retractable Moonrakers are able to emerge at a moment's notice.

Brother Dorun: In the grim dark future of humanity, there is only war. There are no greater warriors in this future than the Space Marines of the Imperium, and of the Space Marines, few are more feared than the servants of the Ordos Xenos, the black-armoured Deathwatch. Dorun had been an Ultramarine when he was given his first Gene Seed and underwent the genetic modifications from baseline human to Marine, and was inducted into the Deathwatch for his unfailing valour and absolute dedication to duty in addition to his sheer lethal aptitude for combat. Saved from death at Tyranid talons by Blofeld and the Animator, Dorun found himself suddenly nearly forty thousand years in his world's past, thirty millenia before the birth of the God-Emperor. Though he may have been the deadliest warrior on the world at that moment, Dorun's somewhat slow mind, built as it was to accept orders rather than question them, were all too mealleable to Blofeld's cunning words.

Not quite as manipulable as Blofeld had believed, however, when Dorun came face to faceplate with Blofeld's enemies, the battle-hardened Space Marine inexplicably chose to speak to them rather than to wade into them with bolter firing and chainsword whirring; he was thus distracted long enough for Blofeld's enemies to catch him unawares with a slingshot-mounted anvil. Even this deadly weapon just barely had the power to crush the Mighty brother Dorun, but no force on any earth can withstand an anvil at terminal velocity, and Dorun's soul went to join his Emperor.

Don Rampage: The self-proclaimed Deadliest Air-Pirate to Ever Live, Don Rampage ruled the skies of his tropical homeworld where his unfailing criminal genius and fox-like cunning were matched only by his own innate ineptness which kept any of his schemes from ever succeeding. Though an ace pilot and a deadly swordsman, Rampage had been kept from glory for the whole of his life by do-gooders, and when he came across the reality gap along with his single-seat plane, The Happy Eviscerator, to find Blofeld standig over him with an offer of a job, Don Rampage did not turn it down. For his troubles, he was beaten, humiliated, and crushed flat before being exiled to his own personal hell, a universe filled with even more wackiness and happy-endings than his own. Rampage would spend the rest of his days attempting to end his own life, a task which proved quite impossible in a children's program.

The Night Gaunt: One of the cartoons brought forth at random by Charles Windy in an effort to stop Blofeld, the Night Gaunt was a dark and morbid supercriminal on his own world. Faced with the prospect of a world to plunder, the Night Gaunt briefly tried to persuade the five cartoons who manifested along with him to join him in a wave of crime, and when they refused, he set off on his own. Briefly he stalked them, debating if it was worth slaughtering them to remove the competition, but soon grew bored and left them. Night Gaunt failed to deduce the relationship between use of his powers and his own survival, and exhausted his Wacky energy in a mere hour. Suddenly constrained by natural law, The Night Gaunt was agonizingly transformed into a mundane though misshapen bat.

Powers: This list contains the powers which various characters had, along with brief summaries of their mechanics. In addition to these powers, all characters had some mundane feats from various sourcebooks.

• Alternate Form: You are able to switch between two forms with different stats, and can even appear to two different individuals, simultaneously, in different forms.
• Animate Object: Within your Sphere of Influence, you may spend wacky points to animate objects, over which you have limited control (using skills such as bluff, diplomacy, handle animal, use device, etc). If your wacky points are high, objects in your vicinity may spontaneously animate.
• Bionics: +4 strength, +2 charisma, -2 constitution, barehanded damage is 1d8 lethal damage, +10 speed
• Blademaster: Your base critical threat range for all bladed weapons increases to 16-20
• Breath Weapon: Your draconic heritage allows you to deal elemental damage. You may use this attack in any of three ways. You may use your breath weapon once every 1d3 rounds. You must spend 1 full round charging this attack before it is used, during which you may not take a full attack and cannot move faster than your basic movement speed. 1) A ranged attack at a single target dealing 2d20 points of damage. Your range increment is 60 feet and you may attack outside of your Sphere of Influence. 2) A cone 60 feet long and 30 feet wide at its base, dealing 1d20 damage to all targets hit. Creatures may make a reflex save for 1/2 damage. 3) A ranged touch attack and spend any number of Wacky Points to deal X d10 + X damage to a single target, where X is the number of Wacky Points spent.
• Brutal Defense: Add your strength modifier to your defense
• Catalogue: Your ACME catalogue contains an endless list of Stuff. Whenever you need an ACME device, you may make a skill check (gather information or knowledge: ACME) at a variable DC (according to the strangeness of the device) to find the correct page. You gain a +4 bonus to this check if the object is being ordered by someone else. Items ordered from your catalogue arrive in 1d20 rounds. You may spend Wacky Points to automatically locate the desired page and have it arrive in 1 round. You may have to spend a Wacky Point for delivered items to function outside of your Sphere of Influence.
• Caveman!: Add +4 to strength. Your intelligence and wisdom are normal but you speak and act primitively
• Close Combat Monster: +12 strength, +4 dex, +4 con, -4 wis, -8 cha
• Detective's Knowledge: When faced with a clue, you may use Bardic Knowledge as though you were a 5th level bard
• Deathtraper: For purposes of trap functioning, your Wacky Points are treated as being double their current value
• Dragonform: Your dragon body is tough and deadly. You have claws and a bite attack with which you are proficient, and your thick scales make you impervious to most mundane weapons.
• Drain Life: With a melee touch attack, you drain 1d10 hp, fort save DC = 15 + Wacky Points for half rounded down
• Flight (1): You can fly at a speed of 60. You must have your club in hand to fly.
• Flight (2): You can fly at speed 80. You must have sufficient room to unfurl your wings (about 6 feet) and at least 2 unspent Wacky Points. For purposes of agility or flying stunt checks, you are considered to have a fly skill equal to 2x(current Wacky Points)+dex modifier. You do not actually have to flap your wings and you may continue to fly if you are grappled after you lift off.
• Gadgeteer: Your utility belt contains most any useful simple item
• Intangibility: You may become intangible at will. While intangible, you cannot make melee attacks or physically interact with objects or characters
• Investigator: You gain a +2 bonus to spot, gather information, search, and knowledge: investigation checks
• Kids’ Show: You take all damage as subdual damage unless you are the target of a coup de grace action
• Krav Maga: Improved Grapple, 1 extra attack at -2, +2 damage bare handed
• Mastermind: For purposes of calculating skill points, your int mod is considered to be doubled
• Monologuing: When you are speaking, characters must make a will check versus your diplomacy, intimidate, or bluff or be Paralyzed. This effect is negated if characters are directly threatened
• Moonraker: You may make 2 ranged attacks each round while barehanded, with a full attack action, or 1 ranged attack with a single attack action
• Ogre Power: +4 to strength
• PrimePhysique: +2 to strength, +5 to base speed
• Regeneration: When resting, you regain hitpoints at a rate of 4 per round. You will regrow lost limbs, regenerate burned skin, and even re-integrate yourself from a pile of ashes. You do not die at -10, but simply continue taking damage.
• Sooper Genius: You gain a +4 to intelligence and a -2 to wisdom. All skills are class skills for you.
• Suffer Not The Witch To Live: You gain 1 extra attack at your highest base attack each round against an enemy who has previously made paranormal mental attacks against you
• Swordsman: You add your dexterity modifier twice to your defense instead of once
• Terror: At will, causes fear in all targets within Sphere of Influence. DC = 20 + Wacky Points Left
• The Best Defense: You have a +4 bonus to initiative checks
• They Shall Know No Fear: You are immune to all fear effects and cannot be affected by the Intimidate skill
• Toon: You take most forms of damage as subdual damage. You may spend a Wacky Point to nullify all damage taken during one attack or event.
• Useful Pocket: Whenever you require a mundane item, roll 1d10. On a 1 to 9, you have the item on your person
• Weasel: You gain a +4 racial bonus to bluff, diplomacy, and sense motive checks involving business, ACME, or your own immediate survival. You may Scurry to boost your movement speed to 60.
• Wing-Walker: When making balance, jump, or climb checks on a moving airplane, you gain a +8 bonus

I've got control issues. I'm aware of this and, like most of my character flaws, I try hard to compensate for these issues in my daily life. I hate driving because while I'm on the road I surrender control to the fools around me. I don't like office work because my schedule and habits get controlled by an employer or supervisor. I don't like society because my life gets controlled by a government which is at best inept and at worst corrupt. I like gaming because I have contorl over a world; I like studying because I have control over how well I do on exams. I like writing because I have control over reality. In situations where I lack control, I am, to put it simply, unhappy.

On Thursday night, my car was broken into. A window was smashed and my backpack, along with the backpacks of two friends, was stolen. Nothing takes away your sense of control over life like being the victim of crime.

Control is a funny thing. It waxes and wanes it response to the strangest things, and often, the times that we think we have it is the time when we have the least of it. Depression, for example, is often characterized by the individual believing they have no control over their life; there may in truth be countless ways in which they can control the events around them, but if they can't see these ways, or have been deprived of the will to act on these choices, can they be said to have or lack control? Similarly, someone walking down the street may believe they have control over their destiny, but (and in an example I find quite close to home), if someone who carries twice their mass decides to make trouble, control quickly evaporates. We can choose to create situations which maximize our control -- the one hundred and twenty pound wimp can choose to avoid biker bars -- but some control has to inevitably be given up, because it's not an adaptive behaviour to minimize risk bullying by refusing to leave the house. In psychology, fear of lack of control is often referred to by the seemingly innocuous label of "intolerance of uncertainty" and when it becomes crippling such that the person cannot function, it might be classified as anything from Generalized Anxiety Disorder right up to Agoraphobia. Well aware of the fact that I already have my own share of sub-clinical eccentricities, I've always been very wary of developing new ones, and no matter how much I may hate leaving the house some days, and taking on the loss of control that comes with it, I never let that fear keep me from going out and doing what I have to do.

As a result, once in a while, my car gets broken into, figuratively and literally.

Did I have control over my car getting broken into? I had some, and I'm comforted knowing that what options were available to me, I had taken. There were three backpacks in my car when I parked it, and because I knew it was a shady street, I made sure they were all put into the trunk and not left visible for a passer-by to see. This seems rather ironic in retrospect; it seems quite likely that what actually happened was that somebody on the street saw a bunch of students putting three bags into a trunk and decided to gamble on getting a free laptop or two. Could I have done anything differently? Obviously leaving the bags in plain site wouldn't have been better, and while we might have moved our bags over at our previous stop, there was no reason for that to occur to us. Did I have control over any other questions of safety? I don't drive a new-looking car, so there was minimal risk of attempted theft (and, in fact, there was no damage done to the ignition to suggest the thief tried to steal it). The doors and windows were all closed and locked; the broken window attests to that, although I'd double checked the locks myself anyway before leaving the car, as is my habit. There was nothing in the car that looked valuable other than the built-in CD player (no signs of damage or of attempted removal) and my sunglasses (which look valuable only from a distance greater than 15 feet). To a potential thief, the car presented a totally unattractive target, but crime is random (mostly random, anyway) and sometimes stuff just happens. I took every step I possibly could to make my car secure -- I had even set the parking break, because I was parked on a hill -- and the theft happened anyway. I could not control whether there was a theft, but I had done everything I could to control the probability of a theft.

This leaves me with a new area of control: I can choose to feel that I have no power, because my precautions meant nothing, or I can choose to focus on what powers of control I did have, because you take a risk every time you leave your house and if you can't bring yourself to accept those risks then life isn't much fun. I choose to focus on the knowledge that I did everything I could and the rest is up to powers beyond me. In many ways, I am powerless -- which galls me to no end and which will no-doubt cost me some sleep tonight -- but I did everything I could, and that counts for something.

Monetarily, there was nothing valuable in my backpack. I lost my coursepack (which I can replace for free at school) and my notebook (thankfully, I've had only two days of classes). I've lost all my character sheets for four games, but because my habit these days is to draw up custom sheets on my computer, three of those can be replaced simply by printing them again and the last one, though painful to lose, can be recreated given an hour or two. I lost some documents related to school, but these were either replacable or no longer needed desperately. The thief has his hands on the names and phone numbers of myself and some classmates, but if it was a casual act of theft then he or she is unlikely to make terrible use of those (and, in fact, there is some small chance that anything non-valuable will be returned to me since my contact info was in the bag). I lost an epipen, which would be annoying if my father wasn't a pharmacist. I lost my favourite calculator, which is probably replacable for about 8 dollars, and my vast collection of pens and pencils which I can replace for about 4 dollars (and might even currently be on sale). I lost the novel I was reading (I hate not knowing how it ends, but it was a lousy book anyway) and the next book I was going to read (which was, tragically, a Neil Gaiman novel), but thanks to the miracle of Amazon and eBay, I can get those back. My bookmark was a magic card (an Island); I have about eighty more identical to it. I lost one unpainted lead miniature, which is painful but can be replaced for about four dollars and which I'd gotten for free anyway, and besides, I've got a drawerful of unpainted minis. The most painful loss was my bag of dice, which genuinely had tremendous sentimental value. The bag was about 10 years old and had been repaired many times. It contained about 20 dollars worth of dice collected over a decade and a half, including my beloved high-rolling Heroclix dice, my unecessarily heavy gold-plated iron dice, my favourite d20, and of course, the Random Luck Die itself, my beloved one-hundred sided die, which has beaten the long-odds more times than Han Solo and was a gift to me way back in my high-school days. I can buy another d100, but it will never be the same one. Still, looking back over this list, I haven't lost anything truly valuable or irreplacable, and considering I could have had my car stolen, or it could have been vandalized in addition to having one window smashed, or I could have been at the car myself when it was robbed, or I could have lost expensive textbooks or been carrying a beloved toy in my bag at the time. This isn't a good situation... but it could have been a lot worse in, at a conservative and off-the-top-of-my-head count, 38 ways. That is, arguably, a measure of control I had over the situation.

It's been shown that people who have a strong faith in something beyond themselves cope better with stress and misfortune than atheists and such; I can only wonder if worshipping gods of chaos, who by definition will sometimes choose to screw me over instead of help, makes me more able to accept and overcome, or less. Given a few more days for the theft to sink in, we'll see how well I handle it.

There is, of course, the one more way which I can control things: attributions. I decide what thoughts I have about what's happened. I live a wonderful and charmed life, and one theft doesn't change that. I had my car broken into, but it was at the end of a genuinely great day, and I refuse to allow the theft to ruin that day for me. I can choose to be angry, or I can choose to revel in my one vengeance, that somewhere out there in the city there's a jerk with a bruised hand who, for his trouble, has a backpack full of the geekiest stuff he's ever laid eyes on and not a profitable object to be had. I can choose to be mad at the friends who I was in town to spend the evening with, or I can choose to be grateful that when my car was broken into, they dropped everything and came out into the cold to help me brush broken glass out of the car and laugh at the bad jokes I was making as a defense mechanism. I can choose to take solace in the fact that this happened during a record-breaking heat wave with 10 degree celcius weather in the middle of January, instead of snow and freezing rain. In a word, I've got some control... not much, and not over whether I have my dice or not, but control none-the-less. We take what we can get.

I can only hope the thief stole some of my music CDs from the car. That'll be all the punishment he needs.

For several years, a good friend of mine hosted the New Year's Party for my main circle of friends. As the old saying goes, "once is a fluke, twice is a pattern, and three times is a tradition," and indeed, celebrating New Year's Eve at his place felt like a holiday tradition. When, this year, the party could not be hosted there, and the people I looked forward to seeing for the holiday were being pulled in different directions due to multiple competing parties being scheduled, several of my dearer associated began to feel, understandably, that New Year's would probably go uncelebrated in any way that really mattered. I recall the friend who had previously hosted the parties posting a very nice essay online detailing what sorts of things were involved in making a good party and all but pleading that someone make it happen. Now, for my part, the word "tradition" has always translated as "something we've done for a while which nobody's had the guts to throw away yet" but New Year's Eve is one of only a handful of holidays, possibly as few as two, when it really matters to me that there's some sort of celebration, so when it became clear that nobody else was going to assemble the guest list I wanted, I took matters into my own hands. As any good emperor knows, if you want a job done right, do it yourself. Or conquer europe.

To respond to the list my friend posted in his essay, he was right on the money when he said that, strictly speaking, you really only need two things for a party. Organizing a party is the easiest thing in the world if you've got good people. I've got damn good people.

Let me just say, first, that strictly speaking, I did not host a New Year's Eve party. I was planning to right up until the 30th when, in conversation with someone, I happened to use the phrase "it won't be New Year's without you." That got me thinking, because it also wouldn't be New Year's with the previous years' host, who would be attending another party. It wouldn't be New Year's without quite a few people, in fact, some dear to me and some less. So, if it isn't New Year's, it's obviously something else -- that's just logical. I actually threw a Stuffed Weasel Appreciation Day party, which just happened to fall on December 31st through January 1st. Anybody who attended will attest that Nukee the Weasel was a vital part of the evening's festivities, and if there was another stuffed weasel anywhere on Earth last night who was showered with more love and snuggles than Nukee, it's a statistical outlier which can reasonably be removed prior to ANOVA.

So here's a Question for you: what makes December 31 special in the first place? It isn't religious, and everybody knows that it's a purely arbitrary point distinguishing two temporal cycles. It misses the Solstice by a good margin and it's not an important date in any ancient mystical tradition, religious or otherwise. New Year's Eve is one of only a handful of holidays which are utterly devoid of all meaning outside of socialization. None-the-less, New Year's Eve is perhaps the most rigorously celebrated holiday in Western society; there is no other night in the whole year when I can name as many separate parties being thrown by people I know, and no other night when I know people who have to juggle their schedules to somehow visit three, four, or more parties in a single night just to see everyone they want to. Even to a bitter, hypoaffective cynic like myself, New Year's Eve is one of the few nights when it really matters to me that I'm at some sort of party. The Jewish holidays for me tend to be about reflection, understanding, and meditation; Christmas is sold to us as the holiday of family, Valentine's Day as the holiday of romance, and Halloween as the holiday of wanton abandon and dark thoughts. Other holidays cover family, lovers, enemies, employers, employees, parents, children, and even pets, but New Year's Eve is the holiday which is meant to be spent with friends. Auld Lang Syne, as they say.

My grandparents were, one and all, truly remarkable people. My father's parents were survivors of the Holocaust and had truly fought to build the kinds of lives they believed they deserved. My mother's mother was a woman of tremendous wisdom and moral courage who endured tremendous hardships to become one of the most loved people in her neighbourhood. My maternal grandfather is the only one of the four still alive, and it is him I think of at the new year. For decades, every year without fail, he would celebrate New Year's Eve by bringing over some close friends and playing boardgames the whole night through. He began this tradition before my mother was even born, so it need hardly be said that the blood of Gamers runs in my veins. This year is the first year in memory that he did not continue this tradition, because he was in Florida with my step-grandmother and so could not see his usual friends. Still, it would not surprise me at all to learn that, way down South where the heat would sear my psycrophillic soul, he was sitting at a table with a couple of local friends and playing Rummy. And winning. It seems only appropriate to me that the year my grandfather did not celebrate New Year's Eve with games, I was sitting at home, surrounded by friends who I genuinely care for and respect and in some cases even love like family, playing Frag, Betrayl At House On The Hill, Mall Of Horror and Jenga.

None of this is truly astounding, of course. The part which I find genuinely amazing, despite all logic, is that I hosted a massively sucessful New Year's Eve party (or Stuffed Weasel Appreciation Day party) attended by more people than I had expected and hoped, at which everyone had a really great time... and not a single drop of booze was tasted by anybody. There was beer and wine around, but somehow, between the orange and pomegranate juice, the soda which flowed like water and the experimental, potentially lethal tea recipes, nobody got around to having any alcohol. None the less, people had fun and 2007 started anyway... imagine that.

Of course, hearing from other people that the parties they went to instead of mine were disapointments and that they kind of wish they'd been at my place instead... that makes me feel pretty good to. The gods fnord love a bastard.

High points of the evening:
Pausing the clock at six seconds to midnight
Moving the Jenga set under the table to make it more challenging
Lots of hugs
Watching people play Frag with my hand-painted minis, including two Killer Penguin Death Squad warriors
Two attacks per turn with the 6D flamethrower
Preparing the prophesized Plastic Cheese Sandwich
Singing along with Tom Lehrer's "Wernher Von Braun"
Nukeezilla attacks the Jenga Tower
The First peanutbutter Cookie of 2007
MSTing "Jewel of the Nile" at 4 am with a couch-full of half-asleep smartalecks
Four-Person Guillotine (mental note: when more than three players, play with at least sixteen nobles per day, and perhaps a fourth day as well. Also, take Robespierre out of the deck)

Once again, here's to another nifty year. It's off to a good start.

I've observed before that I enjoy making New Years Resolutions for purely ironic reasons, which in the last year or two have degenerated all the way down to sardonic and are nowadays just a hair's shy of sinking right into open mockery. That said, despite the fact that I make my resolutions with tongue so firmly in-cheek that I can't eat solid foods until January 2nd, I've always done a pretty good job of keeping the ones that I make. Self-improvement is its own reward, after all, as is earning the priviledge to point and laugh at people who fail to keep their own deeply-held resolutions. Whatever flaws I may have, from aarogance to zyzzyva-taunting, my word is iron and no matter how in jest it may be made, I always keep my oaths.

Last year, I made eight resolutions, which included some new ones as well as the ones from the previous year which seemed worth perpetuating. The full list read:

• I will make people laugh who I have not made laugh before.
• I will confuse the weak.
• I will give out business cards.
• I will continue to be me, or better.
• I will try to improve my typing.
• I will to go back into the archive of this Journal and fix some of the errors I've been too lazy to correct in the past
• I will try to hug more friends.
• I will put more effort into completing the gamer's variation of Khorne's Chant

In the coming year, I will not be repeating the majority of these resolutions. In the case of the first two, these are things I do anyway, habitually, and do not make good resolutions. Furthermore, given the circumstances in which I've met most of my new friends and aquaintances this year, I very much do not want to repeat them in 2007. I probably won't try to hug people more than I currently am because people seem to be satisfied with current levels. I don't really feel like making the Khornate chant another goal for the coming year because it's getting dull. This leaves me with either a relatively short list, or the need to come up with some new resolutions.

Resolutions for 2007:
1) I will continue to give out business cards, because they're useful l'il thingies and they tend to get a laugh from people the first time they see one. In fact, I will be printing up whole new cards; since I started carrying them around in late December of 2004, I've improved the design several times and with input from two semi-professional graphic designers, but never actually printed up new cards, so to ring in the new year I'll be tossing out all my old cards and replacing them with the shiny new versions, which carry my updated coat of arms and include my cel phone number which was missing from the first version. I thought long and hard about changing the quote on the card, but I have yet to find another clever line that fits the right sized space, and in any case, few and far between are the phrases which sum up my existence better than Chaplain's Law: In the end, everything is a gag.

2) I will fix more errors in my journal archive. Because, after all, there are at least 200 more posts which need proof-reading.

3) I will spend more time playing with plush toys. Anyone who fails to see why this is a worthy goal in life has my pity.

4) I will maintain my physical training. It took me years to learn that a healthy body was an essential component of a superior mind, and as I enter the year which will contain my 25th birthday, more and more people in my age-group, statistically, will stop taking care of themselves. I have no great need to increase my exercise regimen and I have neither the inclination nor the interest in working to improve my physical stats, but I'm in the best shape of my life and every year that I can keep myself at the same level that I'm at now means I become superior to that many humans who begin to let themselves go as their metabolism slows. Plus, y'know, being healthy is good and so forth.

5) I will put genuine work into my classes. I've worked and studied as hard as I was capable since August 2005, but at times, my best simply failed to be good enough. This is intolerable and inexcusable, both in terms of general life sucess and in terms of Who I Am and what I have a responsibility to be. I already know that of the four final exams still ahead of me between now and next summer vacation, I'm guaranteed to do well on two and I will have to buckle down and work to do well on the other two. Neurology shall fall before my might.

6) I will improve my circle of friends. Over the course of the past year, no matter how unecessarily melodramatic I may have been about it, I've taken steps to really improve the quality of the people around me. At this time last year, I was furstrated and unhappy with the people I'd surrounded myself with, and I did something about it. Today, in contrast, the people around me are generally those I care for and respect, and who respect me in turn. I've expanded that circle considerably in two separate directions and my life is better for it, where other people in my life continue to whine about the same problem and take no steps to fix it. My social situation isn't perfect -- some who I would have liked to have with me didn't have what it takes to stay, and others who I'd be happy to see gone continue to stick like barnacles -- but I am at least taking steps in the right direction and making measurable progress. Whether I'll still feel similarly positive in six months is always open to debate, but we can only ever truly work in the now and face each crisis as it comes. Given that I'm hosting the party that many of my good friends will be attending on New Year's Eve (also known as Plush Weasel Appreciation Day), I'll be working on this resolution from the very first second of the year onwards.

7) I will give at least two news or magazine interviews about the Empire. I enjoy giving interviews. I can genuinely be said to love it, in fact. This year has been a real joy in the area of media exposure, and I want this coming year to be similarly successful. The past year's victories didn't just spontaneously appear, though... I worked to make things happen, through means both fair and foul, and got what I wanted out of it. If anything, this simply reaffirms my confidence that if I want to attract attention, I have to make it happen, be it by hook, crook, or rook. Now that I have a few tricks to go about making it happen, I have every intention of continuing to do so.

And those are my resolutions. Seven is an auspicious number in Hebrew numerology, so it seems like a good note on which to start the year. It seems likely that I can keep all of these easily enough, and if I can do an even halfway decent job on all of them then it's going to be a good year. If you're reading this, I look forward to your helping to make it so.

For months now, I've wanted to try to organize what I call a "Tea and Arguments" night, wherein a half-dozen people get together, everyone brings a few bags of their favourite teas (or coffee, or hot chocolate or whatever) and argues. The purpose of such an evening is not to resolve anything, or to fight about current issues, or even to see who's smarter... the purpose is simply to get sit in a circle with people you care for and trust and argue for nothing more than sake of argument. Everyone would drop three topics into a hat, and then they would be chosen at random. Some rounds people might defend their own deeply held beliefs, and then a few minutes later might deliberately adopt the role of devil's advocate just to get someone else arguing passionately. It's not about who's right or who's better; it's about arguing. It's about stretching your brain.

I love to argue. I thrive on it, in fact, and I'll often go into normal conversations espousing views which are diametrically opposite to my real feelings just to get an interesting dialogue out of it. I don't enjoy fighting, but I enjoy arguing. A fight implies that two people are genuinely opposed to each other and have serious and often emotional involvement in the issue being discussed... it is usually hostile, unfriendly, and leaves one or both people drained and unhappy. An argument does not have to be a fight; executed perfectly, an argument is more akin to a dance than a duel, and has to it all the beauty, grace, and art which that implies.

In my case, though, there's also an element of testing to it. I almost never feel that I'm competing with the person I argue with, but I always try to take every argument as a test of my own wisdom, cunning, wit, and skill. As the old saying goes, there's the world-class dancer, and then there's the person who does everything the dancer does, backwards and in bad shoes.

I'm simultaneously very proud of my own intellect and terrified of anything happening to that intellect; naturally I would strive constantly to prove to myself that my wit is still sharp or, if blunted, at least able to be swung at high velocity and with some degree of skill. I have only minimal interest in competing *against* the people around me, though. I know of only one or two people who I genuinely consider to be equally clever as I am; most people in general pose no challenge at all to me, and most of the people who I really choose to argue with are, if anything, cleverer and better arguers than I am and I can keep up with them in discussion only because I'm sneakier. What's the point of competing with someone who's inferior, I ask you, and even more pertinently, where's the fun in competing with someone who you know is better? There's practically no point at at all to testing myself *against* others. The only person in the world who I really ever get any benefit from testing myself against is me.

Why do I argue? I argue because I am constantly in competition with myself to keep my mind at its best. I am constantly testing myself against myself because there is no one else whose high score feels worth beating. I argue because I push the upper limits of what I'm capable of every year, and it would be a shame to ever fail to reach a new height simply because I didn't try to pull my way that much higher. Some might call this sort of thinking egocentric or intellectual self-gratification, but I couldn't disagree more. Arguing isn't about making me feel smart -- it's about proving it, and then surpassing all previous limits.

If I don't strive continually to be better than I am, I don't deserve to be however good I've become. To accept that you're at your best is to admit failure.

If I'm as wonderful as I believe myself to be, I have a responsibility to be able to argue. If I'm clever, I have a duty to be able to respond intelligently to any argument anyone makes -- even if the most intelligent possible response is to admit that they're right and I'm wrong. I can't content myself with being able to make a comeback to an argument; I should be have my counter-arguments ready before they've even given me a statement to wrestle with. A great chess-player plans out the game five or ten or fifty moves ahead; a swordsman anticipates the opponent's next move and begins to block before the enemy begins to strike; to beat Space Invaders, you have to fire not at where the aliens are but at where the aliens are going to be. That's the test -- to be able to work work always one argument further into the future, to anticipate one more parry and thrust, and to be able to forumulate a clever and considered response to anything said to me, at the speed of thought. That's what I'm doing when I'm having a proper argument -- I'm relaxing with a friend but I'm giving everything I've got to beat myself.

The matter is, of course, open to debate.