Damn, it's crowded in here.

From The Book of Contrivance, Revelations of Cor-Blime, God Of Stating The Obvious

Over the course of the last year, the storyteller of my Tuesday night D&D game has been revealing that his game world includes amongst its gods several figures based on gods from my own game, which ran prior to his. The gods he's borrowed (and, to his credit, very much made his own) are primarily expansions upon deifications of the player characters from my game, which ended with a half-dozen apotheoses. Seeing his versions of some of my gods prompted me to open up an ancient archive of dark and vile knowledge -- vis, the 40 or so megabytes of records I've kept from my games over the years. Out of that comes the following: a selection of the gods from the various planes which were important to the Dungeons and Bandersnatches universe.

The Blazing Pantheon:
Garm, god of the Sun: Garm is the mightiest of the gods of the Blazing Pantheon and the undisputed "god of gods" of his circle. Not quite the king of the gods but assuredly the one to whom all others listen in the stories, Garm’s avatar is said to be a physically powerful man with blazing red hair and gleaming gold skin who always stands a foot taller than the person who is looking at him. As the god of the sun, Garm is patron to many priests of good, and enemy to the undead. Garm is Lawful Good and is a harsh but fair lord.

Hessek: Hessek the Queen is a god of true evil. Her avatar is a swirling mass of shadows which roil in a humanoid shape, with two blazing red eyes staring out from the cowl. She and her church follow a simple philosophy: those who follow Hessek are to be pampered, and those who disobey Hessek are to be destroyed. Though beyond doubt a force of evil, Hessek is held in check by the burning light of Garm, and the two are locked in a never-ending struggle where Garm has always been one tenuous step ahead. On Protus, the Chronomancer's plane, Hessek is known as the Nameless one, She Who Must Not Be Named, and a dozen other cryptic and cliched titles; for reasons unknown, most who speak her name on that plane are struck down.

Tyridin: Tyridin is a god of justice, though when his priests are out of earshot, he is sometimes called god of storming the front gates in broad daylight. Tyridin is not subtle; he is one of the most active gods, and his avatar is almost perpetually active on the Prime Material Plane, appearing at the sites of greatest and most significant judgments as an eight foot tall warrior covered neck to toe in ornate ceremonial plate mail. The avatar’s face is uncovered, but no one ever quite recalls what it looked like. Tyridin’s priests are often loud and outspoken about the virtues of justice and faith, and will sorely punish any wrongdoing they see. It should be noted that they do not support law, but justice, and in some otherwise quite lawful kingdoms the faith has been outlawed entirely.

The Great Old Ones Of The Netherhells:
Karatax: Though none have seen Karatax in millenia, his body remains interred undisturbed in the depths of Kartaxia iself, and numerous demons have personally visited the spirit realms and confirmed that The Deadliest Demon is quite dead, still demons all across the Netherhells pray nightly to the Lord of Fangs and Slaughter, hoping to attain a fraction of Karatax's might. The fact that to date no single demon's prayers have been verifiable answered by Karatax or anyone else does nothing to diminish the cult's numbers.

Slangg: The cult of the God of Malice, Murder and Treachery is perhaps the single largest "religion" of the Netherhells, despite an astonishingly high turnover rate in its faithful. The high turnover in priests is not at the hands of Slangg's many enemies, for its priests are some of the most unstoppable forces of destruction Below, but rather at the tentacles of Slangg itself, who personally tests all of its clerics when they make a bid to control large segments of the church. To date, no demon is recorded to have passed Slangg's tests, and the leaders of the church, when asked about it, shift nervously and change the subject.

Others and non-aligned:
G'Dank: The god of immediate justice, the god of righteous vengeance, or the god of bar-room brawls depending on who one asks, G'Dank is widely but subtly worshiped on at least three planes and probably many more besides. G'Dank's followers are almost exclusively paladins, for the god's foremost teaching is that in a fundamentally unjust world the just must actively seek out evil and stomp on its head. According to legend, G'Dank himself takes his name from the very first sound he ever made; at the moment of his springing into existence alongside his brother Enkala, god of Pride and Vanity, G'Dank took one look at his divine sibling, grabbed him by the back of his head, entangled one fist in long flowing golden hair, and face-planted Enkala into the Feasting Table of the Gods, where divine skull and divine wood met with a resounding "g'dank" sound.

Tanit: Tanit the Trickster is a relatively young god, being a mere few thousand years old. The legends tell that Tanit was created by elder gods by accident, and many nations tie Tanit in to their legends of the development of free will, and even of humankind. While Tanit has never created any sentient species on any plane, he is rightly credited as developing some of the most powerful (and perplexing) magical items and artifacts ever to exist. To Tanit's credit (and infamy) can be attributed such legendary items as the fearsome "Relatively Tan Bag of Tricks" (whose tiger could pounce through walls and whose bear fired lasers from its eyes), the unstoppable "Worm-Rider's Saddle" (a two-inch long saddle which, when tied to a worm, would cause any annelid to grow into a three hundred foot long voracious killing machine), and the dreaded "Vorpal Sword of Beheading, Stuffing, and Mounting In the Den."

And if you think they're bad, just wait until you see what I've got in store for my players in my new summer D20 Modern game starting next week.

Human legends are filled with all manner of cthonic entities. Tales of ancient evils are so all-pervasive in story and myth that there almost *must* be a grain of truth to all of them. Demons, vampires, shapeshifters, goblins... stories of such creatures occur in very nearly every culture with startling similarities. To be sure, some might happily argue in favour of convergent evolution, improbable cultural contacts, perhaps even a collective unconcious, but the simple truth is far less pleasant: there are humans, creatures of flesh and substance, and there are daemons, insubstantial entities which cross to Earth from places unknown to wreak havoc on the mortals. There are countless forms of daemons, for their nature is to be chaotic and mutable, but certain relatively predictable sub-classes of them are known to exist. A single large class of daemon, for example, must subsist on blood when on Earth, and so over the millenia has given rise to the vampire myth. Another class possesses the bodies of animals exclusively, so perfectly mimicing the disease of rabies that numerous apparent attacks and outbreaks each year are in fact attributable to these beasts. While most classes of daemons appear to have no goal beyond sating their own hunger or causing discord in their vicinity, some few types are better organized and far more insidious.

One class in particular has appeared, time and again, with the goal of no less than the absolute eradication of the human race. Skinriders, they take over the bodies of the weak-willed or injured. The victim's skin becomes chalk-white and their eyes become as black as night. Driving the body in jerking, awkward motions and often grotesquely copying the gestures or mannerisms of those around them, the victim becomes violent and uncontrollable, and many display vast psychokinetic powers which they wield to deadly effect, all in absolute and eerie silence. Throughout history, they have been known as malevolent imitative mute entities -- MIMEs. During a brief period at the dawn of humankind, a massive incursion by these daemons left humanity deeply scarred, and though the daemons were beaten back by the heroes of the age, humans still to this day unknowingly dress in the manner of mimes and re-enact harmless parodies of the ancient daemons, a subconcious defense mechanism against terror no human mind could cope with. Few human mummers understand the fear and hostility with which they are greeted by many, who carry with them in their genetic memory a fear of the daemons.

Today, it is the early twentieth century. It has been nearly fifteen hundred years since the last MIME breached the dimensional walls and rode human flesh, but their long exile has ended with an incursion greater than any in history. At thousands of points across the globe, black tears appear in the sky and through them come daemons in search of hosts, and as each one finds a body, humanity's odds of survival grow longer. The weak, the sick, and the tired begin to rise again as MIMEs, each with fearsome telekinetic powers and the instinctive drive to use them to strike out against any nearby humans. Unless the breaches are contained and the MIMEs destroyed, humanity faces extinction... and there are precious few heroes of this age capable of stopping them.

All hope is not yet lost, however. For reasons unknown, some few humans are resistant to the MIME's touch, taking on the daemon's power but retaining their own minds. These individuals have gained the power to resist the MIMEs on their own terms, pitting mighty walls against gale-force winds and dueling with invisible blades. You are one of these empowered humans; in a world falling to the forces of an unstoppable enemy, you are one of the few blessed (or cursed) with the power to fight back... or hasten the extinction.

The System: MIME is a one-shot campaign using the World of Darkness d10 pre-Gehenna system. Players will begin the game as possessed humans. Each carries within them a daemon urging them to give up their humanity and embrace its power (and malevolence). So long as the character resists the daemon's blandishments, they retain their mind and soul, and additionally have one MIME power, such as:

• create invisible walls
• summon winds
• wield invisible tools
• superhuman acrobatics

Date and time: July or August, specifics to be decided
Openings: MIME currently has three to five vacant seats.

Tempting Fate Day came upon us, this year, as it tends to do with such alarming regularity that you might almost think it was on the calendar or something. Tempting Fate Day is, of course, the anniversary of the day on which the Titanic went from being the mightiest vessel above the waves to being the mightiest vessel below them, and traditionally, Tempting Fate day is the one day of the year on which the Universe's malign gaze is most closely upon the creatures of earth. On Tempting Fate Day ironic catastrophes abound, self-inflicted accidents skyrocket, and darkly humourous fates befall people worldwide. On the fifteenth of April people emerge from their homes, point up at the sky, and laugh at fate, but on the fourteenth, the wise and the cautious lock themselves at home, bar the doors and windows, batten down the hatches, and hide like the tax-collector is at the door with a chainsaw howling at the full moon.On the fourteenth of April, Tempting Fate Day, the Universe is watching, and it's a right bastard; the safest and best course of action for any right-thinking creature is to cower and hope for the best.

I went to the Casino.

Montreal actually has a world-reknowned casino. Owned and operated by the most notorious organized crime faction in the city (the goverment, naturally), the montrel Casino is as wrtched a hive of scum and villainy as any that ben Kenobi ever walked into, mediated only slightly by the fact that the majority of the scum and villains in question are senior citizens and not much of a threat unless looks can, indeed, kill. The Casino is a remarkable example of Enlightened Self-Interest at work, as literally thousands, perhaps tens-of-thousands of slot machines rake in millions of quarters daily from the strong- and weak-willed alike, many with stickers on their sides advertising the gambling-addiction help-line. On an upper floor, card and gaming tables are crowded at all hours and cards are shuffled with displays of manual dexterity rarely seen outside of world-class magicians or unusually-successful gunfighters. And, of course, there's lots of shiny things.

Going to the Casino was, understandably, not my idea. Despite the fact that I put my life in the hands of the twenty-sided die every week, as a general rule, I never gamble. Nobody appreciates the folly of games of chance as deeply as a chaos-worshipper (with the possible exception of a mathematician) and Forsteri frowns upon faithful who gamble material wealth on any game which has a less than fifty-percent probability of success. I found myself going to the Casino for a birthday dinner, and since I'd never been before and the company promised to be much fun, I decided to go for the sake of the experience. As I said, I'm not a gambler by nature, and I held myself strictly to playing away only six dollars and fifty cents (four dollars, plus two-fifty in winnings which I didn't feel would be worth cashing out). I lost this money on the slots rather than a real game, for three reasons. First, I'd never tried slots before, and I thought it might be amusing to experience the proverbial one-armed bandit, as indeed it was. Interestingly, I felt more embarassed and silly putting quarters into a slot-machine than I do making a public speech in front of two-hundred people. Second, the real games all had much higher buy-ins than I felt inclined to pay; my finances are a bit lower than I'd like at the moment with several large-ish expenditures coming up in the foreseeable future, so while I'd enjoy one day playing proper Blackjack or Baccarat, this was not the night to lose a hundred dollars learning the games. Thirdly and most importantly, was precisely because I'm not a gambler and I hate facing situations with uncertain outcomes; if you're winning at Blackjack you never know when it's time to risk what you have or cash out and come ahead, but with the slots, you're at the closest thing to a sure outcome you'll find at a casino. There's a certain sense of reassurance and comfort to that.

On the plus side, the Casino does have one of the finest Italian restaurants I've ever eaten at, at only slightly gouging prices. I would actually consider going back there just for the food, if it wasn't such a schlep to get to. Looking back, I regret not trying their sensibly-priced creme brule while I had the chance.

The real attraction of any decent casino, of course, isn't the gaming or the food. A casino is, in many ways, a psychology textbook made flesh with the added benefit of being covered in pretty lights. A five minute walk through a casino is a "how-to" guide to the field of manipulation and crowd control, along with a dash of operant conditioning and behaviour modification. Consider: the science behind a casino is to design a building which people will choose to spend as much time as possible in even as they lose money. Everything about a casino has to be centered around the principle of putting the thought "I want to stay here and keep playing" even in the face of all rational logic and, quite possibly, a crowd of people trying to pull them away. The biggest tool is what psychologists call "intermittent reward." Waaay back in the 60's when the fathers of modern mind-control were still elucidating the first principles of their art, it was empirically demonstrated that the frequency and regularity of winning a prize affects how long an individual will keep trying the same futile behaivour. Put a rat into a cage with a bar, and sooner or later, rats being clever l'il buggers, it will push the bar to see what happens. If pushing the bar never triggers a reward, the rat will soon stop trying. If pushing the bar elicits a reward every time and then it stops triggering a reward, the rat will soon tire of trying, and stop. If, however, the reward is intermittent and unpredictable, then when the lever stops working the rat will never be sure if the rewards have stopped coming or if it's just having "bad luck." It will keep pushing the bar, for a very, very long time. Humans are much smarter than rats, of course, but the machine could be set to never pay off and the quarters wouldn't stop flowing.

Keeping people putting money into the machines is one thing, but that's just one dimension of the genius at work here. The Casino has courteous and friendly staff that circulate the slot machines with free coffee and juice, because the last thing the owners want is for customers to have to stand up from a machine to go get some water and decide not to sit back down. On top of that, the Casino is built as one giant maze where to get from the main gaming areas to the main exits requires passing through multiple criss-crossing corridors and several counter-intuitive floor-changes; the whole building is set up so that, much like the Death Swimming Pools in The Sims, many people enter but nobody ever leaves. Finally, the overall theme of the Casino was, at least at the time I attended, 50's Americana, complete with Elvis-haired men standing at information desks and rock from that era on every sound-system. To a modern young crowd it's silly and cheesy but to the fifty through eighty year olds, the touch of nostalgia and feeling of youth is addictive in and of itself. Nothing is coicidental or stochastic in a casino's decor; everything you see, hear, or experience is there with insidious forethought.

The important thing, of all that, is that I went to a casino on Tempting Fate Day and nothing catastrophic happened. I lost all the money I risked, but that was hardly unforseen and less than catastrophic. Quite obviously, the blind dumb luck which watches over me in so many situations has its limits and wasn't enough to beat the odds at the roulette machines, or at least, not in the short term, but since I'm far better served expending that luck in more important situations like driving home in deadly snowstorm without snowtires, I can't complain. If I had dared to gamble more money, might I have beaten the odds and won big? I have been known to beat the odds (and accomplish the impossible) more than a few times, and once in a while I enjoy taking my chances and seeing if the Goddess kisses or spurns me, but that night, at least, wasn't the night for it. After all, who wants to tempt fate?

A little known fact about me is that my all-time favourite poem, bar none, is PB Shelley's Ozymandias. It's generally known among my friends and colleagues that as a rule I hate and fail to appreciate all forms of poetry. In part I've always felt that the overly flowery imagery which generally defines poetry is wasteful and distracting from the inherent beauty of language and clarity; in part, I have a certain amount of difficulty connecting on an emotional level with a poem; and, in part, it galls me that a million no-talent hacks who do nothing more than pseudorandomly string words together and claim to have hidden meaning have gotten paid to see their works in print when I haven't. Ozymandias, though, has always been somehting different for me. The poem is one of those rare works which I've never so much read as seen; by the end of the first line I'm visualizing the scene so perfectly that I feel as though I'm there. The emotions of the great king are ones which I can very much empathize with, as are the emotions of the poet reflecting on the ultimate fate of such men. On a visceral and purely linguistic level, I find the poem's flow to be simply beautiful -- perfect word choices matched with subtle tones and adjectives, without unecessary metaphor to obfuscate the ideas. And, finally, the image of the transience of all things, the ebb and flow of entire civilizations, the eternal victory of chaos over any ordered system, is powerful to me. The poet reminds us that all art is transient, and even the poem itself can't hope to last forever. Sooner or later, of everything, nothing will remain but legs and a plaque, and eventually just sand.

This is doubly true for snowmen.

Yesterday was my neurology midterm. Like most of my exams, this consisted of a multiple choice exam first thing in the morning, a respectable lunch-break, and a practical laboratory exam ("so you walk into the anatomy lab and there's like thirty severed human heads and brains with pins stuck in 'em sitting on tables..."). A multiple choice exam is rarely any great challenge for me; I average about one minute per question and typically walk out of any exam more than an hour before pens-down, and yesterday, this meant that my modest lunch break was about three hours long. I wish I was the sort of person who could study uninterrupted for three hours, and if I was, I wouldn't be in the first year of medicine right now. I'm not a great studier, and so I while I did spent about half of that nice break reviewing, and for the remaining time, I did other stuff. While eating my lunch, for example, I treated myself to a chapter of the novel I'm reading rather than attempt to memorize for the eleventy twelfth time which artery runs through the foramen spinosum of the temporal bone of the skull (it turns out it's the middle meningeal). In addition to relaxing with my book, though, I took advantage of one very pleasant distraction. Montreal always has two or three early spring snowfalls, and our April snows tend to be some of the most fun of the year. An exceedingly light, fluffy, and wet snow falls in weather which is about four degrees celsius above zero, which is merely "long sleeve" weather to me. This april snow tends to be soft, comfortable, half-melty, and most importantly, highly adhesive.

In between portions of my neurology exam, I went to play in the snow and make snowmen. I do so very much love being me.

To be really precise, I don't tend to build snowmen. I've always found the snowman to be a bit cliche and, more importantly, rather dull to build. I far prefer to spend my time working on, in the words of the venerable mister Bill Waterson, deranged mutant killer monstersnowgoons. Why on earth would I spend my time building happy little snowmen when I could instead be building horned, fanged, and tentacled snowdemons? And, in fact, this is precisely what I built. On a wooden bench, in plain view and right outside one of the two main doors to McGill's anatomy building, I built a two-foot tall snowdemon with four arms, horns, and a modest fanged maw. The basic structure was a large, conical body with a long thick tail leaving it in the back and curling all the way around to the front. Three of the arms were fairly non-specific pseudopodal appendages but I took pains to carve one of them into a nice lobster-claw shape, just because I could. In a sudden fit of inspiration, I even took an extra few minutes to mold two six-inch tall snowcultists, kneeling before their snowgod with their arms upraised in supplication. Finally, to really top off the whole thing, I signed it, shaping an "EL" out of snow in foot-tall letters next to the snowdemon itself. So far, I've received very positive feedback from the two or three people who actually noticed the sculpture... and the mixed review of one fellow who walked up and asked me if I was building a snow-buddha, a question I found slighty curious since I'd already attached all four tentacles and the tail (although, to be fair, I hadn't yet shaped the horns or fanged maw). The best part is that since I upgraded my cel phone a couple of weeks back, my new one has a camera, and so I was able to immortalize the snowdemon and, as soon as I figure out how to get the pictures off the camera, distribute them to the few people who have followed my history of sculptures with interest.

The thing about building this sculpture, of course, is that I was working with April snow. Winter itself officially ended about two weeks ago, and what snow we've had since isn't truly cold weather so much as the evil gods of the Canadian wilderness fighting their annual hibernation. Even as I was working, the outdoor temperature was about 4 degrees above zero and the very snow I was molding was visibly melting. On the one hand, this was an essential factor in the snow being wet and adhesive enough to sculpt, but on the other hand, whatever snowdemon I built would, inevitably, be destroyed within a few hours. Talk about transience of art -- this snowdemon would be reduced to a protoplasmic pool by dinnertime. I built it at about 10:30 in the morning; I came to check on it at 11:30 after lunch and it had lost two inches of height and most of the detail work; at 2:30 when I walked out of the laboratory exam, it had lost another four inches of height, a large gap had appeared in its tail, and one tentacle had lost too much mass proximally and fallen off the main body to crush one of the two snowcultists (who were themselves semi-liquid by this time and being held together mostly by hydrogen-bonding). I'm quite sure that if I went back now, twenty hour hours later, part of the main conical body would still be there but it would have long since stopped looking like anything more than a curious lump of snow, especially since the sun's been out all morning. Everything else would have been long-since reduced to water by now, and most of *that* will have no doubt evaporated or dissapeared now a sewer grating, never to be used again to build a snowdemon.

So, why do it? Sure, building snowdemons -- and yes, perhaps even snowmen -- is good fun, but it doesn't *last*. It's not just transient, it's arguably futile, especially in April. Percy Shelley might argue that there isn't a point since sooner or later nothing will remain of any snowman but two vast and trunkless legs of snow, but on the other hand, he might just say that if it brings joy and meaning while it stands, that's good enough. A snowdemon doesn't have to last forever or even until the next day to have meaning; I remember it, after all, so it isn't really gone, and this is especially true for the simple fact that I took pictures of it before it once more became one with the world's waters. Most importantly, it was fun to build, fun to look at, and fun to share with the people who came to stop and look. So yes, look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair, for your works will join them too, in time, and what's more, your works probably didn't look half as cool as my snowdemon.

I've observed before that when one is, oneself, educated, one easily forgets how much of one's own knowledge, things which just seems obvious and natural to know, isn't known by the general population. Case in point, following a brief conversation tonight, I found myself thinking about genetics. To me, after gods only know how many years of education, it's perfectly obvious to me that deoxyribonucleic acid is composed of the complementary base pairs of adenosine, guanine, cytosine, toluene, and caramel. This knowledge comes to me the way other people know that, for example, London is the capital of England; they couldn't tell you where they learned it, but they've known it for as far back as they can remember and they can hardly believe anybody wouldn't know it. Of course, people of my aquaintance who know more than I do about genetics usually wouldn't know what I was talking about if I discussed, say, the distinction between the O'Bannon and Romero class zombies, so "obvious knowledge" is really such a subjective thing.

In this particular instance, I'm reminded of a class I took in my second year of undergraduate. At Concordia, all students are required to take a certain number of courses from fields out of their own. Psychology is classified as a social science, and so a student doing the honours program as I was would be expected to take one humanities course (I took an Ethics course in the philosophy department, naturally) and a hard-science class (very much dumbed down, of course, since science profs don't think highly of the social science kids by and large). In my case, I decided to take something useful as opposed to easy and brush up on genetics, a field which I was woefully weak in. I may never forget that first lecture; I sat down in the full auditorium, a large room filled with close to two hundred non-science students, many of them with the glazed-over-eyes and slack-open-mouths that are diagnostic of a certain crop of university students. The teacher -- actually a world-respected geneticist and cancer specialist, for all the good that did her in this class -- began the class by putting up a slide of a human cell, with the legend, "CELL." And then, and I swear I'm not making this up, she told the students, "I'm not going to expect you to remember all of the terms." Fortunately the class did go uphill a little bit from there, and we actually covered some fairly advanced enzymes and even Southern and Northern blotting tests by the end, but that first moment stuck with me (and indeed, did prove prophetic, as I scored the only A+ I ever got in a genetics course).

I later discovered that because I was doing a BSc and not a BA I was technically a science student, and so had to take a social science class as my "out of program" instead (and boy, was that sociology prof not ready for someone like me), which was just one of several reasons why I graduated with six credits more than I needed to. So anyway...

Now, over the course of this past year, I've become proficient in a lot of advanced biological concepts -- and I ought to have, since it's taken me two tries to become so -- and, much as happened to me as I studied philosphy and kept forgetting that not everybody is educated enough to be able to disprove Descartes in twelve words or less, I'm now forgetting that not everybody knows the rationale behind Polymerase Chain Reaction or, for that matter, what DNA is, why it's useful, and why so many things can get into it and make Bad Stuff Happen. Interestingly, where I found it annoying when the people around me didn't automatically know why Kant was a moron ( -- Webster), I find it amusing when people don't know as much as I do about genetics (or anatomy or pharmacology or whatever). I have no idea offhand why there should be this difference, because one would think that if you're annoyed that people can't talk to you about one, topic it would be equally annoying if they can't talk to you about other topics.

Theory: The purpose of philosophy is to stimulate thought, discussion, debate, and argument. Thus, if other people are unfamiliar with the philosophy in question, it's annoying because there can be no stimulating discussion (or at least, not in the near future). On the other hand, the purpose of science is not to spread knowledge, but to empower whoever already has the knowledge and to enable them to lord it over everybody else. Thus, when someone else lacks your knowledge, it is entertaining and you can show off. Lack of knowledge about the one field induces head shaking, whereas the same lack of knowledge in another field induces maniacal laughter.

When you get down to it, the major purpose of a lot of things in science seems to be to give the opportunity to cackle maniacally, possibly while also expounding at length about how they are all going to pay, and why. My professors insist that there's more to medicine than this, but they have they to prove it to my satisfaction.

       "I'm going to have to eat you, you know," it says to me. Now, I'm the first to admit I've led an interesting and exciting life, but this is not the way that even I typically begin conversations. I've already activated my emergency beacon and have been quietly jabbing the mental on-switch furiously, but it's going to take at least forty minutes for anyone to find us, and that's assuming they find the tunnel we fell down and don't have to find another way to get here. I somehow don't think we have forty minutes.
       "Melp," whimpers the tech beside me, or something to that effect. Poor guy... I get paid to deal with this kind of weirdness, but he's probably never been in danger from anything other than high blood sugar, let alone what we've stepped into now.
       "Have to?" I ask, injecting my voice with the sort of pure innocence that only people who are really, really screwed can fake and gazing up at a yellow eye the size of my head. "I can't imagine you really *have* to. Oh sure, you might choose to, but you aren't really being forced. You could choose to just let us leave."
       It opens its mouth and I tense, expecting the worst, but then it yawns. Heads-up-display tells me there's all sorts of unpleasant stuff in the gas the thing exhales, including trace molecules that almost certainly came about from the digestion of human tissue.
       "No," it says with the tail end of the yawn as its jaws close and fifty-two big pointy teeth clack together, fitting perfectly. Countless scales rasp against stone as it shifts its bulk and raises its head off of the floor to get a better look at us. "I have to. I've seen this before, you see. A bunch of you bipeds come down here for one reason or another. I let one of them go once and he only came back with a bigger, armed group. That wouldn't do at all. I'm just going to have to eat you."
       "Melp," repeats the tech, helpfully. I shuffle a couple of steps to the side to put myself between him and the Gaping Jaws'O'Doom and hope I'm being subtle. I'm not; reptillian lips quirk upwards at the edge in an oddly human smirk.
       Plan A: Play for time. Let the big expensive computers built into me run the numbers and try to come up with a way out of this. Ten thousand thoughts per second processor speed, don't fail me now.
       "In that case," I say, trying to look casual and craning my neck around to get a good look at the cave, "I don't suppose you'd consider telling me what a dragon's doing down here?" I can't see much of the cave, sadly... the lighting is hovering just at the edge of visibilities where I can't get much detail from standard ROY or BIV, let alone G, but the hotlamp that fell down the drop with us is pumping out too many watts for me the profitably switch to low light and Toothy is radiating too many kilocals of metabolic heat for me to get anything useful from infrared as I cycle through spectrum views. It looks like the cave itself is only a couple of hundred feet in any direction, as close to a perfect dome as you get when only Nature is doing the digging. The slope the techie and I just dropped down is close to an eighty degree angle and slick with mud and pebbles; I could scamper out of here with my climbing claws but I'd just be leaving two hundred pounds of gristle to be devoured by a dragon, and that sort of things comes out of my paycheck.
       Big Red rumbles deep in its throat; I don't know herpetopsychology well enough to tell if that's amusement, boredom, or its last biped disagreeing with it.
       "A better question," it growls out at me, "is why bipeds keep trying to build above my home. I was here first, you know." So the rumbling sound means 'I'm angry that you dumb kids are playing in my yard.' I file that under 'O' for 'Oh god, I'm going to die' for future reference. "That's why I keep having to eat you people. If I didn't eat them, they'd just build more of those silly tunnels right through my den."
       "Ever tried talking to them and asking them not to?"
       "That's when they sent soldiers after me," it replies. It gives a little snort and a bit of flame jets out a couple of feet. "I didn't try talking again after that. And now, dinner."
       So much for Plan A, then. Plan B: Attempt to intimidate the giant fire-breathing reptile. I try not to pay attention to ten thousand scenarios per second ending with me being eaten.
       "I should warn you, I'm a government agent." I'm greeted with blank incomprehension. "That means I work for the people who tell the soldiers what to do. If I don't come back, they'll send that many more soldiers, and I promise you that they'll come loaded for bear. Err, dragon. Now, if we can work something out to avoid that-"
       "There is nothing to work out," it says, interrupting me. "If they'll come either way, then at least I can make certain that they don't know exactly what's waiting for them. If you go back, they will."
       The dragon has a grasp of strategy. Damn, I hate it when they're not stupid. So much for plan B. That leaves Plan C. I spend a good two heartbeats calculating other options rather than go with plan C, and don't come up with any. Why is it that I keep promising myself that I won't ever leave home again without a heavy weapons platform and yet I never actually have one with me when I need it? I... Oh, right, because of what happened with the plasma cannon during the Slayhack job, that's why they won't issue me heavy weapons anymore. Well, who makes up these "rules" anyway?
       I take a deep breath and switch the voice modulator in my helmet to add a touch of defeatism and sincerity.
       "Okay then," I say, and spread my hands a few inches away from my hips, palms open and outwards, in the universal 'well, what can I do?' gesture. "I guess you'd better just eat us."
       I have never before this moment seen a dragon look nonplussed before. Which is easy, since I've never before today seen a dragon before. Ooh, I am soooo dead...
       "I... what?"
       "Eat us. Obviously you're going to. I can't talk you out of it and I certainly can't stop you if you try. At least I can meet my fate with a calm, quiet dignity."
       This noble speech is belied by the continued whimpering from behind me. My olfactoryceptors cheerfully inform me that he's soiled himself; I turn them off. Big Red looks confused for a second longer, then undulates its spine in what I assume is a draconic shrug.
       "I admire that kind of acceptance," it says, looking at me. "There may be hope for your species yet. Not for you, but for your species, maybe. You're very brave."
       "You would be amazed," I say, "how often a giant monster has tried to eat me." By the Emperor, if anything I've said tonight carried the ring of truth, it was that. I give the dragon my very best 'you can trust me, I've got that kinda face' grin, which is pretty much wasted since I've got my helmet on and my mirrored face-plate lowered, but what the hell... points for trying.
       It does that shrug again, then rears up slowly, opens its mouth -- ah, fifty *six* teeth, my mistake -- and unhinges its mandible.
       "One thing," I say quickly, holding up a hand. It gapes at me; I think it might be trying to form a question but it obviously can't talk with its jaw like that. "You eat your food raw, right? You don't torch it first or anything?"
       "Nw," it slurps.
       "Just checking. Well, I guess you'd better eat me now."
       And it does. With, might I add, remarkable enthusiasm and far more drool that it could possible need. This... is the third most disgusting moment of my life. Above the sound of being en-mouthed, I can hear the tech boy back "outside" screaming renewed cries of terror as he watches the dragon's head strike down serpent-like, rear back up, and me vanish into it.
       For a few seconds, the whole process is remarkably non-horrific, and then my shoulders smack up against what I'm pretty sure are the dragon's palatine tonsils and I jam up. There's a sort of snap-squoosh sound as its lower jaw snaps back into place and its mouth crunches closed, and suddenly both my lags have been shorn off just below the knees. The control gate in my anterior spine instantly cuts off all pain sensations from that far down but the shock still gets through and I grey out for a moment. Damn it, one of those legs was still organic!
       The dragon swallows.
       Mercifully, no bones break as a dozen giant masticatory muscles contract and shove me forcefully down the dragon's esophagus, though my damage report system lets me know that some of my tendons and even the main support rods in my spine are being stressed to redline. Everything goes dark; my vision cycles through four visual spectrums before it settles on ambient light amplification and my world goes green but visible. It takes almost a full minute for peristalsis to force me the whole length down, during which time I develop a newfound sympathy for newborns, insoluble fiber, and mass-driver ammunition. Finally, bent and battered, I'm dumped through a sphincter into the stomach. Being eaten is downgraded to the fourth most disgusting moment of my life and is already toeing the line of fifth.
       My outer armour is built of a composite metal and ceramic designed to be non-volatile, non-conductive, and nearly indestructible, but I still wager I've only got a few minutes before the acids in here -- whose chemical compositions don't even begin to be comprehensible to my surface chemoceptors, although good ol' hydrochloric is in the mix -- start eating through and begin to work on what little soft pink flesh is still underneath. I was kind of assuming I'd have legs for this part, but needs must make do or some such. I redirect maximum power away from non-essential systems and into the servos of my main joints. My theoretical maximum strength assymptotes around the six hundred kilos mark, but experience has taught me that I can push that up to very nearly one full metric ton if I have to, and I push every newton I've got to shove against the stomach walls and buy myself a little bit of breathing room. There's a muscular rumble and a hiss of pain from above in response, but Toothy hasn't seen anything yet.
       The panel on my ventral right forearm slides open and out snaps eight inches of Sharp Pointy. I perform an improptu gastrectomy and start working my way up.
       The whole world begins to feel like it's shaking as the beast writhes around me. My audioceptors automatically shut off as the sound of the screams pass one hundred and twenty decibels -- on the inside, at least -- and I pass through what I assume is the diaphragm in eerie silence. I pop the climbing claws on the distal phalanges of my left hand to help pull myself up into the dragon's thoracic cavity and there it is, pulsating in front of me. A huge muscular sac as tall as I am sits above me, with massive bellows on either side and an organ with no analogue in any species I've ever opened up that's literally radiating heat. I claw my way up, finding firm purchase in contracting and relaxing muscle tissue that's almost as hard as solid iron and my left elbow bends the wrong way and snaps as I catch a diastole at a bad angle. I don't feel a thing; aside from my control gate, I've got so much endorphins and exogenous stims pumping through my blood right now that I wouldn't feel a chainsword to the guts. I give myself one more heave upwards -- Emperor, but I wish I had legs right now -- and there, above me, is Mister Aorta. Mister Aorta and Mister Radio-ulnar Retractable Combat Blade have a little party.
       Now this... THIS is the third most disgusting moment of my life.
       It takes me another twenty minutes to hack my way out, even using both combat blades and the fusion cutter in my finger. I emerge into the cool cavern air along with what can only be described as a heaping steaming pile of entrails, with one broken arm and two severed legs -- which, by the way, I can see lying on the floor not too far away, pretty cleanly severed. The tech I fell down here with is huddled in one corner whimpering and looks to be in pretty sorry shape... since I just had to claw my way through a monster's rib-cage using one and a half arms, I haven't got a lot of sympathy for him. By my best estimate, it'll be another ten to twenty minutes before help arrives, and there's no way I'm getting back up that incline in the shape I'm in now. I flop down to the stone, try to get comfortable, shoot tech-boy in the back with a mild tranquilizer dart, and as his cry of pain melts into two soft snores and a thud, call up some music on my helmet's internal speakers and settle down to wait for evac.

It's now been just over one year since my last build upgrade, when the combined pressures of coming precariously close to failing my neurology class, the growing certainty that I was going to be asked to repeat a year of medical school, a difficult break-up, extended illness, holiday stresses and four years of slow personality change precipitated a minor rebirth. Eric 4.1 was replaced by Eric 4.2 over the course of a very interesting week. This was the first of my various rebirths which I had been in a position to fully appreciate and contemplate and I drew a number of interesting insights from the process, none of which are going to be discussed here. No, tonight, with less than half an hour to go before my posting deadline, we attempt to look back on the previous year and assess whether the current Eric has been a worthy sucessor to the name. As some of you will have already guessed, what this really means is "Eric couldn't think of anything good to write about in time."

One of the major driving forces behind the deletion of Eric 4.1 was his/my (I've always been a bit confused as to how I feel about applying those pronouns in this case... I wish I was joking) social circle. As near as I can tell, most people don't tend to spend a lot of time contemplating how close they are to the people around them. I've always been driven to greater introspection than most people, which is a dangerous habit in anyone as melodramatic as I am. At the time, out of the people I considered friends and close friends, pretty much every single person around me had, in recent memory, done something I felt was a severe betrayl or disapointment. In some cases, these betrayl existed only in my own mind -- I sometimes have trouble separating my imaignations from reality, sad to say -- and most of the rest of the cases were things I was able to easily forgive and forget after brief conversations with people, because their friendship mattered more to me than holding some piddling little grudge. A handful of people, regretably including some of those nearest and dearest to me in years past, I more or less cut ties with entirely, and I haven't really had any cause to regret that. The two people who I cared for most in the world at that time were among those who had commited non-imagined (objective, tangible, written evidence existed) sins against me; one, I resolved effortlessly and the other, not so much, but that's the way things go sometimes. The important thing is, in late March/early April of 2006, I resolved to stop trusting everybody around me, with the intent that this would be the perfect time to look at all my friendships and, hopefully, remind myself why I cared for the people around me and rebuild those friendships from the group up in the manner which both I and my friends deserved. It was, arguably, not the smartest thing I have ever done, but it also wasn't the stupidest, and by-and-large, it's been a tremendous sucess in the last year.

How have my friendships changed in the year since then? To one friend, I began saying "I love you," and to another friend, I stopped; in both cases, rightly so. I drastically reduced the number of people of whom I asked the Six Great Questions, because I came to conclude that most people didn't want to be asked and weren't that interesting anyway. In a number of notable cases, I began working hard to become closer to a number of people (several of whom are reading this right now, and if that's you, "hi!"). My relationships with most of the people around me didn't change at all, and there's no reason why they would have. The important thing is that *I* was left with a more secure sense of who I cared for and why, and that's a valuable thing to have in your life. I strive every day to remember all the things I have to be grateful for in my life -- a long list, since I've always had the devil's own luck in a lot of ways -- and not take anything for granted, since I've got a lot of things that people around me don't got. I had grown to take some of the people around me for granted; I don't know if they had begun to take me for granted, and I wouldn't presume to speak for them. What matters is, in the year since, I worked hard to stop taking for granted those I care for. In some cases, this meant stopping caring for them, but in the majority -- the vast majority, and no mistake about it -- I feel closer to them than I did before.

This is, after all, what the purpose of rebirth is: to grow, to evolve, to shed our weaknesses and to exagerate our strengths, to become better than we were. Am I truly better now than I was then? It's hard to say. I'm not happier. In many ways, I've only become angrier and more bitter. I'm not enjoying my studies any more than I was and I'm still in pain all day, every day. On the other hand, I can look at the people around me and feel comfortable believing that I know who cares for me, and equally importantly, why they do. I've got the friendship of a large and varied group of people; I've got the respect of people I respect; I've got the love of a wonderful girl and a handful of friends who I really think of as being as close as family. And, without intending to imply causation, I didn't feel that I had that 365 days ago. I don't know if the people around me ever look at their own circles to evaluate that sort of thing and, if they don't, maybe it's because they're able to live happy lives without being so pathetic as having to constantly re-evaluate everyone around them. I do have to, and rather than let that get in the way of my having fulfilling relationships, I instead let it drive me to have silly, melodramatic conversations with people every so often about whether they trust me. I wouldn't presume to say that I'm better for what I've done in the past year, but I *feel* better for it, and as near as I can tell, it's worked. If nothing else, there are more people reading this right now than there were last year, and for the most part, I'm more fond than I was of the people who do. That's a victory.

Now, getting this uploaded before midnight in six minutes, *that* will be a real victory...

[The curtain rises. The scene: A kitchen, Ancient Egypt. The walls are crude mud-brick and the table is little more than a flat stone set upon two less-flat stones. A HUSBAND and WIFE are seated at the table, about to have a meal. A BABY is also at the table, asleep in the WIFE's arms. A pet, possibly a jackal, sleeps under the table contentedly. Through a window in the background, we can see that it is night and the stars are out. To the left of the window is a cheap wooden door. Someone knocks, twice.]

HUSBAND: Who is it?
(voice): Death.
[HUSBAND and WIFE exchange a glance, and then HUSBAND stands, walks over to the door.]
HUSBAND: Death who?
[HUSBAND opens the door. There stands DEATH, in cheap black robes and white skull face, carrying a crude scythe. ]
HUSBAND: Crap, I thought it was a knock-knock joke.
DEATH: I get that a lot. Can I come in?
H: [pausing for a moment] You're asking permission?
D: Yeah, yeah I am. Can I come in?
H: No, I think you'd better not.
WIFE: We just cleaned the floors, and besides, everything else is a mess. We aren't fit to have company.
D: It looks fine. Let me come in.
W: If you aren't going to enter unless we give you permission, why would we give you permission?
D: You have to. I'm Death.
W: Tell us why you're here first.
D: You won't like it.
H: Oh, you're so sure? Tell us what you're here for and try us. We might be understanding.
D: I'm here to take your firstborn.
W: We aren't understanding.
D: Look, I've got to take your firstborn. Let me come in.
H: What? No, we aren't going to let you in. If you were here for the jackal, maybe, but we're not going to let you take our son!
D: Hey, this isn't my idea. You think I want to be here? My buddies are off wenching in Valhalla and I'm stuck here doing unscheduled pickups instead. Some jerk stuck four and a half million names onto my list this morning and they're all rush jobs, so if you think you're in a bad mood, don't think you'll get any sympathy from me.
H: Bad mood? You're here to kill our son!
D: And because of it, I'm missing out on mead and wenches. At least he gets to sleep through his evening.
H: We are not letting you into our house.
W: Who added all those names to your list? That doesn't happen often, does it?
D: Funny you should ask. There's this guy called Moses, who-
H: Moses! Hah. I might have known.
W: Him and that brother of his, always getting us into trouble. Last week we were slaves, but thanks to him harassing the nobles, this week we have to handmake all our own bricks. Then there's the frogs raining from the sky, and the river turning to blood, I'll tell you, I'm never going to get that out of my laundry. Then yesterday it was darkness everywhere...
H: And tonight, can you believe it, tonight, he says the angel of death is going to descend from the heavens and... and... Oh, crap.
D: Yeah, you got no idea. You know how many firstborn sons there are in fricking Egypt?
W: Well, I-
D: Four million, six hundred thousand and eight.
W: That's-
D: Do you know how I'm going to manage to collect four million, six hundred thousand and eight kids in one night?
H: You-
D: Me neither.
W: We're sor-
D: And on top of THAT... on top of that... half of these houses, I can't even walk into. Ten houses I've tried and seven, I can't even walk through the door for some reason. Who ever heard of Death not being able to go where he wanted? [HUSBAND and WIFE exchange a look] What? What? What was that glance between you two? You know what's screwing with me?
H: Well, there's this guy called Moses...
D: Oh, for the love of...
W: He told everybody to smear a bit of lamb blood on their door to keep out Death. We thought he was a crackpot, but after the thing with the locusts a few days back people are doing what he says just to keep him out of their yards.
Death: [looks at the doorway] This blood here? You mean this little smear of blood here? If somebody were to wipe this off, I could walk in?
[HUSBAND and WIFE share another nervous glance. A moment passes. DEATH begins to wipe furiously at the doorframe with his sleeve, which starts to smoke. He pulls his hand back with a yelp of pain.]
D: Ow! Ow! Crap! What'd you mix into this, acid? Ah, for god's sake, that hurt!
H: Just regular blo-
D: No. Forget it. This isn't worth it. You know what, keep your dumb kid. I'm gonna go try another house. I swear, if that Moses guy is a firstborn, he's gonna regret waking up this morning. Ah, damn it, my best coat, too... [DEATH wanders off. HUSBAND slowly closes the door.]
H: Well, that was probably the strangest visitor we're going to have tonight.
[Someone knocks on the door twice. HUSBAND walks over and opens it. Standing outside is a bedraggled looking man with a grey beard down to his navel, wearing desert robes and carrying a long walking staff.]
ELIJAH: Hi. Sorry to bother you, but I've locked myself out of my flaming chariot. Could I trouble you for a cup of wi-
[HUSBAND closes the door on ELIJAH'S face. Curtain falls.]

A favourite author of mine once observed that there is an important distinction between strategy and tactics. This difference is probably rather subtle, a statement I make based solely on the fact that I have no idea off the top of my head what the actual distinction might be. The author's argument was that tactics are what win battles, and are fairly easily learned, studied, and applied, but strategies are what win wars, and those are much more difficult to master. This sort of distinction might be purely semantic, but on the other hand, it might also have interesting implications. At the very least, it behooves the tactician or startegist to consider what the difference might be.

Going by Webster, at the very least, the two words would seem to have meanings which differ mostly in the richness and implications of their meaning. Tactic, derived from the Latin, is defined simply as "a device for accomplishing an end" or "a method of employing forces in combat." A tactic seems offhand to be a sort of one-shot deal, something conceived of for one limited use to accomplish one single goal and then abandoned. Of course, a single goal might be an overarching, abstract quest of a thing -- The Higher, The Fewer, as it were -- but in terms of how the word is generally employed, a tactic is probably a plan by which one strives to achieve a single, comprehensible, and achievable goal. A tactic is all about efficient use of a given resource to accomplish a given assignment, and hence, the word is usually used in the plural, because very few people are ever trying to achieve only one goal at a time.

Strategy, according to Mr. Webster, is something different. For one thing, the defiition is longer, such that we can assume that either 1) it's a word of greater importance, 2) it's a word of greater richness, or 3) the person writing this word's entry in the dictionary was getting paid by the letter. Strategy, derived from the Greek, is defined as "(1) the science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological, and military forces of a nation or group of nations to afford the maximum support to adopted policies in peace or war; (2) the science and art of military command exercised to meet the enemy in combat under advantageous conditions; (3) the art of devising or employing plans or stratagems toward a goal." Right off the bat, we see a few differences. "Tactics" is the employment of methods, whereas "strategy" is an art. We also observe that while a tactic is something generally restricted to a single goal, a strategy is more of an all-encompassing idea. A tactic uses resources efficiently to accomplish a task; a strategy uses *every* resource to accomplish *every* task. It's more broad. It's more ambitious. It's more impressive. It's probably more expensive. And it's probably more long-term.

None of this is to say that a strategy is better than a tactic. The dictionary discusses tactics in the context of single goals or of employing forces. Obviously, a military force can be a mind-bogglingly-large variety of sizes, but most armies pale in comparisson to the complexity of, as Webster says, entire nations. In the military context, rather than nation, Webster specifically says military command. The word itself is derived from the Greek word for "general" which suggests to us that a tactic might be what a captain comes up with after his bosses tell him what their strategy is. Metaphorically and literally, most of us are not the generals or national voices in our lives, but everybody can aspire to using tactics. In fact, in a lot of situations, a tactic might be a better way of getting things done than a big, complex, and bankrupting strategy. Tactics are what we use when we haven't got enough colours of high-lighters to draw up an impressive looking strategy. Alternately, once we've got a strategy, tactics are what we use to get it done.

To whit: A strategy is a group of tactics, much as a flock is a group of birds or an annoyance is a group of humans. When tactics travel in packs, we call it strategy.

Interestingly, another word, stratagem, which is derived from the same greek root as strategy, adds yet another different definition. While both roots are derived from the Greek word for military leader, a stratagem is specifically a cunning or clever artifice or ruse used to accomplish an end. A group of tactics is a strategy, but a tactic with a dash of sneaky and a pinch of lying becomes a stratagem. It goes without saying that historically, most sucessful strategies have involved a moderate contribution from stratagems as well as their more boring cousins, the tactics.

The one part which bugs me about all this is that strategy and stratagem alike come from the word strategos, which loosely literally translated actually comes out as meaning "the one who leads (or drives) across the landscape (or possibly campground)." This seems to imply purely "the guy who has the whip, the beer, and/or the money" and says nothing at all to me about stragey or tactics. Presumably we're supposed to read between the lines about that sort of thing, but really, who's got time for that sort of thing these days?

When I administered my little quiz not that long ago, one of the questions which people got wrong the most was the question about my undergraduate honours thesis. The honours psychology program is meant to be a give-away course for the gifted students to take; in exchange for doing a research project over the course of a year, the student takes two single-semester classes and one full-year class in which they're pretty much guaranteed an A and a two to four positive letters of reference. Professors get cheap and enthusiastic labour, students get some research experience and a leg-up when they apply to graduate school, and Concordia gets to brag about the high-quality of their psychology students. It's a good system which works out well for everyone involved, except people who dislike doing most research (like me, although in exchange for a few A's and two reference letters I'd have debased myself a lot more than I did).

It might be argued that impression formation dominated my undergraduate career. Impression formation is the area of psychology which busies itself with understanding the all-important first-impression, and people who work in the field strive to understand how we form impressions, why we form them, and what factors influence them. Impressions can be influenced by the obvious (how firm is someone' handshake, do they smile and say hello or mumble and stare at their feet, and so forth) and by the extremely subtle (the posture someone has the first time you see them, how often they blink, and how quickly they speak). The professor who oversaw my honours year had the dubious pleasure of having me in his employ for four summers and two full academic years -- I began working with him during the summer between my first and second year of CEGEP and he never did manage to get rid of me until I graduated except for the summer I spent failing to operate a webdesign company. From the very first week I worked for him, one of my major tasks was to be involved with follow-up research in the wake of one of his newly-graduated PhD students, whose name I won't post here in case she ever looks herself up on Google. Her PhD thesis was on formation of impressions of warmth on limited information -- how do we decide on a first meeting whether someone is kind and caring -- and among other things, she elegantly demonstrated that people who share autobiographical memories readily are perceived as more warm. No matter how many projects I got involved in working in the laboratory, that single finding was always involved in something I was doing, including both my honours thesis and my smaller second-year research thesis.

For the adacemically-minded, a few references. Impression formation research has yielded findings about thousands of nifty topics, not the least of which include how a woman's meal-sze affects her perceived femininity (Basow & Kobrynowicz, 1993), how male baldness affects whether they're perceived as friendly (Cash, 1990), and one of my favourites, how wearing black alters perceptions of an accused-criminal's guilt (Vrij, 1997). It has shown that an ideal leader is someone who is more sociable than your best friend, but less warm deep down (Lusk, MacDonald and Newman, 1998). It has shown that people with a name more common in society are perceived as warmer and more likely to be hired given two resumees identical except for the name (Copley and Brownlow, 1995). Impression formation has even been used to see whether the best captain really was Kirk or Picard (Herringer, 2000), which I swear I'm not making up.

So anyway...

What made my honours thesis a bit more interesting -- to me, mind you, not to anybody else -- was my take on it. An honours student is expected to show initiative by forming their own original research question, and a student who meekly accepts an assignment from a professor is usually not seen as first-class help. My supervisor and I spent several hours discussing implications of the impression formation research and it was actually through my misunderstanding something he was talking about that I came up with my research idea. It had been shown that what kinds of memories and how much of them people share affect whether they're seen as warm or cold... what would happen if you toss a dose of weasel cunning into the characters? Manipulative individuals are generally considered to be cold by definition, so how does that affect if they're perceived as warm? And yes, the title of my thesis really was Perceived Warmth in Manipulative Individuals.

Our hypotheses: 1) individuals with better autobiographical memory are perceived as being more warm than individuals with poor autobiographical memory in absence of any limiting factors. 2) manipulative individuals are perceived as being cold but as displaying warmth when it is in their own best interests to do so regardless of their autobiographical memory. 3) arrogant individuals are perceived as being cold and as acting in a cold manner, regardless of their autobiographical memory.

How did we test this? Cheaply and easily, thanks to the miracle of questionnaires. We designed a series of short forms which gave a three-line description of a fictional college student, describing him/her either as manipulative ("deceitful and unfair to others"), arrogant, or in terms previously shown to be basically neutral in terms of first impression ("critical of her own work, practical, and determined"). They were additionally described as having either very good or very poor autobiographical memory ("memory for personal events and experiences in their past"). Participants answered a series of questions on a five point scale, including measurements of actual warmth ("Mary is kind and has a warm heart," "Mary is sympathetic to others"), measurements of displayed warmth given motivation ("Mary behaves warmly towards students she works with," "Mary behaves sympathetically towards students she works with"), and items relevant to manipulation ("Mary has very good memory for the strengths and weaknesses of students she works with," "...which students she works with work hard and which do not").

I originally planned to include an in-depth discussion here of how we used statistical analyses to look at the data, but I've had a sudden attack of mercifulness, so I'm skipping it. Suffice it to say we used four fairly simple 2X3 between-subjects ANOVAs.

We failed to support a single hypothesis. Because of some confusions about data collection, some corrupted questionnaires, and the complexity of the research question requiring no less than 36 different versions of the questionnaire, we *almost* supported several hypotheses but failed to achieve statistical significance. Since we didn't support the basic "high ABM makes you look warm" hypothesis, any further analysis became pretty much meaningless, and since that was the one finding which we knew had alreday been proven by about twenty studies, the whole project became as useful as a Carl Sagan textbook to the state legislature of Utah. We did show with significance that manipulative individuals are seen as being cold and acting warm and that arrogant individuals are seen as being cold and as acting cold, but in scientific terminology, this finding can be considered to be "mind-numbingly obvious." I played around with the numbers a little bit in ways which an ethical researcher really isn't supposed to and found that if we'd doubled our sample size and gotten the same porportional results, we would probably have supported all hypotheses, but collecting even as many as we did was Hellish and may have contributed to my current phobia of cafeterias, so that wasn't an option. Fortunately, unlike in the real world where the grant money stops flowing if you don't prove anything, the honours program didn't require that we support our hypotheses but merely that we be able to explain if and why we didn't, which was easy.

What did I actually learn from this project? Aside from the fact that if you want your data collected right you have to do it yourself and not trick other honours studnets into administering your questionnaire for you along with theirs, I learned one very important thing: evil people who share a little bit about themselves are perceived as being less evil by the people they interact with. We have an innate instinct to see sociability and kindness in people who share what appear to be their private memories; we think they're showing trust and intimacy and we're more likely to like them. I didn't learn much about research in my honours year (except learning that I don't like it much), but I did learn how to be a better manipulator. If I can share a smile, a joke, and two heart-warming childhood memories the first time I meet somebody, the probability that they're going to like and trust me rises exponentially, and the truth is, I've had a much easier time making friends since I learned that. The fact that those heart-warming memories are often made up on the spot is something my new friends don't need to know.