Challenging Theology: Exploring Paths to God and Redemption

I originally thought that “All Paths Lead to God/Heaven” was heresy. I was kind of surprised when a friend whose faith I trust was okay with a Seeker saying they thought it was correct.

But after he explained it, I can understand better. God can use anything, even other Gods, to lead to him. As long as you seek the Truth, you’ll find Him. So you start with Buddhism, and try to perfect yourself and stop hurting people, and God can use that urge to lead you to Him. And if you are born, live, and die in that faith without ever hearing a good push for the Good News of Jesus sacrifice on the Cross for your soul, you may still reach heaven on the strength of your desire to reject sin. But I don’t know. I’m not God, I don’t judge souls, and can’t judge souls or righteousness.

I think, at most, this is a potential comfort to someone who struggles with accepting Jesus as Truth if the implication is it means their loved ones who passed away are consigned to Hell without ever having had the chance to hear the Truth.

I thought of an analogy, probably hundreds of others have thought of it before me.

If you want to go from New York to Los Angeles, there are dozens of roads that can work.  it isn’t that all roads are equally good, but even roads that lead away from Los Angeles are connected to the roads that lead to LA.

But the farther along you go, the closer you get, the more clear it is that some roads are better than others.  And there are certainly some roads that are fully dead ends.

Likewise, I think you can start by seeking Guanyin’s (Buddhist Goddess) help, and God can use that to lead you to him.  But at some point, you have to recognize that Guanyin, or Allah, or whatever, isn’t enough.  If you continue down that path, you get further from the Light.  And that’s where the By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them comes in.  Your direction and proximity device show you are getting farther away from LA.  If you continue down the path of Buddhism, like Martin said that they just ask for help, they aren’t getting into it enough to become monks, but if you do keep on that path that’s where you must end up, and the deeper parts of Buddhism are that the ONLY end to suffering is total destruction of self and awareness. That’s much more despairing than Christianity.

I have been bothered by some of the explanations I’ve encountered about the Old Testament. Mainly, that God was trying to rescue His Chosen People from sin and death.

I’m bothered by it because God knows everything, knows it wouldn’t work. He wasn’t trying stuff out, and then forced to try something so extreme as sending His Son.

Rather, I think I see it now as proving to US we can’t do it on our own.  And each new iteration of the Covenant or method shows that if even His Chosen People couldn’t do it with His direct help, we have no chance other than throwing ourselves fully into trusting and loving the Messiah.

I mean, there was direct punishment for idols via destruction of cities, being conquered and enslaved by other nations, flooding the whole world.  Shows that we aren’t able to keep punishment in mind enough to forgo sin. The direct, spelled out Laws that explicitly tell us how to act weren’t enough.  God’s Chosen People weren’t able to sustain ritual sacrifice and tribute to expiate sin, they still fell into idolatry.  Kings with a direct line to God weren’t able to remain Holy and Trusting in God, and led the entire nation astray. Prophets and Judges with direct messages from God couldn’t shame or judge His Chosen People into keeping the Covenant.

Which, by the way, is a pretty strong indictment of the claims Catholics make about the Pope’s infallibility and how they are the only true church because they were started by Jesus Himself.  Man simply cannot be Holy, even if you give him the powers of a Pope elected by Cardinals.

I’m not enough of a scholar to line up all the ways we try to justify ourselves and fail, but I bet if I could, I could match each one of them with a different era of the Old Testament.

Anyway, I just thought it was easier to type out all my thoughts.  If I got anything egregiously wrong, or even if you think I can word something better, y’all can respond in the comments or by email (if you have mine). I don’t mind being used as a negative example, i.e., “one Christian said something similar to what you just said, but here’s why he is wrong (so you don’t have to call them wrong to their face, right?).  But if you DO object to something I said, let me know.  I throw these out there as conjectures and ideas to be tested, not as things I’m fully convinced of.

Faith, to me, still includes a lot of ambiguity. I have a strong light cutting through the fog that I’m trying to follow and reach, but there is plenty of fog where I’m at now. Or to make it explicit: my Faith itself is now unshakeable, but a good half of my theology is still mostly written in dry-erase.

Trump’s Political Image: Complex Responses and Contradictions

New Gitabushi Political Law:

“Every Dire Political Prediction is wrong.”

See this:

I can think of all sorts of ways he’s wrong.

Just off the top of my head:

Regardless of what Trump does, he will be painted as Extreme Right by the Left.
SOME of the people will respond as if they believe that. With some of them liking him more because of it, some of the moving to the right because they like how his policies turned out, some of the people refusing to acknowledge his successes because they can’t handle attributing any success to the Extreme RIght, etc.
And then SOME of the people on the Right will continue to paint him as Not a Real Republican, Compromised By His Move Leftward and just repin all the above reactions.

I know people like to think simply.

But all the dire predictions are predicated on the notion that people aren’t fractious and complex, on the notion that there isn’t a 20% to 30% portion of EVERY cohort that is contrarian and rejects conventional wisdom solely BECAUSE It is conventional.

And add to that the fact that the Right is more inherently fractious than the Left.

I understand the impulse to want to throw up your hands and consign to hell/chaos/destruction the people who don’t embrace your personal preferences. The impulse to see everything as two sides: those who agree with me, and those who are wrong.

But it is a huge mistake to assume, and especially to base any conclusions on, the conviction that everyone who diverges from your views does so in the exact same direction for the exact same reasons.

Thus, dire predictions are always wrong.

Octopath Trablahblah

I’ve been gaming a bit more in recent months (fanfare!) Never thought I’d find myself waking up at 5:30am to claim a little gaming time before the start of the day, but I guess if you want something you make time where you can, right?

Persona 3 FES cemented my like of the series (though it really didn’t live up to P4G), and Persona 5R has been solid so far. Even gave me a reason to dust off the Playstation 4.

But I’ve still got the Switch in rotation. It’s invaluable, the ability to play for a few minutes on the couch while the boy is occupied, or to plop down on the bed and relax briefly while he plays in the bath. I try not to do it too much; I know he’s watching me, and I don’t want him to always see me glued to a screen. But this is the most game time I’ve been able to carve out since he was just a little potato and I was on paternity leave. And this time I actually get to sleep, so bonus!

Anyway, I’ve been chipping away at Octopath Traveler. I wouldn’t be the first to opine about the wasted opportunity this game was, so I’ll skip that. Hopefully Triangle Strategy will see improved writing and character plotting.

I would like to take a moment to wonder about a relatively minor annoyance. I’m picking up the last available character, and the people in her village have an irksome way of speaking. It’s like an overexaggerated medieval style speech, along with weird spellings.

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But why just this one village? The knight’s people didn’t talk like this.

And it was a localization choice. I’m playing with Japanese VA, and in Japanese these characters speak normally, without any speech oddities as far as I can tell. If the original Japanese script had wanted to convey this kind of speaking style, they probably would have thrown in a bunch of 「でござる」(degozaru)’s and such.

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“Senseth?” Come on. This kind of thing doesn’t make or break a game, but it can blemish a gem. Again – here’s hoping Triangle Strategy avoids some of the mistakes of its “spiritual predecessor.”

-Bushi

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Mario USA

This video popped up in my recommendeds last night.

Damn, sexy Peach!

But really what I wanted to draw attention to is Mario 2. Well, what we know as Super Mario Bros. 2.

If you’re not in the know, there was this Nintendo game called Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic. Maybe it looks a little familiar to you?

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Back in the late 80s, Nintendo wanted to put out a Mario Bros. sequel to international markets, but determined that the real Mario Bros. 2 was a too difficult and too similar to the original (this game would later come to be know over here as The Lost Levels).

So instead, they took Doki Doki Panic and basically reskinned it as a Mario game. Viola!

But wait – Shy Guy, Birdo…these have become time-honored staples of the franchise. Surely they had them in Japan, right? Right!

The reskinned Mario Doki Doki Panic was released in Japan as Mario USA.

U-S-A! U-S-A!

I knew about the Doki Doki reskin, but never knew about the Japanese release/naming of the game. Until I saw this video…

Neato.

-Bushi

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The Bad Sleep Well

It’s been a while! Happy 2021 and all that. Not a whole lot of reading or writing being done these days; fatherhood and entrepreneurship take a lot.

Also I don’t like this stupid new WordPress interface. I’ve fallen out of the habit of writing these posts. I got a flat tire! I didn’t have change for cab fare! There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! IT WASN’T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD!

I have been doing *a bit* of gaming and watching when I can scrape together some globules of time. Maybe I’ll post again soon about the gaming component.

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Lucky dog that I am, I’ve been gifted a few old J films over the past couple birthdays and Christmases, and I just recently got around to viewing one of Kurosawa’s lesser known works – The Bad Sleep Well (悪い奴ほどよく眠る). I won’t give any plot summary here, in case you want to check it out for yourself, but suffice it to say this isn’t Kurosawa’s usual take on feudal or post-war Japan. This one takes aim at the country’s corporate culture, corruption, greed, and the nature and banality of evil.

A few thoughts with a little bit of spoileriness:

  • Great visuals and camerawork, as is typical for Kurosawa. In Kagemusha, he made brilliant work of color. Here, he keeps up with his expert employ of light and shadow.
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  • While his character ultimately falls a little flat due to the writing, Mifune is great, as always. The guy was the archetypal samurai, but he sure had range.
  • Takashi Shimura as a bad guy!
  • A lot of well done scenes; the setup in the first act starts off a bit confusing, but comes together brilliantly.
  • If you read any reviews of this film, you’ll almost inevitably find that the reviewer was disappointed with the ending. I can’t disagree. It wasn’t completely unexpected; in fact it was Shakespearean and quite J. But unsatisfying.

-Bushi

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DS9 and Fatherhood Feels

It’s not a unique phenomenon – to experience old things differently after initiation to parenthood. Nor is it new to me – I’m pretty sure I’ve commented about this on Twitter at some point over the past couple of years, if not on the blog. But man, it’s a hell of a thing, to be so moved by something like a campy scifi  TV show.

I recently started watching through Star Trek: Deep Space Nine again, for maybe the third time. Every few years I get the urge to watch through one of the old series, and being that I’ve already done Voyager and TNG over the past couple of years, it was time.

DS9 occupies a weird space in Star Trek for me. Many fans claim it as their favorite series, often citing the dark Dominion storyline as particularly appealing. For me it falls behind Voyager (I know, I’m a weirdo) and TNG somewhere, but I still quite enjoy it. The writers and cast did a commendable job in striking a balance between the old Star Trek camp (as seen in the fillery Ferengi Adventures episodes) and a more modern-toned grittiness.

Maybe DS9 isn’t higher up on my favorites list because while I liked individual characters, the cast as a whole just never really did it for me for whatever reason. Still, in my rewatch I’m gaining a new appreciation for some of DS9’s denizens. In particular, as you may have guessed, I’m finding a lot to like about Ben Sisko and his son, Jake. Or more specifically, their relationship.

Sure, DS9 isn’t the first Star Trek to prominently feature a father-son, or even parent-child relationship. And it wasn’t the first to do it well. TNG had a rather well crafted one, as a matter of fact. Data and Lal only got one episode, though, unfortunately.

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(Boom – suck it, Wesley!)

Perhaps one of the main reasons I appreciate and am more affected by the Siskos than the Crushers, aside from superior acting, is the father-son part. It’s naturally easier for me to put myself in Sisko’s shoes, being a father to a son myself. It could also just be that Benjamin and Jake are more likable as characters than Beverly or Wesley. Whether or not that’s a function of acting or writing, I’m not sure. Though as an aside, it is amusing to see Avery Brooks play such a down-to-earth, normal seeming guy in Ben Sisko when Brooks is such a nut in real life.

Now Crusher may be a good mother, but I guess I never really felt that sold on her relationship with her son.

With Sisko, by contrast, it’s immediately clear what a good and devoted father he is. He’s affectionate, patient, and interested. Ben and Jake talk, and they spend quality time together.

Incidentally, I was also struck by a Brometheus tweet the other day:

It resonated with me because I ask myself sometimes if I’m doing enough with my son. When I get home in the evening, tired from a long day of work behind me and more work ahead of me after he goes to bed, am I taking the lazy way out when I just sit on the couch and watch him playing with his trains? Am I going to regret it someday, that I wasn’t more engaged? I’d rather not find out. I need to redouble my efforts.

But back to DS9.

Of course it’s only a fiction, but I think it speaks to reality. You can see that Sisko did things right in how devoted Jake is to him. Of course as Jake ages, both father and son change. Eventually he makes a best friend and no longer orbits Dad. He becomes interested in girls. He develops a passion for writing. Ben has to learn to let go, but he supports his son through each of these steps, actively. And they still take trips and do activities together as time permits.

It’s a hell of a thing. I think The Visitor is probably the closest a TV show has made me come to crying. It’s just a TV show! I’m not choking up – you are!

siskos

At any rate, I am feeling man feels and gah!

-Bushi

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Muh Switch! or “Pandemic ‘Profiteering’ and ‘Price-Gouging'”

It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway – these are strange and difficult times. With the pandemic raging and quarantine protocols widely in effect, there’s been discovery and revelation. It turns out that although cheap stuff is good, having large swaths of your supply chain based in an authoritarian, petri dish of a country isn’t so much.

But I’m not going to rag on Communism right now. Instead I just wanted to share my frustration and concern with what I’ve seen here in the good old US of A. I already ranted about this on Twitter, so I’ll try not to retread too much.

I understand the anxiety of people who can’t find toilet paper at their local grocery store, then pop onto Amazon or eBay and are horrified to see something like this:

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“Price gouging!” they exclaim as they mash the “report seller” link.

We live in relatively soft, cushy times here. Now I’m not saying I’d like to wipe my butt with leaves and grass or the pages of old Daniel Steele books, but if I had to I could. And yet, toilet paper is considered an essential good. Ok, fine. It is what it is. There are no real comparable alternatives to toilet paper on the market (unless you count those flushable moist wipes, maybe?).

Hopefully someone’s working on those three seashells.

seashells

But you know what’s not an essential? A Nintendo Switch. Your favorite brand of pasta sauce. The complete series DVD set of Lost. Dumbbells.

And yet…

switch

To be fair, I think most news outlets I’ve read have been pretty straight about what “price-gouging” actually is. It’s the unfair price inflation of “essential goods and services.”

Part of the problem here is that words are hard. Especially subjective words like “essential.” It doesn’t help when the government gets to decide what “essential” means.

You really start to see the confusion and outrage on social media and in places like Facebook buying/selling groups. I can kinda get it – a mom or dad who’s confined at home thinks “It is essential for me to be able to entertain my kids who have been trapped at home for weeks and who I am stuck with 24-7 since I am now working from home. It’s bullshit that the video game system they want is selling for 2x the retail price!”

And I get it. It sucks. I really want to buy a Ring Fit Adventure, which was originally retailing for $80. But it’s been sold out everywhere for a while now, unless you want to pay up on Amazon or eBay and fork over $300.

Me, personally, I think “Gee, that sucks. Wish I had got one when they were available for cheaper. Guess I’ll wait and see if supply ever catches up with demand.”

But a disheartening amount of people seem to be thinking “This should be illegal. This must be illegal! Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!”

Here’s the thing about reselling and resellers – while there are some unscrupulous folk and some shady ways of going about their business, by and large they perform a valuable service. You may not want to pay $500 for a Switch, but someone does and they are willing and able to pay. They may not want to leave their house, or maybe they live in a small town with few places to buy video games and consoles. And if you have $500, you at least have the opportunity to buy one online, too.

And how much money is that scummy price gouger making? He’s charging $500! He’s making hundreds off of poor parents!

Well…about that. Let’s assume the sellers is some dude who went to Target or GameStop when there were Switches to be had, and bought up 10 consoles.

First off, the guy just dropped $3,000 + sales tax. So assuming a 6% sales tax, let’s say he just spent $3,180 on 10 Switches.  So there’s the initial capital that he had to save and plunk down.

Let’s say he is able to sell a Switch for $500 on eBay. $500 – $318 = $182. He’s also going to be paying eBay a 10% fee and Paypal a 3% fee. So now we’re at $500 – $318 – $50 – $15 = $117. And that’s not even accounting for shipping, which will knock off a few more bucks.

By charging $500, a reseller is making a profit of about $117 by selling a Switch on eBay. Amazon charges higher fees, so it would be less than that if they sold through Amazon. Selling all 10, he’s looking at about $1170 profit, then.

That’s not too shabby, and it’s a flip I would make. And yet, the guy’s not making a killing. A big part of the equation here is that most buyers don’t think about (or care about) the cost to the seller.

EBay and Amazon could help alleviate the situation somewhat by temporarily reducing seller fees, allowing some savings to be passed onto the end customers. But they don’t.

There’s also the risk involved. Buyers are rightly concerned about shady online sellers trying to scam them out of their cash. But it works both ways. There are buyers out there who will claim an item was received damaged or defective or that the box was empty, and the platforms tend to side with the customers in such disputes. Thankfully cases like these aren’t terribly common, but they do happen. Especially with high-value items like electronics. That’s a risk that a seller has to bear. They get scammed out of one Switch and all of a sudden they’re down $300 – almost 1/3 of the total profit they were expecting out of this batch.

Some people seem to think it’s unfair for them to pay above retail, or at least much above retail. So how much is okay? $350 for a Switch? Then the reseller would be making $350 – $318 – $35 – $10.50 = $4.50. Ah yes, solid work for $4 (let’s pretend USPS will mail that package for free).

But wait, if not for the resellers, I’d be able to get a Switch at Walmart! Possibly, but probably not. Sure, there were resellers who were able to drive around and snatch a bunch up. But right now demand for Switches is sky-high. This is not an artificially inflated demand. Nintendo just hasn’t been able to make enough.

If no one were willing to pay $500 for a Switch, prices would start to come down. Rather than sit and wait, some (re)sellers would gradually lower prices until they found a price point at which buyers would buy. And other sellers would follow suit……..

switches

The point I’m trying to make is that there are a lot of people out there right now who support capitalism on paper, but not when push comes to shove. I think they don’t understand or care what “essential” means when it comes to price-gouging, they don’t know or care what “fair” means when it comes to either price-gouging or profiteering, and/or they don’t understand the basic economics of supply and demand.

-Bushi

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Law vs Chaos

  • by Gitabushi

When I started playing Dungeons & Dragons, the full Alignment Chart was the norm. Good vs Evil, Law vs Chaos.  Lawful Good was a straitlaced Bible Thumper (even though “Christian” wasn’t really a concept in the game), Chaotic Good was Robin Hood, Chaotic Evil was a serial killer, and Lawful Evil was Fascism.

Law = Order, and Chaos = Randomness, in the way our group understood it.

I always gravitated toward Chaotic Good. Ever since reading the Hardy Boys, I felt I identified with Joe, maybe because I was blonde as a kid, and he was impetuous, so impetuous seemed good to me, and impetuous is Chaotic.  But, of course, I wanted to be a good person and do good things.

One of the fun moments was a flame war in the D&D community over Tarl Calbot’s alignment: when he turned complete selfish and amoral, was he Chaotic Evil, or True Neutral, Chaotic Neutral, or even Neutral Good.  Without the internet, the arguments raged in the letters section across a half-dozen Dragon magazines.  Good times, good times.

I guess I didn’t learn anything from that, but with a few more decades added to my life total, I now feel like “Neutral” is a dodge. Anything except for the most extreme stance could be seen as “neutral”.  And who decides what “balance” between the two is?  One of the compelling arguments about Cabot was, if I recall correctly, “If you really don’t care whether you do good or evil, aren’t you really just evil?”

While I was heavily into D&D, I read the Chronicles of Amber. This series was probably the first (and maybe only) book/series I’ve read that talked about universe-scale battles of Law vs Chaos that left an impression on me.

Before I continue, let me link some other mentions of Law vs Chaos you should consider checking out before continuing, because there’s a chance I might vaguely reference some of the things mentioned in these posts. And if don’t, they are still good posts, and I get paid by the word, so I might as well pad this out:

More Amber

Appendix N Review

Three Thoughts on Three Hearts and Three Lions

Broken Sword

Mumble Mumble and Chaos

Jeffro on 3H3L

One thing I got from Amber, and seems to be a theme in any book that talks about Law vs Chaos, is that Law is generally Good, and Chaos is generally bad.  Law is order, predictability, security. Chaos is destruction, unexpectedness, insecurity.  The takeaway from Amber is that they have been battling against Chaos taking over, but maybe Chaos isn’t all bad; without Chaos, there would be no growth, no change…everything would calcify and become static.  Jeffro points out that “Chaos is not always synonymous with Evil”, and that’s about the best anyone says about it.

Okay, that was all build up. Because, as at least a few people expect, I’m here to say that Chaos is actually closer to good, and we should be saying that “Law is not always synonymous with evil.”

Part of it might be where you draw the line, where you see the neutral point, what you think moderation is.

But here’s what I think the key is: everyone is looking at it on a Macro level: the Universe. Forces. Everyone is one One Side or the Other.

That is a Law perspective.

Law is collective.  Law is Authoritative. Law is an imposition of Universality.

From the Law perspective, you are either with us or against us. You will do what we tell you, or you’ll do what someone else tells you.

But what is the greatest original gift God gave to us? Yes, salvation via the Gift of His Son was the greatest gift ever, but I’m talking the original gift, the one that made the greater gift necessary.

Free Will. Agency. The ability to choose.  This is what we have in common with God.

One of the problems with discussing Law vs Chaos, or even Good vs Evil, is when they are discussed in Manichean terms, as if they were opposite poles, with a midpoint that is neutral between them.

But as CS Lewis persuasively explains, Evil is not the opposite of Good, it is the absence of Good, like Dark is the absence of Light, or Cold is the absence of Heat.  When the light is dim, you don’t say, well, there’s 10% light and 90% darkness.  When you turn up the illumination, the darkness doesn’t resist. Where there is light, there is no darkness.

So you can’t really mix Law and Chaos.  You can’t really moderate Law and Chaos.  You can’t really find a balance point between Law and Chaos.

What you can do, perhaps, is see how they are two sides of the same coin.

We have the Wisdom of Crowds, where the average opinion of thousands of individuals is usually more correct than the most informed expert.  I am still somewhat stunned regarding the old McDonald’s model: they knew that they could draw a circle, and if there were enough of the right type of family demographics within that circle, the McDonald’s would be successful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a McDonald’s shut down (although I’m sure some have, if the area demographics changed too much). And they knew that once those demographics were met, they could pre-make burgers and fries and hold them for no more than 10 minutes, and still have to throw out minimal food, because they knew when people would be coming in to eat, and pretty much what they would order, to within +/- some incredibly low percentage.

On the other hand, we have Leftist Totalitarianism, where people seek power to impose authoritarian rules on others, and once doing so, the shortages and measures taken to maintain the social order make it impossible to figure out what the next shortage will be, or when the Secret Police will come for you or your family.

Putting this into a political context, you could say, “Who wouldn’t want Law & Order and reject Chaos and Anarchy?”

But I prefer to see it as, “Who wouldn’t want Agency? Who wouldn’t want individual rights?  Who would want your options restricted to only the few approved ones allowed?”

To me, that’s the Law side of Law vs Chaos: you lose agency. You lose self-government. You lose options.

For freedom to mean anything, you need the freedom to fail, the freedom to make some wrong choices.

Since thinking of this, when I hear Law vs Chaos, I hear Collective vs Individual, Totalitarian vs Libertarian.

So instead of trying to moderate this on a macro level, as in, let’s have some laws and some freedom, and maybe they’ll balance out, I would prefer to find the balance on a micro level: I have agency and the liberty to do what I want, so I will self-govern and choose to exist in harmony with others who also self-govern.

Of course, that will be insufficient. People don’t always understand their own abilities and limits, and they often don’t have the empathy to see how their actions negatively impact others. Plus, on a micro level, people often try to impose order on their children, their subordinates, or people they feel have lower status than them (Law rears its ugly head!). So we do need government to to resolve those mistakes, misunderstandings, and issues.

However, we should see government as a necessary failure, a safety net that helps mitigate the failures of Chaos on an individual level.

Maybe that’s neutral, maybe that’s moderation.  One of the eternal problems on questions like these is “Where do you draw the line?”, but that’s a topic for another day.

The point today is merely to get you considering the notion that perhaps Chaos is more synonymous with Good than Law is.  I’m sure I’ve convinced no one.  Hopefully, I’ve made you think.

 

Another Argument for Hard SF

  • by Gitabushi

I just finished reading “The Martian”, by Andy Weir.

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Great book.  GREAT book.  Must read. Go buy it or check it out from the library.

FWIW, the book adds some depth and explanations to what you see in the movie.  One big change that actually makes the book more scientific than the movie (thank goodness).

And this is the point.

In a story, you have to have conflict and obstacles. If the story is just “Hero wants treasure, and finds it. The End” no one is going to enjoy it. So you add in an obstacle, like a monster.

“Hero wants treasure, finds it, but has to kill a monster to get it. He kills the monster easily. The End” is not much better.

A good story has lots of obstacles that the hero must overcome in a believable manner.  If overcoming the problems is too easy, the protagonist is a boring Marty Stu/Mary Sue.

To make a good story, the protagonist has to struggle, and has to learn something.

This is one of the weaknesses of game-based stories: “You can almost hear the dice rolling.”  The main characters have battles, but it’s just swing and miss until the bad guys collapse.

One of the biggest challenges to writing is creating obstacles that seem realistic to the readers, that aren’t overcome too easily, and that don’t make trivial tasks seem difficult just to add drama.

In science fiction and fantasy, you are introducing concepts that break the rules of current reality. That makes it even more difficult to create a coherent, believable system of obstacles.

“The Martian” is so good *because* the author researched everything, did all the math, and ensured that every obstacle and every solution were as close to real-life as possible.

This is probably why it got a movie treatment, as well.

It’s Science Fiction, but only barely.  It’s the hardest of hard science fiction, but without getting too caught up in numbers, or the author showing off how much he knows.

Everything that happens to Mark is realistic, and every solution he comes up with is realistic, as well.  That adds to the greatness of the story.

Now, that doesn’t mean every story should be hard science fiction. Not at all.  It just means that if you avoid hard science fiction to avoid sticky problems of math, you create a different set of problems for yourself.

There is no good or bad choice in this.  But awareness by the author of what your goal is, and what is needed from you to reach the goal, is key.

I’m now reading “Artemis” by the same author.
 
Good book so far. Hard SF, again. And the better for it.

I am sowing

Sheesh – soon I’m going to have to rename this place the Gita Bushi blog.

Just wanted to pop in to throw up another “I live!” post. The fact is, I don’t have much time for myself these days…which means I don’t have much time or material to share here or at Bushi SFF.

I’m still paranoid about being outed and flogged for my impolitic opinions and beliefs and trolleries, so there’s not a ton I can reveal right now, except to say that after my pickle empire necessarily crumbled to ruins, I started up another small business. It’s been a lot of hard work, and being an entrepreneur in addition to being a husband, father, and working a full time job leaves little time for amusements.

But we’re building a foundation, and I hope the venture will grow into a family business over time. We’ve been at it since about February/March, and have a few thousand buckaroos that we didn’t have before.

My guilty pleasure these days is a little Dota Underlords in the fragmented moments between toil and dream and…toilet. I’ll end on that TMI note.

-Bushi

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