Traverse Fantasy

There’s a professor at my partner’s graduate school who’s very eager to catch students in the act of academic dishonesty. The class is split up into small groups to write and present a review article of publications in the field. Like clockwork, every year, the students who write the actual data summary for their respective groups’ projects get called to his office to beg for academic probation (as opposed to expulsion). Why? Because their portions of the project have undeniable similarities to published works as detected by the professor’s anti-plagiarism software. You might notice the problem here. Those students wrote the data summary section of their review articles—the section where you cite, quote, and summarize existing literature to contextualize the more analytical sections of the review. Every year, a handful of poor students get slapped on the wrist by the professor but then are quietly freed by the dean who has seen this happen every year and has a smarter head on her shou...

I’ve been making changes to my homebrew heartbreaker Cinco! based on my most recent play-sessions. These aren’t published yet because I have some new empty space I’d like to fill with handy tools for myself. The document is now A4 so that it can be resized to A5 for print. The main character sheet is now digest/A5 sized, and cards for items and exhaustion will be moved from your sheet to your hand. Replaced supply with rations. Rations are only spent when resting for a whole night, specifically to treat any place in the wilderness like a haven. Health potions however can be consumed at any point, including during an encounter; this makes them very valuable as treasure! Removed distinction between equipped and packed cards. You can now use any of your 7-ish items during combat, except that: large items cost 1 extra action to use; and you can’t use duplicates of the same armor type. Levels are now from 1 to 10. When you play with feats, you start with one at level 1 and gain...

There’s an idiom by which evangelicals refer to the Bible, namely the “Word of Gxd”, and they will read bits of the Bible referring to the Logos as being self-referential towards the Bible (never mind that the form in which we receive it is different from what the authors, who probably had not realized they were contributing to canon, would have had in mind). Then it occurred to me: wait a second, the Logos ? Are there any references to the Logos in the New Testament which are not either referring to the Logos qua ontological function or to logos qua reason (if not  logos  in its most basic, literal sense)? Keep in mind that the New Testament is addressed to the Hellenistic world which was well acquainted not only with the language in which the various authors were writing, but also probably (whether by being literate or via cultural osmosis) with the concepts of Greek philosophy which Christians were both competing with and borrowing from linguistically as Hellenized Me...

With help from James Bishop’s blog , I’ve compiled quotations from Paul which elaborate upon his understanding of Jesus’ life (a sort of mini-gospel): But when the fullness of time had come, Gxd sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. Galatians 4:4 (NRSVue) Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of Gxd, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures, the gospel concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be Son of Gxd with power according to the spirit of holiness by resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the gentiles for the sake of his name, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ, to all Gxd’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be ...

I had a dream a few nights ago. Maybe you can help me. I was taking someone to a childhood favorite bakery of mine—not a real place, just in the dream—and I was very excited. However, no matter where I stood at the counter, the workers there would either ignore or heckle me while serving others. Eventually, even the other customers became frustrated that I was standing there even though I obviously wasn't welcome there. Some time passed, but then someone I understood to be the owner came out and apologized to me. He said that they might not have what I originally wanted—it was so busy and they were running out of goods, I remember in particular slices of cookie cake and a fried sheet cake which they iced like a donut and sliced into long rectangles, none of this making any sense—but that he was going to give me a box and I could pick out anything I wanted. I woke up and felt melancholy. A dream is a dream, but I understood intuitively what my mind was trying to communicate through ...

Previously, I submitted a working definition for gnosticism, an infamously vague category which typically serves to mark various doctrines as heterodox. These still have in my view a family resemblance, despite the exonymic nature of the term itself. There’s no minimum viable criteria to which all doctrines called gnostic can be reduced without shaving off the edges and possibly mischaracterizing many (or all ) of them. However, there are tendencies manifest in doctrines called gnostic, which distinguish them from others called orthodox, and we should think of these tendencies not as specific beliefs but as relations between a believer, their dogma, and their praxis. My earlier go was : that physical creation is a corrupt prison in which our souls are trapped, and that the goal of religion is to release our souls into a perfect immaterial realm where we’re free of material trappings and temptations But even my attempt to cast a wide net is too specific and thus fails to accomplish ...