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The Silmarillion in 1,000 words. Here’s some choice bits:

AINULINDALE:

ILUVATAR: Ahem.
AINUR: Wow! Existence!
ILUVATAR: *blows pitch pipe* LA!
AINUR: LA LA LA!
ILUVATAR: LA LA!
AINUR: LA LA!
MELKOR: This sucks. BUM BUM BA DUM!
AINUR: Um. . . la?
ILUVATAR: Ahem. LA!
MELKOR: Boop bop-a-doo-bop!
ILUVATAR: LA, dammit.
MELKOR: Bwam bardle ningle boom.
AINUR: . . .
ILUVATAR: Right, you’re out of the band.

Also:

VALAQUENTA:

MANWE: I’m in charge!
VARDA: I’m Manwe’s spouse. And the queen of the stars!
NAMO: I do death and fate. They call me Mandos.
VAIRE: I’m Namo’s spouse. I weave things.
IRMO: I have gardens. They call me Lorien.
ESTE: I’m Irmo’s spouse. I take care of the gardens.
YAVANNA: I make things grow.
NIENNA: I’m sad.
ULMO: I live in the ocean.
AULE: I’m Yavanna’s spouse. I’ve got a great big hammer! I made dwarves.
NESSA: I dance.
OROME: I hunt!
VANA: I’m Orome’s spouse. I make living things happy.
TULKAS: I’m strong. I’m Nessa’s spouse. I got here last.
MELKOR: I’m bad, momma, I’m ONE BAD MUTHA-
TULKAS: Grar.
MELKOR: Um. Yeah. Hiding now.

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
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Blatantly stolen straight from BoingBoing: An ultra-snarky and hilarious take on Shakespeare’s play, Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Here’s a snippet:

HELICANUS: What’s the matter, my lord?

PERICLES: Oh…the king of Antioch is sleeping with his daughter and now he wants to kill me because he’s afraid I’ll tell everyone about it or something. (He leans out the window.) OH, IF ONLY I HAD NEVER LEARNED HE WAS SLEEPING WITH HIS DAUGHTER.

HELICANUS: I can see how that would be a problem. Maybe you should leave town until he cools off, or dies, or whatever, since it’s pretty easy to find you here.

PERICLES: Since I’m prince and all.

HELICANUS: Exactly.

Here’s the rest of it.

Hey, greetz out to all one of my faithful readers (that’s you, Googlebot! I love you!). Sorry about the recent lack of updates. Work’s been absolutely nuts, and between being sick as a dog and overworked in general, haven’t had many thoughts to put together and post up. And what thoughts I have had, have been sucked away by the forums over at the Spiritual Humanism site, which I’ve been quite active on lately. I just like being able to post rants about philosophy, science, and rationality up someplace where I know other people with the same interests can read them, as well as getting to read the rants other people have posted. Lotsa pretty thought-provoking stuff there. Lots of fluff and theists/deists/irrationalists who seem to not realize what kind of religion SH really is, too. Quite a few people who call themselves humanists/atheists/agnostics but still cling to superstition, as well. But nice, open-minded people overall. I’ve been posting some of the longest rants I’ve done in a long time over there, and I’ve been gratified to see that some of them have even been read in their entirety. Not by everyone, of course. I can be quite long-winded, so I’d be amazed if everyone read everything I post.. but at least enough people do read to get a meaningful dialogue going, and that’s a good thing.

Found on /.: a beautiful-looking FPS game compiled to 96KB of size, including everything, textures, sounds, the lot of it. Go check out the screenshots and download it from the .produkkt, but be warned before you try and run it: it may be tiny, but it packs quite a whallop for your hardware, with minimum requirements of a 1.4Ghz CPU, 512 MB of RAM, and a 128MB Fully DirectX 9 compliant graphics card. Still… sweet..

Well, as a newly ordained priest of the Church of Spiritual Humanism, one of my duties is to preach, no? Well, I’m cross-posting a rant I just put up over on the SH forums, which sums up my beliefs as they relate to SH pretty nicely, I think. It’s long, so bear with me:

I know I’m really late to this party, but I just got ordained a couple of days ago and have been lurking my way trough the forums since then for getting a feel for just what I’d signed myself up for.

Anyway, I just want to take a little quote from one of AndyH’s posts and use it to explain what, to me at least, Spiritual Humanism is and means, and the reason it resonated in me enough for me to want to join:

AndyH wrote:
Now I know for some, it is an important part of their religion to trust god, or the bible without question, but I just wasn?t brought up that way. It?s hard for me to accept. So much for my tolerant, open minded humanist ideals. But there?s a big difference in respecting the spiritual beliefs of others and embracing them myself. So fine, all good then, don?t believe a thing. We immerse ourselves in science and facts and the tangible. Safe, secure, explainable. The rainbow is NOT beautiful it is simply sunlight that has entered a drop of water and it is refracted, and some of this light is reflected once at the back of the drop and exits, being refracted again. The light which undergoes one reflection leaves the drop at a range of deviation angles, but this has a minimum value of about 42o and more light emerges near this angle than at other angles, leading to a bright band. The angle of minimum deviation is slightly different for the different colored components of white light, so the colors are split. This forms the primary rainbow at an angle of 42o to the anti-solar direction.

See what I mean? This method does not help me to appreciate or enjoy the rainbow. Or even look forward to encountering one again. It?s like having sex in a morgue. We are human. We have emotions and passion and love. Very little of that can be explained by science and logic.

See, to me, Spiritual Humanism is a way of looking at that rainbow, understanding all the science behind it, and at the same time being awed by its beauty. I can look at a picture of a far away starfield and understand the science behind how they got those details to show through infrared, how far the light travelled, at what speed, what we can learn about the composition of those stars through examining the minutest details of that light… and at the same time I can gaze into it and be swept away by the beauty and majesty of it, and let myself meditate on the sheer massive *size* of the universe. The scientist and the spiritual being in me can both be fed from the same source, and that, I think, is part of what SH gets at. Reason and Spirituality can feed each other, can coexist and become stronger together. We can use our spirituality to inspire our reason, and use our reason to better understand the nature of spirituality, which leads back to the beggining, and so forth, and all the while, we grow wiser and, hopefully, happier.
(more…)

Yet another reason why I’d much rather be ordained through the Church of Spiritual Humanism rather than through PULC: The Church of Tom Jones. That’s right, the PULC and these folks are the same people. You can’t possibly expect someone to take an ordination from the freakin’ Church of Tom Jones seriously, can you?

Well, I’ve been looking around for a new webhost for my sites, including this one, since hosting them from home has been a bit of a bitch. However, paying $10+ a month for 4 sites is a bit more than my budget can handle right now. However, I just ran across these fine folk:FuitadNET, and they have a ‘reseller package’ with 3 GB of space and 25 GB of monthly bandwith, which is more than plenty for all 4of my sites, combined, for just $9.99/month, and I can point as many domains and as many websites as I can fit in there with no extra charges. So I should be able to host all 4 sites there for one monthly fee. Sounds nice. And I know they’re reliable, as several webcomics I read regularly are hosted with them, so if these folk can handle them, they can certainly handle me.

Update: Just got my confirmation email for my new ordination. Here’s an excerpt:

The Church of Spiritual Humanism promotes religion based on reason. As a member of the CSH clergy it is your charge to strive to base your actions on, and influence others to be motivated by, deliberation and reason and not the irrational, emotional, or subjective. Furthermore your responsibilities are to peacefully follow the proper course of action, and to avoid infringing on the rights of others. You alone are responsible for your actions as a member of the clergy.

Cool, huh?

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Well, those of you who’ve known me for a while know that I’m an ordained minister of the Progressive Universal Life Church (PULC), which is a sort of open church-type organization that will ordain just about anybody who asks for it. And if you send them money, they send you an ordination certificate and a card identifiying you as an ordained minister of their church. Of course, no one really takes PULC, or the church it was based on, ULC, too seriously. NYC law even specifically mentions ULC as a church that’s not qualified to perfomr marriages there in its marriage codes. I mainly got my certificate and card from PULC as a joke, and to piss off my mom. But I’ve never taken it very seriously, especially since the beliefs PULC espouses tend to be a bit too christian and bible-based for my personal tastes.

So then I was surfing the web today, and I stopped by ReligiousTolerance.org’s Christian Urban Legends page, which I like to check out every so often just to have a bit more ammunition in case I’m forced to spend any amount of time with the fundie x-tian side of my family. While I was there, I saw a banner ad for Free Ordination! I figured it was probably my old friends PULC or ULC, but I clicked anyway out of curiousity, and lo and behold, I discovered the Church of Spiritual Humanism. They also offer one of those free online ordination deals, as well as pay-for packages with Certificates of Ordination, ID cards, marriage certificates, and the like. But the name of the church sort of struck a chord in me, since I’ve always been a bit of a humanist, sort of Agnostic by default. And I read the blurb on their site:

As Spiritual Humanists we believe that every person has innate right to make a spiritual connection to the rest of the cosmos. Our premise is simple:

We can solve the problems of society using a religion based on reason.

We cannot abandon ancient traditions and practices but we can adapt them to our new understanding of the universe. Religion must be able to adapt to new knowledge about the universe without rejecting the deep spiritual connections to human history and the natural world that we are a part of.

Now, see, that actually makes sense to me. Weird, huh? Of course, the kicker is that I’ve always joked about being a Saganist, based on the works of Carl Sagan, especially his book The Demon Haunted World in which he gleefully debunks a lot of the nonsense floating around the world. And the wordplay with ’satanist’ is just icing on the cake. But anyway, at the bottom of the page, they have this quote from Mr. Sagan himself:

A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.

Carl Sagan

Well, I didn’t have much choice in the matter at that point: I registered with them, and I’m now an officially recognized member of the clergy of the Church of Spiritual Humanism. I then proceeded to check out their forums, to see what kind of folks I’d just tied myself to, and they actually seem to be a fairly sane, helpfull, open minded and intelligent bunch. And checking out their legal questions forum topics, it turns out that the Church of Spiritual Humanism is *very* official, at least, official enough for NYC, which is amongst the most anal of jurisdictions for that, so, hey, bonus!

So now I’m saving up a bit of cash to order out one of their Clergy Packs so I can have the certificate and ID card (which looks much, much cooler than the one I got from PULC), and they even include some books explaining more, and a marriage certificate. Imagine that: I’m now a member of a church who’s beliefs I actually agree with!

So… who wants me to officiate at their wedding?

So I caught Natalie today sneaking a peek at some Furries over in Second Life. Well, the following is all I have to say about that: The Geek Hierarchy.

Did a quick and dirty upgrade to version 1.2-alpha of WordPress, just because I love living on the bleeding edge, and now Permalinks work, which means that I’ve got prettier and much more Google-friendly links to my posts now, like http://www.techgnosisweb.com/2004/04/10/name-of-my-post/ instead of http://www.techgnosisweb.com/index.php?ooga=3f28qhvp8hvp4p4vq34v89h4v. Better, no?

So I’m driving back home with Natalie earlier tonight, and there’s this van in front of us. I had spent the past 5 minutes staring at the back of it in confusion, not really registering what I saw. My brain was off, I guess. I blinked, and all of a sudden it came into focus.

“Honey, is it just me, or does that van have an air conditioning unit hanging out of the back window?”

Now, let me make this clear: I know that most cars have built in air conditioning. Air conditioning in cars is nothing new or terribly exciting. But this van did not have your usual run of the mill car air conditioner. No, someone had gone through the trouble of taking a full-sized air conditioning unit, the kind that usually goes in one’s bedroom window, and fitting it through the back window of the van and then hooking it up properly. So there was this beat up blue van, with about a foot and a half of air conditioner sticking out the back of it. The funny part of it all is, see, that as we passed by the side of the van later on.. the guy dirving it actually had his windows rolled down.

Anyway, I’ve been coding all day, and I’d say I’m about halfway done with the project I’ve got due on Monday. There’s still a lot to do, and tomorrow I have to do laundry, which is a couple of hours, at least, that I would actually rather spend conding. But I’ll be up tonight as late as I can handle to finish up as much of this as possible, since I promised myself that as soon as I finished the project, I would write up my reviews of Freelancer and Max Payne 2 over on AniGaming.

Hey all, Old Man Katsu here, coming to you live at 3 in the morning with a sore throat and the begginings of a nasty cold. I’m trying to Nyquill it into submission, but don’t know how effective that will be. Wish me luck.

At least the proto-cold didn’t keep me away from managing to relax and have some fun today, the first weekday I’ve had off in a long time. I totally need a vacation, I’m burning out on work. At least today I was able to let off some steam and play video games all day then watch anime with the guys at night.. ahh, I needed that. I finally managed to continue my Xenosaga game on the PS2 (take that, stupid Gigas boss monster!), and I finished up Freelancer on the PC (Excellent game for those of us who still pine for the days of Wing Commander), and then proceeded to install Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, which I then proceeded to play almost halfway through in one sitting. It’s very short, but it’s very, very, very good.

Well, I have to do a few work things over the weekend, tho, as there’s still some details on the Sense project that aren’t done yet, and I’m supposed to meet with them on Monday, so I need to wrap those up, stat. But at least I got to relax today before going back to sacrificing myself to the coding gods.

Oh, and before I forget, the 2 DVD set of Mazinkaiser anime episodes is the bomb… especially that 4th episode.

Got around to installing a new CSS style for the new and improved blog. How do you like it? Still need to work on a new logo, and on restoring the images on the posts. I should have that all ready to go this weekend.

Well, Techgnosis is finally back. After an extended absence due to some server troubles, I finally managed to get this sucker back online. You may, of course, have noticed some changes around here now that it’s back. Foremost among them is the fact that I’m not using Movable Type anymore as the software behind the blog. While it served me well and faithfully, it gave me way too much trouble now that I was forced to do some serious server changes. So I looked around for alternatives and found this one: WordPress, the succesor to old school blogging software b2. I poked around their site, looked at their features, and was suitably impressed. It works more in the style I like (IE. pure PHP and MySQL, no need for Perl in between or rebuilding of pages, changes are shown immediately, pages are dynamically generated, better search capabilities, etc.), and was absolutely brain-dead simple to install. It also did a pretty good job of importing my old Movable Type entries from the blog, so pretty much everything is in place. There’s still some issues with images, but I’m working on that, shouldn’t be too hard. The interfaceitself, for creating new posts, is very nice and dead simple, and generally it seems much more responsive and full featured that Movable Type for a lot of things. And it’s got the advantage of being Free and Open Source, as opposed to Movable Type, which is neither. So I think I’ll stick with it for a while. I do, however, need to do something about the look of the site now. I’d been meaning to change it anyway, but I really do need to get something different than the default WordPress look. Wish me luck.