SuperPope: ex Cathedra

Hey. I went to Japan.

I pretty much never, ever use this blog anymore (blogging is so 2005), but some folks do come here to check on me on occasion, so I thought I ought to mention that Erin and I finally went to Japan this past October.  It was a fantastic 10 day trip, and I kept an overly detailed blog of it, which you can read here.  I also took way too many photos, which can be viewed here.

Hiatus Update

A lot has happened since my last update.  My sister and her family moved to Black Forest, Colorado.  We flew there to visit them for a few days over the 4^th of July weekend and had a great time.  Then one day after getting home, my wife had her thyroid removed at Mercy Hospital in Edmond, OK.  She’s doing fine.

In less important news, we got a new computer at the house.  An AMD Athlon 64 system from CyberPower Systems.  I can’t recommend them highly enough.  I have never paid so little money for so much computer.  It even has an nVidia Geforce 7800 GTX, the fastest gaming card available right now.  It runs Halflife 2 with maximum settings in all areas and at 1920 x 1440 resolution at well over 60 frames per second.  Seriously.  The thing doesn’t even break a sweat.

I’ve finished several games and need to get reviews up (is it narcissism to think anybody cares?), so I’ll do that soon.  If you’re still reading this, thanks for stopping by.

More Sith-Bashing

I’ve been getting a lot of flak for saying that “Revenge of the Sith” was for the most part a steaming pile, but it seems I’m in good company. Although my review focused more on the movie’s failure to adequately complete the story, I’m glad to see that others noticed the absurdity of Obi-Wan’s “Only a Sith deals in absolutes” remark. Take this excerpt from the article “No Faith in This Force” by Orson Scott Card (yes, that guy who wrote “Ender’s Game”):

But in a pivotal scene, Obi-Wan says what amounts to the same thing: “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

Isn’t that odd? The only thing both sides agree on is that people who believe in absolute good and evil are bad!

I suspect that Lucas realized, after writing "Good is a point of view," that all his friends actually believed that. So he had to make it clear that moral relativism was the right way after all—so he had Obi-Wan say that absolutism was a Sith thing, even though in the actual story, the best of the Jedis show an unbending commitment to absolute Good.

It’s a terrible thing, I suppose, for a writer to invent a religion and then discover that he and all his friends are on the wrong side of it.

Read his full article here.

Also worth reading is this blog post, which I have commented on. Notable among his complaints against the film is “Anakin’s unbelievable, immediate shift from doubt to disgust to obedience.”

I wholeheartedly agree.

Sid's Lexus

My son Sid totalled his Volkswagen Beetle, so we bought him a Lexus. This baby's rollin' on dubs, has one TV in the dash and another one in the trunk, two phat amps, speakers, and a PS2 built into the front console.

Okay, so it is just a $10 toy, but it really does have all of those details. I thought that was cool.

Typical Bloggers

I'm pretty new to this whole scene, but blogging seems to be a strange thing. At first I thought it might be too odd for people to see that my conversations swing so often between video games, movies, and theology. Then I started looking at other weblogs. As it turns out, most bloggers seem to be:

A) Liberal lesbians (is there another kind?) who think all Republicans hate freedom, hate nature, and swig down oil by the 10 gallon barrel

B) Potty-mouthed Goths who rant ad nauseum about how much God hates them, and that the feeling is mutual

C) Pretentious poets

D) Love-struck teens

E) All of the above

Needless to say, I'm feeling pretty comfortable about saying whatever I want here.

Welcome!

People who know me realize I'm generally pretty easily distracted. Sure, I take medication to keep me on track, but that only helps while I'm at work (my real job). The Apostle Paul said in Romans 7:19, "For the good which I desire, I don't do." Put in Dave's terms (and misappropriated in reference to temporal frivilousness instead of the eternally valuable work of Christ) that would read, "I want to draw, animate, and update my website, but instead I play video games and watch TV."

Well, this blog is an attempt to rectify that. At the very least I hope to start getting my day to day opinions typed out so I can share them with anyone who might be interested. If you ask me a question I might post an answer to it here, too. I'm very opinionated about Christianity, and would be happy to defend its tenets to any and all who are up for a good debate. But more on that later.

For now, this is just my "Hello, World" statement.