Ancient Logic

To wrap up my review of 2012, I'd like to put down some more personal reflections on what this year has meant to me. This was the year I finished grad school. I am now on track for professional status at my school and, hopefully, a long career as a middle school history teacher. I arranged my last class, Fiction Workshop, to usher in a major change in focus in my life. No more education courses (for awhile, anyway) and a renewed focus on family and writing. I go to more of my wife's shows and less time shuttling between Salem and home. No other way to put it: life's gotten better. I've gotten serious about writing. I'm basing this observation on the number of rejections I've been getting. Nothing quite focuses the mind on an endeavor like repeated ego-corroding, soul-searing form rejection letters for queries and submissions. I haven't even gotten to the point where my rejections are particularly helpful, three sentences and a thank y...

I picked up my copy of this paper and pencil RPG about twenty years ago and played it throughout high school. If I'd been born a few years before, I might have played more DnD and a few years later and I'd probably have been sucked into Evercrack but this was better in my view: Magic and technology, side-by-side, with a character generation system that let you create pretty much any street samurai, battle mage, or rigger you wanted. The world of Shadowrun was deep, involved and printed in source books so cheap they pretty much disintegrated the second you looked finished reading through them. But anyway, for me, 12/21/12 will always be the start of the fifth world, marked in the Shadowrun mythology as the date a dragon wakes up and flies around Mt. Rainier. Awesome! I will take that over some moldy misconception over Mayan calendar practices any day.  This also marks the last few days in the year, which I've traditionally marked with a round of Year's Best ...

Event #1: I have reached the Stone Ages in my Ancient Civ class. Always a merry time, I get to talk about the rise of human civilization, and the great changes that brought about the rise of agriculture, villages and cities in rapid (relatively speaking) succession. One small part of today's lesson was giving a definition of religion (yes, I talk about religion in my history class). Let me write it down and see what you think of it. Religion is the belief in the unseen. If you can't see it, hear it, touch it, smell it or prove that it exists and yet you still know  that it exists -- that's religion. It's one of the most basic characteristics of the human species. The odd pile of flowers over dead Neanderthals aside, we seem to be the only hominid capable of such an interesting assumption. I might quibble with the definition but it seems to work for seventh grade history. Event #2: This blog popped up on Twitter today and I was blown away by the force of its argume...