Odds and Ends

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the creation of my Confucian quote bot on Twitter, UnwobblingPivot. Today, it has over 13,600 followers, has received a lot of positive feedback, including good questions about the passages shared, and has gained a little brother on the Fediverse. In fact, it’s significantly more popular than my main account (which has a bit over 1,800 followers), but I don’t feel too bad about being outclassed by the Master and his sources and students. I have a page of general information about the bot already, so in this post, I’ll look back at how and why I created the bot, and what plans I have for it.

Back in February, my mother-in-law came to visit my wife and I at our new home, and while talking a little about my experiences in language study during dinner she told me that I ought to learn Chinese. Now, she said this jokingly, but once the idea occurred to me I figured, why not? I decided that I was going to learn Chinese.

It’s October and Halloween is just around the corner, so now’s a perfect time to bring out Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Not the compilation of Edgar Allan Poe stories, though that’s good, too, but the Alan Parsons Project album based on various Poe stories and poems, though most aren’t from that specific collection - only “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

So, the semester is well underway, you have a heavy load of coursework to do, a full time job, a blog you need to update, a woman you’re attempting to woo, a library to volunteer at, all in addition to the normal errands and chores and unforeseen tasks to do. It’s a lot, so how do you deal with so much work? Obviously, you dive into the sprawling 40+ hour campaign of Ogre Battle 64: Person of the Lordly Caliber, the best game of its era and, for me, the best of any era - with one massive, almost game-wrecking caveat, which we’ll get to shortly.

The biggest surprise I’ve ever given my parents was last year when I told them that I was getting into professional wrestling. My online presence here and on Twitter reflects my real-life interests and hobbies closely, and as you can tell from a scan of my article and review index most of what I read and watch leans toward high culture. I’ll dip into popular culture with things like Devilman now and then, but overall I’m more likely to be reading French poetry or something. I have little interest in sports generally, and most guys who are into wrestling started watching when they were young. I remember several friends in middle school talking about it, but I had little interest. So what happened?

‘Of course’, said Queequeg. ‘Man want to die, nothing can save him. Man want to live, only God can kill him - or whale or storm, maybe’.

Once again, it’s time for me to look at the past year in bibliophilia. In 2018 I read thirty-six books, down from 2017’s forty-two, though considering this was also the year I started graduate school I’m actually pretty happy with that number.

Looking at the state of Christianity, the lack of unity is disconcerting, as “each has a cry of his own, I am for Paul, I am for Apollo, I am for Cephas, I am for Christ.” Those in favour of ecumenism sometimes go too far, but it’s hard not to sympathise with their goal of fostering more unity among Christians, as long as it can be done without falling into indifferentism. There is, though, one thing regarding the Bible that seems to be universally agreed on, and that’s that the genealogies are the most boring part of Scripture.

Recently, I’ve been working my way through Scripture, and one thing it’s reminded me of is how wild the Old Testament gets, particularly in the Book of Judges. It makes one fully appreciate why the sacred author says twice, including the very conclusion of the book, that “In those days there was no king in Israel: but every one did that which seemed right to himself.” The only times that Israel wasn’t a near anarchic, heathen-ridden mess was under the guidance of the judges.

I recently received the book Medieval Monsters, an art book collecting illustrations from various medieval manuscripts, by Damien Kempf and Maria L. Gilbert, as a gift, and it’s one of those books whose main flaw is that it’s not big enough. That is, I wish it were bigger both in the sense of having more content and just being physically larger. At just 6" x 7.5", this is the smallest art book I own. More typical  would be something like The First World War in Colour, which is 8.5" x 11.5". To be fair, most of these illustrations don’t have a lot of detail and so may not merit as much space as some other genres of art, but a larger size would also allow for more content. On a positive note, the paper and print quality is nice, so what is here looks good.