The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by JamesK:

I'm sorry if this comes off as disjointed or somehow insensitive to the real victims, I'm still trying to digest this all through the process I know best: Recontextualizing.

While reading through all the links last night, the ones that stood out the most were Jay's deleted Tweets where he talked about needed sacrifices and mastering death and the rest. I realized: I've seen this scenario before. Many times.

My stance on woo shifts back and forth depending on whether my "But it feels empowering and good" side or my "It's all in your head, you don't need to actually do any of it" side is stronger, but I always enjoy approaching these things with the assumption of - well if it -is- real, then what happened?

If we assume that summoning The Warrior archetype is real, and belief creating reality is real, then Ray is either very stupid, or he is very evil.

I do a lot of roleplaying. 'Exalted', 'Unknown Armies', 'Mage-tA', and I've put Ray into games before as the Villain of the Week. To answer someone's question from further up: "Why would someone kill his followers?" If you assume magic is real (and some of those Tweets read like they were coming from the sort of headspace where someone would think it is), and you assume someone is an amoral monster, then there is an excellent reason to kill a lot of people all at once.

Magically, (in settings such as 'Unknown Armies' or 'Mage') death is very powerful. Control that much death, and you are controlling a lot of power. Taking a mystically significant number of people into the wilderness and getting them to kill themselves at your command is one of the time honored techniques for the villain that wants to attain Godhood/Awakening/Ascension/Assumption of Avatarhood/Soforth.

Of course, it didn't quite work. The Conquering Death sweat lodge was stopped after just half of the planned cycles, and nearly everyone lived. Godhood assumption thwarted, Jay quickly left.

Or he didn't believe any of what he was spouting, but still managed to cobble together enough ritual to manifest The Warrior within himself in all it's dark, greedy, abusive glory. Because you can't be a manipulative power-abusing dick and manifest The Warrior positively. The Rules never work like that.

I don't know if Ray had actually gone so far around the bend that he'd actually try and do something like that, but if I ever gave out those Tweets in a game, the players would be complaining that they -got- it already and I didn't need to hit them over the head with "Bad guy bad, going to kill a lot of people for power now."

Not sure what I'm trying to say, but regardless of whether you look at this from a "Woo is real" or a "Woo is Woo" stance, James Arthur Ray has done some very very bad things.

-Thank you-

I'd just found the CNN article and was wondering what the rest of the story was. Then my daily blog-cycle brought me the answer in more detail then I could've ever dreamed.

Creepy creepy stuff.

There are times when I love living in the future. This is one of them.

My husband -hates- "The Times They Are A'Changing". It played at the funeral of one of his dearest friends and it's guaranteed to make him almost suicidally depressed. When he heard me watching this and was told it was from Watchmen, he declared we'd never see the movie until he had a mute button. Then he settled down and watched it with me and now he's trying to figure out how to cancel Saturday plans so we can go and see it.

Seriously, Warner. WTF?

I live in a neighborhood that's mostly empty vacation rentals. You couldn't tell that from the last ten minutes. There are fireworks and firecrackers being set off down the block. People are screaming up in the hills, there are cars driving around leaning on their horns.

It's like New Years. I didn't realize this many people lived here, and all I can hear are their voices, but that's enough.

I can't believe it's happened.

A group of teenagers with more then their fair share of romantic entanglements become entangled in something even worse when their woodland vacation spot becomes ground zero for an alien invasion! The two alien commanders, Oberton and Titanon, are in a foul state after Oberton managed to gain sole experimentation rights on Titanon's prized human subject. Now back on Earth to collect more samples, the crew encounters the teens and Oberton sets to work to decipher "This strange human emotion called 'love'." Pheromone injections are liberally applied by Oberton's annoyingly cutesy CGI lackey, the hapless nerd of the teen group is transformed into a half-alien hybrid for Titanon to obsess over, and everyone learns a valuable lesson before the spaceship returns to the stars come sunrise.

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. "Eye of the World" published 1990. The final book of the series is currently being written.

Stopped reading four books back, personally. Will probably give the whole thing another try once they're all out in paperback.

"Say what you will, but the lurkers can read the archives and draw their own conclusions." They can and they do, but not the conclusions you think they do.

"I think the record of this discussion speaks for itself." It does, but not in the way you think it does.

"Well, if you were a -real- (publisher/writer/coder/whatnot) you'd know that..." Bonus points if the target is a real (publisher/writer/coder/whatnot)

"You all have serious psychological issues to get this obsessed with me."

"You have your job mentioned in your sig! Does your boss/company know you're espousing your personal views as company policy?"

It's probably a worrying sign about my Geek-Quotient that my first thought after reading the whole vf vg rguvpny gb ra-Fynlre gur znffrf jvgubhg gurve pbafrag thread was "You know, 'Hunter: the Reckoning' could be the basis of a great Post-S7 Buffy game."

...

Dammit. I need to run this.

One of the things that I really like about the later seasons of Buffy is how they explore just what it means to be The Slayer for so long. After all, until Buffy came along, Slayers seldom reached their 18th birthday. Heck, Buffy got killed her second year in and only got to keep going on through a Plot Device.

Slayers aren't supposed to stick around that long. They aren't supposed to last for years, to gather friends and obligations, they aren't supposed to survive long enough to deal with all the trials of getting through highschool, collage, and into the adult world while still dusting vampires and battling demons.

Slayers are the hand-grenade in the arsenal of the Forces of Good. Small, compact, and they do a whole lot of damage when they go off, but they're a one shot. Until Buffy.

And they way they explored that in the final seasons worked for me in a weird twisted way.

#212, Clifton Royston

Sadly, according to the site, the students working away at this are "collage bound". That says to me late highschool, possibly senior year.

And there's really nothing I can add to that to make it any better.

And here I thought inspiration for the Tree Squids came from Discovery Channel's "Future Earth" and their proposed candidates for the next intelligent species to evolve on earth in several hundred million years: The aboreal squids who live in lush temperate rainforests and use their supersized brains and tool using to fight the mammoth predator squids of the forest floor.

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