All posts by sonworshiper

Laying Down the Law

Last week, I read a few posts on friends’ FB walls about the Supreme Court hearing arguments for and against legalization of same-sex marriage. Friends who lean left are delighted at the prospect of marriage equality. Friends who lean right lament what seems like a further shifting of moral standards away from Christian values. Some discussions popped up about whether pastors could be prosecuted for refusing to condone or conduct same-sex marriages in their churches.

My gay friends hope that one day the government might afford them the same rights as heterosexuals. 

On the other hand, religious friends fear that one day the government might punish the faithful for so-called hate speech and Orwellian “thoughtcrime.” And it makes them all the more adamant that they must stand up and stand firm on their beliefs in the face of the changing culture, no matter the odds stacked against them.

After all, that’s what devout people do.

I pondered the comments and posts I saw from my Christian peers last week, and one question came to mind: Why are we hoping in the law on this issue? What drives this all-consuming (and often failing) Right Wing push to stop same sex marriage? Since when did a law accomplish the kind of redemptive work of grace that we as Christians praise and proclaim?

Consider Paul’s words to the early church in Galatians 3. Did Christ die on the cross to put in place more laws, or to free us from them? Do we get right with God by strict adherence to the law or by grace through faith? If faith makes us right with God, then why would we set our hopes on establishing laws–a system that our holy book clearly shows could not and will not save a soul? And if the law doesn’t save a person, yet saving souls is the very mission Christ gave His church, then why are we putting laws in place to enforce Christian morals and beliefs on a secular nation?

And why limit our law-making to this one area? Why not fight for laws against greed? Pride? Gluttony? Laziness? We talk a lot about “America was founded on Christian values” and people fight to keep the Ten Commandments in front of the courtroom as though that’s the foundation for the American legal system or some kind of Bill of Rights. But where then are the laws against worshiping other gods (Commandment #1) or creating idols and symbols of worship (#2)? Why is our God’s name used in profanity with impunity (#3) and why do so many Americans work on Sunday (#4)? Where are the laws requiring honor and obedience toward parents (#5)? And why aren’t there laws making adultery illegal (#7)? Why can people get away with lying everywhere but when they’re under oath (#9), and why is it acceptable–even encouraged–to desire what belongs to others (#10)?

Admittedly, some of those were once laws on the books in various parts of the country. And over time, they’ve been removed. Not as an evil plot to draw America away from God and drag our nation down to hell, but out of respect for the idea that our government was never intended to legislate a religion, and our religion is founded on the idea that legislating morality is inherently doomed to failure.

Yet we’ll trot out our arguments once more, and claim this is the battleground of the day, the place where the line must be drawn in this culture war.

Well, I find myself waving the white flag. Not at the opposition, as if to say I give up my beliefs or my faith in God or my adherence to biblical principles. But at my own side, to say, “Cease fire, we’re shooting at the wrong target, doing more harm than any perceived good. Lay down the guns, lay down these attempts to use law as a weapon.”

I know most of my side is just going to keep firing away, convinced–in spite of our own doctrine to the contrary–that human nature can be fixed by a legal statute or amendment or court decision. And I’ll probably look to them like an enemy or at least a supporter of the opposition.

But I’ll keep making my own and waving that flag despite the odds. After all, that’s what devout people do, right?


White Flag, by Jan Jacobsen, available for use through Creative Commons.

Tahwaria

My four year old has a new favorite topic of conversation… one shared with my nine year old and my teenage son: Terraria. (Or Tahwaria, as the four year old says it so very often.)

  
For the uninitiated, it’s a game available on PC, on consoles like XBox 360 and PS4, and on mobile devices like Kindle and iPad… and probably some others. 

So, discussions with our little Dude now center around important Terraria facts: 

Do you know about Wepis? (Lepus)
He is BIG. And he is a BOSS. And to fight him you need a subishis wooking egg. (suspicious looking egg)
His face looks funny. But he can’t kill me though. WAIT. WHAT? I DIED.

Armed with a wooden sword, ax, and pickaxe, your tiny character lands in a sprawling world full of dangerous beasties. You build a home for the character that serves as your guide, and then explore and expand from there. Finding and defeating powerful boss monsters unlocks new aspects to the game along with more assistance from the folks who want to “settle down” in your growing complex of houses. There’s a definite RPG side to the game as you find or craft better armor and more powerful melee, ranged, and magical weapons.

Like a two-dimensional Minecraft, this game usually encourages creativity and constructive cooperation among my kids and their friends. My four year old can play around and build things or dig for shiny metals. My nine year old can fight enemies and explore the dangers of the world. And my fourteen year old coordinates with his friends to take down the massive world boss monsters in order to unlock new types of materials. There’s also the option to turn on player-vs-player and fight it out with your frenemies.

The game isn’t perfect. A recent update or perhaps an inherent glitch caused the loss of my character and a few weeks’ worth of progress. Cloud saving might have prevented that, but some reviews on the iTunes Store implied that even cloud saved characters can sometimes encounter similar problems. Device issues can also cause trouble. The Kindle my nine year old uses somehow purged itself of all data, and he lost everything he’d done. 

That said, the game is addicting and interesting enough that both he and I find ourselves starting over, lamenting what was lost but enjoying building a new world nonetheless.

The kids also play with me sometimes, mocking my lack of progress and my general noob status. “Oh, you’re making items and armor out of iron? That’s cute. I barely remember ever needing that. Did I show you my rocket launcher, my space armor, and my machine gun?”

One day soon, I’ll catch up to them. I just need to find some more tungsten ore for that sword I want to make…

Time Off: My Least Favorite Part

After taking time off, then preparing to go back to work, the step I dislike most–despite knowing the feeling is inconsequential and silly–is shaving.

The military’s regs won’t permit a goatee, and I can’t abide a mustache by itself. I’ve tried, on behalf of my wife who always wants me to grow one. One look in the mirror and I am compelled to shave it off.

I managed to keep a mustache long enough to go to work and see how people reacted one day. After several sneers, jeers, and what I think was a lawful order from my Chief, I went home and shaved it off at lunch.

Maybe what I hate about it is a Monday morning sort of feeling… The sense of impending doom that says, “yes in fact you do have to go to that place every weekday, because you like doing things that require money and this is how you get that.”

Alas, poor facial hair, I knew thee well.

  

Priorities

April is drawing to a close — a full third of this new year gone so quickly! 

I’ve been busy.

I returned home from a 3.5 month deployment, I completed the first draft of my fantasy novel, I reconnected with my wife and four kids over some time off and a vacation to the resort at the north end of Okinawa, and somewhere along the way I may have picked up a PS4. 

I’ve kept my plate full in order to finish some projects, and let some good things fall off the edge (like this blog). Several other projects also suffered neglect. 

I do miss the sense of community and the wonderful variety of posts that fill my reader, but I committed to finishing that manuscript before returning to work after my deployment. That took some focus. And while I have another novel just getting started, and two manuscripts to revise and self-publish, I feel I can take a breather from that one daunting task and bring some other priorities back into view.

So I’ll catch up a bit with some of the fun I had over the last few months while I’ve been away. And I’ll be sure to post updates once the novels are ready for public viewing. (Right now, my “baby” is in the hands of several well-meaning but linguistically-critical alpha readers, and I’m getting lots of valuable feedback.)

Just wanted to drop a post to say I’m grateful for those of you who have interacted with me here over the years. I appreciate your patience and your failure to click “unfollow” in the time I’ve been gone. 

Blessings!

Finding Voice

You must strive to find your own voice, because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it at all.

– Prof. Keating (Robin Williams) in Dead Poets Society

In critique groups, writing conference presentations, and books dedicated to the craft, I’ve often seen reference made to “finding your voice.”

Sadly, the description of what that is and instructions on how to do so are all fairly vague–by necessity. Voice is a big part of what sets one author apart from another in writing. But it’s an elusive quality, hard to pin down sometimes, let alone to document in a how-to book. The consensus is, the best way to find it is to write, write, write. And then write some more.

I don’t think I could give a lot of clear, descriptive adjectives about the sound of my wife’s voice. But you can bet I’ll recognize it as soon as I hear it.

One good practice is to look at examples where an author has a particular style that sets them apart. Read how they write, and consider how the word choice and sentence structure create the desired effects.

I somehow missed that Prince Lestat came out at the end of 2013. I picked it up as a travel companion. Very quickly I realized I don’t much care for Anne Rice’s style of writing. In my late teens, I read some of her work and loved it. Now, I deemed it haphazard, a little wordy, with too much rambling for my tastes.

Then again, she’s making money with ease, so who am I to judge? We all like what we like, and she’s clearly got a fan base.

What I did like about the book is that it felt like dropping in on old friends. The chapters written as Lestat sound like that character in my mind… how he would say a thing, how he would interpret events taking place. While I may not like the writing style, the voice shines through.

Another great example is this gem I picked up solely based on a recommendation by Brandon Sanderson in one of his blog posts: The Accidental Highwayman by Ben Tripp.

It’s a madcap adventure through an England on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution, with an intrusion of magic into the real world. The “voice” Tripp uses for his characters and their descriptions of his world seem effortlessly perfect. Line after line stands crafted to drop the reader squarely into Kit Bristol’s head, with no cracks or flaws in the writing to jar the reader. It is chaotic and quite silly–no serious thinking required here. Therefore, it probably falls in a “love it or hate it” category. But for a light-hearted jaunt, or a mental break from the demands of the real world, the book serves well.

I now can see that’s more likely the result of dedication and hard work than a gift of luck or genius as a writer. And this gives me hope. Because otherwise I’d read something like his work, declare my inability to match such skill, and go play video games for the rest of my days.

The More Things Change

On the day SecDef announced the new U.S. mission in Afghanistan, I hit my 20-year time-in-service mark.

The long-running Operation ENDURING FREEDOM is finished.

We didn’t hear about the change until the 31st, and then only through commercial news media. Everything official assumed we’d be called something else. My deployed crew and I were in the middle of planning the first sortie of the new year, so we went with Chuck Hagel as a pretty good source of guidance.

When we landed, at the end of the day, leadership was still confused about what named operation we supported… because their leadership was still confused. Multiple names floated around. No one had even heard of FREEDOM’S SENTINEL.

It’s frustrating… partly because it makes us all look like bumbling idiots trying to figure out the change, and mostly because the humor of my joke was lost:

Really, we're the good guys. We have America Lasers.
We’re the good guys. We have America Lasers.

Sorry, it’s a hastily-done drawing on whiteboard. If you want a good picture, check imgur. I have missions to fly and stuff.

Comic book fans will recognize this as an old-school Sentinel, a giant death robot programmed to find and eliminate mutants like the X-Men. (If you saw the newest X-Men film, modern “cool-looking” Sentinels feature heavily.)

US News & World Report had a headline about the name change, called War in Afghanistan Ends, Except Not At All.

Ouch.

But given that our tasking and guidance remained exactly the same, it’s hard not to feel a sense of “So What?”

An individual on my crew put together this helpful chart that reinforces the point:

(And there's years of missions flown all around these two countries... but that would get cumbersome if included.)
(And there’s years of missions flown all around these two countries… but that would get cumbersome if included.)

Sorry, whiteboard again. We had other things to do (or so I’ll maintain).

When I went through Professional Military Education, we had lengthy lessons on Change Management. The idea is, change is hard and scary, which causes people to resist it. So there’s a good way to implement change, and some bad ways to avoid.

If you can make a change known well in advance, you can get your experts on board to figure out how the plan will work. Questions are answered before they’re asked in the heat of the moment; problems are solved before they’re encountered on the flight line. Ideally everyone contributes, and the plan becomes both better and well-known. Then, when leadership says, “Execute the plan,” everyone carries out the change with enthusiasm and support that comes from ownership.

I’ve seen this process go poorly over the last 20 years.

I’ve seen leaders declare sweeping changes without considering what obstacles stand in the way. I’ve seen people ignore regulations governing how we do business, in order to shift to the “new” plan–when no one knows what it is.

Whole squadrons arrived at work wondering “What exactly is it that I’m supposed to do today?”

I sat in a conference room with the leaders of every office in the squadron at a meeting that opened with, “Since the re-organization took effect last week, we’re going to sit down now and figure out how we all fit in to accomplishing the basic mission of this unit.”

That’s a question that maybe could have been answered well in advance.

I left that meeting with a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities on my shoulders and on my peers. Better yet, I felt equipped to communicate that vision to my subordinates, who had the same questions I did.

I also stepped out of the room and immediately spoke in private with the officers in charge of operations. “Sir, if feedback flows both down and up, then can we make sure the message goes up the chain that what we’ve just done is the exact opposite of everything we teach about how to implement change in an organization?”

To their credit, both officers I spoke with agreed completely and admitted they’d felt the same frustrations. I overheard a conversation with higher-ups where one of the officers I’d spoken to conveyed my feedback and challenged the superior’s mistaken view that creating chaos and thrash in the unit was beneficial, since it would make everyone give 110% to figure out and implement the change.

When I look at this news and how this change has come about, it leads me to believe one of three things:

1) This name change is purely cosmetic. Since it seems nothing fundamental or practical is different from my last OEF sortie to my first “whatever we decide to call this” sortie, I find this very likely.

2) Too few in power care that we do things well–we just need to do things. We teach a right way to implement change that produces ideal effects. But we are often directed to execute the opposite–doing whatever someone higher up the chain desires, at once, regardless of whether its fit existing rules or structures. And asking questions to make sure we’re legal or compliant with standing regs is viewed as a frustration and hindrance. I’m not sure whether that all applies in this situation, but it smacks of the same “rush to change” I’ve seen elsewhere.

3) What I’d hoped was an isolated “one bad apple here or there” case of poor management seems to be a hydra of similar leaders. Ignorance of what’s going on–throughout a squadron, a community, a region, a theater of operations, and so on–that’s going to happen from time to time. But willful ignorance, once an issue is called out, is unacceptable. It’s also called negligence. Or apathy. Or complacency. But definitely not leadership. Again, I’m not sure this directly relates to our changing-but-not-really operations in Afghanistan. But it matches up with past experience.

True leaders realize what they lack, own up to the fault, and then make corrections and adjustments. It’s refreshing to see that happen. Those people stand out from among the drones and yes-men committed only to their own promotion.

We need more Sentinels of that sort, not the robots.

Happy New Year.

Back Where I Started

On a deployment six and a half years ago, to a “secret” undisclosed location in Southwest Asia (that everyone knew all about), I picked up some D&D rulebooks to keep boredom at bay.

I read through the rules of the game, and noted some of the authors’ suggestions for ideas players could use for their characters–or Dungeon Masters could use to write stories those characters could star in, like a Choose Your Own Adventure.

And it struck me that no matter how well I planned a story, real live people would make decisions I didn’t anticipate, causing the Adventure to go in any of several exciting ways–but not the way I first envisioned.

So why not write the story the way I wanted to?

I sat under the Memorial Plaza’s massive double-tent (affectionately referred to by most as “the bra” for how it appears from a distance) or at the Coffee Beanery shop across the street, and I began to write.

I’ve written things before, of course. But during my two trips here several years ago, I decided to take writing seriously. Within a couple years of studying novel writing and elements of style, over the course of six plus months deployed (and time writing at home), I’d typed out over 100,000 words of a massive fantasy tale.

But the material borrowed too heavily from genre tropes. It sounded too much like World of Warcraft or Dungeons and Dragons in novel form. It had no unique element to separate it from the rest of the books on any fantasy shelf, along with too many elements I discovered had been done before and better than anything I’d write.

I decided to shelve the thing until I could devise some fixes to all the problems I saw. And I worked on other projects until I found the solutions to those glaring issues.

I regret that decision. It took me six and a half years to develop the discipline to finish a full novel manuscript–not of this fantasy project, just a novel–because I’d learned to give up part way whenever I felt a project had too many flaws.

So here I sit, where I began years ago, halfway through the almost-completely-rewritten manuscript of my long-planned fantasy novel. A lot has changed. Almost everything about the world, the magic systems, and the long-term plan for the story is different than when I first envisioned it. Also, I’m allowed to sit here in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt instead of wearing Air Force PT gear.

IMG_0941.JPG

Most important, I’ve proven to myself through NaNoWriMo that I can finish what I start, flawed or not.

So this time, I will have a completed draft before I depart for home. I may find my way out here again in the next few years, but I don’t want this novel to come with me for a fourth trip.

Guys, Man Up

There’s no reason I should have to say this. But I do.

I’m disgusted.

Dear all guys anywhere:

After you go into the bathroom and put your hands on or near your junk to do your business, wash your freakin’ hands!

No one wants you touching the bathroom door, or office supplies, or the restaurant table, or other people with your unwashed hands.

Sorry, not sorry. There’s no room for mercy or grace here. You don’t wash your hands afterward? You’re a horrible human being, simple as that.

“Dave, come on, I know some people do that, but is it really so prevalent that you’d waste a blog post on it?”

Yes. It is. I daresay the majority of men who use the bathroom at the same time as me are walking right out the door without touching a drop of water, let alone some soap.

Grossed out? You probably should be.

I know I’m shouting into a storm, peeing into the wind, as they say. I doubt a blog post will change some filthy person’s behavior.

But I can hope.

Until then, there’s always these:

IMG_0940-1.JPG

Also great on stuff that’s been touched by people’s junk.

D&D 5th Ed: A Resurgence of Imagination

I quite possibly squealed with glee when I saw the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition Player’s Handbook show up at our local base exchange book store. That meant they should carry the other books when those are published.

It's here!
It’s here!

I know there’s Amazon, but I still like picking up a physical thing and looking at it before deciding to plunk down my card or cash.

Some of my best-viewed blog posts are about 5th edition. It’s perhaps a trick of the title I chose; certain kinds of players go looking for ideas on how to build the “best” character to “win” at the game, so they’ll search online to see what combinations and tricks others have found within the rules to make (arguably) overpowered characters.

I suppose it’s the D&D version of human growth hormone, and it’s not banned… just frowned upon by some.

Leaving for a deployment plus NaNoWriMo kept me from focusing on setting up the long-awaited game for my family, let alone an actual group of people. But what D&D 5th Edition is doing well is just that: bringing groups of people back together.

Sure, your tabletop group today might bring along their tablets or iPhones for dice apps and fast tracking of information related to the game. The tabletop might even be virtual.

But people are connecting once again, telling stories together, and exploring that wonderful space between our ears. Some fear that in our digital, always-connected, everything-visualized world, there’s little room for imagination and wonder.

Thankfully I find these fears unfounded. My kids play with Legos and bring me their latest creations constantly. They also play Minecraft on the iPad or Xbox. But again, they often show off their wild palaces, deep caverns, and unique structures. They’re exercising and expressing their imagination with ease.

While I don’t fear for them in this area, I do want to encourage them–and their friends–and create spaces for their minds to play in. Because we have that ability to conceive of things beyond ourselves… beyond even the bounds of what we’ve seen or experienced before… beyond what actually exists and into what could.

Maybe that’s not for everyone. Whether the subject is video games, RPGs, or even TV shows and written fiction, I know I’ve heard the judgmental “I don’t waste my time thinking about things that aren’t real.”

How boring.

This article sums it up really well, even if the URL appears to be about something completely different (and super gross):

The awesome glory that is Dungeons and Dragons