I’m looking at my calendar… sadly, I appear to have frittered away too much precious time of late. If I crank a full week of comics this week, then when I get back from Joberg at the end of NEXT week I’ll be down to 14. I’ll then have about five days to crank another week’s worth before family vacation.

Assuming I don’t come down the mountain to work on the strip, I’ll wrap the family vacation with ONE week left in the buffer…

In the week following family vacation, assuming I draw a week’s worth of strips, I’ll be in BIG TROUBLE. See, I then leave for Hague, and that would mean that when I return, the buffer will be at ZERO.

What needs to happen is this:
1) I need to script two or more weeks this week, draw one, and color three.
2) during the week before and the week OF family vacation I need to crank out three weeks of strips — scripts, coloring, the works.
3) During the week AFTER family vacation, I need to push out a week of strips.

That way I can return from Hague with two weeks in the buffer, and with a whole MONTH of “no travel” to build it back up in anticipation of August-September-October, when we do the crazy schedule thing again.

*sigh*

The only problem with this plan is that during this same time period there is an enormous project under way at work, in which I’m the principal driver, and my job is to prioritize, revise, and farm out the work described in about 400 pages of 10-point font.

–Howard

Ah, the dice we roll when we post things online.

Sandra’s fifth Live Journal post, a nice piece about gardening, got anonymously trolled, drive-by style.

I, however, posted a “wee discourse” lamenting the corruption of religious principles, and the ensuing discussion of religion did NOT erupt in a flame-war. There was nary a troll to be seen ANYWHERE.

You’re all to be commended on your reasonable behavior. The anonymous troll, however… he does not get commended. He gets lampooned.

Going forward, know that I plan to keep religious and political stuff fairly low-key. While I do have strong right-leaning tendencies, I’m not especially evangelical about them. Mostly I prefer to talk about fun stuff.

The implications of finding or not finding WMDs in Iraq is NOT fun stuff. Building WMDs on the other hand… the physics, the chemistry, the biology… I can talk about that for hours.

My mouth should probably be re-classified as a munition.

My brother and I had a great time last night. Rush 2049 for the N64 remains, hands down, the best car-battle game made… even though it’s principally a racing game, with car battle thrown in after the fact.

Why is this so? If I knew the answer to that, I’d make video games for a living instead of collaboration software.

Trying to drive in reverse as a guided missile bears down on you from the front, and doing so while giggling and screeching with the guy who fired it… now THAT’s entertainment. And don’t even get me started on the fun implicit in turning your car invisible, picking up the battering ram, and going close-range hunting on a guy who is packing nukes.

And now it’s time for lunch, Church, and then an evening spent in quiet celebration of Kiki’s 9th. I’m not telling you what I got her, because I know you guys can’t keep secrets for crap. 😉

–Howard

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on the current U.S. political scene, and am disturbed by the way in which religious principles get maligned by both parties.

A little background on me: I’m a mormon, and I have what mormons call a “testimony,” which means you’ll hear me stating my belief in pretty strong terms. I have a fairly simple, Sunday-school-esque belief that there IS clear-cut right and wrong. I also believe that just as God would have us choose the right, Satan would have us choose wrong (Sunday-school-esque, remember?). And in order to accomplish that, Satan needs to make good things look bad, and bad things look good.

He’s done a great job of that.

Consider for a moment the Christian principle of altruism. The Ayn Rand institute (an institution for which I have a lot of respect — one which does a lot of good) published the following in Philosophy: Who Needs it:

Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. These are not primaries, but consequences, which, in fact, altruism makes impossible. The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice — which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction — which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of good.

The context here is that suicide bombers (among others) are maniacs, and that the principle of self-sacrifice is what enables them to, well, sacrifice themselves for what they see as a higher goal.

Fine. While we can probably agree that suicide bombings are “bad,” if not outright EVIL, it’s not the principal of self-sacrifice or altruism which is at fault. Fault lies in PICKING THE WRONG HIGHER GOAL.

My point here is not to discuss self-sacrifice. It’s to use this as a model, as an example for cases in which both the Left and the Right have taken bad activities, and smeared not the activity itself, but one of the good principles used to justify that activity.

In short, just because an Evil person does an Evil thing and justifies it in part with some ideal, principle, or meme does NOT mean that the ideal, principle, or meme is Evil. What has REALLY happened is that a Bad Thing has been mixed with some Good Things, and one or more of the Good Things look “guilty by association.”

C.S. Lewis described this process really well in The Screwtape Letters. Don’t go thinking that I’m being all original here, because for the most part I’m not.

Another example, this one much more commonly used: The crusades — there are those who say that because Catholicism and Christianity were used to justify the crusades, Catholicism and Christianity are Evil.

You might as well say that because sex was used to create so-and-so (insert name of your favorite target of vilification here, but don’t use Hitler or you’ll be accused of invoking Godwin), that sex is evil.

Upshot… I remain convicted of my religious beliefs, even in the face of evidence that those selfsame beliefs get used as justifications for evil acts by other people.

–Howard