orthogeeks

To clear up an apparently possible confusion; In his last post Garth is not in any way referring to current events (except for the recurring event of Halloween).

Egypt is being used metaphorically here, similar to the Rastafarian (or Orthodox or Muslim) references to “Babylon”. Egypt is where we were imprisoned.

Now that we are free, we are not to forget everything we were when we were in Egypt, but to “plunder”. What is plundered? Riches; that which is valuable: all else is left behind.  That is sort of the deal with Orthogeeks, and our approach to pop-culture.

As to Halloween specifically, I remain conflicted.  It seems to me as I look around that in purely popular terms it has changed, from being a chance for kids to eat way too much candy, to being a chance for adults to lose their freakin’ minds, in some form or other.  So it’s coming back around, at least in the manner in which it is celebrated, to being a purely pagan holiday.  I mean, dressing up as something else and engaging in various debaucheries?  What could be more pagan than that?  The spirit of this is the Party, the whole Party, and nothing but the Party.

If we’re concerned about how to deal with Halloween, I say treat it as a learning opportunity.  It’s a great time to talk about paganism, human sacrifice, harvest festivals, etc.  To touch on Garth’s point, it’s a great time to start showing how such holidays as Samhain were reclaimed by the Truth.  To teach how the power of the demons is vain and futile.  To show (with examples if possible) how the beauty there was in the ancient pagan world is pointing to and is fulfilled in Christ.

And there was great beauty in that world.  It is with us still.  And the beauty that exists in the modern pagan (it might be called “secular”) world can also be reclaimed.  But it must be beautiful.  I see very little beauty in modern Halloween celebrations.  I see a lot of kitsch, and a lot of obnoxious childish nonsense.  Sometimes that can be fun, but the way it’s celebrated in America by adults has the sweaty tang of desperation.

Here’s a fun exercise: work out what you’ll spend on Halloween this year, and give it to your church, or a local charity.  See what kind of return that gets you, spiritually; will it be the vague emptiness that comes after a night of trying to forget you’re mortal?

Or will it be the cool breeze of a spring day that you somehow catch as the weather turns cold?

The sharp sea-air of Truth will smack you in the face and make you go, “Oh, yeah! That’s what it means to truly Live! To give of myself to others.”

Anyways.

Whee! Friday!

I have less than ten minutes left at work, and I figured: “what better time to post?”

Lots of exciting stuff is happening for geeks right now, and I intend to be more vocal about it.

First of all, I’ll definitely be visiting that Art of Games exhibit, and I think it would be fun to go with Garth, and maybe our wives if they’d care to.

I saw something a few posts back where Garth responded to the question (paraphrased) “what gives you the right?”

Nothing.  It’s one of those things where, by the Grace of God and/or dumb luck, we find that we’ve actually started a website, started a podcast, and update irregularly (well, I’m irregular anyway…fibercon? Metamucil?).

That plus a few decades of solid and consistent time-wasting on both our parts, plus just enough ego to think we might have something interesting to say, and here we are!

Whee! Friday!

On a more serious note, we had a beautiful service for the Protection of the Mother of God last night.  I got to direct the choir again, which doesn’t happen that often.  Nice to not have on all that brocade all the time.

Friday!

Later!

I apologize for my tardiness.

You see, I’ve been letting video games rule my life.

Back to that in a second.

I’d like to start by saying that I agree with 99% of what Father Artemy says. I have some things to say, but I know the tendencies of most people (myself included).

So before going on, I’m going to repost here the bulk of his interview which deals with computer games.  Please read, then pause and consider.  I’ll be back for part 2.

Here ’tis:

- You have touched upon the subject of computer games. It is natural for children to want to play games. Should this involvement in computer games be considered an illness?

- In our times, we are witnessing the following phenomenon: mankind, having exhausted its strength, has figured out new ways and methods of child education, of informing the children and introducing some manner of intellectual habit through computers. At the same time, we are becoming convinced that these inventions do not in the least justify themselves in obtaining the goal. Children are drowning in the quagmire of computer games. There is danger not only to their spiritual well-being, but also to their mental and physical health. They are becoming invalids before they have even had the chance to fully unfold their extraordinary powers. I sometimes think about how our country is not so technologically equipped (thank God), as other countries; yet every year more and more children are turning into computer Monte Christos — imprisoned voluntarily in the Chateau d’Iff of their own apartments. Their souls no longer see the living world. “The world holds no interest, and bread is not sweet.”

We are also witnesses to the terrible loss which children are inflicting upon themselves — motionless and dehydrated, they truly become patients. Certain modern psychologists kindly remind us that in 19th century Russia schizophrenia was called stony insensibility — the incapability of sharply perceiving things in the world. A person who is free from computer sickness can say together with Pushkin, “I am born to think and to suffer.”

A child who is, to the contrary, entangled in the virtual tentacles of the octopus of computer games, really does appear bloodless in the eyes of a trained specialist. He looses interest in living life, all his reactions are dulled, and he seeks no friendship with his peers. He becomes Kay of Han Christian Anderson’s fairy tale, and finds himself in the land of icy hearts, an eternal captive of the Snow Queen, playing his melancholy game of Hermann Hesse’s computer beads, repeating together with the story’s famous heroine the words, “Freedom or no freedom, it’s all the same.” He has lost the will to live. He no longer dreams about the future, he has fallen into a slavery of the most horrendous kind — computer instincts. His soul becomes filled ever more each day with aggression, pride, and fornication. All this is made even worse by the fact that it is all coming about in a hidden way — in the form of computer games.

- You have described a terrifying scenario. What antidote is there?

- It seems to me that any means are good. Furthermore, I think that it is now time for more active ways of using spare time. I am willing to remember the famous soviet era words to teenagers, “O sport, you are the world!” Let your child be completely worn out by sessions at the swimming pool, let him disappear in the stadium. Let him love communion with horses more than with people —only let him be protected from computer horrors.

Of course, we should praise those child-care workers, teachers, educators, and parents who succeed in inculcating a love for living nature in children. Having traveled around the provinces, I am convinced of the great importance of a child’s contact with living earth. The deep provinces still retain the practice, begun by rural soviet era schools, of obligating the children to work a certain number of hours on the school grounds, growing plants. This is wonderful! Our dear little children see the fruits of their labors. They are present at the miracle of inception and growth of a new life —from a seed to a flower, or even a carrot… But for a child living in the big city this unfathomable miracle is, alas, unattainable.

Another way is the study of a geographical area through hikes, travels, or visiting some secret, hidden areas of one’s native region. I think that it is ideal to organize children’s free time in this way, to bring them into contact with the history of their own localities. For example, there is a priest in Ryazan (who has a university degree in education) who has gotten permission for children to work in the local archives under the guidance of an expert. They searched for information on the clergy of Ryzan who served in days of yore. They compiled a list of priests beginning with the 15^th century, then searched out their graves, where they planted crosses together with the children. Then, after celebrating the Divine Services, Batiushka asked the children to read the names in the commemoration books which they themselves had compiled. Thus, their labor in history became a spiritual labor, and an invisible link formed between former times and our own. Names culled from the depths of Siberian archival veins were presented to eternity. A dream! A truly poetic educator. Unfortunately, not everyone can do it just like this, but we are bound and obligated to find ways to actively fill our children’s spare time.

Now in Russia it has become fashionable (in the positive sense of the word) to take little boys to army bases in order to instill in them a warrior spirit. It’s nice for the soldiers as well to see the youngsters’ interest in their military activities and way of life. And you just have to see how the boys handle the armaments of previous generations, how they get photographed together with a bazooka or the elementary Kalashnikov machine gun.

Let all sporting achievements that breathe the fighting spirit into our youngsters, all that bears an element of good-natured excitement, be born, developed, and strengthened. These days, it seems to me that the main panacea against our civilization’s illnesses is to turn the little boys into Mowglys.^[6] This does not mean leaving them to their own devices, or depriving them of time with their parents, but rather letting them get to know the world of animals and plants. Let them go diving, let them catch fish; as long as they do not lock themselves into a room and become flying Dutchmen or phantoms, and waste their energy on those endless, onerous, and soul-corrupting games.

- From what you say, I get the impression that cyber-addiction is becoming a serious problem in Russia. Do you meet many people suffering from this?

- I do meet them, unfortunately. I see that the devil sneaks up unnoticed, and then enters audaciously and boldly, like a commander, into the homes of affluent people who have managed to get their heads above the waters of poverty, and amuse themselves with the above-mentioned acquisition. Often these people are not able to organize their children’s free time. More precisely, they fail to recognize the seriousness of these computer games in time before their homes are filled with them. Often catastrophe comes from unexpected quarters. The child has everything he needs for complete mental, intellectual, and spiritual development, but instead he becomes an expert on game technology, and the flux of his passion swells to unimaginable magnitudes. In Japan, by the way, it is against the law for children to use computers until they have reached a certain age.

- Recently an inexpensive computer has been developed for use in schoolrooms of the Third World, as a way of spreading computerization all over the globe…

- I like what Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin had to say when he was recently in Belgorod. There was a recent congress there on the implementation of national priorities and demographical politics. The President was asked his opinion on the computerization of kindergartens. He answered, “Well, that is too much. We would have to send all the children to psychiatric clinics,” and brushed the idea aside. We express our gratitude to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin for his sober approach and competent assessment of such insane initiatives. We likewise hope that his successor will also take heed.

So listen.

At the end of the day, when all’s said and done, in this day and age and at this point in time, basically:

We love games.  Read the rest of this entry →

I remember when I was much younger; somewhere between 8 and 10 years old.  I was at church listening in on a conversation between my mother and an older female parishioner.  The woman was saying to my mother, “I think it’s necessary for children to be exposed to evil.”  I suppose her point was that it may do more harm than good to shelter a child from certain realities that he must surely one day face.  I remember that at the time that seemed rather foolish to me.

But of course, it tends to happen anyway.  And what important and interesting happenings those are!

The first time you get picked on by a bully.  The day you realized you would one day die.  The first time you are used by another human being.

How important, in those contexts, are our introductions to terror?  How much did we learn from them; their initial impact, but also the way in which the terror is dealt with by our hero?

So we return to the Doctor, and to the Theme.

We should regard Theme in both senses;  the musical as well as the literary.

I offer this quote from the Wikipedia article on the subject:

“The theme has been often called both memorable and frightening, priming the viewer for what was to follow. During the 1970s, the Radio Times, the BBC’s own listings magazine, announced that a child’s mother said the theme music terrified her son. The Radio Times was apologetic, but the theme music remained.”

Yes it did.

There’s an important segment of the theme music, known as the “bridge” or the “middle eight”, which “is an uplifting interlude in a major key that usually features in the closing credits or the full version of the theme.”

These two elements of the theme combine to create a complete picture of the soul of the show.  At the beginning we have darkness and a fear of the unknown.  The darkness is dispelled by a stab of light: in the music the middle eight; in the show itself, the Doctor.

In answer to the woman who gave that advice to my mom all those years ago: All people will, at one time or another, encounter evil; hatred, fear, injustice.  The important thing is not that we stress the fact that these exist; this will become abundantly clear to them as they grow up.

The important thing is that we discover good ways in which their minds can be excited by the possibility of hope offered by such characters as the Doctor.  That possibility is made manifest for Christians by the Lord Himself, to whom we attribute the title Our Sure Hope.  We’re responsible for tilling the soil, making sure that our offspring become the “good ground”; ready for the Sower.

Say!  That gives me an idea for another essay!  Garth!  Rejoice!

I must have been 4 or 5 years old.  All I remember is a flash: a green tentacle wraps around the throat of an unsuspecting man and tightens.  The man chokes out a terrified scream.  A younger man in odd tan clothing grabs the tentacled creature and throws it to the ground.  He has a gun.  He shoots the creature until it stops moving.

On the strength of this horrible moment, I didn’t watch Doctor Who again for years.  If I even heard the unmistakable strains of the theme music floating through the house, I would demand with tears that my parents turn it off.

And yet, even then, I loved it.  I never admitted my fear to my friend James, who can truly be credited with introducing me to the show.  We went right on playing Doctor Who in the quite awesome cardboard TARDIS his father made for him.

But from that point on, our games had a different taste to them.  When I finally did come back to the show in my early teens, it was with a certain degree of wariness; at any moment something horrifying could occur.

Of course, a rather sad sort of teenage cynicism and jadedness came over me for a few years, and I would only see the cheesiness of the monsters and the cheapness of the effects.  For some reason I kept watching.

It was the theme song.  It lived in my head and my heart, and does up to this day.  What it says is the essence of the show for viewers young and old, fans of 4th, 7th, 10th, or 11th doctors:  prepare for an adventure through time and space, and prepare to be afraid.

It was during this period of viewing (spoilers ahead) that I witnessed one of the most shocking events in Doctor Who history; the death of his companion Adric, in the 5th Doctor Episode “Earthshock”.  A new reality settled in.

Characters that I knew, people that I cared about, could be in serious danger, and their survival was not guaranteed.

Life would later remind me of this lesson, but it was one for which the Doctor had prepared the ground.

Man, do I love Doctor Who.  Just ask anyone, and they’ll tell you, “Man, does Chris go on about Doctor Who.”

It’s true.  There are few subjects that I go on about more often or more interminably than the eponymous Doctor and his mad, glorious, often terrifying and sometimes absurd adventures.

This has been going on since long before the return of the show to television in 2005.  The Doctor and his many companions have been a regular fixture of my life in one form or another since I was about 5 years old (that’s 26 years ago).  It therefore seems meet and right for me to address this most geeky of subjects in my first substantive essay here on Orthogeeks, since it is a cornerstone of my life as a geek, and has to a large extent informed my tastes in the sci-fi genre.

I will begin with a quick description of the show and its main character to provide context.  If you’re in need of a more in-depth description, you should head over to my friend Alan Kistler’s website, where he has written a series of excellent essays on the show.

First, a point of order.  When one is discussing the show, the Doctor is referred to as “the Doctor,” and never as “Doctor Who.”  Moving on.

The Doctor is a time-traveling alien from a society known as the Time Lords.  At press time he is 907 Earth years old.  He is a renegade/exile from his people, for reasons that are never explicitly stated.  It is implied that he disapproves of the stagnation and non-interventionist ways of the Time Lords.  At some point shortly before the beginning of the series, he stole a TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space) and ran, with his granddaughter in tow.  The TARDIS is his time machine, and on the outside it looks like an old police box, akin to a telephone booth; an outdated piece of pop iconography.  With this device he travels to points across all of time and space, battling evil geniuses and malevolent aliens, usually with a young human companion, through whose eyes the viewer is introduced to the show and its concepts.

Coming soon:  An Introduction to Terror

So yeah.  Garth has gently reminded me that it’s time to man up with the strength of my convictions and contribute.  Thank you Garth.

Yes, we are Orthodox.  Yes, we are Geeks.  What of it?  Whatchoo got ta say?

It’s time (and long past time) for a voice to cry out from the wilderness; the intersection of that peculiar and awesome Venn diagram.

Garth and I are quite different from each other.  What do we have in common?  Orthodoxy and Geekdom, you might say.  But then you’d be wrong.

We’re both Orthodox, sure.  But see, Garth is a fairly recent (about two years ago) convert.  I’m the son of a priest.  The way we approach and personally practice our faith is different.  The level of enthusiasm and zeal we bring to our worship is also different.  So while we have plenty to talk about when it comes to Orthodoxy, we don’t have much common ground.  Which one of us is the more zealous, you ask?  Let me put it this way:  whatever kerygma is, it sounds gross.

Geekdom?  Again, I’ve come to notice we’re quite different.  I believe that I am more aware of current pop trends in music, games, tv, etc.  And Garth is more aware of big words.

I love you, Garth.

What we truly have in common is the experience of being Orthodox and Geeks at the same time, and having both of those things mean an awful lot to us.

Thinking about it in terms of ancient Christianity, I shall paraphrase:  There is neither Nerd nor Geek, there is neither Fandom nor Un-fandom.

In a multicultural, pluralistic society such as ours, Geekdom may as well be our nationality.  We self-identify as Geeks.  Those are our people.  You, gentle reader, are our people.  This concept becomes more and more true as we live more and more of our lives online or in video games or TV or movies; when our Facebook friends or favorite fictional characters are as real to us as our physical neighbors.

I’m a little older than Garth, but both of us are right on that cusp between Generation X and Digital Natives.  We both remember a time before the internet (or more properly, the advent of the web).  But when it came we were ready and willing to be explorers and appreciators.

We’ve been on BBSs (google it, like I had to google “Kerygma”).  We’ve played 8, 16, 32, and 64, when bits were an easy measurement of power.  We’ve played old gen, new gen, and next gen.  We’ve played RPG, RTS, FPS and MMO.

We’ve watched Star Trek and Star Wars, Doctor Who and Dr. No, Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica.  Dr. No?  Hey, I couldn’t think of another Doctor, and sometimes the phrase is everything.

We know our territory; we know our people.  But each of us has chosen to become children of Abraham by adoption, or Christ has chosen to adopt us, I should say.  Do we then stop being geeks?

No more than the original disciples stopped being Jewish, or a male stops being a male, or an Anglo-or-Afro-American has to stop being Anglo-or-Afro before he can become an American.  Which is to say that each of the things we are, or the nations to which we belong, will become adopted and co-opted, changed and made new, enlightened and made holy by Christ and His Church.

There are many things to say on the subject of the relationship between gaming, geekdom, and the Church.  But for now, I’ll close by simply saying:

Kerygma…

Preach it, brother.