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Kaymyth

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What?  All the cool kids are doing it! 

 

And no, I wouldn't jump off a bridge if everyone else were doing so because I am freakin' terrified of heights.

 

 

Doing this could actually be a really terrible idea.  Fantastic!

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(Forgive me for asking about your beliefs; I find them fascinating, in the best possible way.)

 

 

You've said before that you believe most, if not all, of the deities worshiped throughout history have been real projections of the universe. Do you believe that any of these deities have been actively hostile or malevolent towards humanity, such as the gods the medieval Aztecs offered human sacrifices to?

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What's your view on Egyptian gods and goddesses being used in comic entertainment (for example, Marvel's Moon Knight is an "avatar" of Khonsu, who in some myth cycles is the son of Bast)? Do you find it disrespectful? Ignorant? Funny? Don't care?

 

We're going to go into UPG territory here.  I have a variety of meditation exercises that I do to turn on the godphone, so to speak.  The impression that I get is that they're more or less happy about it because it means that more people are paying attention to them again.  They like attention.  They like to be remembered.  And even if the comics are inaccurate, it means that people are at least thinking about them, which gives them a better shot at gaining followers again.

 

Unlike a lot of the religious traditions Western culture is familiar with, the Egyptian gods are not all-knowing and all-powerful.  Sure, they know more than we do, and they're more powerful than we are, but they have limits and they couldn't stop the historical changes that caused them to fall into obscurity.  Most of them have spent the last couple millennia with nobody but each other (and occasionally bored members of other pantheons) for company.  They've been lonely.

 

So, the short version: if they're not offended, then I'm not offended.  And I think that the sorts of things people might expect them to be offended by most of them actually find hilarious.  You don't hang around humans for 6,000 years without developing a sense of humor.

 

(Forgive me for asking about your beliefs; I find them fascinating, in the best possible way.)

 

 

You've said before that you believe most, if not all, of the deities worshiped throughout history have been real projections of the universe. Do you believe that any of these deities have been actively hostile or malevolent towards humanity, such as the gods the medieval Aztecs offered human sacrifices to?

 

No apologies necessary. :)  I think I can be a little less circumspect in this thread than the general Religions thread, since I think I can run on the assumption that people deliberately reading a thread started by me might have a slightly higher tolerance for Weird than the general masses.  Still, if I start getting oblique about something, it's because the answer is likely to make a majority of people think I'm A ) crazy or B ) trolling.  I am up to my eyeballs in Weird Crap.

 

And I think that in a lot of cases, the deities were shaped by peoples' expectations of them.  I believe that they are pieces of the Universe that broke off and were formed by a combination of its intent and our imaginations.  And people can imagine some really scary things.  But I like to think that the general goodness of the Universe overcomes a lot of those darker impulses, so you wind up with some terrifying-looking gods looking down at their followers' sacrifices and sighing, "Oh, not this again.  Um, High Priest Bob?  Could you not....oh.  Eeugh."

Edited by Kaymyth
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Do you have children? Work with children?

I was serious on the Bad Day thread, you come across as an awesome motherly person. :)

 

I do not have children, but I have an elementary education degree.  Unfortunately, I moved to KC about the time the bottom dropped out of the economy and severe cuts got made to local schools, so I never did secure a teaching job.  So I work for Major Financial Institution instead, and practice my teachers' patience on clients. :rolleyes:

 

On a tangent, probably the most terrifying thing I've ever done was substitute for kindergarten.  I mean, they're cute at that age, but they bounce around like tiny hyperactive electrons.  I'm a lot better with kids who are able to hold a decent conversation.  My nieces and nephews are one by one starting to reach the age where they get interesting to talk to (and start corrupting to the Geek Side).

 

It's unlikely at this point that I'm going to have kids of my own, so I gotta geekify the niecelings and nephewlors. 

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Okay, I have to say: I'm kind of curious, thanks to the MLP avatar. Who is Best Pony?

 

Also: what your favorite book, and why?

Note: I don't mean favorite Sanderson book, or even favorite fictional story- just what is your favorite book, period.

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Okay, I have to say: I'm kind of curious, thanks to the MLP avatar. Who is Best Pony?

 

Doctor Whooves.  Hands-down.  But Vin!Pony comes in a close second. :)

 

 

Also: what your favorite book, and why?

Note: I don't mean favorite Sanderson book, or even favorite fictional story- just what is your favorite book, period.

 

ERROR ON LINE 55 - INFINITE FEEDBACK LOOP

 

Favorite book?  Seriously?  I can't even narrow down a single favorite author, and you want me to pick a single favorite tome out of my entire glorious library?  I'm sorry, it...just can't be done.

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Regarding your religion. (I must say, I do find some of the more obscure religions fascinating from an objective point of view. If you find anything too prying or insulting though, then feel free not to answer.)

 

It sounds interesting the way that you phrased your earlier post. You made it sound like human consciousness in a way... created the entity of the God. Is this what you're trying to say, or did I misunderstand your post?

 

If this is the case, then what do you believe regarding the very beginning of Creation, before there was human consciousness to make gods in the first place?

Edited by TheYoungBard
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Regarding your religion. (I must say, I do find some of the more obscure religions fascinating from an objective point of view. If you find anything too prying or insulting though, then feel free not to answer.)

 

It sounds interesting the way that you phrased your earlier post. You made it sound like human consciousness in a way... created the entity of the God. Is this what you're trying to say, or did I misunderstand your post?

 

If this is the case, then what do you believe regarding the very beginning of Creation, before there was human consciousness to make gods in the first place?

 

I kind of figured, thanks to some of the responses I got in the Religion thread, that some people were more curious, but I didn't want to derail that thread and make it all about me.  So, here is a thread that's all about me!  And don't worry - if I wasn't willing to answer questions, I wouldn't have started the thread at all. :) 

 

To go off a bit on a tangent, understand that there are lot of people who follow different pagan faiths who keep it very tightly under wraps.  We get a lot of negative reaction from people who who don't understand (or deliberately misunderstand) what it is we are, and that leaves some people living in fear.  Fear of being ostracized,  fear of rejection from their families, fear of being fired from their jobs, even fear of having violence inflicted on them; I'm in a rare position to be able to be completely out about my religious status.  I have the good fortune to work for a company that is very liberal in its social policies and treatment of employees, and my family is more or less accepting of the fact that I live my life a bit differently.  Not everyone has this; heck, I wouldn't have it had I stayed in education.  So I use my status to try to engender understanding, so that the next time someone else nervously pokes their head out of the "broom closet" (so to speak) they have a slightly higher chance of being greeted by a positive reaction.

 

In short: there are more of us than you think, mostly because a lot of us are worried about what might happen if they become known.  But the proportion of us who are willing to stick our necks out and talk about it is slowly growing.

 

Now, on to the actual question.  

 

Basically, I view the concept of ultimate divinity as essentially being the soul of the Universe.  (And yes, being part of the Universe ourselves, that would mean that we are each a tiny, tiny sliver of Divinity ourselves.)  But, see, the Universe is big.  It's really, really, really big - so big that we cannot even begin to comprehend even the scale of how big it is.  We know it's there, and we want to understand it, and the Universe wants to speak to us, too - so it spun off pieces of itself that were obviously much, much smaller than it, but much, much bigger than us.  Big enough to be able to impart wisdom, but small enough for us to comprehend.  And it used our imaginations as templates on how to forge those pieces - those are the gods.  All of the gods.  For a more detailed explanation, go to the Creator's Corner board and read the Creation Myth that I posted a few weeks ago - that's my story of how the Universe and the gods came to be.

 

The ancient Egyptians had a grasp on this kind of concept themselves - they called their gods the Netjeru, or the Names of Netjer.  To them, Netjer was the source of Divinity, and the gods were the many Names that it could call itself.  They had a very fluid idea of how that worked, too, as each of the gods really was his or her own self - but you could also combine two or three of them together into a new god that embodied all of those qualities if you needed to.  And then you could pop them back apart again later.  Basically, they had a sort of Lego deity philosophy.

 

As for what caused the birth of the Universe? I take that question as one that's unanswerable.  Whatever happened to start the Universe existed outside the laws of physics as we know them; since our brains are patterned within those laws, it stands to reason that there's a chance we aren't even capable of conceiving of what happened to start things.  Whatever it was, it's almost certainly something that's outside the observable Universe, and there may never be a single human soul who ever figures it out.

 

The ancient Egyptians had at least three different creation myths of their own that completely and utterly contradicted each other.  Ask your average person back then which one he or she believed was true, I expect that they'd just look at you funny and say, "All of them."

 

So, sure, maybe some all-powerful being started the Universe on purpose, or everything we know might be the result of some all-powerful kid sneaking into Parent's workshop and playing with their tools.  Or maybe we're inside the blossoming of a giant space turtle fart.  I'm actually OK with not knowing.

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So... who is your favorite Doctor and why?

 

Furthermore, what do you think has been the biggest missed oppurtunity of Doctor Who, and what would you do if you were in charge of the show?

 

Sylvester McCoy (Seven).  He was the active Doctor when I started watching, so he was "my" Doctor.  Also, Ace was my freakin' hero when I was a teenager.

 

Missed opportunity?  Hmm.  I'd have to go with Romana.  In TV canon, they've never officially resolved her voluntary exile to E-Space.  She's got a loophole in the destruction/retconned banishment of the Time Lords in that she's been living outside our own universe.  What happened to her?  What's happened to her in the centuries since she stayed behind?  Is she still in E-Space?  Did she come back to fight in the Time War?  Is she still good, or did something happen in all those years to change her for the darker?  So far, the writers have been more interested in coming up with convoluted ways to resurrect the Master rather than bring in another Time Lord character that has an even better reason to be around.

 

What do you think of the Kane Chronicles and how they portray Egyptian mythology?

 

I haven't actually read them, so I'm afraid that I don't know.  From what I just skimmed on Wikipedia, he's mostly used the Romanicized names for them, so it's either a case of Didn't Do the Research or he just decided to go with the names that people know.  To be fair, it's probably the latter.  I'm sure there's plenty in there I'd laugh hysterically at, though no more so than things like Stargate and the Mummy.  You just have to take them all as stories that exist in their own universes and don't have any real bearing on my religious practice.

 

The one thing I do take a little bit of issue with is the popular portrayal of Anubis/Anpu.  It's always, "oooooh, the dark god Anubis!" which contrasts so starkly with the gentle Anpu I know who guides and protects souls on their journey to the Duat.  I think that of all the Netjeru, he's the one who sometimes gets his feelings a bit hurt.

Edited by Kaymyth
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The one thing I do take a little bit of issue with is the popular portrayal of Anubis/Anpu.  It's always, "oooooh, the dark god Anubis!" which contrasts so starkly with the gentle Anpu I know who guides and protects souls on their journey to the Duat.  I think that of all the Netjeru, he's the one who sometimes gets his feelings a bit hurt.

 

Partly a follow-up question to Anubis, partly a general one.. why do you think pop culture characterizes underworld gods like that?

 

After all, it's hardly restrained to just Anubis. Hades is usually presented as the Big Bad of Greece in films and comics. Is it just a hang-over from Western religions, which associates the underworld with the Devil (and therefore EVIL) or do you think there is another reason for it?

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Partly a follow-up question to Anubis, partly a general one.. why do you think pop culture characterizes underworld gods like that?

 

After all, it's hardly restrained to just Anubis. Hades is usually presented as the Big Bad of Greece in films and comics. Is it just a hang-over from Western religions, which associates the underworld with the Devil (and therefore EVIL) or do you think there is another reason for it?

 

I think that's a big part of it.  We tend to equate the "underworld" with the concept of "the Very Hot Place", when really that's not the case at all.  Granted, even in some of those older cultures, the lord of the underworld was someone to be feared.  Poor Hades gets essentially demonized, when, in fact, he's probably one of the few Greek gods who really sticks to doing his job and not messing around with hapless humans.  The only "bad" thing that he's ever really done was the alleged kidnapping of Persephone, but even that could be attributed to a bad PR department and the mother-in-law from heck being way louder at telling her side of the story.  (I mean, think about it.  You're a young, beautiful goddess with a smothering mom.  One day, you meet the tall, dark, mysterious lord of the underworld, and he's interested.  Do the math.)

 

But yeah, I think it's mostly cultural prejudice.

 

So turns out you died in my dream last night. :wacko:

What did you die of?

 

So, there I was, standing before the oncoming demon horde, as they roared their terrible battle cry.  I lifted a fist into the air and cried out a command.  Trathiathryxl, my trusty draco-unicorn hybrid, swooped in from above and landed by my side, bellowing a challenge to the demon army as I mounted.  "To the air!" I cried, and we soared into the sky.  We raked the army with swaths of dragonfire, impaling the occasional behemoth upon Trathiathryxl's elegant, razor-sharp horn.  Bolts of magical energy leapt from my hands, striking down still more demons.

 

We fought with all of our might, knowing that it was hopeless for us, but someone had to hold them back from the capitol.  The lives of thousands hiding behind those walls hung in the balance.  We didn't have to win; we just had to hold them long enough for the human army to make it to the field.

 

In the end, we fell.  The demon general brought us down with a well-aimed laser strike to Trathiathryxl's wing.  One last blast of dragonfire took out an entire regiment of demons before we struck the ground.  I stumbled off of my fallen mount, bleeding with at least a dozen cracked ribs, and looked up into the general's cruel eyes.

 

Trumpets sounded in the distance.

 

I smiled.  "You're too late," I told him.  "They're here."

 

He growled deep in his throat.  "Still, you are dead."  He raised his sword for the final strike.

 

I gathered the last of my eldritch energies and leapt at him, one final effort bringing me into his reach.  My hands latched onto his armor and I grinned wildly, maniacially.  "So are you."  I released the last of my magic in one bright explosion, disintegrating me, the demon general, and everything within 1,000 feet.

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So I'm under the impression that you know about music, so...

 

I've always wandered about time signatures, particularly in works when they change (such as in jazz)... I've got some friends that claim they can tell when the time signature changes while listening, is there a method to recognizing time signature changes while listening to the work in question?

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So I'm under the impression that you know about music, so...

 

I've always wandered about time signatures, particularly in works when they change (such as in jazz)... I've got some friends that claim they can tell when the time signature changes while listening, is there a method to recognizing time signature changes while listening to the work in question?

 

I do know quite a bit about music; I spent a good number of years as a music performance major before I finally accepted that I do not have the hand structure/joints to handle playing the oboe on a professional orchestra level.

 

Basically, for those of you who are not familiar, time signatures are written in a format that looks like a fraction.  The top number indicates how many beats per measure, and the bottom number indicates what type of note gets the beat.  So, some examples:

 

4/4 time = four beats per measure, and the quarter note gets the beat.  (1/4 = one quarter, get it?)

2/4 time = two beats per measure, and the quarter note gets the beat.

3/4 time = three beats per measure, and the quarter note gets the beat.

6/8 time = six beats per measure, and the eighth note gets the beat.

2/2 time (also known as cut time, and the signature that most marches are written in) = 2 beats per measure, and the half note gets the beat.  Essentially, it's a really fast version of 4/4, written that way so that performers don't panic at the sight of lots and lots of sixteenth notes.

 

Hearing the time changes can depend on a lot of factors.  A switch from 4/4 to 2/4 could be nearly impossible to detect, while a switch from 4/4 to 6/8 is usually quite obvious.  There's also a matter of which beats are emphasized in a measure; 3/4 can be counted one-and two-and three-and, while 6/8 is usually more of a 123, 456, 123, 456.  So a lot of it is practice and familiarity, with a touch of "Did the composer actually make it easy to tell the difference?"

 

There's actually a jazz piece called "Take Five" that's pretty popular - it's written in 5/4 time.  A lot of folks don't realize how programmed they are to hear music in even time signatures until they hear a piece like that; it can mess with your head a bit until you get the rhythm down.

 

And then....then there are the "modern" composers who like to write pieces that are seemingly designed to tax a musician to their limits.  They're technical masterpieces, but are kind of horrible for the casual listener.  I've played pieces written by people who seemingly believe that anyone who leaves the time signature the same for more than three measures straight isn't trying hard enough.  So you'll get bits that go from 2/4 to 3/8 to 5/8 to 4/4, back to 5/8, down to 2/4 again, and then to 7/8, and just for giggles, a single measure of 1/2.  These tend to be the same sorts of composers who think that tonality is for wusses, so the pieces are almost universally painful to play. 

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Best Jazz instrument?

 

Oh.  Well.  Hmm.  "Best" is such an all-encompassing term.  I'm going to go tentatively with alto saxophone, mostly because I play it.  But I assert that I can also turn any instrument in my repertoire into a good jazz instrument.  Flute, in fact, I have used for jazz band solos; but given the right piece, and I could rock a jazz solo on the oboe.'

 

Yeah.  Jazz oboe.  That would be cool.

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Favourite song?

 

ERROR finding single song.  Generating list.

 

(You're cool with a list, right?  Of course you are.)

 

General favorites:

 

Enya - "Ebudae"

A rather fantastic mash-up of the Doctor Who theme and Green Day's "On Holiday"

Breaking Benjamin - "I Will Not Bow"

The Goo Goo Dolls - "Iris"

Frente - "Labour of Love" and "Ordinary Angels".  I also love their cover of "Bizarre Love Triangle".

Bastille - "Laura Palmer" and "Pompeii"

Jonathan Coulton - oh so very many songs, though "Mandelbrot Set" is up near the top.

Eve 6 - "Nightmare"

Imagine Dragons - "Radioactive" & "Demons"

Evanescence - "Bring Me To Life" & "Listen to the Rain" among others

 

Things that never fail to make me smile when they pop up my playlist:

 

Owl City - "Fireflies"

Frente - "Accidentally Kelly Street" (quite possibly the most cheerful song on the planet)

Imagine Dragons - "On Top of the World"

Walk the Moon - "Shut Up and Dance"

 

Stuff I've recently discovered:

 

Lindsey Sterling.  Pretty much all of it.  Though Roundtable Rivals has one of the more spectacularly ridiculous yet awesome music videos I've ever seen.

Katy Perry - "Roar"  don't judge me

"Shake it Off" again with the judging  - Though I actually prefer the Walk Off the Earth cover to the Taylor Swift original.

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Where can I find this amazing-sounding mash-up? 

 

Let's see if this works.  I'm never quite sure what a YouTube link is going to wind up doing on this forum...

 

 

 

Edit:  I suppose technically it's a mashup of a mashup.  It took the original KLF mashup version from back in the day and re-mashed it.

Edited by Kaymyth
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  • 6 years later...

*cracks neck* HI. :P

I just read through all of the thread (fight me, you're interesting and a good writer) and from what I remember of the Kane Chronicles, Anubis/Anpu was actually portrayed as being a good person? Don't remember details, but I know he ended up nice. Hopefully in a way he's okay with. (Set was definitely a villain for some of the series, though.)

Your epic death scene that I'm sure you remember writing after six years also made me think of a question: Will you forgive me for not having read Swift as Steel even though you sent it to me mooooonths ago? I always mean to and then I go off and read something else. Whoops. 

Where are you at in terms of progress there? I've seen you talking about Eva in #writing but I don't know if you're editing now, or working on a sequel, or what. 

What's your favorite candy?

Do you prefer sociology or psychology? 

If a horde of monsters came through your window, what kind of monster would you want them to be? 

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