More theism
Okay, let's take this down a new channel. New premise: There are many gods.
An army of gods. A plethora. A myriad.
In the "branching cosmos" mould, or in the Gaiman/Pratchett "everything anyone believes in is true" tradition, gods - or something like gods - exist because humans believe in them, and so everything everyone has ever believed in is true. The choice is yours; the eschatological supermarket is here for your browsing pleasure. It's a buyer's market.
Okay. Now, it's a common enough theme in this kind of milieu to muse on what happens to those gods who are created by human passion and discarded. Where is Odin now that the nine-times-nine are no longer offered to Him at Uppsala every nine years? How does Quetzalcoatl feel now that the great sacrificial pyres are no longer lit atop His pyramids? Gaiman's American Gods is pretty much eclusively about this.
What about the gods we create by accident? I'm not just talking about Sock Fairies that steal one of each pair of black socks - but hell, why not them too? - but gods we create, build up, offer sacrifices to and forget without ever realising we had done so.
I'm thinking about the Millennium Bug.
Serious fucking god, that. The whole world stood in terror of His shadow; propitiatory sacrifices valued in the tens of billions of American dollars were dedicated to Him. He was the Adversary of the Cathode Pantheon, a Cthonic lord of technology, the Luftwaffe Gremlin writ large and terrifying against the cave wall. Let them who have wisdom know His number, for it is the number of a name: Y2K.
So in one night we forget him. It passed, and it didn't happen. He had mercy on us, and stayed His hand. In a way, He had no choice; with no technology, there can be no fear of technology's loss. But for one shining night, it was His time.
Poor dude.
In update news, much as before. The Jhereg event rocked about forty or fifty million faces (for a scale of comparison, Bon Jovi has "seen a million faces, and rocked them all"; thus, the Jhereg rocked about forty or fifty times as much face as Jon Bon Jovi has in his career). I had a great time, I saw lots of people I love having a great time, it was awesome.
Work is hard and stressful but oddly gratifying. I'm dealing with penny-pinching, small-minded bureaucrats for managers (not my immediate manager, though; he's fucking awesome), who don't seem to realise that it's their business that suffers if my team is under-resourced. I have a team of eight technicians whose complaints vary between entirely justified and breathtakingly childish, but who have the luxury of not having to care whether they're being reasonable or not, and I have to choose which complaints to take seriously and which ones to deflect or try and put in context for them. In the mean time, my favourites times are fixing things that don't work like they should and researching and reporting on problems.
Just had a pay review, which was modest but nice. Combined with my manager's recent decision that we're going to stop mucking about and claim overtime whenever it's needed, it looks like I'll be a bit more comfortable coming up.
Tamsin's updated on her own LJ, so you have her life up to date. So that's about it. Tatty-bye.
An army of gods. A plethora. A myriad.
In the "branching cosmos" mould, or in the Gaiman/Pratchett "everything anyone believes in is true" tradition, gods - or something like gods - exist because humans believe in them, and so everything everyone has ever believed in is true. The choice is yours; the eschatological supermarket is here for your browsing pleasure. It's a buyer's market.
Okay. Now, it's a common enough theme in this kind of milieu to muse on what happens to those gods who are created by human passion and discarded. Where is Odin now that the nine-times-nine are no longer offered to Him at Uppsala every nine years? How does Quetzalcoatl feel now that the great sacrificial pyres are no longer lit atop His pyramids? Gaiman's American Gods is pretty much eclusively about this.
What about the gods we create by accident? I'm not just talking about Sock Fairies that steal one of each pair of black socks - but hell, why not them too? - but gods we create, build up, offer sacrifices to and forget without ever realising we had done so.
I'm thinking about the Millennium Bug.
Serious fucking god, that. The whole world stood in terror of His shadow; propitiatory sacrifices valued in the tens of billions of American dollars were dedicated to Him. He was the Adversary of the Cathode Pantheon, a Cthonic lord of technology, the Luftwaffe Gremlin writ large and terrifying against the cave wall. Let them who have wisdom know His number, for it is the number of a name: Y2K.
So in one night we forget him. It passed, and it didn't happen. He had mercy on us, and stayed His hand. In a way, He had no choice; with no technology, there can be no fear of technology's loss. But for one shining night, it was His time.
Poor dude.
In update news, much as before. The Jhereg event rocked about forty or fifty million faces (for a scale of comparison, Bon Jovi has "seen a million faces, and rocked them all"; thus, the Jhereg rocked about forty or fifty times as much face as Jon Bon Jovi has in his career). I had a great time, I saw lots of people I love having a great time, it was awesome.
Work is hard and stressful but oddly gratifying. I'm dealing with penny-pinching, small-minded bureaucrats for managers (not my immediate manager, though; he's fucking awesome), who don't seem to realise that it's their business that suffers if my team is under-resourced. I have a team of eight technicians whose complaints vary between entirely justified and breathtakingly childish, but who have the luxury of not having to care whether they're being reasonable or not, and I have to choose which complaints to take seriously and which ones to deflect or try and put in context for them. In the mean time, my favourites times are fixing things that don't work like they should and researching and reporting on problems.
Just had a pay review, which was modest but nice. Combined with my manager's recent decision that we're going to stop mucking about and claim overtime whenever it's needed, it looks like I'll be a bit more comfortable coming up.
Tamsin's updated on her own LJ, so you have her life up to date. So that's about it. Tatty-bye.