Why Marcus Will Not Play Football

Words really cannot express how much I dislike sports. Really. If you didn't get the memo already.

But I have to say, when I read this article, I couldn't help but giggle.

See, apparently it's take this long for the NFL to realize that getting hit in the head, repeatedly, is not good for you. The most recent suicide, Junior Seau, is having his brain donated to science to see if he's got this new CTE diagnosis.

There was one study released last year, that showed that the average football player has encountered 4000 hits in high school, 4000 more hits in college.

Is it no wonder that NFL players have a life expectancy of 54 years, that they are more likely to suffer from depression, mood swings, and other indications of brain damage. Apparently helmets are designed to prevent skulls from cracking open, which I'm all in favor of, but too many people assume that because there's all this protective gear on that the players will be fine.

I'm sorry. Are you an idiot?

You're still smashing your brain against the side of your skull. Repeatedly. After all, "Getting hit--hard--is not a small part of the game. It is the game."

And that ain't good for you.

Especially if you're in high school.

Sports should be fun, not fatal. I will not ethically support anymore "a sport that--if executed to its fullest--wipes out the wits of its players."

And my son isn't going to play football. I've linked a lot of articles, but if you're going to read just one, READ THIS ONE. Chilling. But it may be what finally kills American Football, drying up the source of football players, since it's worth the risk of brain damage to play in the NFL, but not to play high school football. I can only pray that football goes the way of the dodo. But my son, Marcus, won't ever play football, even if the sport doesn't vanish. I'm not willing to let him destroy his brain to let him have some glory in high school.

And no, this isn't an announcement of a pregnancy. I've already called Marcus as a name for a male child.

Edit: After posting this to Facebook, a friend of mine showed me this article from The New Yorker. It's clear to me that football causes hundreds of these mini-car crashes to the skull, and that getting out of football intact is more a matter of luck than anything else. Not for my kid.

Hopes for the New Dungeons and Dragons Rules

The new iteration of the Dungeons & Dragons rules comes out tomorrow. I’m looking forward to them, and have already gathered a small group of friends to do a quick online adventure in the format of the other online campaigns I’ve been participating in, The Corruption of Azim and The Salvation of Jenoa, which I'm very much enjoying. It's like group novel-writing. For this short adventure, we’ll be part of the beta test of this first iteration of the 5th edition (?) rules. 

The two campaigns that I do participate in use the D&D 3.5 edition rules. There are always rules and things to quibble with in every iteration of every game (okay, maybe not chess), but overall I vastly prefer the 3.5 edition rules to the 4^th edition ones. Why?

D&D 4E is a video game, plain and simple. They streamlined some of the rules, and that was okay, but they streamlined combat and made the game much more combat or challenge-centric. And you know what, that’s not what D&D is about. It’s not about the combat or the challenges. 

It’s about story. 

Vin Diesel here talks about how D&D is more about using your imagination than about just getting to the next monster.

It's about the ability to take a few rulebooks, some dice, and pencils and paper and creating entire worlds in your imagination with your friends. And it's not just that the worlds are cool and interesting and fun. It's that you get to practice the discipline of wonder and of imagination that you get from books or stories. TV, Movies, and Video games are awesome, but it's just not the same. It's one of the reasons why I will definitely try to get my kids to play it (with less adult themes than my current campaigns, which I would rate PG-13) instead of buying them an Xbox.

Like my nephew, Alex, here playing with my D&D Dice.

In my campaigns, the emotional involvement of the players is also a high priority. I receive no higher compliment than the fact that one of the players felt like he had been punched in the gut when I made a folk hero of his people into a fallen paladin-an evil blackguard. Or when another player said that his character is deeply frustrated because of how a certain trial was decided. Getting the players emotionally involved is important, and that isn’t just about how many hitpoints the bad guy has or whether you’ve used your daily power yet or not.

In the campaign where I am a player, it’s really fun to play the bad guys. Chris, a friend of mine, wasn’t contributing as much as he wanted, so we had to write his characters out. It was really too bad, because he had such an interesting story about the betrayed Lord Tyrus of Eridor who had turned against the king because his fiancé, Veena, had been killed after the king promised her to a neighboring Baron whose lands the king wanted. The DM was pretty clever about how to write the characters out. Tyrus’ new wife, Shandra ended up being kidnapped by slavers, and Tyrus ran off to try to save her (after being bitten by a werewolf!). We didn’t know what had happened to them.

Fast forward a few months in the game. There was a moment when we, the bad guys (so fun to play bad guys for a change), charge into the room to save Baron Goldhammer, the mayor of Coppermine Ridge. This is the same Baron that Tyrus’ fiancé had been given to by the imperialistic King Heron. You see, the Baron needs to die, but not yet, and someone is out to get him. So we need to save him in order to kill him later at the right time.

We show up at the Baron’s offices and there are corpses everywhere. Worried that we are too late we rush into his personal office to find . . . Tyrus, standing there with two demons at his side, holding the bloody and beaten (but not dead) Baron aloft in his hands. Blood dripping from his gauntlets and sword, Tyrus screams out, telepathically.

It's your fault she's dead! Veena never loved you. You conspired with King Heron to take away what was rightfully mine! You didn't fight in that war, bleeding and watching your friends die around you! Did you think your riches could buy her love? Did you think you could make her care for a greedy, traitorous snake like you?!

What is Tyrus doing there? Where is Shandra? Was he successful in rescuing her? Is she dead? Is he a werewolf? Is the Baron dead? Why is Tyrus speaking telepathically (he didn’t have that ability before)? Will we have to fight our friend? If Shandra is alive and we kill him, what will we say to her if we ever run into her again? If the Baron is dead, will that ruin our plans?

I remember my exact response. “Holy crap!”

I remember Adam’s exact response. “Holy crap!” (Adam is the other player in the campaign aside from Susan.)

That, my friends, is what Dungeons and Dragons is all about. Story. Not challenges. Not combat. Not loot. Story. If I want the other things, I’ll reactive my World of WarCraft account.

Here’s hoping the new rules are about facilitating good storytelling. We'll find out tomorrow. 

Internet Mormon Phase = Finished - Well, Mostly

I had a wonderful time over the weekend. Susan and I got to go down to Southern Virginia University for the Mormon Scholars in the Humanities conference. 

Got to meet old friends, make some new ones, and have a great time talking about lots of different things. It stands out in stark contrast to some of the other Mormon things that are going on in my life these days. In short, about a month ago because of some of Facebook's new features I got added to a few new Facebook groups by some well-meaning friends, namely Mormon Stories, Mo 2.0, and Feminist Mormon Housewives. 

After a few weeks, I decided to keep track of exactly what I had ended up discussing in those groups. Here's the list: 

1. Defending purchase of church historical sites. (We should be spending the money on the poor only!)

2. Blaming bad friends, clearly, not the kid who is acting out as a teenager. (Because the kid doesn't choose his friends.) 

3. Church still believes that gays choose to be that way. (It doesn't. Please update your preconceived notions of what the church teaches concerning homosexuality.)

4. Ignoring the institutional church is great and liberating. You get to make your own stuff up! (I, Carl, hate liberal protestants. I hate liberal protestant Mormons even more.)

5. The Book of Mormon teaches modalism. (..... Um. No. 1 Nephi 11 alone axes that idea.)

6. Mormons are an ethnicity. (Yes, because someone who just joined the church in Chile is clearly the same ethnicity as someone who is an 8th generation Mormon and has never set foot outside of Utah.) 

7. Joseph Smith had a manuscript he was reading from during the BoM translation. (Can you find a source for that?) 

8. Joseph didn't translate the current text of the Book of Mormon in 100 working days. (Can you find a source for that also? Can I make up my own sources for history too?!?)

9. Spaulding manuscript. (Really?) 

10. Compared Joseph Smith to John Edwards. (Right, because that's a fair comparison.)

11. Joseph Smith got the plates from a cave. (This one is sort of forgivable. According to some second hand reports decades after the fact Joseph and Oliver returned the plates to the Hill Cumorah when it opened up to admit them to a secret room. However, I don't think that means that Mormons think you could dig the hill up and find the secret room with all the records seen in the vision.) 

12. Defending Jon Krakauer as an actual historian. (He's not.)

13. The confusion over whether or not prophets always are 100% infallible. (Ugh. They're not infallible. Get over it.)

14. It is inappropriate for Roman Catholic priests to call out nuns on their "weapons-grade crazy" teachings. (The only person in the Feminist Mormon Housewives facebook group who would even dialogue about this issue was a lesbian episcopalian, who I'm pretty sure isn't as invested in Mormon issues as I am because, well, I'm actually a Mormon!) 

15. In order to be a feminist, you must be pro-gay marriage. (*sigh* I wasn't aware that was part of feminist orthodoxy.)
16. My love for non-members increased when I left the church! (Mormonism: You're doing it wrong.)
17. DNA disproves the Book of Mormon. (Only if you assume the hemispheric model, which the text itself does not support.)

In contrast, this weekend was incredible. Wonderful people. Intelligent conversation. Well-informed opinions. And people who had actually done their homework on Mormonism, Mormon history, and Mormon doctrine. I never had to resist the urge to tear my hair out. Here's another participant's blog post on it. 

I think the Mormon Stories/Feminist Mormon Housewives/Mo 2.0/etc. thing was a good phase for me. I've learned many things, and think I will be a better, more kind, more aware Mormon because I've spent time watching these people struggle with certain aspects of the church. A few weeks ago I was talking with a sister in my stake and I said something along the lines of "I feel that we, as an institution, have failed when people don't understand the gospel." Her response was something like, "I don't. Everybody has a responsibility to learn the gospel for themselves. It's not my fault they didn't do so." That overly callous response to some of these issues in the church jarred me, and though I agreed with most of what she said (after all we do have a personal responsibility to study the gospel) I vehemently disagree with the tone in which she said it (overly flippant and dismissive of people's real experiences and pain). 

So because I've been playing around in these different out-groups of Mormonism, I'm more careful about how I phrase things. I'm more sympathetic to those who leave the church (even though I clearly don't agree with them). I'm aware of how the culture around women's bodies and sexuality is quite unhealthy, etc. However, I think I've derived about all the light and truth that I can from these groups. It's negatively affecting my use of time (so much easier to argue on facebook than study French or write real papers), and I find it more often than not it leaves me more frustrated and angry than I ought to be on a daily basis because it's so much an echo chamber in there where the church can do no good, and believers like me are constantly marginalized or poked fun at. I looked through the entirety of the Mormon Stories and FMH Facebook groups and there wasn't a single positive thread on their first pages. Also, I've noticed that my comments have devolved into some pretty snarky and sarcastic one-liners. I'm not helping the situation either.

So I'm done. I'll probably occasionally look back at Feminist Mormon Housewives because some of their posts are pretty interesting (their series about marginalized people in the LDS culture, divorcees, children of single parents, etc., was fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time), and I'll probably still listen to the occasional Mormon Stories Podcast on my runs if there's an interview with someone I'm interested in listening to (a penguin could interview Teryl Givens and it would still be worth listening to), but I'm pretty much done with this phase, I think. This last month has just made that more apparent to me, and the contrast with this last weekend just sealed the deal. I'll stick to guest posting on the more academic and believing Mormon blogs, but that'll be about it. 

One of my friends from this weekend talked about how she thinks she will amount to not much in the church, because she's divorced. That's probably true, and it shouldn't be. Made me want to give her a hug. 

So all is not well in Zion. (It won't be all well until Jesus comes back, in my opinion.) 

But it's not as bad as most of these internet Mormons have made it out to be. 

And it's still Zion. 

P.S. Oh, and I'm now the gospel doctrine teacher in my ward. So I can now do a bit more to make sure the LDS Cult of False Expectations continues to die. That, more than anything else, will help these out-groups of Mormons by cutting off a good chunk of their membership before they even get to that stage. Because you shouldn't have to go to the internet to find people who will listen to you . . . you should be able to go to your local ward.