The police are rioting

And it's happening in cities across the nation. If they could maybe, you know, not? And also refrain from killing (mostly black) people for funsies? And perhaps deign to allow some degree of accountability that it's increasingly obvious is lacking at present? And just generally stop confusing themselves with soldiers at war minus Geneva Convention rules? That'd be great.

TDoV 2020

(The following was written for presentation as part of a local Unitarian Universalist service celebrating the 2020 Transgender Day of Visibility. The opening directly quotes from a previous blog entry, so should look familiar to anyone who's read that.)

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It's been about two years, now, since one branch of a major Christian church justified its anti-transgender stance with an official statement bearing a name that referenced Genesis 1:27, as though this were not only an obvious and natural conclusion from the text of the verse, but the only conclusion possible.

As the verse reads in the New International Version: "So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them."

"And" should be such a simple word.

Particularly for something written in a time when women were often considered little, if at all, better than property, that verse from Genesis makes a fascinating assertion. The image of God is not the sole domain of the male, nor, for that matter, of the female. Neither masculine nor feminine is better or more Godly. The man cannot say to the woman that he is more favored of God, nor the woman say to the man that nothing of God is in him. All are part of God's creation and exhibit facets of God's nature.

Text Encoding and Compression (featuring Lufia 2)

One of the things I have a lot of on my website is attempted translations of video game text, mostly SNES-era RPGs since that's what I grew up on and have the most familiarity with. This started out as something I did out of my own personal curiosity and for practice, before it occurred to me that I might as well go ahead and share it. Here's a little more insight into part of the process.

Most Common Kanji in FFVI Text

Some time ago, I was asked about kanji that frequently appear in Final Fantasy VI, so I scanned the text dumps to put together a list of the top 25, then added some basic information about them. Going through some of my working documents recently, I found the list and figured it would work as a blog entry with some revisions and extra detail, mainly added commentary.

Concern troll no friend to gay community

One of the editorialists who often leads me to wonder about standards in the editorial industry is at it again, layering a new bit of supposed concern over a rehash of many of the same tired and flawed arguments he was pushing three years ago, all while still claiming his bigotry isn't. This time, Chris Freind has taken it upon himself to offer branding advice to the gay community, advice that just so happens to play into the hands of transphobic (and homophobic!) groups. Who'd have guessed?

Languages aren't codes for each other

One of my facebook friends whom I don't actually know is a native English speaker living in Japan who was recently (well, recent when I started writing the draft of this post months ago, anyway) vexed by a school worksheet. It had a series of example phrases written in both Japanese and English that included the following:

"Don't use Japanese. Speak English."
「日本語を使わず、英語で話しなさい。」

"How do you say this in English?"
「これは、英語で何と言いますか。」

The teacher instructed the students to cross out "in" in the second example, and when pressed on the issue, explained that since both examples contain 「英語で」, it can't be right for one to have "in English" when the other just has "English". Which, though it makes sense, simply isn't correct.

A Lament for the Once-United Methodist Church

Background

It's been brewing for decades. In 1972, the United Methodist Church added a declaration that it "does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers this practice incompatible with Christian teaching" to its rulebook, the Book of Discipline [1]. Such sentiments were unfortunately typical of the time, though by no means universal. Homosexuality, some argued, arose from demonic influences, or was a communist plot, or was at best a step removed from rape and pedophilia, or if nothing else was unnatural and disgusting.

This language, and related language barring LGBTQ+ people from holding leadership positions, have lingered in the rules ever since. Enforcement, on the other hand, has been inconsistent. This upsets those who have an attachment to these rules, and such people often insist that the rules must have teeth.

In the meantime, though, the position enshrined in the Book of Discipline has become increasingly controversial, as heterosexist attitudes have over and over proven to be unjustified. And so some within the United Methodist Church have participated in or outright performed gay weddings, in defiance of the Book of Discipline, even before the United States Supreme Court affirmed marriage as a civil right for all consenting adults, regardless of sex or gender, in 2015. There are openly LGBTQ+ clergy, too, including a lesbian bishop in the Pacific Northwest Conference of the Western Jurisdiction. In everyday life, more and more people within the church, even if not gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or whatever else themselves, have found that they have friends, neighbors, and family members who are. Many feel, too, that the attitude of exclusion embodied in this policy runs contrary to the very nature of Christianity.