Metroid Prime 4

Development for Metroid Prime 4 was announced in like 2017. It's why I decided to buy a Switch that Christmas. (That and Breath of the Wild.) Like four years later, Nintendo announced that they wasn't happy with the development, so they were handing it to a different team to restart development from scratch. So we waited for eight years before we actually got the game.

I like the game a lot. They clearly went to great lengths to make it feel like Prime 1, while also having plenty of new stuff. The difficulty levels seem reasonable, at least on the Normal setting. The areas look lovely, especially the natural settings. I could have gone without the motorcycle and hub area, but it doesn't detract too much. It's not like I loved trekking through Magmoor Caverns every time I wanted to change areas in Prime 1. So I'm happy with it.

But I need to rant a bit about the plot. This next part has spoilers.

I don't like the story. The ending is unnecessarily sad, but even worse, the whole thing feels pointless. To be clear - it doesn't feel pointless while you're playing.  You're exploring and finding items and defeating enemies, which is the point of a Metroid game. But if you step back and look at the story, that story lends nothing to the game experience, and sort of invalidates it.

In a normal Metroid game, you are stuck on a planet (or ship or station), alone or mostly alone. Bad guys are up to no good, and you need to stop them or they'll threaten the whole galaxy. In Prime 3 you weren't always stuck, since you had access to your ship, and that hurt the tone a bit. In this game, you are stuck, but there's something missing: the bad guys are not really up to anything.

I mean, there's Sylux and his plot with Metroids and the space pirates, but that was in the intro area. On Viewros, there are no pirates, and no Metroids (just corrupted bosses). The bad guys are mostly mindless monsters, which isn't a bad thing in itself, but here's the thing: the reason you're here is because the Lumorn device teleported you here, to collect keys and Green Energy so you can transport their Memory Fruit somewhere else. The Lumorn are already destroyed; they just want their memory to survive. They should have just written a journal and beamed it to the galaxy. Instead they abducted not only you, but a team of Federation troopers, and (by accident) Sylux. And for no apparent reason, they seem to have transported him into a life support pod, which lets him gain boss-level powers. 

If the Lumorn had done nothing, Samus and the troopers would have been just fine. Sylux would have been defeated. The whole galaxy would have gone on without any negative consequences. But instead, not only did they very nearly kill Samus, but they ended up stranding or killing that team of Federation troopers too. 

So the premise is shaky. There's also the matter of the ending, where you end up bailing on the team. They don't really care about the Lumorn; they're just sacrificing themselves because they believe you're important to the galaxy (and they are correct). Are we supposed to believe they die? I'd think they could take out Sylux, since he should be weak after his fight with Samus. On the other hand, why was he able to do so much damage? Why did it take more than just the robot buddy to hold him back? Why couldn't Samus just hurl a power bomb at him? Why didn't she engage right away, finish him off, and then deal with the teleporter?

And what are we supposed to think happens next? Maybe Samus could send an expedition to retrieve them, although we don't know how far away Viewros is. If the team does survive, can they even get out of the tower? I'm afraid the designers just didn't want loose ends, like having to explain why theses guys weren't in later Metroid games. (That's no excuse - Samus isn't that social, and there's no reason to think she'd bring them along on later missions.)

We're supposed to feel like their sacrifice is meaningful, but really I think they are just victims of irresponsible behavior on the part of the Lumorn. And bad plot writing.

Gradius Origins

I wrote previously about how I was introduced to the Gradius series. It caught my eye and imagination way before I played it, and Life Force (for the NES) and Gradius 3 (for the SNES) are among my very favorite games. Space shooters are super nifty, especially when they have great music. But the Gradius series started out as arcade games, and it was always in the back of my mind that what I was playing was a port of something larger. (The arcade games had better graphics, at least at first, and of course they were harder because they were designed to make people keep putting in quarters.) The Switch has ports of some of those games, but they were always over-priced relative to my level of interest. 

But this year they released a collection, "Gradius Origins", which includes Gradius 1, 2, and 3; Life Force, Salamander, which was the game Life Force was derived from (but with standard power-ups instead of the capsule system from Gradius); Salamander 2, which I had never heard of (and which I'm still not that interested in because it has some slightly icky stuff), and a brand-new game, Salamander 3. The price tag was still a little higher than I was interested in, but since I would probably have bought a new Gradius game for $15 or so by itself, I figured the collection would eventually go on sale enough to justify getting it. That was kind of a boring paragraph, but I am kind of stingy, even with video games, so it seemed relevant.

Anyway, the collection went on sale this week and I got it. I'm pretty happy with Salamander 3 in particular. It has a very similar feel to the NES Life Force (but still without the Gradius-style power-ups). On the easiest setting, it's hard, but not impossible, which is important. I beat it after a few days (and a few YouTube videos). The music is good, but not terribly catchy. I've gotten used to that in space shooters; I guess nothing competes with Life Force and Gradius 3. But it still disappoints me every time. But anyway, that game is very worthwhile.

It's also fun to play the original games. But I'm glad I waited for the sale, because, as expected, there are some issues. The first is that they are hard. This collection has an "easy" mode, which helps, and I'll probably beat the first couple of games at some point, when I'm in the mood to really try. But it's going to be painful. For Life Force / Salamander, it could have been much more manageable if they had given you limited continues. Since continuing lets you pick up right where you left off, having no restrictions is basically invincibility. (Salamander 3 does too. It's designed as an arcade game, even though it only exists on consoles. I think that was a mistake, although I get why some people would get nostalgia from it. But seriously, the words "Insert Coin" don't belong on a console game.) 

But the main thing I take away from these old games is something I suspected all along: the NES games are superior. I like the simpler music, and the red/blue ships in Life Force. I like the lower challenge, including the fact that your shields protect your whole ship, and not just part of it. And I really appreciate that the level design in the NES Life Force - on the arcade, two of the levels are basically just exercises in dodging asteroids, whereas on the NES they replaced those with an inside-an-organism stage and one that starts out with mountains and then turns into an Egyptian pyramid themed area. It gives the game a lot more personality than the originals had. And then there's Gradius 3. I had read that the arcade version of was ridiculously hard, and that's true. It's absolutely ridiculous, and not in a funny way. The SNES version is better in every single way. (But it's still interesting to see the origin.)

So anyway, it's always delightful to go and save the world using a starfighter and an arsenal of lasers and missiles. But I sure am glad those Nintendo ports were available decades ago so I could develop nostalgia, rather than just thinking "that's a nifty idea" based on the demo on an arcade cabinet on a ferry.

The Last Jedi (why it's dumb)

The Star Wars sequel trilogy is dumb for a bunch of reasons, starting with the way it totally undoes all the good that was done with the original movies, both in terms of plot and also the character development of all of the original cast. But Episode 8, "The Last Jedi", might be the dumbest of the lot, because the plot holes are just so huge.

(It has been pointed out that the movie also fails to give Rey any real character development; all of her actions are obvious and require no change or sacrifice. And Finn gets totally shafted in terms of story. But I need to move on to the bad science.)

A big chunk of the movie centers around this long chase scene, where the good guys can't jump away in hyperspace, and they're being chased by a big bad guy ship with lots of starfighters, and slightly-faster sublight engines. The good guys have decided that their only hope is to make it to the closest planet, where maybe they can hide. (How this helps if the bad guys are in orbit and there's no way to jump away, I'm not really sure, but ignore that for the moment.)

Right away, this premise is stupid, for a couple of reasons.

• Even though the bad guys' big ship is taking a while to catch up, the TIE fighters could easily go and take out the rebels. But the bad guy leader dude explicitly says no to this plan. I guess he really wants to use the big guns, even if takes days to catch up.
• Unlike the good guys, the bad guys can do a hyperspace jump. They could just jump a short distance ahead - either to catch up, or (if that's too tricky, given Star Wars hyperspace computation logic) a little bit farther, putting themselves in-between the good guys and the planet they're trying to reach. Then the good guys would have nowhere to run to.

Please note that neither one of these issues relies on any kind of real-world science knowledge, or deep Star Wars lore. It's just basic logic, based on obvious principles and established conventions. The bad guys are just being stupid. But wait, there's more.

As the good guys are fleeing, Finn and Rose decide to take a side trip to another planet. For info or something. (I've only watched this once, and it was a long time ago.) They're not speeding ahead to the planet the big ship is going to; they go to a totally different planet. If that was an option, why doesn't the whole fleet head there? Did they have a little ship with a hyperdrive? And if so, why didn't they use it to shuttle other people off of the main ship, so they're not all targets on the same ship? The place you're running to is either your only hope, or it's not.

So aside from any storytelling, the whole premise makes no sense at all.

The way they treated Luke Skywalker is even worse.

Turkey Talk

 

I decided that the world needs to know about Turkey Talk. To that end, I'll just refer everybody to a text document and a YouTube video I created explaining what it is, and why you should use it.

Lemmings

Sometime back in the 90s, my friend rented Lemmings for the Super Nintendo, and we played it a bunch. It's a fairly simple puzzle thing, but it has these endearing creatures that you're supposed to save, and its music is just legendary. (You'll have to trust me on this. It's all chiptunes, but so many of them have an incredibly epic feel, and they have remained firmly stuck in my head in the decades since I played it.) Before I went home, I memorized my password to the tune of one of the game's music pieces. (LGSSCZL)

To give you an example of how I feel about the music: there is exactly one piece of piano music that I can play with both hands without having to practice and scrutinize written music, and it's an arrangement of the Lemmings tune with the Pachelbel's Canon chord thing in the background. I worked it out from memory one summer at my grandma's house. (I later wrote sheet music using Noteflight. A PDF is here.)

I don't love everything about the game. For one thing, you can't save all the lemmings. In fact, you have to blow some of them up. (It's just pixels flying, so it's not gross or anything, but it's not exactly a good plot point.) And some of the hazards that can take them out are a bit disturbing. And the game can get hard, in the tedious way. I mean, it's also challenging to use your various skills to make the lemmings a path to the exit. But even when you know exactly what to do, it's easy to make one little mistake that messes you up.

There are versions of the game for the PC and pretty much everything else that was out at the time. And there's a modern fan-remake called NeoLemmix, which adds quality-of-life improvements to fix that stuff. But I do care about intellectual rights. So, like 30 years after I played the game, I bought it on eBay and continued where I left off. It was just a few levels away from the end of the easiest difficulty level ("Fun"), so I have finally beaten the game!

If I keep playing, I'll probably use the NeoLemmix version. But either way, the music is on my internal playlist forever.

Traditions around mourning and loss

Mourning the loss of someone you love is difficult and painful. Various cultures and religions have developed traditions designed to help people through the process. I'd never want to change a person's perspective on their loss (or death, afterlife, etc.) if it's helping them grieve, cope, and move on. But sometimes we hear a sentiment that was helpful to one person, and we repeat it like it's a universal truth, and it ends up hurting others. Sometimes it hurts them by adding to their emotional burden, and sometimes it goes beyond that and causes people to feel like they need to make major sacrifices of time or other opportunities. When that happens, I think it's important to back up and focus on the most fundamental truths, and set the additional traditions aside.

I say that with the understanding that what I consider truth will be considered just another tradition to many. That is fine - the same principle applies. The main idea is to avoid holding on to sentiments or expectations that increase the burden on grieving people, in the name of helping them or the people they have lost.

I'll get to what I think are the essential principles, but first, here are some examples of the problem:

• Sometimes someone will die doing some kind of recreational activity, and people will say something like "He died doing what he loved." If that makes their family feel better, great. But what happens to the family of someone who died of a slow disease, having experienced pretty much no happiness at all for a long time before they died? If it's good when someone dies quickly after enjoying something, then is it bad when that doesn't happen?

• Sometimes someone will ask, "What if the last thing you said to that person is the last thing you ever say?" If your last words to someone were trivial, or worse, regrettable, is that going to be a source of ongoing pain for them?

• The same thing applies to all of our funeral traditions, really. Funeral homes sell coffins that are nice looking and padded on the inside, so that they would be comfortable to lie in. Cemeteries sell plots of land with nice views. People decorate memorial services with flowers. All of these things are fine if they help the grieving people. Physical objects can give people something to focus their faith on, or even to distract them from some of the realities of what they are experiencing. But what happens when someone dies far from home? What happens when the family could provide those luxuries, but at a cost that would create a heavy financial burden?

• One more: Say someone is suffering from a terminal disease. Mentally, they are not themselves, and they might not even be fully aware of what is happening. There's no cure, but death might be months away, or years. Just how much of a sacrifice should their family and friends make to be with that person? How important is it that they have someone with them when they die?

Here are the basic principles as I see them:

• In this life, a person's happiness can be affected by a lot of things beyond their control. Other people's choices and random chance can make bad things happen to good people. But once we leave this world, that isn't true anymore. As soon as someone leaves mortality, their level of happiness is gated only on their relationship with the source of happiness, God. (Of course they can still be disappointed by the choices their family makes, if it leads them to unhappiness. But empathy isn't the same as direct personal suffering.)
• If we accept that, then nothing a living person does can take happiness away from someone who has died. Nothing that is done to the body can limit the happiness of the deceased - not even a little bit. Of course, that implies that it can't help them either, and that, I think, is why we have all of these traditions in the first place. We want to feel like we can help. But really, all of the traditions we have are for us, not them. They serve to help the living grieve. And if a tradition does not meet that goal, it should be discarded. Because the person who has died doesn't need it. They are doing just fine.

• We talk about a person having a soul or a spirit, but that's not really right. A person is a soul. They have a body, during mortality and after resurrection. In-between, they do not have a body. The body left behind is not part of the person; it's part of the earth. The number of people buried in any cemetery is zero.
• The way my son talks about this is to refer to our bodies as mech suits that we pilot. If you saw a place with a bunch of empty mech suits, you wouldn't say "wow, that's a lot of dead people".
• This does not mean that deceased people have no connection to this world. I don't pretend to know the details about that. But I am confident that to whatever extent your loved ones are connected to this world, they are connected to you, wherever you are, and not to a location that happens to have several atoms that used to be part of their body.

• We humans put a lot of emphasis on firsts and lasts. We remember beginnings and endings more than the stuff in the middle. This is true of stories, and material we've studied, and memories of our own lives. And so we naturally get hung up on the end of a person's life - their final moments, or days, or even years. If someone dies in a horrible and unexpected way, we might fear that the person is sort of stuck in that moment, since we can't see them recover. But of course, that's not true at all. The purpose of life is about who we become. It's about the choices we make. And since people aren't usually making a lot of choices at the end of their lives (unless they are sacrificing themselves for someone else), the final day of a person's life might actually be the least important day. You can bet that the person isn't dwelling on the suffering and loss they felt on that day. They have moved on.

If we can let go of the need to feel useful to the person who has died, and of the fear that they might still be suffering the way they were when they were last here, I think that opens up a lot of doors. It won't make the pain of losing someone go away, but it will avoid adding to that pain with unnecessary rhetoric.

It also makes the answers to the questions above a lot clearer.

• It doesn't matter if someone didn't die doing something they loved.
• It doesn't matter if your last words to them weren't special, or even if they were something you regret saying. They will remember the whole relationship, not a single moment.
• For funeral and burial services, you should do exactly what will help you and those most affected by the loss, and not a bit more. No sacrifice should be made for the comfort of the deceased. They're better off than any of us.
• If you didn't make it to their bedside before they died, you haven't committed some eternal sin. The relationship is just paused, and the gap won't even seem that big a hundred years from now.
• You should visit gravesites when and only when it will be helpful to you, and never out of a sense of duty.
• When someone is dying, of course it's good to see to their comfort, but the living shouldn't be making unreasonable sacrifices to optimize for a person's final days. I know this one is controversial, because the person is still alive, so you actually can affect their happiness to some extent. But if you help out the dying person for a couple of days in a way that traumatizes you for years, or that incurs an expense that you'll spend years paying back, then that's not a very good exchange. They are going to recover for free; we need to keep living with the mortal consequences. So we should take those consequences into account.

Some of that might sound jaded and insensitive, and I admit that in the moment I'm writing this, I haven't suffered a major loss like the ones I'm talking about. But I have been around enough to be aware of damage to people still around that came as a result of rhetoric and decision around the loss of someone close to them. And maybe the times when we're not in the middle of it are the best times to reflect on the principles involved, so we can avoid having to carry that extra cultural burden when the loss does happen. Hopefully the principles here are helpful to someone. And if they're not helpful to you, you should disregard them, just like any tradition.

Deep Space Nine

I've been rewatching a bunch of Deep Space Nine episodes. Not all of them, but the good ones. I will always like The Next Generation more, since that's where I was really introduced to Star Trek, but man, DS9 has the best story arcs of any Star Trek. So many great moments. I actually haven't seen many episodes more than once, except for the very end, which I rewatched with my wife a few years ago. And there were a few I had never seen, either because of scheduling, or because the previews made me not want to see them. But yeah, it's glorious. 

First, some thoughts on the intro. It is quite different from its predecessors' intros - there's no monologue about the "final frontier", and only slow camera movement. And of course, the music is slow and sort of melancholy instead of upbeat and adventurous. Even the gold-colored text sets it apart - it's less glowy and more down to earth (or Bajor, or whatever). All that could be considered objectively worse than the Next Generation counterpart. But the DS9 intro is amazing. It captures the feeling of isolation that permeates the show. Starfleet is not coming to help. You can't run very far from problems, even at the end of an episode. You're stuck where you are, and you have to deal with things long-term. 

And one final thought about the intro: It's important to note that, for a few years in there, DS9 was the only source of new Star Trek we had. When I was watching it back in the day, I wasn't comparing the show to TNG. I was just basking in the glory, grateful to have a window into that world. And the music and visuals of the intro still capture that feeling for me, no matter how many times I've watched the show.

[Spoilers for the series]

I started with the three-part thing about the Circle, which I had never seen, and the previews seemed stressful so I hadn't bothered before. The episodes are... fine. Like most Star Trek series[es], DS9 wasn't amazing in its first two seasons. (But still better than most shows.)

Then I started reviewing episodes that introduced the Dominion. The Jem'Hadar showed up in the finale at the end of Season 2, in an episode that starts out all happy and peaceful. Incidentally, it also contains a great monologue from Quark, about how humans don't like Ferengi because they remind us over ourselves (and the audience is like, yeah) - but then he points out that Ferengi haven't abused each other the way humans have, so they're better. (I'd point out that in the case of women's rights, they have absolutely been worse than humans. I kind of hate any episode that involves Ferengi, except for the ones actually stationed on DS9.)

Then at the start of Season 3, they introduced the Defiant. Man, I love that ship. (It will surprise no one to hear that Nemesis in The Plasma Master is heavily based on the Defiant.) I was reading about how some producers were hesitant to give the show its own starship because it might compete for attention with Voyager. That, of course, is nonsense. But it was wise of them to make the Defiant an uncharacteristically-battle-oriented ship, with plenty of flaws that set it apart from everything else. But forget about those, because when that thing starts shooting, it is absolutely glorious.

About the end of that episode: I don't love it when stories have cool things happen and then say they didn't (especially Garak's line about "the plan"). But finding out about about the Changelings - that was huge. I've read that the twist there wasn't the original plan for the Dominion (or for Odo), but it was a good idea, because makes the Dominion that much more intimidating.

I skipped ahead to "Improbably Cause" / "The Die is Cast". The visuals at the end of that episode are great. Romulan and Jem'Hadar ships are cool, but of course what's really great is that the Defiant gets to blow things up again. (And the story here is very important for Garak, and of course Odo.) I also watched the finale of the season, which I didn't really remember. But it seemed important for the next thing:

The start of Season 4 is where things really fire up. If you aren't familiar with the show and want to be, don't read past this sentence before you're properly caught up, because it will spoil things.

Bringing Klingons in was nice, because they have some of the coolest ships in Star Trek. But when the camera pans up to show Worf - that was amazing, a total surprise. It was like this life-changing gift that the producers had just thrown at us. A piece of TNG (which had ended years prior), just... it was just wonderful. And you know what else gave me warm, fuzzy feelings? The moment near the end, when the station's new weapons deploy. The missile launchers and phasers and stuff,  hammering away at the Klingon fleet. It's not just visually cool. It marks a major change in the show. Deep Space Nine is no longer helpless in its isolation. It has evolved. And the station has gained a bit more character, taking a step closer to the Enterprise D that we all know and love.

I skipped something else about that episode. They changed the intro. Instead of the quiet isolation from before, we now see runabouts and other ships docking. There's a Cardassian ship. There are even some people in space suits doing maintenance. And of course the Defiant is there, and at the end it detaches and flies into the wormhole - another reminder of how the station has gained importance and the characters have a greater sphere of influence than they did at the start.

They also tweaked the music, adding a steady beat behind the main theme. This is sort of controversial - this new track doesn't always land a beat at the same time as the rest of the music, and that's because they were too cheap to re-record it. But to be honest, I was happy with the change. It creates a more energetic tone, which matches the changes to the show. ("Growing the beard", as they say, although Sisko already had a beard by this point. But he did shave his head over the summer.)

Then I watched "Our Man Bashir", an episode that's not important, but I had never seen it. I might skip ahead quite a bit. The end of Season 4 is where Odo loses the ability to shape-shift, a condition that lasts for the next TWELVE EPISODES. That was so stressful for me when I watched it before. I wasn't sure they'd ever give it back - it seemed like maybe they needed the Founders to have that advantage over Odo or something. When he finally gets the ability back, it's such a relief. But I'm not sure I need to relive it.

I will definitely be rewatching the finale to Season 5. That was the start of another huge story arc, which was also filled with stress, but in a much more satisfying way. And it looks like the second-to-last one is important because it introduces Weyoun, who everybody hates, but is also important.

I'll update this later.

An Arms Race with Bears

Last year we moved to a new house, which is surrounded by a lot of trees. One day in springtime, our neighbor texted me picture of a bear behind his fence. The next day I saw that our garbage can was tipped over and open. But there was no garbage strewn around it, so I figured maybe it had blown over in the wind. But the day after that, my daughter pointed out a pile of garbage some distance away, near the trees. So I checked the security camera, and sure enough, a bear had gotten into the trash. It just decided to drag all the bags away before ripping them open and making a huge mess.

Round one was after dark, so the camera footage isn't great, but here are some shots from the visit #2:

 

Well that wasn't going to work. The garbage collection folks said they didn't have any bear-proof cans, but that we could install a lock. So I found something that looked good and installed it. (But not before the bears visited us again.) The good wildebeests (get it? "gnus"? news?) was that the locks were indeed beyond the bears' ability to open. (You need fingers to undo the carabiner.)

The bad wildebeests was that the lids themselves were flimsy enough for the bears to pull back. It took them a lot of effort, but after flipping the cans over and climbing on top of them, they were able to get food waste out and make a huge mess.

Since the bendiness of the lid wasn't that much, I hypothesized that maybe I didn't need a bunch more locks; maybe just a bungee cord across the front would make it no longer worth their time. Here's what the bears thought:

This went on for more than 10 minutes.

So I broke down and bought four more locks, for the corners of the two cans. And guess what? The bears haven't even bothered coming back. Maybe the locks I had made things not worth their trouble after all. But for the rest of my life I'll have to unlock three carabiners every time I take out the trash. So I'm not really sure whether I won the arms race, or whether the joke is on me.

Defining Oldness

Every once in a while people argue about what it means to be "old". Some of my kids think that 50 is the cutoff. The term is relative and subjective, but it could be useful to think about it in more absolute terms.

Sometimes a teenager will look at a 35-year-old and say "ew, you're old". But what they really mean is "you're in a place in your life that I can't relate to." It says more about the younger person than the older one. So that's not a good place to look for a definition.

There are a few conditions I've observed that I think lend themselves to defining "oldness" in a few different ways.

The first sense is "physically old". We could define that as the point at which you can't physically do the stuff you used to, because your body's capabilities are shutting down. In that sense, most 35-year-olds aren't old, and neither are most 50-year-olds.

A similar standard can apply to "mentally old". That should mean that your brain doesn't work as well, to the point that your memory or cognitive abilities are an order of magnitude lower than they used to be.

Here's a more interesting one: I've observed that some people get to a point in their lives where they've made mistakes, and they continue that pattern of behavior even when it's clear that they'd be better off changing - but they can't let themselves change, because doing so would be to admit that all of the damage that has already been done was preventable. So they refuse to change, as a coping mechanism against the pain of admitting past mistakes. (This is different from simply refusing to admit you're wrong, which of course is present in everybody from time to time, regardless of age.) In my view, when you reach a point where your past mistakes add up to regret that you can't face, you're emotionally old.

There's another kind of oldness that I don't have a good name for. It's when there is no one in your life that you'd take advice from. It's not that you can't face your mistakes, it's just that you don't see anyone as an authority figure, or as having wisdom that you don't already have. I kind of think of this as being "spiritually old", since essentially spirituality is all about being willing to make changes even when you'd rather not.

You could also label the above state as being "intellectually old", although I think that might be better applied to another very common situation: feeling like you already know enough. That's closely connected to not seeing authority, but even someone who won't take advice can be interested in learning. And someone who always takes advice from someone might use that as an excuse from having to learn on their own. I'm not 100% sure that "oldness" is the right way to describe this state, since many people never really value learning, but everyone has phases of their lives where they have to learn something, even if it's just how to do a job. Once they stop feeling that need, I think they've lost something that's essentially youthful - the ability to look at the world as something you can explore.

I guess the point of all of this is that, while everybody will outlive their physical health, most of the other aspects can be avoided. (The mental thing is on the fence since it has a physiological causes, but some of that can be prevented too.) In theory, if you stay humble enough to learn and change, you never have to really feel old. 

Not that I'd know - I'm still young.

The wrong way to argue about abortion

Abortion is one of the most polarized issues in American politics. It's also one of the worst-debated ones. Both sides tend to rely on straw-man arguments that vilify the people on the other side.

• Pro-Life people portray Pro-Choice people as wanting to kill babies. (That is, they hate Life.)
• Pro-Choice people portray Pro-Life people as wanting to control women. (That is, they hate Choice.)

Both of those portrayals are wrong, because in reality the difference between the two groups comes down to the question of when a human life begins. If we could scientifically prove that, the discussion would end.

Here's a version of the issue that's simplified, but not by very much:

Let's say a woman wants to have an operation. Should she be able to?

• If the operation will kill another person, the answer is no.
• If the operation will not affect another person, the answer is yes.

Which of those bullets represents the situation with abortion? Well that's up for debate. In fact, that's the only thing that really needs to be debated to resolve this issue! [Edit: This is not quite true. See comment at the bottom.] But is that what people debate? No, hardly ever. Instead, people talk about how evil the other side is. It feels empowering to be so right! But it's not really empowering at all. It just makes the power swing back and forth based on who's in office (or on the bench) at the moment.

As an example, on the radio this morning I heard a woman explain that abortion rights are a racial issue. He's the gist of what she said:

Black communities (due to a lower average income) have much higher abortion rates. Therefore they have higher needs, and denying access hurts Black people more. 

But when she says that, here's what a Pro-Life person hears: 

Black babies are killed much more often than white babies. Therefore allowing abortion hurts Black people more.

Same data, same concern for racial justice. Opposite conclusion. It's going to be like that every time.

Here's a great idea that will probably never happen: Compromise, so that each side gets the most important things they care about while acknowledging the validity of the other side's concerns.

Like, for example, what if you you amended the Constitution to say something like this?

Abortion is allowed in the first trimester of pregnancy and forbidden in the third. States may decide what to do in-between.

You could tweak the specific week numbers, but you get the point. Pro-Life people would avoid the most heinous abortion scenarios; Pro-Choice people would avoid unwanted pregnancy for the vast majority of women, since presumably most women who get abortions know they want one pretty early. Nobody would be completely happy. But nobody would lose what they have just because political power swung a different direction this year, or this decade.

Could we just... admit that pretty much everybody involved is a good person and just talk?

U.N. Squadron

U.N. Squadron was the first Super Nintendo game I rented back in the day. It caught my eye from the Nintendo Power magazine stuff based largely on the fact that it has an energy meter, unlike most games in the genre, so it seemed more accessible. The various customizations and the Capcom brand were draws too. I wasn't surprised to find that the game has delightful music. The backgrounds are gorgeous, especially if you're used to NES graphics. And it has a bunch of memorable boss battles and stuff. I eventually beat it on Easy mode, although it did require a bunch of tedious side missions to get enough in-game money to buy the best plane after I had already upgraded once or twice.

The game isn't perfect. Since weapons and planes cost money, you sort of have to lose and retry, over and over, in order to build up enough to buy what you need. In fact, the "right" way to play the game is to stick with the default plane (and its minimal special weapons) until you can buy the best plane, the Efreet. Doing this is sad because you have to bypass my favorite aircraft, the A10A Thunderbolt, which has an extra downward-firing cannon (at the cost of a weaker forward-firing one). It's kind of sad that the game simultaneously encourages you to get a variety of aircraft, and demands stinginess.

The "U.N." branding is kind of odd. In Japan the game is branded after some Anime series, but they changed the name for sale in other countries. There is no reference to the United Nations though, or anything else with those initials. It's about a mercenary group. But whatever - the genre is not known for its meaningful plots. 

There's a side-effect to the original branding though: games based on outside brands rarely get re-released on virtual consoles. So U.N. Squadron has never been available digitally on modern systems. So recently I bought the game on eBay and replayed it. It's really nice - it has aged quite well, assuming you can overlook the above-mentioned need to be stingy. After beating it again on Easy, I went for some additional runs: Beat on Normal, Beat on Easy without the Efreet (so I could use the Thunderbolt on almost all the levels, including the last one), Beat on Easy without using any continues (which required me to use my least-favorite character so I could power up my main weapon faster).

Wings of Fire

I'm not sure why I didn't get into the Wings of Fire books sooner. I think I was a little worried that they wouldn't handle dragons correctly, since so few authors do. (Also in theory they're aimed at a young audience, and I'm not a huge fan of similar books, like the "Warriors" cat books).

But in the last year my younger kids have sometimes asked me to read a chapter or two to them - so I got exposed, but I was getting things mostly out of context. When they started getting the graphic novels from the library, I figured I might as well read them that way, so I'd know what was going on, and it turns out they're pretty interesting. I mean, they're about dragons. And now I'm reading the real books.

It still doesn't exactly handle dragons the way I would. I mean, there are a bunch of different types, and while the SkyWings are the most traditional dragons, they're all red/yellow/orange, and I feel like you need blue and green fire-breathing dragons to be fully compliant. (You know, like Mrandor and Valkron.) But the different types create interesting variety, and the characters are good and stuff.

Plus, the series deserves a lot of credit for one huge thing - it's about the dragons. Not about people fighting dragons, or riding on dragons, or seeking out dragons. The dragons are the characters. And that actually does a lot to make for a compelling story. I mean, they fly, and they have these tribe-specific powers, and they very greatly in size. So it's not like you could tell this stories with humans swapped in for the dragons. (There is one spin-off book, Dragonslayer, that is about the humans. It's very well done and could be read before the others I guess. But it's probably better after the first five books, which is what I did.)

In a way it's surprising that humans are included in their world in the first place, but I think it does work because it gives you a sense of scale. (Although be fair, the scale issue can make things a bit hard to picture at times, which is one way that the graphic novels help.)

It is a bit icky at times. The dragons occasionally eat people, and even though they think of humans as animals, as a reader I can't help but be disturbed. They also fight with each other, and in both cases the injuries are described in enough detail to be, well like I said, icky. I'm kind of surprised my elementary-school-aged kids weren't more freaked out by a few scenes. (The graphic novels actually skip over icky details, mostly.)

In general, though, it's delightful to see into a world of scary monsters going on quests and stuff. And the series is almost over I think, so I should be able to binge-read for a while. Yay dragons!

Metroid Dread

We waited a very long time for a sequel to Metroid Fusion, and it's delightful to have it. The game looks and plays like a real Metroid game, more so I think than Samus Returns (the game it most resembles and the second-most-recent). The map in particular is delightful - not only does it show you the location and type of items you've seen (including whether you've acquired them or not), it shows everything you need about the rooms you've visited, including individual destructible blocks and what it takes to destroy them. The lighting effects are nice too.

The boss battles are pretty hard - I perished a ton of times on almost all of them. But there are always checkpoints nearby, so the penalty for losing is low. (Really it's just time on the clock, if you're interested in speed running.) One of the help text thingies they show you while loading says that "no attack is unavoidable", and that's true - once you know what you need to do, even the hardest battles become reasonable. And one of them is pure joy.

I do miss the music of Super Metroid. Dread's music is fine, but none of it is memorable, and it doesn't lend the same kind of character to the different areas that Super Metroid (or even Zero Mission) had. 

As for plot, that is also fine, and I can't say much without spoiling things, but I will say that they didn't include much detail, and I don't feel like this works as the "ending" of the side-view Metroid story, like the pre-release media paints it as. At the start we don't find out how the Federation reacted to Samus's rebellion in the previous game, or where the Dachoras and Etecoons went, or why Samus's armor looks totally different now. And while the ending is certainly more plot-heavy, it still raises a lot of questions.

But anyway, I'm very happy that they finally made a new Metroid game. Hopefully it will do well and they'll keep cranking them out.

The definition of "black"

Sometimes people get so technical in creating definitions that they end up defining or categorizing things in a way that flatly contradicts the colloquial definitions of those things. I think that's lame.

One example is the question of whether black is a color. Some people say that it's not because it's the "absence of color", or it's a "shade", which can be used to modify a "color". 

But, come on. "Color" is a way to describe what frequencies of light come from an object to our eyes, and which of the light receptors in our retinas react to those frequencies. We experience colors as contrasts to other colors - just try and describe how a color looks in any other way. In that sense, black is definitely a color. It's one of the ways our eyes perceive light bouncing off of things. If someone is wearing a black shirt, and you ask them what color it is, they don't go "Oh my gosh there IS no color!" They also don't try to figure out which primary or secondary color is being reflected the most and then say something like "I think it's a profoundly dark green." They say it's black. And even you developed some ultra-Vantablack shirt and there were no light coming off of it at all, zero is a valid value that something can have. But then again, there's never really zero light.

And that brings me to another point. Some people say that nothing is really black, because black means no light and everything reflects a little light (except a black hole I guess). But dude, that is NOT the definition of black. If it were, it would be totally useless. That's like saying nothing is cold because nothing has a temperature of absolute zero. There are plenty of things that we all look at and say are black. That's the definition of black. It's all relative. All colors are relative. There's no use defining a common word in such a way that it can't actually be applied to anything.

Edit: The same principle applies to magenta. If you think the definitionn of "color" is "light frequency", then magenta isn't a color either, because that's just how our brain interprets blue + red. And for that matter, brown isn't in the rainbow either. So either none of these things are colors, or "color" refers to how our brain processes light, and not just the frequency of light we see.

Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians

One of my kids checked out Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians from the library. Brandon Sanderson has written some good stuff, so I figured I'd check it out. The book is hilarious. The plot is fine - it's one of those kid-gets-powers-and-has-to-save-the-world types of things. But what makes it great is the commentary that the narrator gives. It's a very self-aware book, written as a biography after the fact, and it openly mocks various tropes in literature. I don't know if I can even say that much about it here without spoiling the jokes, but I haven't laughed out loud at a book in a long time (well except for What If? by Randall Munroe), and I did that several times here.

Axiom Verge

Any Metroid fan will agree that there aren't enough Metroid-like games in the world. So whenever I hear about one, I want to want to play it. But there's often something that shuts me down, like an icky theme or a super melodramatic premise or tone. Axiom Verge is an indie game (like literally by one guy) that is super popular but does have a weird/dark plot. But a sequel came out and people have been raving, so I gave it another look. The plot isn't sadder than Ori, and the icky factor is actually less than the worst of Super Metroid (although in the latter game you can avoid the worst of it). So I went ahead and got it.

Exploring the world is delightful. The visual and musical tone are very reminiscent of Super Metroid and Zero Mission. The whole experience feels familiar - in the sense that it's weird and alien, but the creatures from Metroid would feel right at home there. The power-ups definitely have Metroid-esque analogs, but they are unique at the same time, and it's fun to be surprised with how they enable you to get past the game's various obstacles.

And just like in Super Metroid, you can get lost and stuck. I got super stuck at one point. It ended up being just a matter of having forgotten about one little spot, but as I explored everywhere, I kept finding optional power-ups. That's a sign of good design, in my opinion. And of course when I finally found the way forward... well then I got stuck again, but after that, it was super satisfying. Another time I wandered all over the world trying to find that next item that would let me progress, only to realize that I already had the ability I needed, but I had never thought to use it in a certain way. And believe it or not, realizing that was a good feeling.

I like the boss battles. They're not super complex, but the bosses look cool, and it's satisfying to figure out what to do. (It's usually much simpler than what I expect going in.)

There's a lot of variety in items to collect. I mentioned the abilities that would correspond to "suit upgrades" for Samus, which are the main source of innovation regarding how you get around the world. But there are also upgrades to health and attack power, that sometimes come in pieces you need to collect a bunch of to equal one upgrade. So there is always a reward for exploring. There are also a lot of different weapons. Verify few are strictly required, but there's a lot of variety in how they work, so you can pick what works for you (or what looks the coolest).

The plot is decent but super confusing. The ending - I don't know if it was trying to lead into a sequel or just to cement the feeling that you don't know what the heck is going on. And of course I could have done without the bits of profanity thrown in, and the icky white remains of the former population. (In Metroid, you're always exploring ruins, but you generally don't actually run into the former inhabitants.) I was also a bit thrown off by this item you can get that allows you to enter codes that supposedly alter reality. One of them is obvious, but it doesn't seem to do anything. In fact, even after finishing the game I have no idea what you're supposed to do with it, or what any of the other codes are.

But that aside, Axiom Verge is the most Metroid-like game this side of an actual Metroid game, and that includes Ori. It is glorious.

A Link to the Past

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has been one of my favorite games, really since I saw the first screenshot and saw that it was a return to the Zelda 1 style and looked amazing. The SNES graphics create a charming world to explore, and there's so much in it - the game has the most levels of any Zelda game, and it started a lot of the conventions they still use in the top-down games, and even some in Breath of the Wild (like certain switches and the sword spin). And the music is super epic - an orchestrated version of the original theme, and probably the best ending sequence of any game. My only real regret about the game is that I read too much before I first played it, so there were a lot of things I didn't get to discover.

I replayed the game again after not having done so for probably 15 years, and it was really fun. I'm surprised at how many things I didn't remember - I'm still not sure where the last 4 heart pieces are. In order to make it challenging, I decided not to power up the Master Sword or my tunic - after all, the green outfit and blue sword look better than the wonky colors you end up with normally. This worked out pretty well.

Here are some screenshots of my journey, along with some random thoughts. (Some spoilers implied)

This is one of my favorite spots. The trees and river create this nice, tranquil vibe. And you passed below it on the way up and saw the heart, but it was inaccessible at the time, so finding the way in is rewarding. It looks like a great spot for a picnic or something.

The Zora king looks cool, and I like how he calls you "little man".

I want a sign like this.

Drat, turned into a bunny again.

Zelda is very quotable.

See that bombed wall in the Tower of Ganon? I had never figured out how to get to it before. But this time I remembered a puzzle I solved (and felt like a genius!) in the extra dungeon of the GBA version of this game, and it hit me! (There's nothing essential in that room, but still!) I will leave it to the reader to figure it out. And no, there is no invisible floor.

This is me fighting Ganon, with the green tunic and blue sword.

... and proof that I won!

Now, a note about where this game falls in the plot. Nintendo has stuck it in the middle of one of three alleged timelines, but I think that's bunk. And A Link Between Worlds positions itself as a sequel to this game, which is also bunk (in part because the state of the Triforce at the start of that game matches the end of Ocarina of Time [split], not A Link to the Past [joined]).

But in any case, this has to be the last Zelda game. Here's why:

See? After this, the Master Sword is never used again. And Ganon is totally destroyed. The Essence of the Triforce said so. I think that precludes putting any other Zelda game after this in the timeline.

Anyway, even though I wasn't surprised by things very often, this game still ranks in my top five ever. Yay Zelda!

Cyber Shadow

This was a really good game for what it is. It's reminiscent of NES platform fighting games, but it has save points at reasonable places, upgrades to find - the stuff you'd expect in a modern game. It also has better, catchier music than most modern games have. A lot of the bosses are very cool looking. The graphics are intentionally retro, but given that limitation they look good.

On the other hand, it also has a melodramatic plot (although you can ignore that), and toward the end the game just gets a little TOO hard. But to be fair, even when things are really, really hard, MOST of the time it's a matter of figuring out what to do, meaning how to best use your various abilities to make the situation more manageable. So for most of the game, I didn't mind having to restart sections over and over because I felt like I was making progress by thinking things through. But in the rare times when it really does require precision (and in the many times when it seems like that's the only way to win), it does get frustrating. But none of this makes me dislike the game overall. (I paid the $15 pre-order price; the regular price is probably reasonable too if you're into this genre - I don't actually have any nostalgia for the NES ninja games.)

There was also one design bug, which I found quite frustrating. There's this part where you have to climb a set of platforms faster than this spirit monkey thing. The game hints that you can make it easier by sword-bouncing off of these lantern things, but I had this power-up left over from a previous area that made a blade spin around me and destroy stuff. That's great when you're fighting enemies, but this thing destroyed the lanterns before I could approach, so I just had to do the whole thing with very precise jumping. Drove me crazy.

Portal (1&2)

For the Christmas break, I played Portal 1 & 2. I had heard about them since forever, but I never really gave them a lot of thought - I was turned off by the "dark humor" motif, and of course they're not on Nintendo consoles. But Steam works on my laptop and the games were dirt cheap.

They're really fun. For one thing, the computer making fun of your character (who's not a bit fazed by the taunting) is pretty funny. And beyond that, the puzzles are really well designed. They're satisfying, not unreasonable, and they make you feel like an absolute genius whenever you solve one.

The portal gun works exactly like you'd expect - you put a blue portal here, an orange portal there, and they're connected. You can go through them. Other stuff can go through. Momentum is maintained. You can look through and see what you'd expect to see, which is generally the same room but from a different perspective (and maybe yourself, depending on how they're positioned). You can't help but want one. But then, that's how all good sci-fi tech is. Unrealistic, but so clear in its purpose and use that you can easily imagine what you'd do if you had it.

Best quotes: this and this, and my personal favorite.

 

Dealing with weird stuff in church history

[I wrote this on Election Day 2020 but posted it here later. The original, formatted document is here.]

I should say at the start that I have a strong testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that Joseph Smith is his prophet. I'm grateful for the peace and perspective the gospel has given me, and the blessings I've received as I have tried to live it. For the most part, the history of the church strengthens my testimony - there have been many miracles that show the hand of God in it, and the church has been a positive influence in the world.

It's also fair to say that some parts of church history aren't great. Some people react to this by just rejecting everything about the church. Others make excuses and may even perpetuate some of the unfortunate cultural issues from the past. I have been thinking lately about how to address the negative aspects of the history, so I figured I'd better write it down. Fair warning - this post is long.

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The church has never claimed its leaders were infallible. It's actually very important to be able to see a prophet's role as distinct from their identity as a person, because prophets make mistakes. Sometimes really big ones. We need to be able to see and acknowledge this without it shaking our faith in God, or in the core doctrines of the gospel.

When I was young, I imagined the prophets and apostles as being in direct personal contact with Jesus Christ all the time. He told them what to do, and they just did it. I imagined something similar with local church leaders, except through the Holy Ghost instead of visions. As a missionary and in interactions with church leadership, I have since learned that most of the time God leaves decisions up to us and guides us in subtle ways, many times through other people. Most of the time he is fine with the direction we choose, and will only "warn us off" if we're headed for something immoral. We can get extra direction when we seek it (study, ponder, pray). But very seldom does God give us course-altering direction when we haven't asked for it. This is true even for prophets. God reveals truth "line upon line, here a little and there a little". (See 2 Nephi 28:30, Isaiah 28:30.)

This is important to understand with regard to church history, both ancient and modern. The clear modern example is the racial distinction on the priesthood, which was started a few decades after the church was created and wasn't lifted until 1978. I'll say more about this later, but for now I'll just point out that the church has disavowed all of the attempts at explaining the reasons for it using scripture. In other words, it was a mistake. A big, harmful one. Why didn't God correct it sooner? We don't have a direct answer, but I think a part of the answer has to be that not enough people were prepared to follow the direction to stop being racist. It was only when enough people were willing to follow that direction that the change came. (And yes, that means that racism was a huge problem in the development of the church.) Some might hear this and think "How could Brigham Young have been a prophet if he believed such racist ideas?" One answer could simply be a matter of existential priories: God needed a church with a strong community. There had to be enough members in Utah and worldwide to hold the church together. If too many people left too early, no amount of truth would have preserved the church long-term. But having a lot of people in strong communities was something God could work with, and fine-tune their moral failings bit by bit, as they were ready. In any case, I think separating Brigham Young's character as a man from his role as a prophet is actually liberating from a faith perspective. You can criticize one without throwing away the other.

Here's another example: Moses and Joshua wiped out a lot of people on their way from Egypt to the promised land. The Book of Exodus suggests that God told them to exterminate entire communities - men, women, and children. Really? Or is it possible that Moses received revelation about moving people, and commandments about how they should behave, and misinterpreted some of the "how"? I think it is. One might ask again, "Why wouldn't God stop him from committing genocide?" Well, he needed a group of people that wouldn't sink into idolatry. He needed people who would believe in him and pass on the covenant he had made. He knew he could work on the "love your neighbor" stuff later, so he gave them just enough to establish the basics. They weren't ready for any more than that. This is speculation, but it makes sense to me.

One more quick example before I get back to Brigham Young. A lot of people instrumental in forming the United States were guilty of atrocities. George Washington owned slaves. And without him, we would not have this country in the first place. He was a hypocritical white supremacist. And he did great things, for which we are indebted to him. We can believe both. Thomas Jefferson: same thing. Christopher Columbus: he did even worse things. And he was instrumental in the hands of God in forming a free country, and by extension, in the restoration of the gospel. I'm not saying I would vote for any of these men if they were running for office today, but we can acknowledge the good they did even while condemning their immoral behavior.

In a lot of ways, Brigham Young was the George Washington of the early church. God needed someone with leadership skills, and a vision of how to build a community. Brigham Young drove the creation of industry all over Utah and other places the church created settlements. He negotiated a peaceful situation with the United States and the Native American communities in the area. Without him, that church of refugees probably would not have survived its first fifty years.

He was also profoundly racist. He wasn't as bad as a lot of people in the South - he didn't advocate all of the atrocities committed against slaves. He didn't even own slaves. But he did believe in slavery. He strongly believed that black people were inherently inferior. And, while some might say that it's not fair to judge him against modern morality, his actions don't even stand up to the morality of the church at the time. The Book of Mormon condemns slavery, as does the Doctrine and Covenants. Joseph Smith wanted to abolish slavery. But Brigham Young upheld it.

And then there is polygamy. In some ways this is even weirder than the racism thing - not just because polygamy is messed up, but because the early church had a much easier time backing up the doctrine of polygamy with scripture. But women suffered a lot under the practice. And I'm not going from rumors or anything here - most of what I know about the subject comes from the Church's own publications. It was pretty bad. Did God set it up? Well maybe - the whole thing was wrapped in secrecy at the start, so it's not super clear what Joseph Smith said, or which parts of it were direct revelation from God, versus something that another imperfect man might have misinterpreted. (The section in D&C that mentions it didn't come out until a long time after Joseph Smith was murdered.) But even if we accept the institution as created by revelation, the implementation was not great. Women's rights and wellbeing were not respected as much as they should have been. Again, there were a lot of mortal people running this thing, and we shouldn't be surprised when we learn that they messed it up.

So how should we react? I think there are three important things.

First, I think it's very appropriate to be offended. I am offended. Racism is awful. Slavery is a betrayal of the gospel of Jesus Christ on every level. And hypocrisy makes bad things even worse, maybe because it is so effective at convincing people that they are good. We don't need to make excuses for others' wrong choices. It's okay to be outraged.

Second, we need to have a clear idea of core doctrine versus what I'm going to call "interpreted doctrine", versus practices and policies. (See this talk from General Conference, and this one.) There's a broad spectrum of how directly-from-God the things we believe and do fall into. That's just the nature of living in a mortal world. If we're clear on which things came directly from God, we can hold onto those things without getting thrown off when we realize that a human leader has made a mistake. Or even an atrocity.

And third, once we have that clear distinction about church history, we need to apply it to ourselves. We need to ask ourselves, "What part of my beliefs and practices are susceptible to human weakness? Are there perspectives I have that God would like me to change, if only I'd open myself up to changing?" (See Matthew 19:20)

Sometimes it will be policies that will change. But sometimes the doctrine of the church will be added to or clarified in a way that contradicts what members of the church had come to believe. When black people received the priesthood, a lot of members rejoiced - not just for the blessings of their black brothers and sisters, but because they no longer had to make excuses for a racist policy. They were beyond ready. But other members of the church had a hard time with this. They had been immersed in all of the theological rationalization for the policy. The idea of having a black bishop went against their religious beliefs. Of course, this means these people were racist. But the point is that they sincerely believed that God wanted them to be. At least up until that day. After that day, those who had embraced the racism of the time had a choice to make. Some left the church, or stayed but harbored racism. And others opened their minds and hearts and received a witness from God that white people aren't actually superior. Those people changed, and they're better people now.

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I want to point out one more concept that I think is in flux in the church today - in culture, if not in doctrine. This bit will involve a lot of speculation - this comes from me, not the church, and I could be wrong in either direction. But it's something that I think about.

It has to do with how we approach homosexuality. Now, the church is pretty clear on the law of chastity - no sexual intimacy except between married people, and marriage is between a man and a woman (because the essence of marriage is creating an eternal family). Most people and cultures in the world today don't believe in or support that standard. We can live with that. We don't walk around glaring at our heterosexual neighbors and thinking of them as unclean. And we should not do that with homosexual people either. The church certainly does not advocate looking down on other people based on who they're attracted to. But in the culture among church members, there is a stigma attached to being gay.

Growing up, I feel like I was raised with a relatively open-minded view of people. Racism always seemed and felt evil. But gay people? I have to admit that I felt an "ick" factor attached to that idea. Like, the idea of two dudes kissing still feels wrong to me - although I think this has more to do with bias than it does with morality. Not all of this bias comes from church - this is in the whole world. But let's examine the church bit.

Let's say you have two teenagers, a boy and a girl. The boy asks the girl on a date. They see a movie and eat food, and the boy pays. They hold hands. At the end of the night he kisses her on the cheek, and then they part ways. Nobody would call that a violation of chastity. Why? Because it's not sexual. It's just feelings, and social interaction. But if you change that story and replace the girl with a boy, all of a sudden you've got a problem. If these are BYU students instead of teenagers, you have an Honor Code violation. Why? If the law of chastity is about sexuality, and sexuality is only okay between a married couple, and romantic behavior is okay outside of marriage, then why are we concerned with non-sexual behavior between two men or two women? Why do we even care?

Of course, the perceived problem is that romantic behavior between people of the same gender "gives expression" to feelings that could lead people to break the law of chastity or to make other decisions that will stop eternal progression. That feels super weak to me. For one thing, two dudes on a date are no more likely to break the law of chastity than a heterosexual couple. The hormones are the same; it's just who they're targeting that's different. And if you're not attracted to the opposite gender, then you're not going to get married to them, so a same-gender relationship isn't competing with a potential opposite-gender one. (I mean if you're bisexual, then maybe it is, but that feels like a technicality that doesn't really sway the argument here.)

So the conclusion that I draw is that we should chill out and get off the backs of gay people. We should try really hard to stop feeling that "ick" factor, and acknowledge that it comes from the societal messaging we were raised with, not from God.

"But, But…" that biased voice in my head says, "how does being gay fit into the Plan of Salvation? What happens in the Celestial Kingdom?" To be honest, I do not know the answer to this. Growing up, my impression was that being gay was a birth defect, so it would be "cured" in the resurrection. That is an awfully insulting position to take. That doesn’t make it untrue, but then there isn't any scriptural evidence to back it up, either. Perhaps Brigham Young might have said that gay people are the way they are because of some spiritual deficiency, like he felt about black people. Of course that is even more insulting, and it feels deeply wrong on a spiritual level. I'd have a hard time even respecting someone who claimed that. The only other answer I can think of is that there's a celestial path for gay people, but it hasn't been revealed yet. Why not? Well maybe it's because the church isn't ready for that revelation. Because we have too much bigotry in the membership. Again. Still.

And if that's the case, then we are just like the members back in 1978 before President Kimball removed the restriction on the priesthood. We have a choice. We can hold onto the traditions of the past and be total jerks to our neighbors, damaging the image of the church and causing our descendants to be ashamed of us. Or we can be ready. We can move past the biases we've been fed and do a better job of thinking of everybody as equals. Neighbors. You know, the way Jesus Christ commands us to treat everybody.