THE BLOG IS BACK!

Hello good wonderful people!

Greetings from afar! I have decided we need to bring back the blog in all it's glory, so I have resurrected it.

How are we all? I thought I'd give you an update of what's been happening since September and I'm hoping that some brave soul will follow suit.

So, Nottingham's great! Awesome city, I'm loving wondering around in my lunch break and stumbling across great parks, buildings, chill-out spots and shops! It actually makes me want to go shopping?!? which is bizarre as usually I can't stand shopping or being in town for more than an hour, but here I find myself wanting to stay in the city centre for ages and have the money to buy that THING that looks COOL but has no practical use whatsoever. You should all come! Look how cool it is! I promise I won't take you shopping.

My course is good fun, we're making puppets this week out of polystyrene. It gets everywhere, I keep finding little white blobs in my clothes. Here's my course-mate with her new found friend...

...and what looks like a puppet massacre in the workshop...

... We've even got some headless puppets hanging from a rope so we can cover them in PVA...

It doesn't look creepy at all..

Freshers' week was... *insert word here*. The reason I say that is because (I'm sure you'll all know having done freshers' week before) that it's hard to sum up in one word. For me it was a mix of feeling happy, excited, nervous, lost, joyful, curious, cautious, down, anxious, confident, content, cheerful, lost (geographically), feeling at home, wanting to go home, wanting to explore everything and wanting my course to start so the late nights could stop.

So all in all I would say that it was good, but I can now safely say I'm not a massive fan of clubbing. Which always gets you a "you're weird" look from people, especially when they discover that you don't really drink either. I had a conversation with a uni rep, which went something like this:

"So are you coming out tonight?"
"No, not tonight."
"Oh, having a chilled one?"
"Yeah, something like that."
"Are you coming out tomorrow night?"
"No."
"Oh..." *Pauses for a sec, then walks away*

It just makes you feel a bit alienated sometimes, but actually having said that, my flatmates have been lovely, I couldn't have wished for a better flat. There are 10 of us all together, 6 girls and 4 boys. Most of them are southerners bleeerrgh, but they're still people and that's what matters. Here's a picture of them semi-dancing in the kitchen.

I've been trying out archery too! We're in Nottingham, so you've got to! I got near the middle bit and took a picture so you would believe me..

I'll beat Robin Hood in no time!

That's about it from me, but please do comment, rant, moan, request, suggest, or splat on this blog. It can be big, it can be small, it can be fat, thin, reflective, funny, serious, none, any or all of the above, we just need to use it peeps! :D

If you don't know what to write or are feeling the uni blues, just listen to Sam :)

Love from Sherwood x

Salad, Leeks, Mecha-Ferrets, Bombs, Gnomes and LEEERRRROOOOYYYYYYY JEEENNNKKIIIIINNNNNSSS!!!!!

So most wednesdays Leggett and I get together to play various games and what not and recently we've been testing my RPG, Fire and Steam. We've had some interesting occurrences for sure, so imma share them because they're hilarious. These are the most recent 2 adventures and I'm sure there will be more to come. 1 of there is Derek's adventure and the other is Amos's, Matt's brutal and disturbing lizardkin barbarian. Enjoy!

Adventure 1. Derek and the Magical Anus Monster.

Derek awoke upon a stone sacrificial altar at the far end of a large room. red curtains lined the walls connected to four pillars in each corner of the room, and in the partings of the curtains lied a total of three doors, one to the south, east and west. On the floor was a small stream flowing round the altar, unifying in a large, central pool, big enough to refresh one's self. Unsure and unaware, Derek hobbled to his feet, ready to explore, wearing nothing more than his beard and a loin cloth.

The southern door looked most appealing.

Opening the door, he finds a large conglomeration of priests and townsfolk. They stop and stare at his huge bulge... They cheer and bow, chanting "THE DELIVERER HAS COME". Derek stands there, not really sure about anything, but none the less accepting this high praise as a god. He is informed by the high priest and priestess that their town is being attacked by "the sorcerer" and that Derek is their "deliverer"...

Derek is not a woman and so shudders at the thought of delivery...

However, they show him the armoury and wow there were no guns... immediate disappointment, but a magical crossbow/RPG (called the Bolter) was close enough he supposes. Taking as much as he could carry and enough armour to protect him from a nuke, he wanders back into the main room for three whole barrels of XXXXXXXXXXXX pure dwarvern ale (how the hell they got their hands on this is beyond Derek, but Derek speaks in the third person so overlooks this matter). The door begins to thud. "They're smashing it down!" he thought (obviously) and in a moment of quick wit, he hurried the people into the sacrificial chamber and readied the Bolter. The door is smashed down and a huge (like, 10 times the size of derek) Minotaur comes in with a huge-ass shotgun. He's slow and can't hit Derek at 10 paces, let alone with a shotgun of that size. Five shots from the Bolter and it falls dead, but a swarm of strange beast-human hybrid creatures flood in after. The priests and townsfolk were feeling more courageous after watching Derek slay a "great minotaur" and rushed to help, stabbing the beasts with their sacrificial daggers whilst Derek ploughed through them toward the entrance.

When Derek finally leaves the temple, he finds the city in ruins and the beasts running amok everywhere. He hears a strange sound in the distance... Salad and Leeks?.. who knows. Getting closer to the sound, it definitely is a ferociously screamed "LEEKS! SALAD AND LEEKS!" coming from the barracks. Entering the barracks, Derek finds some of the town guard being swarmed by quite a few of the beasts. Some guards fire crossbows from the upper balconies, and two are throwing a bed on top of them. On the roof, presumably about to jump on the bed as it crushes the beasts, is the man screaming "LEEKS! SALAD AND LEEKS!". This strange man does indeed jump onto the bed, and wielding nothing but a butcher's knife and a frying pan, cleaves through a majority of the beasts, leaving Derek and the rest of the guards a few to shoot. The brute turns to Derek gives him a nod and says "leeks. salad and leeks". Intrigued in this unusual creature, Derek asks the guardsmen who he is and why he says that. They respond by saying that he witnessed a massacre committed by Amos Habbakuk and the barbarity of it made him return the salad and leeks he had eaten to the mortal world and scarred him for life. Knowing Amos... Derek is not surprised.

Salad and leek man along with some of the town guard and Derek all go to the library to rescue anyone there. Upon arrival, there is a nutter of a librarian on the roof of the burning library casting fireball spells everywhere...

...nope...

...nope nope nope...

...

...nope...

... thinks Derek, but he notices a strange contraption he had seen before... yes... it was a mecha-ferret (or war-ferret to the Dwarves) piloting a servo-harness, not good in combat, but gives a ferret the power of the slightly-more-than-average human. Still it died easily to the crossbow bolt to the face, and popped like they do when put in a microwave...

The library is soon cleared, but the stupid librarian keeps throwing fire everywhere... so we move on to the town hall. This is rather hopeless. Three great minotaurs and mucho-beasties plus a few more war-ferrets. The most worrying thing here wasn't that Derek would die, but that salad and leek man would. He is glorious to watch...

A battle raged here for a while and during said battle, Derek noticed that all the bodies that died started crawling toward the city gates for some reason... so after chopping up some bodies so they couldn't crawl away, Derek pretended to be a body, and crawled toward the gates. Approaching the gates, Derek sees a hideous monstrosity; this black thing, larger than the gatehouse it's smashed into, and spewing acid from its tentacles that appears to be helping the creature digest the rotting corpses around it... mmmm... delicious...
Watching for a little longer, the thing opened a "mouth" and some weird hybrids popped out and joined the siege. Through fear and "nope" he climbed over the wall without anyone/thing noticing. Because Derek has a heart and wanted to save the poor city (though he had contemplated running like a motherfucker) he walked round the evil one, and in doing so revealed... eyes... on its back?... or is this the front?... if it is then HOLY SHIT IT HAS A MAGIC ANUS THAT POOPS HYBRID CREATURES... By this point Derek is getting closer and throwing up a bit because of the smell, but far enough away to hit with le Bolter. Derek can hear a voice in his head saying kill... but it's no more dominant than the other voices...

So Derek shoots an eye and makes it go pop. He hears the creature scream in his head and feels crushed by the pressure. He also feels an urge to move to the town hall where the main siege is taking place which seems to be telling him to kill at that point... nothing Derek's iron will can't stop, so he shoots another eye. Again, forced to in knees by the pressure, but this time he feels an urge to stay right where he is... and kill, as though the creature was targeting him... Soon, he can see the beasts crawling over the walls and through the small gaps to get to your position.. RUNNING RUNNING RUNNING to the left occurred. The beasts just stopped right where Derek was and hobbled around looking confused for a bit before returning to the city. Derek felt that the point change from where he was, to somewhere between the creature and the town hall. This happened a few times, each time the point moving closer to the creature from the town hall each time, until the beasts just stopped and fell over and the voice saying kill was no longer there... though Derek couldn't tell... Walking back to the lifeless black creature, Derek hears the scream of "LEEKS! SALAD AND LEEKS!" and the strange dude bursts out of the belly of the beast in a spray of black stuff, blood and acid, just nodding again in appreciation, simply saying "leeks..." and all the while Derek thought "if the city had this nutter, why the hell am I the deliverer?!"...

And all was well...


Adventure 2. Amos, Fiddle and Neb and the Train of the Suicide-Bombing Gnomes.

NOTE: Leggett has made 3 characters; Amos Habbakuk the lizardkin barbarian, Fiddle Farthing the human hunter and Obadiah Nebuchadnezzar (aka Neb) the dwarf guardian.

Amos, Fiddle and Neb are on a train to one of the large cities, but the train has been hijacked by bandits. The three and all the passengers were chucked in the caboose at the end of the train and tied down. The three, however, know their way out of a simple badly tied rope, and all together lunge at the three guards in the caboose, Amos lunging at one and ripping his arms off while Fiddle and Neb just flick them on the nose... The remaining two guards retaliate, but to no avail, as Amos ripps their heads off... I should've mentioned that they have no weapons, only armour...

So Amos grabs the freshly decapitated bodies and storms into the next carriage shouting LEERRRROOOOYYYY JEEEENNNNKIIIIINSSSSSS!!!!!! and proceed to kill a few more guards in a very brutal manner and rescue some now-disturbed and mentally scarred passengers and throw them in the caboose too.

The next carriage has more guards, but this time Amos' discovered the ladder to go onto the roof of the train. There's a hatch on the top of the carriage and that can only mean one thing... SURPRISE LEEROY!!!! BURSTING THROUGH THE ROOF HE MUTILATED ANOTHER FOUR GUARDS and this time decides to search the carriage. He finds bombs... four bombs... quite a bit of boom power too, so naturally Amos goes and gets the four gnomes that happened to be passengers and straps a bomb to each of them... he is very pleased, though the gnomes feel unsafe around such high explosives and a mass murderer...

In the next card there is a massive load of boomy bombs all over the cart... enough to blow the entire train and most of the area around it... so Amos sends one of the gnomes in and threatens to blow up (to which Matt rolled 100 for intimidation). The guards just laugh and one of them goes to stab the gnome a little for fun. Before he gets chance, AMOS BURSTS THROUGH THE ROOF ONCE MORE. BRUTALLY KILLING THAT PERSON WITH HIS BEAR HANDS (RAWWWRRRR BEARS FOR HANDS) AND BLOOD FLIES EVERYWHERE. One of the guards strikes a match and threatens to light the bomb fuse whilst the remaining guards ready their guns and aiming at Amos. Again, naturally, Amos lunges at the fuse-holder and stops him. Some simultaneous shooting occurs and the guards are dead the there is even more blood around the carriage. But one guard still lives, and after an amazing interrogation by Amos (rolled 100 again), his baby faces only cause the guard to feel better. The gnome tries to get stuff out of him and he spills the beans. Turns out they're an organised crime group who were hijacking a train to blow up part of a city. So he throws the guy out of the window so precisely (rolling 3) he only breaks a single pane of glass and feels pretty damn proud of it.

Intrigue gets the better of Amos and he detaches the caboose with the passengers and then the carriage with all the explosives and sets it off just to see the explosion... its quite the mushroom cloud...

Explosively satisfied, he pursues more murder and sacrifice to his great lord of soberness, Trevor. He is now at the coal car where the shoveller is being forced to fuel the engine. One side of the cart is a massive furnace and the other is a coal storage space with two guards making sure the shoveller works. So Amos melts one of them in the furnace and rips the other in half. The now terrified shoveller is forced to go and stand in the corner and think about what he has done.

The next caris the engine where the gears and steam power of the machine drives the wheels... nothing is in here, so Amos tries to jam the gears just to see what would happen, so grabs the shovel and puts the handle between the gears. The shovel breaks and the train jerks a little, but ultimately continues on its decelerating way. Amos opens the last door where the train driver and two more guards are. Amos tries to rip the door of and throw it at them but he misses somehow and throws it into the ceiling. Finding their attention, he punches one so hard his arm penetrates his skull so it now resides on his elbow, then snaps the other in half with one hand. The train driver puts on the brakes and everyone is saved, except the evil bandits... theyre in bits everywhere.

Matt's a bit brutal ain't he?

Stokachu 

So many different views... how can any of it be true?

There are loads of different opinions, interpretations and translations of the Bible. Not only that, there are also tonnes of denominations, belief systems, factions and so on that have arisen from it, and not just Christian ones!
Even if I was interested in exploring Christianity, how would I know what to look into? How could I divide the "worth looking into stuff" from the "definitely without a doubt load of rubbish stuff"?

I don't know if that's something you've ever thought about. I certainly have. If you're at all interested, I'm planning on doing some posts on the matter. The first (the rest of this one), is on which Bible translations are worth reading (if any)? The second will probably be on why on earth are there so many different denominations, and what on earth we're meant to do if we just want to find out what the Bible has to say without bothering with all the nonsense. I may or may not do some more after that (hopefully much shorter posts!), based on the reception of these ones :P

But in case you just can't be bothered to read two massive posts (I probably wouldn't be), the short answer:
- The most common translations tend to be pretty good, so if you have a Bible then I wouldn't worry too much about it, what you've got is probably reliable and true. If you're interested in getting one, I'd recommend the NIV and ESV translations of the Bible, as they are very close to the original texts while remaining readable and without the thees and thous of the King James Bible. These are also the Bibles that you tend to find in hotels, they're the little red ones the Gideons gave out in a school assembly once, you probably have one somewhere, or the ability to get one for free if you want.
- Don't bother with denominations. Read the Bible, find out for yourself what it's all about. Anyone can understand it, don't let people convince you that you don't have what it takes. If there is anything you don't understand or want to ask someone about, go for it, ask someone! Just don't listen to people who make stuff up (like purgatory).

So, on with the post.

The Bible - Which One!?!?
There's the KJV, NIV, ESV, the Message, the New World Translation, the RSV, the DRB, the CCD, the NABRE, to name but a few. Most of which sound like the names of special forces and government agencies. And surely this throws up the question of reliability? How can any of it be true if so many different translations exist?

[WARNING - Lots of history stuff, might not be that interesting for you, feel free to skip to the ANYWAY below :P] First of all, we still have many Koine Greek, Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew manuscripts (the languages that the collection of books and letters we call the Bible was written in). Many of these are on display in museums - if you can read the language then you can go and read these manuscripts for yourselves. It's the accuracy of these manuscripts that really matter in trying to work out whether or not the Bible is historically reliable, rather than the accuracy of the English translations people have made of these manuscripts (of course the accuracy of the translations we read does matter to us, but I'll get to that later). Just to justify my last point:
Imagine I heard a lecture from a Professor Higgs. I then went and told you all about what he said. Except what I told you was a load of rubbish, it wasn't what he was trying to say. That wouldn't make what he said untrue or unreliable, it would just make me false and unreliable. So it is with the Bible and people's translations of it.

Can we trust that these early (2nd century BC to 3rd century AD) Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew documents are indeed based on the original books and letters? And if so, can we trust that through paleography, textual criticism, and hundreds of thousands of hours of study, discussion and work that an accurate representation of the original books and letters can indeed be made through these? Yes. And if you use the same methods and critique as you use to determine the reliability of other historical documents, then overwhelmingly yes.

Take many of the Classical works for example:
"In evaluating the significance of these statistics...one should consider, by way of contrast, the number of manuscripts which preserve the text of the ancient classics. Homer's Iliad...is preserved by 457 papyri, 2 uncial manuscripts, and 188 minuscule manuscripts. Among the tragedians the witnesses to Euripides are the most abundant; his extant works are preserved in 54 papyri and 276 parchment manuscripts, almost all of the later dating from the Byzantine period...the time between the composition of the books of the New Testament and the earliest extant copies is relatively brief. Instead of the lapse of a millennium or more, as is the case of not a few classical authors, several papyrus manuscripts of portions of the New Testament are extant which were copies within a century or so after the composition of the original documents." Bruce M. Metzger - Pulled straight from Wikipedia.

What that's saying is that the time span between the earliest surviving copies of part of a widely accepted classical (ancient Greek) writing are from roughly a millennium or more after the originals were written, whereas the earliest surviving copies of the New Testament scriptures is less than a century. In fact, in those terms, the New Testament Scriptures are actually pretty top notch for ancient documents. Anyway, this is a lengthy discussion, but well worth looking into (I'm certainly going to be reading up much more on it. [Be warned, though, it's very easy to get the wrong idea when you read this stuff - it's a lot more complicated than you would think (or than I thought, at least). Later manuscripts are less reliable than earlier manuscripts, but people often refer to them in one category, so beware people talking about difficult to qualify statistics like, "There's x number of conflicting words between y manuscript and z manuscript", when really they've decided to dump something written by a monk 500 years later which no one uses for translation with a manuscript written less than 100 years later that everyone uses.]

There's loads more that I would love to say. I'm no expert, but I'm aware of archaeological evidence, non-Christian historians (Tacitus being my main example), historical standards and so on which would all suggest that the early manuscripts we have can indeed be used to come up with a highly accurate Bible. By that I mean a Bible which contains historically really accurate copies of the letters and books it does indeed claim to consist of. Whether or not what these original letters and books had to say is true is a different argument. But I don't want to consume the whole blog page in one post, so...

ANYWAY

I got carried away, my apologies.

Safe in the knowledge that there's a good chance the Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew documents we get our English translations from are reliable and accurate, we're now left trying to work out what English stuff is accurate and what isn't.

First of all, stay away from anything Gnostic, Mormon, Catholic, Coptic, Jehovah's Witness' (New World Translation) or similar. Their scriptures often include stuff varying from inaccurate and unreliable to just plain made up. [WARNING AGAIN] I feel I ought to justify this, but I'm aware this is a pretty long post as it is. So I'll be as brief as possible...
The Book of Mormon - meant to have been written by someone writing down what someone else was reading off of a plate that no one else could read or see (in 1830 by an American). Enough said.
Gnostic Works - Gnosticism is a cult predating Christianity (some argue not) that adopted and mutated Christian beliefs, it does not align theologically with the major themes of the Scriptures and their additional texts are likely made up (e.g. the "Gospel of Mary") ("The Gospel of Mary is an apocryphal book discovered in 1896 in a 5th-century papyrus codex." and, "Hollis Professor of Divinity Karen King at Harvard Divinity School suggests that the original gospel was written in Greek sometime during the time of Christ. Most scholars disagree with her conclusion..." Again, it's all on Wikipedia so you can see for yourself what I'm saying.)
Additional Catholic Old Testament Documents - this one is more ambiguous. There are 7 books present in the Catholic Old Testament which are not present in the Protestant Old Testament. These books are present in the Septuagint Greek Old Testament, but not in the more reliable Hebrew Old Testament, and hence they are not included in the protestant Bible (the standard of what could be considered part of the Bible had been increased since the formation of the Catholic Bible). They remain in the Catholic and some Orthodox Bibles mostly due to tradition, though you could attempt to make some standpoint on their reliability (this is without considering whether or not they even make sense historically and theologically - the rest of the Old Testament Scriptures do). No reference to these books is made in the entire Old or New Testament, and though this definitely does not mean that they are false documents, it's hardly in their favour.

ANYWAY

So we know what to stay away from, but what's good?

Well, the RSV (Revised Standard Version), the ESV (English Standard Version) and the NIV (New International Version) are all pretty reliable. They've had some of the most care and time taken (by countless highly trained and qualified translators, linguists, historians and scholars) out of all the English Bible translations. They also tend to show you wherever the translators are unsure of their translation - footnotes on the page tell you if they're unsure of a word, or if a verse is in some later manuscripts but not the original and most reliable ones. Such footnotes are comfortingly rare, too. The RSV and ESV go as much as possible towards as word for word a translation of the Bible as possible while still maintaining English grammar and "readability". The NIV also adheres to this, but with a slightly greater focus on conveying the meaning of the original manuscripts, as this can occasionally be lost in translation.

A lot of people have King James Bibles, these are ok, but they're not the nicest read (subjective, of course) and not as accurate as more modern translations.

The Message Bible is not really a translation of the Bible at all. The author has decided to convey the meaning of the Bible, without using most of the original Bible words. This can be really helpful, some bits of the Bible aren't the easiest read without patience, time and effort, and this could help make more sense of these. But I'd be very hesitant on calling it a Bible. It begs accuracy questions, and undoubtedly some of the great depth of meaning and authority that the actual Bible has will have been lost. Not saying it's a bad read, though.

So there you go. Sorry for a REALLY long post, but hope it was interesting enough for you to have got this far :P

All the best! Hope you're doing well (:
Matt(hew)