This week in Andalusada: 9/29/2012

It's been an incredibly bad day for me in a lot of respects, but at least I can save the work on this a bit: not only have I been awesomely productive with it, but I've also Pretty much immediately after I was done posting the last weekly review on Saturday, I started writing for this week, which is unusual - usually I try to take at least one day off.

• The first post was for Oskar Sansinger. I don't know much about him, but I do know his name; it's enough to start writing with.
• The second, also on Saturday, was the first post on the Scrapbook to have no tags at all: "Best Practices: tagging and titling." It's more of a note to myself (and an introduction to the insane mess of labels over there), setting some guidelines down for better writing in the future.
• Because I'd been furiously editing everything related to the House of Sansinger on Monday, and because the details of the war were scattered throughout several pages, I created a master page for the Axamallan Revolt that evening.
• After a discussion with Rob (in which he mentioned the role of the nebulous "Grand Princess [who?]"), I wrote a biography for her, settling on a name for the lady: Grand Princess Teresa.
• And because it was one of the few names that I'm aware of, and I'd mentioned the Cordoveros before, I wrote up a stubby biography for Don Musa as well, raising the population of named Andalusians to three.
• I skipped out on a social event Wednesday. Instead, I wrote some of the details into Teresa Maria's life, and in particular into one specific part of her life: the Christianization of Mexico.
• The last post this week was on Thursday, when (in keeping with other things) I posted the Greater Japanese Empire, allowing me to hyperlink everything else to it.

That's what I have to show for my week, and if that was all I did it'd be enough. It wasn't.

More below the cut:

Dinner, 9/27/2012

I lied. My hair wasn't remotely cut, the way I said that it was on the phone. And when I went to get it cut, the first thing I did was to drive home to see if I'd just left my debit card there or bothered to lose it properly. (I'd just left it there.)

I pulled $60 out of the bank today. $20 went straight into the gas tank, $16 went into the haircut, and the rest went into a vegetable platter, a large lemon, and $8.99 worth of fiery chrysanthemums. And then it was off to the party.

Orders were very strict: I was to be there no later than 5:15 if I wanted to remain in good standing. I was fifteen minutes late. The traffic across the bridge to Northampton was awful, stop and go every minute of the way.

Dinner was superb. Crudités, a quiche and a half, a bottle of champagne, caviar (which was meh), a random scattering of pastries for dessert... the single richest meal that I've had in months.

And then, driving home, there was "Gangnam Style" on the radio. I nearly drove off the road.

The logic of Andalusada and GURPS

On Monday, I started writing about the reasoning that guides and shapes the formation of the Andalusada universe. Last night, the first identifiable force in Andalusada was sloth. Tonight, it's something that I've touched on before but never seriously discussed: GURPS.

The logic of Andalusada and sloth

It's been a long time since I did anything that merited the tag "regular writing." The most I can say is that I've reliably posted weeks in review for Andalusada consistently - that I've been writing on the Scrapbook rather regularly indeed.

I mentioned that I started a standardization campaign on Friday. It's sent me looking back over dozens of former pages, editing them to fit my new standard policies - and rereading them, because I usually haven't thought about any of them except to look them up for links. And it's left me wincing a lot, because of how awful my writing can get over there. And how inconsistent.

There's one thing about it that's managed to routinely get my attention, though: the times when I stop to explain why I wrote Andalusada the way I did on that point. Those side notes are fascinating to me. And since this is (alas) a vanity blog, and Andalusada is what I'm thinking about at present - and since a lot of those notes are going to get obliterated in the great reformatting to come - I'm going to start discussing the overarching forces that have shaped my work as a Demiurge.

The first of these forces, and it's a shameful one to admit, is sloth.

In which I talk about a papyrus fragment

The stores sell caramel apples and fresh cider, and there are racks of pumpkins outside the doors. The nights are colder now, and the blue hour comes too early. Autumn is upon us.

And instead of honoring that, I'm going to talk about a papyrus fragment, the details of which are found over here.

My first response was the one I posted on Slacktivist:

There's a strong tendency on the part of many scholars to err uncritically on the side of the exotic and non-traditional: the same person who takes the standard gospels as unreliable in their depiction of Jesus will then treat a text written centuries later, which makes outlandish claims attested to nowhere else, certainly no text written when there were still living witnesses to Jesus's life, as if it were very good evidence!

YES. THIS THIS THIS. Thank you so much for saying that. 

On a broader scale, my biggest issue with this whole topic is the horrible looming sense that there isn't going to be ANY intelligent, rational discussion about if and how this papyrus fragment means or matters: that people will, for personal psychological reasons, arbitrarily and dogmatically declare "Jesus was/wasn't married!"

Because as a relatively studied Christian (and usually the one who has to represent Christianity in my completely unchurched social circles), I waste enough time as it is dealing with the Rapture and Dan Brown. And maybe it's because I'm short of sleep, but I have no hope that popular culture won't make a mess with this, and I am tired of endless remedial cleanup.

 My expanded thoughts are as follows, below the cut.

This week in Andalusada blogging: 9/22/2012

No blogging happened for me until late on Wednesday night, when (powered by Concerta) I decided to forcibly reset my sleep schedule. There, in the twilight of it, the writing started:

• The first thing I posted was "Very Poor Introductions," linking back to the very first post I ever began on this (back when it was Ixbiliada.) It connected a few dots for me - in particular, I invented Annemarie Sansinger on the spot, because there was no plausible Bonaparte left to write Bonapartism: a Very Poor Introduction any more.
• Next up on the list, after some cleanup (about which more below), was a master page, keeping track of Andalusada's authors.
• The UCNA, the nation that is Moorish civilization as of Andalusada's present day, is a successor state. The third post of the week was the placeholder for what it succeeded: Umayyad Seville. Writing that (especially answering why?) was both satisfying and very, very instructive: I'm gonna have to revisit all of this later.
• And because I'd already introduced the "families" tag earlier, I decided to make "families" a bit more substantive by writing a substantive family to tag it with: the House of Umayya.
• Due to a terrible accident, a truly terrible post from I think May (regarding Ibero-Romance languages or something) was completely erased and lost. I took the opportunity to edit it a fair bit, turning it into something specifically about Moorish (the rest of Iberia be damned; I'm not even sure that Castilian is spoken.)
• And lastly, on Friday night, I finally posted an entirely place-holding page for the House of Sansinger, tying together a fair number of other assorted entries. I'm still editing it as of this posting.

If the writing was all I'd accomplished this week, that would've been enough. It wasn't.

Slacktivist says it like it is

It occurs to me that I've been essentially neglecting any writing about the Discourse of Decline recently - and just on time, Fred Clark (a smarter man than I) delivers:

Everybody knows that evangelical churches are more theologically conservative and orthodox. And everybody knows that mainline Protestant denominations are liberal and heterodox....

It goes something like this:

1: Find the most liberal theologians you can from mainline Protestant denominations — Tillich! Spong! — and then sketch caricatures of them that make them seem as outrageously liberal as possible.

2. Make these caricatures the avatars for mainline Protestant churches, always suggesting that they are typical, hugely popular and influential.

3. Cite this outrageous theological liberalism as the cause of mainline “decline.”

4. Contrast this mainline liberalism with the orthodoxy of evangelical churches.

5. Cite evangelical orthodoxy as the cause of the rapid growth of evangelicalism.

6. Lather, rinse, repeat. For years and years and years.

This is propaganda. It’s the shell-game that we evangelicals have been playing for decades now. And it’s a shifty, dishonest trick.

Fred, you nailed it.