Thoughts on Everspace

Everspace is a roguelike space-arcade from (literal) Hamburgers, led by Michael Schade and Christian Lohr under the "Rockfish" imprint. They didn't have much capital to create the game they wanted, so went early-access. The Star Citizen jokes wore out after the two 'burgers slapped it out of early-access, at which point I bought it.

...for an earlier machine. That one couldn't handle the framerates when I was, say, inside one of those polygon-rich abandoned crates. So I gave up on this game, still mired in sector-two, after being killed like sixty-five times. You'll be aware that I'd got a newer machine but this was not a better machine until recently.

Anyway: I've been enjoying the game since last June. I've got to further sectors, got introduced to some more of the lore; there are some events which still jank my screen but these are fewer now.

Everspace proper has a DLC, "Encounters"; and - lately - a sequel. So the game is popular.

One thing I notice after playing for awhile, both in getting-gud and getting more upgrades, is that I'll be getting through higher sectors so playing... longer. Runs through earlier sectors get a bit same-ey.

There's an artifact which allows to skip that first sector. This effectively makes a game a bit more difficult on account, although the first scene in sector-two will give you more fuel, you won't start with any other loot you might have got back there. A lot of artifacts have a give-and-take thing going on.

The experience changes with the Encounters DLC. The universe feels more crowded, at least the midsectors do, as you meet more characters with their own little sidequests. Kind of like how Starflight 2 presented a different experience than the lonely Starflight.

Is E1+E a better gaming experience than E1 alone...? If it unbalances the game, then it's a pay-to-win scam and we hate those. If it introduces lore you want for this game, it's a Zaeed scam. I can report at least that Encounters does not do this to us.

Still - I'm going with, "not at first". At first, you'll be going through the sectors, learning the lore, finding the new perils in the original game. But: as you keep going through sectors 1-4 over and over again, or maybe just 2-4: the mainline gets kind of boring. The Encounters DLC gives reasons to play through those sectors again; you might be doing something new this time.

Also this DLC is cheap now.

Get the Interceptor into Sector 7 and then put Encounters into the play, is my advice.

Gravitational-wave news

Over the past few days a series of articles have come out about gravitational waves with, perhaps, some way to resolve Hubble Tension. The Baghistan used to post about that tension quite a lot but, we've given up, since it didn't look as if our current instruments and basic constraints were up for it. By extension it's difficult to sus out that "Lambda + Cold Dark Matter" thing.

We are now - at last - able to detect the gravitational wave background. Also, the first quasars happened when time itself was going five times slower.

Does any of this help? I don't know. But I get the feeling it will help.

Happy boomer day

Today is the day Murrka's boomers go onto the Internet and tell stories about how big they used to boom, back in the good old days, wearing their XXXL-sized "America Love It Or Leave It" shirts.

Even now some sell and, presumably, buy dead-terrist boom-booms, featuring Bin Laden but also Arafat, Qaddafi, and Saddam. The Reagan Years! Nothing a boomer likes as much as 1980s nostalgia. Excepting the fun electoric music with the staccato fake English accents; they'll be singing sweet home Alabama instead. Maybe Kid Rock; you know, to relate.

Booming up your 43 year old daughters is all part of the experience. Freedom, freedom, freedom. (Oy.)

Then, hopefully, they get to the terlit fast enough to do a boom boom there; and wonder how come their kids aren't calling them as much anymore.

A sanguine affair

One countersemitic argument is that Judaism is blood-obsessed. The Torah differs - and not just the website.

In olden times was wedged a crack between Deuteronomy and most of the Prophets; against Ezekiel and the Priests. The Holiness passages, I guess, would be some later attempt to bridge this chasma.

Rabbinic Judaism effectively downplays the Torah as we have it. This opens up space for text as was dissonant with the Temple (early Jeremiah) and/or exists without one (Psalm 137, perhaps late Jeremiah). Certainly anything in the Tanakh as came from the north could be used, where they rejected or at least opposed their own temples (the Elijah-Elisha cycle, Asaph's psalms, Hosea).

By contrast Christianity accepts the Priests, to the point Luke has Mary as a child of the then-incomplete Temple. Cerinthus perhaps had argued that Jesus was the Temple. In our orthodoxy, even for Nestorius, we don't say this; we say Mary became the true Temple - better, the Tabernacle - and her womb the Ark, in which God Himself took up lodging. [UPDATE 9/4: No, Scott Hahn was not making this up. Read Hippolytus.] A Skrbina still might accuse Christians of inheriting barbarism, but we actual Christians assert we know better.

As usual I seem to be coming across the mutual incompatibility of rabbinic and Christian claims about the Scriptures... but not, necessarily, the superiority of one over the other.

Where Christ used Psalm 110, and where he didn't

I'm on chapter 12 now. I got a bit sidetracked on account of today being cloudy, occasionally rainy, Sunday, and hot. So couldn't leave the house, so ended up napping 10 AM - 12:30 PM.

On Pitre's assumption that Mark is Peter's memoir (which assumption I share) the Christian exegesis of Psalm 110 is mooted. I remember this from [pseudo-]Barnabas. Also from Anon To The Hebrews which Pitre concedes is nonPauline so might be late, perhaps even Barnabas-contemporary; in fact Tertullian ascribed Hebrews to exactly Barnabas (being unaware of the other one).

The orthodox Christian reading of Psalm 110 (and of Melchizedek) is that - having accepted this Psalm - it proves the existence of a Messiah who is not the son of David, or at least not only that. Christians in the Hebrews / Barnabas generation, which was likely post-9-Av, were fond of this one.

My concern, against Pitre, is that Barnabas was aware of a Jesus biography. Might have been oral; might have been written - I don't know. Mark's gospel is possible; that Christ shall be seen at God's right hand is a Psalm 110 flourish which Pitre #11 sets in Mark 14:55-64.

What is not possible, for Barnabas, nor for that matter for Hebrews, is that Jesus cited this Psalm for his own Christology. Barnabas like Hebrews and like Mark himself nowhere ascribed this particular reading of the Psalm to Christ. These three were all aware that Christ had come to Earth, done deeds, and said sayings; Mark wrote a whole book about all that. They were also all aware of Psalm 110's relevance. Why not this bit of Christology, a tafsir bi'l-masihi if you will?

Cerinthus objected to higher Christologies on adoptionist terms, hence why his sect held to Mark to the other evangelists' exclusion. But even Cerinthus was stuck with Mark's pronouncements of some part of Christ's divinity. If Cerinthus had been aware of (say) Barnabas it is unlikely he'd have objected.

Mark may or may not have been aware of Barnabas, or of Hebrews. I find plausible Mark agreed with that exegesis of Psalm 110 now seen Mt 22:41-6/Lk 20:41-4. But I find equally plausible that nobody was aware that Christ himself had cited the argument. Until Matthew stuck it there.

Pitre's book is full of stuff like this, on assumption of Matthew as an eyewitness (if secondary to Peter); to bolster the highest Christology. Pitre does this even where he doesn't need to. By doing this, Pitre is undercutting his own credibility and, thereby, the credibility of the Gospel. I find this to be unnecessary and, honestly, tragic.

Parallel lives

My post earlier won't offer much news to regular readers here; I've been on the Evan Powell case for some decades now. I am thoroughly convinced of the external and internal evidence that "Mark" presents the defence of Peter to a then-skeptical Christian community and that no reason exists to doubt that some man called Mark (maybe "Johanan Marcus") assembled this defence.

Whether or not Marcus Johanan had this from Peter himself or from his posthumous defenders against (principally) the Johannines, isn't my concern. I'm concerned now with the parallel accounts of Mark in Papias, with those of Matthew in Papias. Frankly Matthew is concerning, here.

Pitre - who I stress was writing for the Imprimatur - kicks a long punt in his seventh chapter, The Dating of the Gospels. This handles the Synoptic Problem. Pitre throws up his hands except to dismiss "Q", the missing source between Luke and Matthew, with Mark being the nonmissing source. Pitre considers Goodacre (and Farrer) to have convinced him - but of what, is difficult to sus out. I am guessing, at least that Luke used Matthew and Mark.

In an earlier chapter, Pitre flags the Gospel of Matthew's note that Matthew-the-disciple was a tax-collector. Matthew would, then, be literate. Elsewhere Pitre considers that Zebedee the father of James and John was not just a fisherman but someone more like "Joe The Plumber", one who hired a fleet, so with his sons as apprentices and, presumably, provided with primary education. (Why hire an accountant like Matthew over there if your kids will do it after school.)

The point to all this: Pitre offers a theory that Matthew learnt from Christ Himself and wrote stuff down, before - one assumes - Mark came into the scene after the AD 30s and, also, learnt from Peter writing Peter's stuff down. Matthew wasn't there during the various scenes where Peter (and usually James and John) were talking to Jesus in private; so Matthew got that information from Peter directly.

The first problem with that theory is the critical finding which the Imprimatur cannot allow: that our Mark and Matthew each develop a source which is basically just Mark. We'd have to assume that urMark is Peter's dictation. Papias does not allow this; Papias says that Mark took this dictation.

Papias also insists that Matthew had taken his notes in Hebrew. Sure: this is northern Judaea we're (mostly) talking about; "Hebrews" there and then intermingled a lot of Aramaic. Still. None of this Semitica is Greek, and "Matthew" as we have it is a Greek gospel.

By contrast with Papias' account of Mark, which as a work done for Peter's sake fits that text; Papias' account of Matthew looks nothing like what we have of Matthew, which is at base just Mark in Greek with bonus (Greek) content, if anything in better Greek.

I do not believe that Pitre can have it both ways. I do not think that Pitre can tout the Patristic support for Mark whilst dismissing the same support against Matthew.

A stronger case for Mark

Last Saturday I drove up to Saint Malo / Saint Catherine way up the hills north of Allenspark. This morning I went back up there, with my hat this time. I'd learnt my lesson, that tree canopy shifts and doesn't protect the scalp. Anyway. This time I bought a book, Brant Pitre's The Case For Jesus. I've read seven chapters, with a less-fried head.

I am unsure how far Pitre's apologetic tract counts as a work of scholarship. The giftshop charged me five dollars. Five dollars is what the Farooq masjid in west Houston had charged for Ahmad Salamah's book on Sunni and Shia - in 2003 or '4. Also Pitre's Case bears Imprimatur - which, I've learnt, is real episcopal jargon, that the bishops approve it (another bishop, the irrepressible Robert Barron, gets the afterword). I get the impression that the Church like the Saudis print stuff like this at cost and unload it in giftshops.

Despite his restrictions, Pitre has adequately presented The Case For Saint Mark As Evangelist. If we ignore this book's commentary on Matthew, Luke, and John - oh, we'll get to them, believe that - it sets out some basic rules from which we can decide between an anonymous book and a nonanomymous book, and therefrom nonanomymous and pseudonymous. Pitre might even have undersold Mark.

Pitre's example is To The Hebrews, and his first point-of-departure is the manuscript tradition. Now, the MSS record for Mark (at least) is famously as poor as that for Thomas, until the third century AD. Mark's first MS attestation is in scraps before it gets regularly bound into multigospel codices and lections. But wherever we see a header for Marc/k-an text, the header is always "The Gospel kata Mark" or just plain kata Markon. Similar for Latin, and for Sahidic ("Coptic", for Pitre) and the two Aramaics when we get them. Nobody, except the harmonists and maybe Luke, quotes from Mark without saying "this is from Mark".

By contrast, To The Hebrews shows up in MSS anonymously, sometimes even as "anonymous"; sometimes ascribed to Paul (as the later Patristics) and sometimes to Timothy (rare in Patristics!). [OH RIGHT 7/8: Plus to Barnabas, for Tertullian and maybe D/06; but I fully understand if Pitre doesn't want to talk about those neanderthals.]

Pitre argues that even if the Markan MSS are third-fourth century, at least some MSS should stick asterisks by the Markos/Marcus attribution. Nobody does. Every mufassir upon Mark since Irenaeus has assumed Papias and attaches Papias' thoughts on the Markan gospel, to that text which we now consider as the Markan text.

Papias' account of Mark is devoid of context, coming to Eusebius and to us through the filters of Irenaeus and (likely) Pierius. Pitre, I would complain to him, should have noted that we cannot buy a book of Papias like we can of, say, Eusebius - who himself had not commissioned a copy of Papias. This complaint is not however fatal to Pitre.

The reason for that is that Papias' description of Mark, as the amanuensis of Shim'on Mar Kepha, fits Mark's text well. Pitre doesn't say it, but Evan Powell will: Mark admits Peter's failings to put the best possible light upon them. Powell found that in comparison against John 1-20, Mark's Gospel becomes Peter's apologia. Powell went on to retach "John 21" for Mark's conclusion.

I don't know how far Pitre could follow Powell, in a book with episcopal Imprimatur. Pitre takes our John 21 at its word that the "beloved disciple" wrote it. Of interest is that Powell argued that John 1-20 was authentic to John the disciple-then-apostle; although, again, I'm not getting into that here.