This article has been up for a long time, as a matter of fact, I am not even sure that Godchecker is even still being updated. But, for what it is, its pretty much feature complete. Today, I’d just like to call a few new folks attention to the article on the numbers important in mythology around the world, highlighting such favorites as Zero. Zilch. Nothing. Nada. Is there a God of Nothing? Or could this be the sign of the Cosmic Egg?
Half. This is the number of HAIURI, the half-there God of the Xhosa people in South Africa.
One. This is mostly for mono Gods such as YAHWEH or ALLAH. As in: “I am the only one and don’t you forget it!”
Two. Lots of twins, dynamic duos like the Mayan HERO TWINS, and good/evil opposites such as AHURA-MAZDA vs AHRIMAN. In Rome, JANUS has two heads to look backwards at the past and forwards into the new month of January.
Three. A certain Australian tribe only ever learned to count up to three. Anything after that is simply ‘many’. Now threes are many. There are triplets, triads and triple alliances. All FATES, GRACES, NORNS and Destiny Spinners come in threes. Even a certain mono God named JEHOVAH has jumped onto the bandwagon, claiming to be the Three-in-One. The swinging sixty. If you remember the sixties, you probably weren’t there.
Seventy-two. This is a number favoured by one of the Jade Deities of China and is reached by a system of multiplying the value of lesser deities which is quite beyond our comprehension. Eighty-six. The ORION Pregnancy Testing Kit. A carving on a mammoth tusk depicting Orion as seen 32,500 years ago. It contains 86 mysterious marks which seem to correspond to the days Betelgeuse is visible from Earth. Pay attention: 365 days of the year minus 86 equals the average gestation period of a human baby.
Ninety-Nine Names of ALLAH. Another mono God who wished to up his numerical stakes.
And, of Course…
Forty-two is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. At least in Magrathean mythology. According to comedic luminaries such as Douglas Adams and John Cleese, Forty-Two is the funniest number in the Universe. It is also the mystic number which obsessed Lewis Carroll when he was writing about Alice and Boojums.
So, I figured I would do something constructive and report a persistent threat to your persistent world, because he is really grinding my nerves with this crap. At any rate, there is some dude or group thereof who are trying to steal people’s information by impersonating Blizzard Entertainment Support staff. Most of you are already probably fully aware of this type of foolishness, but just in case, if you see an e-mail that looks like this
I’m not trying to be combative, but I really, really want to try a real mystery game or something where the game isn’t so combat driven. I just lack the talent for it, I think. Or maybe I am not attentive enough. Or maybe it’s the players thinking of stuff I don’t. Whatever. I’ll just have to draw it from every angle or something. I’ve done crazier stuff. That will have to be in the summer. Just rolling dice to kill Orcs is just bumming me out. Maybe a detective game that can be played as a campaign.
So is this a microblog?
So, my cat Vivian and I were talking about how Facebook, by becoming the Wal-Mart of the digital communications media(A convenient, one stop shop for simplistic knockoffs of useful applications and games while simultaneously laying bare one’s own taste in just about everything by encouraging you to just put it out in public. Like in a shopping cart.) had in effect created a place where role playing a character entirely different from yourself is not only possible but probably a pretty responsible way to go. We were trying to decide if we could find a positive side of this media that matters to us, when with the most strikingly obvious observation I was struck. Facebook looks just like a character sheet. Facebook, at the end of the day, doesn’t actually require you to have a real name. Facebook has applications where one competes for coins, points, or privileges in certain groups of applications made by the same developer(Classes, professions, skills, experience, whatever). Facebook has applications that take a great deal of time to figure out, that the change shape of the user interface in agreed ways for the groups that install them(RP/RL analogue? Religion.) Facebook has applications simply to show your rank in a certain field compared to your friends(Loot/RP Rewards). I’m really not sure at all where to go with this now. Vivian blew my mind.
