Capability

Way With Worlds: Creating Religion Is Hard

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Church Ruins

[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum, MuseHack, and Ongoing Worlds]

So let’s talk about creating and writing religions in your world. You may now start panicking.

Creating religions is challenging,as we all know. That sense of challenge, the burden, the awareness of all the effort it takes can bring us down in our world building efforts. Chances are even mention this is giving you flashbacks.

So before we explore writing religions and creating religions, I want to cover the challenges we world builders face – and discuss overcoming them. Will I cover all possible cases? No theres only so much I can do or remember, swear to . . .

. . . er anyway, lets’ go on and look a some of the challenges facing writing religion and common traps.

But First . . .

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Geek As Citizen: Science Awareness

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Scientist Scope Technology Science

Neil deGrasse Tyson gives me hope. And not just that a relatively nerdy guy can become an intellectual sex symbol (according CERTAIN people in my twitter feed). It’s that we can make paying attention and knowing science cool again. Because we need to, and the remade Cosmos is a great start.

It seems as of late science isn’t cool.

  • Of course there’s climate change, where apparently 97% of scientists agreeing about it leaves room for controversy, especially if fat donations and speaking gigs can be wedged into that room.
  • There’s the disgusting anti-vaccination crusade that means we get measles back to kill our kids. There’s a nice story of leaving the anti-vaxx movement here or you can just stew in anger over the body count site whose URL mocks Jenny Mc Carthy.
  • Abstinence only education doesn’t work, though people still seem to think talking about it will convince people it does. Having been a teenager and remembering it, and looking at the numbers, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t.

We probably need to clone Neil deGrasse Tyson (Ok, you folks on Twitter, calm down, you know who you are). But baring the possibility of using dark technology to create an Army of Tysons* it’s up to us to enhance science awareness.

It’d kind of be par for the course.

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ITIL Certification And You

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Direction Sign

Well, I’m pleased to say I have my ITIL Certification – well, the foundation. Hold your applause while you go surf the web to find out what the hell I’m actually talking about.

Now as everyone knows, I’m big on certifications. They show skills, they force you to study, they look good on a resume because they show commitment and knowledge. I can say in my experience that having those extra letters after my name has been great for my career (and takes a lot of effort).

When I first started looking into the ITIL at my manager’s request, I wasn’t sure what it was. Later, I found it was extremely useful, very educational, and something I wish I’d know about earlier. I wanted to share my experiences because this might be something for you.

OK, look, stop surfing, I’m going to explain it.

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