for some reason ive been thinking a lot about pre-christian traditions and folklore and shit, ever since i finally read that copy of the mabinogion i had on my bookshelf probably for decades. i go back and forth between how sincere my interest in this shit is, and like even i don’t know if im just irl shitposting when i talk about how i want to become a druid. idk.
anyway this article is kind of interesting i guess but the last paragraph really rubs me the wrong way.
i know it’s just a short article and they don’t have time to get into all this business, but the arbitrary distinctions between what counts as ‘religious’ or not, and what counts as ‘pagan’ or not are really weird to me, because those seem to be such nebulous categories anyway. i suppose the ultimate point is that the pre-christian traditions that remain were allowed to remain because the church saw them as non-religious, whereas anything that they did perceive to be a religious practice was eliminated?
which seems to be the wall everyone always runs into when talking about this stuff. when it comes to britain it seems to always come down to the best, oldest knowledge anyone has of pre-christian traditions being from bede the venerable, who people seem to generally agree was not the best source for that sort of stuff but no one has anything better to recommend other than really circumstantial archaeological evidence. then for later stuff, it can very easily be determined that most of the like post 17th century (ish) stuff you read about supposedly ‘ancient’ traditions was mainly just made up by revivalists, this happens for basically anything considered ‘pagan’ or ‘wiccan’ or what have you to the extent that whatever traditions that take those names today should basically be seen as modern new religions rather than anything with a direct connection to pre-christian practices. which is fine! it’s great actually.
but it still just sends these weird jolts of curiosity and wonder and sometimes frustration when i think about the comparatively massive textual record of traditions and practices in china from roughly the same time period. even though that is itself a really spotty and inconsistent textual record. but then you look at most of europe and realize the church really just like erased centuries of history. i dont want to be too edgy about it but i do sometimes feel like the reason europeans were historically so keen on doing genocides in their colonies was because in some way they knew it had happened to them in the past and basically decided that was fine. we live in a weird world!
is there a useful distinction between religious and non-religious rituals? i’ve always wanted to make this distinction but can’t support it myself with anything I can think of. i’m also unsure about what pagan actually describes. it’s specifically “rural” religions in europe that were not Christianity, right? but it seems like it gets used to mean one specific religion in some cases, which doesn’t square with its generic meaning as I understand it.
yeah this is the question, isn’t it? thinking about how the word ‘religion’ is used is one of those things that just drives me crazy, because to me it is a label that really can’t mean anything unless you provide a more precise definition of how you are using it. but it just seems like everyone in the world acts like it is as concrete and universally agreed upon concept as, like, i don’t know, “tree,” or “soup.” as in, there’s thousands of different kinds of trees and soups that don’t necessarily have that much in common with one another, and yet if you put a picture of them and ask someone to identify it i would imagine most people would agree.
like, ‘is x a religion’ is basically the ‘is x a sandwich’ game on steroids. the second you get into it you start having a discussion about the nomenclature itself, and the definition of ‘religion’ often feels even more arbitrary than the definition of sandwich.
don’t really have the mental inventory to back this up with concrete details, but “imo” the word “religion” came into popular use primarily as a way to identify things that were like christianity and yet weren’t christianity, so even from there you are getting onto pretty shaky ground.
i used to TA for an intro to buddhism class that had this whole unit on unpacking the idea of religion and talking through buddhism in relation to two academic definitions of ‘religion’
clifford geertz:
and emile durkheim
to me either one of these seems like pretty useful and functional, but students would always end up getting hung up on words like “men” and “church” that, to me, are obviously meant to be understood very generally, but would lead to the same kind of grumbling about presumed definitions that the assignment was meant to inspire, but instead of for ‘religion’ it would be about what is a man, or what is a church, etc. either that or they would just basically dismiss both definitions and like, look up ‘religion’ in a dictionary and find something that matched their own personal concept of it, usually relating to ‘belief in a higher power and an afterlife’ and decide that geertz and durkheim didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. the confidence people have in their own presumptions is so fascinating to me! it’s so persuasive! i would always end up being convinced that they were basically right anyway, somehow, even though i knew they were wrong.
anyway imo paganism is basically the same thing. like, my understanding is today it refers to a fairly uniform syncretized tradition ‘inspired’ by the evidence of older practices that happens to still exist. the problem is that modern syncretic version can too easily be projeced into the past, leading to presumptions about some kind of pan-european non-christian religious system that existed in some uniform way throughout the continent. when, as far as i can tell, the reality is (unsurprisingly, to me) a million different local traditions with varying degrees of systematization connected to one another only by really tenuous linguistic evidence (e.g. deities whose names seem to share common indo-european roots)
also, my pet issue with this stuff is how video games like Civilization have permanently rotted peoples brains into thinking human culture advances on a linear path of ‘progress’ from one level to the next. and on top of that the kind of contemporary pop culture thing where deities and mythological figures are conceived of as actually existing singular entities that share some kind of celestial realm but have, like, ethnically differentiated spheres of influence. i mean like thor hanging out on a cloud with zeus and being like ‘you smite the vikings , i’ll kill the shit out of all the greeks… yeah…’ idk. that stuff’s cool too i guess.
“Pagan” to the people who invested a lot of meaning in it (i.e., Christians for whom it was a derogatory term and an excuse for colonialism) certainly means “non-monotheistic”. How it came to mostly mean “pre-Christian northern Europe” in modern usage is mysterious to me.
The Romans fucked around a lot with various Celtic peoples
you read a spectator piece you get what you deserve 
When cracks form in the concrete, they preferentially travel to the lime clasts, which have a higher surface area than other particles in the matrix. When water gets into the crack, it reacts with the lime to form a solution rich in calcium that dries and hardens as calcium carbonate, gluing the crack back together and preventing it from spreading further.
COOL!!!
love this
yeah the bit about like, to one ear you’re speaking nonsense words in your poor person tongue, but to another ear you’re citing beautiful spiritual texts is gonna be a non videogame thing i think about a lot
REASON I HATE VICE #347: HI FI RUSH ARTICLE
Apologies for being a negatron but taking a moment to complain about this article. TLDR; Vice’s idea of a scrappy underdog: Bethesda-produced super-high-polish product.
“No drawn-out preview cycle. Virtually zero maketing. Just a cool-looking game, executed well, with word of mouth doing the rest.”
Virtually zero marketing? Videos covering the games with 200k+ views on both IGN and Edge and a spot on the Bethesda/XBOX Developer Direct showcase couldn’t have hurt…
Even if this is a smaller marketing campaign than others from huge publishers, this kind of platform isn’t available to 99% of developers.
“Hi-fi Rush is a peek into what a more sustainable game industry can look like if bigger publishers embraced smaller, one-and-done games… or if they hadn’t helped kill them in the first place.”
Framing the alternative to AAA as “mid-sized” games polished way beyond the capabilities of most people - awful. It’s the embrace of poptimism by journos almost everywhere (including “alternative”-branded sites like Vice) that seems to me to be contributing to the limited success of true underdogs…
Vice and any traditional media absolutely don’t carry enough water to contribute to the limited success of true underdogs
Anyway here’s my steam capsule review of Yogurt Commercial, a brilliant and preposterous game that could have benefited from some kind of coverage to find modest success
Brilliant, funny groundhog day game which sees you play a yoghurt commercial actor tasked with creating yoghurt commercials. The game starts out as very limited: on your first day your task is to walk to work, turn on a camera, and eat some yogurt. But as the yoghurt company grows dissatisfied with results, their requests become increasingly outlandish. Can you get the mayor to eat the yogurt on camera? Can you shoot a commercial where you set the table on fire? The game quickly overwhelms the player with revelations of hidden possibilities, opening up into a surprising, anarchic sandbox.
I guess that’s a good point yeah. For a solo lesser-known dev who’s game has 51 steam reviews, can’t help thinking throwing some clicks their way would make some financial difference, or at least put some eyes on something worth looking at? What is the point of a game site? (I fear the answer to the last question might be depressing).
It’s bad all around. At one point mainstream games press took care to carve out time for small games, knowing they didn’t drive traffic. But not only have we managed to prove over and over that mainstream press hasn’t been able to drive sales beyond a few dozen, those sites are so hollowed out and on the edge that they have often given up an indie beat or morphed it into a ‘commercial indie’ beat.
I guess care about (overestimate?) game sites because they were a big influence on me. Pre-Gamer Network-purchase Rock Paper Shotgun in particular. They covered all sizes, but gave small and large equal weight. (And the site was profitable). I got a PC because of Jim Rossignol’s article on STALKER - and his description of the game as “a world that feels as if it is going on without you” has stuck with me. Games by increpare and thecatamites, which challenged my idea of what a game should be, were things I downloaded because RPS writers urged me to. They advocated, and had criterion for value, instead of passing on banalities “I had fun”, “if you like X you might like this”, “this gave me comfort”.
It’s terrible, high-middlebrow criticism has bottomed out and been replaced by 4-hour-long video essays, which really means I don’t have access to it anymore. The work people on this site did to build criticism in the late 2000’s had a huge impact on me and I feel lucky I got it when I could.
don’t worry, soon chatgpt will eliminate all these jobs in total! and in return we will gain, uhhhh, well, I’m sure it’ll be something for someone, somewhere!