MTV's "Fear" is getting to be disappointing. The first episode was incredible, delivering a level of creepiness and tension that Blair Witch Project didn't achieve. The second had a slightly different format, and wasn't quite as scary but certainly had its moments. Both were fascinating explorations of human psychology, fear of the unknown, and the power of suggestion... and more.

But the third episode (which we waited months to see) resorted to cheesy gimmicks and didn't even have a thin pretense of paranormal investigation. Holding a tarantula for 2 minutes is not a supernatural experience, nor is pulling a lever that supposedly dumps cockroaches on your head. And I'm sorry, but asking someone to climb a 350-foot platform, put a noose around their neck and then shove off a concrete block attached to the other end of the rope, is just sick. I was extremely annoyed that they summarily disqualified the guy. It's supposed to be Fear, not Stupidity.

Fourth episode was slightly better, but made one wish they'd choose their contestants with a little more care. Holly from Hollywood was about as annoying a stereotypical ditzy blonde as they come, and seemed completely insincere for a good portion of the show. On the other hand, there was one particular room which scared the living crud out of every person who had to deal with it... not because of anything the show's creators did. That room saved the episode from its own cheesiness, and reminded me of that creepy feeling I got when I first read Lord of the Rings and the party was travelling through the dark spaces of Moria.

The key is to get the imagination fired up. Planting bugs and rats, or asking people to do something that would normally be hazardous to their own lives, doesn't do that.

The D&D campaign continues. Unfortunately between being a bit sick, and one of our major servers hanging up completely and needing to be cold booted, I missed out on a significant amount of the session. Still, it's becoming apparent how such a motley team of caravan escorts is going to gain a heroic reputation.

My GemStone cleric is progressing nicely. Having just mastered "something-or-other", as well as learned to raise the dead, I expected to be temporarily short of goals... but nope. Looking forward to Bravery, Bind and Heroism in the short term, and Transference and Spirit Guide in the longer term. Not to mention the gradual exposition of my character's beliefs and motives to the unsuspecting masses. Bwahahaha.

Partially thanks to Bubba, partially to one of the shemsu who's won awards doing it... I'm back into fantasy miniatures again. For those not familiar with it, they're pewter, plastic or lead (the old ones), at a scale of about 28mm=6 foot (or in some cases, 15mm or 10mm!). We're talking about brushes with two or three hairs in them here.

Check out some of these contest entries, especially the bovine battlesuit and the tattooed skunk-haired warrior chick. (Normally I think topless or nude miniatures just look goofy at best, but I see now that it's all in the paint job.)

Anyway. Bought about 9 minis from Discount Hobby: a slow and poorly laid out site, but they have photos of everything they offer -- and they have a lot to offer. One of the two thieves I picked should work to represent Livia in the D&D campaign, there's a half-elf sorceress with a polearm that's perfect for my GS3 sorc, one of the clerics might be close enough to stand in for my GS3 cleric... and the rest were just cool looking enough to spring for. I'd have picked out many more, but I'll also need brushes, paint, etc. Probably will get craft store paints since they cost half as much as those from a game shop.

Finished The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe. It's about 95% dry toast and 5% tasty jam. I'm glad I read it for the insight into combat, but it wasn't entertaining... it literally put me to sleep a few times. Contrast that with the Stephen King novel (Hearts in Atlantis) I just started last night and am already devouring. Nothing particularly exciting is happening and the subject matter doesn't really seem that interesting to me... but the writing itself is entirely compelling. Of course, King being King, I'm sure something incredibly twisted and bizarre is going to worm its way into the plot soon enough. Heh.

Last weekend I bought a mouse and a CD-ROM drive. You'd think that of the two, the mouse would be easier to install...

I'd been using the very first version of the Logitech Trackman Marble -- with no scroll wheel or extra buttons, very comfortable to the hand but awkward for action games. Against my instincts, I bought a Kensington Optical Mouse-In-A-Box, because it was a little cheaper than similar offerings from Logitech and Microsoft. Optical, 5 buttons, scroll wheel. Unfortunately the drivers recognized it as a 2-button, no wheel mouse; I had to reboot in safe mode to uninstall the drivers; and the setup.exe for the newer driver version refused to run at all. So after much struggling and a dozen reboots, I managed to convince the Microsoft Intellimouse driver that the button had at least three buttons and a scroll wheel. I still don't have use of the side buttons (useful for back/forward when browsing). Should have gone for Logitech.

On the other hand, the CD-ROM drive (52x to replace a 12x with a very high error rate) was a snap. Unscrew and unplug the old drive, put the new one in its place, don't even worry about drivers or anything. The downside? It's about as loud as the house's furnace starting up, or a small jet engine. Any game that constantly accesses the CD (such as Worms Armageddon) is drowned out by the drive noise. I'm going to have to put the computer under the table and probably cover it up with the cardboard box the case came in. Lovely.

Found a couple of interesting things at the NWU Library WWII poster archive (you don't want to know where I got the link). The left one is my current desktop wallpaper at work. At home, I'm using the classic "All Your Base" image. Heh.

It's fascinating how our culture has changed since then. No way would we accept some of that propaganda now; the closest we came to it during Desert Storm were some lame jokes, goofy T-shirts and sending homemade cookies to our troops overseas. Of course Desert Storm didn't compare to WWII for sheer scale, and rather than straining our resources and forcing us to conserve, it probably was a boon to the economy.

And now that whole style of art and illustration is just a novelty. Hmm.

The "people die, but books never die" quote is an ancient sentiment... which has never died. Heh. There are at least two ancient Egyptian (Middle Kingdom) poems on that subject that I know of, and I'd be surprised if there weren't many more.

More oddities reported by the search engine I use for this site. The top search for last week was "pictures of people who look suicidal." As far as I can tell, these are all searches performed by people who are already at my site, not from a general engine. Hummm.

I could whine about my lack of enthusiasm for anything lately, but I won't. Instead, I'll mention that within the last week Poco woke up from his hibernation and has been torturing the cats with his lizard antics. He's still not as active as usual, but then the temperature has jumped all over the place, from "throw away your coat" a couple days ago to snowing last night.

Amber has finally started chasing the laser pointer up and down the hall. She's not as eager to catch it as Key, but when she charges, better not get in the way. She's like a shaggy, charging, enraged wildebeest, but a little smaller.

Key's hook-like claws get caught in everything... including Amber's thick fur. Neither cat is very pleased when that happens. Twice now, we've seen Amber dragging Key around while both wail and hiss and frantically try to disengage.

The geckos (still at work and safely out of cat range) are still the same as ever: Kalila inquisitive, Josephine sulky. Kalila was rubbing her face on the edge of her log this morning, which struck me as really odd until I realized she was shedding. I wonder what it's like to shed -- if it's itchy and horrible, or if it's a big relief, or if it's kind of morbidly fascinating like peeling off that outer layer of skin after a bad sunburn.

My sloppy handwriting looks much, much better with a medium calligraphy nib. It becomes a nifty juxtaposition of blocky and spiky, instead of just messy and lopsided. Something about that wide nib forces me to keep the proportions of the letters more or less regular. I should pick up more calligraphy fountain pens just for regular note taking. :)

Random IM conversation:

The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe gets off to a slow start, but I'm starting to get to the good stuff I think. Thrusts vs. draw cuts, pommel strikes, and so on. Thrusts are far more deadly to an unarmored foe, and don't leave you as open, but are less natural for the novice swordsman than the round movement of a slash. This is the kind of stuff I'd like to see in HJ if I can.

I don't remember what I was surfing or searching for, but I accidentally ran into findagrave.com. Hmmm. I toyed with the idea of filling in some info on St. Charles' Oak Grove Cemetary, but to get the kind of detailed information the site lists might prove difficult.

Also happened upon gravestonestudies.org, which has a neat little shop with calendars, books, t-shirts, etc. (and unfortunately has a manual order form, doesn't accept credit cards, and I haven't heard back from them yet). And just today, the featured site at blogger.com was Cold Marble (which reminded me to mention the other two links).

DNIF. No obligations this weekend, so I'm going to sleep a lot and play GemStone.

Steph wants to get her scanner working, or get a working scanner. Then I'll be able to post the nifty portrait of Livia (my D&D character) she sketched last weekend... and ask her to do one of a certain gruff, muttering cleric and a certain loopy sorceress, back to back. Steph's sketches make me wish I could draw more than a lopsided stick figure myself.

And, yes, I admit I thought about starting up yet another character. One that kicks a lot of butt, advances fast, and doesn't have to worry about running out of mana. But I haven't done it yet. I'm going to try to concentrate on what I have and enjoy those to the fullest. Really I am.

Woke up this morning,
got myself a...
um, no.

It felt like somebody turned up the gravity this morning... maybe 2G for most of the body and 7 around the eyelids. I could just not get awake and moving until early afternoon or so. I still feel tired and may try and catch another nap this afternoon.

Watched Run Lola Run for the second time (Tivo grabbed it). The roommates haven't seen it yet, so I guess all I'll say for now is that somebody in Germany is very clever and not afraid of throwing a few punches at the audience. Whoot.

Lots of thoughtful thoughts in today's surf material. If you play online games then this is probably someone you know.

Bwain, I know what you mean about those walls. I did the same from around 12-17, because I was tired of being hit by every piece of excrement that the monkeys at school would fling. Good fences make good neighbors, and all that... well, it didn't work of course. Those walls became a fortress I felt I had to defend, and I was paranoid of everyone who approached me. I hate to think of the people I brushed off who really were honestly trying to be friendly, not to humiliate me as I assumed. Who knows, I might not be single today if I'd treated some of them better.

Brian, ask yourself this: is the worst possible outcome any worse for you, emotionally, than the fear you have about it? Personally, I've found that no matter the outcome, I usually feel so much better after getting things off my chest, that actual rejection is insignificant beside that. The fear of rejection is so much more draining that actual rejection.

About this time of year 13 years ago, I sent a Valentine's Day candy-gram to a very sweet girl I went to school with and had a major crush on, who also happened to be a decent friend. In it I said some silly and embarrassing but honest things, and as soon as it left my hands I started shaking. I was in a real state until I saw her next on the fateful day. She said something diplomatic about being glad she had such good friends, and that was that. And it was such an amazing relief!

I even sent a similar email to Steph back before I moved up here, and it's pretty fricking embarrassing now, let me tell you. But I'm glad I did, 'cause now I can look back on past ninny-hood and cringe, instead of still being a ninny today. :)

Now admittedly, I wasn't brave enough to tell my parents I had become Kemetic Orthodox until after my sister told them she was gay. So I sent them a big long rambling email... and as soon as I got the reply I immediately felt much better, before even reading it to see what they thought. (And while I don't think they understand my religion, my need for it, or where theirs failed me -- they accept, and they don't treat me any differently now than they did beforehand... and that's what matters.)

(And, heh. Here I am writing all this while IM'ing Brian and not mentioning that I'm writing this... we're talking about the game industry and TV shows. Journals and letters really are my most comfortable medium...)

My thought on it is this. Someone who really cares about you will not reject you outright. They may have a difficult time, requiring them to adjust their own thoughts and beliefs to fit the facts. Or they may let you down easy, tell you they don't really approve, but still let you know that things are okay.

The worst possible case is the least likely -- and if they do turn completely against you, while it may be hard to bear, you'll know what you're dealing with and won't hurt yourself with worry anymore. It may still be easier overall to be totally rejected than to be afraid it will happen.

And the moment very few of you have been waiting for... the gaming update. Check Mike's journal for details on the D&D campaign. My observation is that the party is not really coordinating like a team quite yet; we shouldn't have gotten into a situation where our wizard and our human rogue were in the front line getting beaten up (and blocking the Halflings' shots) while the paladin and warrior were off to one side. The total absence of trust between some of our characters makes a little fumbling not inappropriate, and we came out okay anyway (mostly thanks to the wizard and clerics, I thought).

Since my last bit of babbling about GemStone, I've done a 180. I'm not playing an Empath anymore, and I did indeed start up a sorcerer just as I said I wasn't going to do.

I could go on about my reasons for not enjoying the Empath profession as I used to, but I don't want to sound whiny. I've changed, the social structure of the game has changed, the ratio of Empaths to non-Empaths has changed, and the pace of healing has changed. This is not inherently wrong, it's just not the situation I was comfortable with. Now that I've experienced it a little bit, Eillie has stopped nagging me about it anyway. :)

Not sure how the idea struck me, but I thought it'd be fun to play an, unpredictable, cute, dangerously crazy lady sorcerer "touched" by Zelia, goddess of madness. And it is! Her personality is an amalgam of Delerium and Shivering Jemmy from Sandman, Mojojojo from Power Puff Girls, Lusiphur from Poison Elves, Dot from Animaniacs, and the sillier sides of some of my friends and myself. With the occasional moment of wittiness, brooding angst, or any other thing I happen to throw out. It's wonderfully liberating. The only restraint is that I can't just pull out a wand and blow somebody's leg off at random when she gets in one of her less friendly moods.

When she started talking about an "orphanage" I was originally thinking it was an asylum that she'd believed was an orphanage... but today an idea hatched. She's the right race and everything, so why not have her be the lost daughter of Eillie who drifted out to sea? She wouldn't know that and nor would anyone else, but it's fun. :) Zelia would have taken an interest in her because that was the event that started pushing Eillie toward the edge...

This character is (or thinks she is) in love with a demon. Whether the demon actually exists, is aware of her, etc. is debatable. Current theory is that he's from her own imagination originally, but Marlu (god of personal power, destruction and demons) is using it to lead her on without her realizing it. Bwahahahaha. And yet the sorceress herself is generally pretty nice to people (in an incoherent way) and thinks Lorminstra and Ronan are peachy keen.

Aaaanyway. I hope this is the end of the shuffling around, starting and stopping of characters for a while. And if it isn't, I'll at least wait a couple of weeks before I babble about the new ones. Heh.

I do too like (some) J-pop (in moderation).

• Let's see now... there's Tank! by the Seat Belts, opening for "Cowboy Bebop". Oh wait, that's not really pop, that's big band.



• Key no Lullaby from "Key the Metal Idol"... not really pop, but Japanese. Actually I like the instrumental stuff from it best.



• How about the opening song from Serial Experiements Lain, by Boa? It's vaguely pop-like, but in English and doesn't have that bouncy Japanese sound to it.



• Toru Takemitsu... uh, not even close to pop.



• Kenichiro Fukui's soundtrack for "Einhander"? Ranges from techno to industrial electronic, but not pop.



• Cruel Angels Thesis from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Yeah, now that's J-pop! There ya go!

I also dig "Hiru no Tsuki" but I don't quite have the same attachment to The Voice that Jeff does.

I don't feel like I've been playing that much GemStone, but I have the side effects of a full-blown game addiction. Tired eyes, messed up digestion, feeling less chipper in the mornings and general fatigue. Perhaps it only takes that one less hour of rest per night to put me over the edge. Or maybe it's just the January-February blahs. Or considering how Steph was feeling, it might be something mild but unpleasant going around. At any rate, I will try to be a good little boy and not stay up too far past my bedtime.

Current state of things: after a couple false starts, the new Empath is off to a good start and quite viable. Healing tips are generally much better now than they were in the "good old days." The Cleric overcame a hurdle, has a great place to hunt now (thanks Jeff!) and is doing well... but is a few levels from Resurrection since I haven't trained him properly from the beginning. I'm not going to start up any Warriors or Rogues or Sorcerers right now and lose my focus altogether.

Heromachine is useful "in reverse" to visualize how a character looks as you put him/her together. Of course this picture of the new Empath doesn't match the text description exactly, but it's a jumping-off point for what I imagine her to look like, which is what influences the all-important RPG question "what to wear?" (Yes, I'm much more concerned with how my characters dress than how I dress myself. Heh.)

Thought for the day: Long John Silver's is not bad.

So we made it through our first D&D session. Since we decided not to split up, there are a whopping 10 people in our party, and Mike deserves credit for the work he's done... not just handling such a large group but converting a 2nd edition campaign to 3rd edition rules.

The downside, at least so far, is that the pacing hasn't allowed a lot of room for RPing. Maybe this will improve in the future as we get acquainted with the game. It's also possible that we're more comfortable RPing online since that's the background we all have in common. I'm thinking my character is pretty dour and cynical for a halfling, but is that because it lets me be as closed-mouthed as I want to? Heh.

Dice are neat things. Normal old spotted 6-siders like everyone is familiar with may be a bit harder to appreciate than the variety of shapes and colors that RPG dice have... but most dice have certain things in common.

The typical die is a regular polyhedron -- meaning every face is the same shape and size. The d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20 are the five Platonic Solids -- it's almost too bad d10s are used as well.

Aside from tetrahedral d4's (where you read the surface that faces down), the opposite faces of any properly made die add up to one more than the number of sides. Look at a d6 for instance; the 1 and 6 are on opposite faces, 2 and 5 are opposite, and 3 and 4 are opposite. That doesn't make the dice any more fair, but seems to be a tradition, a sort of symbolic balancing. I thought it was cool that they applied that to RPG dice as well as plain old d6's. If you find any dice that don't add up in that way, you just might have something rare there.

The "crystal" dice I bought for this D&D campaign are not regular polyhedra, except the D20. The d4 is an elongated rectangular box with pointed ends so that it can only land on one of four faces, and unlike tetrahedral d4's its opposite faces do add up to 5. ;) My favorite are the d6's though -- sleek little shards of probability. "Rolling" these is not unlike throwing the sticks from a senet board. A comfortable sort of feeling, and more fateful than rolling a cube. Or maybe I'm just strange.

Aside from the D&D session I pretty much spent the weekend playing GemStone until late at night, then dreaming about it. And I learned, I think, that I can only do so much combat.

The ka of Eillie is nagging me. ;) (I understand authors when they say their characters demand certain things...) She doesn't like it when she sees Empaths that are inattentive. If someone stumbles into view, falls over, moans and twitches, a real healer would at least look at them to see if they need help! Plus I just miss that style of play, where (once you achieve some basic competency) levels are a fun thing to have and not the driving force behind one's playing time.

I'm not going to actually play that character after all -- she is from a different time and a different Dave. (And might get pounced on by people who want the infamous guide to be updated, or an RP award or GM favor or something.) But I am going to start up a new Empath -- it's the profession I should be playing. And I'm leaning more towards the "town healer" style rather than a combatative one just to make sure I don't push myself to get level after level.

Am I going to keep going with the cleric? Dunno. Maybe I'll bring him in once in a while so he eventually learns to resurrect, and I can see what that's like. At any rate, he's temporarily going to be a source of a little extra money to get the new Empath started. I know, twinking twinking blah blah. Does it really matter if that money is going to primarily be used to buy clothes and fluff?

What's more interesting to me right now though is what all this says about me, and what it means for MMORPGs in general. There are certainly people out there for whom the hunt-experience-gold cycle is not enough, and some don't even find it interesting at all. I know I've said before that trade skills don't excite me -- but are they in some way similar to service professions? Maybe I need to rethink how much fun it could be to play a blacksmith.

I think sometimes, prayers are answered in odd ways just for the humor value. I've been wanting insight and enlightment and that sort of thing... well, last night I dreamt about watching a movie called "Enlightment," directed by Ang Lee, starring Chow Yun-Fat as a Chinese master of some sort on a trivia game show.

On either side of me in the theater were a crotchety old husband and wife having a conversation right across me about whether they should take their car in to have it fixed. Steph was a couple of rows ahead throwing popcorn at me over her shoulder. Typical!

The game show host read a vaguely familiar famous quote which I can't recall now, and asked the master who originally said it. After a minute-long pause in which the couple to either side of me continued their argument, Chow spoke: "The Buddha." The host yelled "wrong!" and a dozen ninjas and burly men with sharpened tree trunks leaped in and tried to kill him. An amazing fight scene ensued that wouldn't have been out of place in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon if only it weren't taking place in a TV studio.

I've been reading A Beginner's Guide to Constructing the Universe: The Mathematical Archetypes of Nature, Art, and Science. It's frustrating, because it's about 33% really cool stuff, 33% mystic Pythagorean numerology and symbolism, and 33% bad information and stretching too far to make a point. That first 33% makes the book well worth reading, the second 33% is kind of interesting to me in a trivia sort of way... but I really wish he would have spent a little more time on research.

He's got the Egyptian stuff especially wrong. No doubt he's looking at it from a Freemason/Rosicrucian/Greco-Roman perspective, but still. Set does not have red skin, cloven hooves, horns, pitchfork, etc. The "Nine Bows" were not all humanity, but foreigners and potential enemies. And "Seshat" does not translate to "seven" (as claimed by the caption for photos of the Statue of Liberty side by side with illustrations of Seshat and a Native American mask) but "scribe" -- he'd have been better off with Sefkhet-Abwy ("the Seven-Horned Lady") there. He assigned Nit to 4, Seshat to 7 and Nebt-Het to 8, not because ancient Egyptians did but because that's where he thought they fit. (Interestingly enough though, he did hit on the symbolism of 9 as the limit/boundary/end of things, which fits in with Nit-Seshat-Nebthet having that number.)

Still, there are a lot of things in the universe and in our mathematics where things are a bit too coincidental. I've often wondered why circle and time measurements were so oriented around multiples of 6: 6*6*10 degrees in a circle, almost 6*6*10 days in a year, 6*2 months a year, 6*4 hours in a day, 6*10 minutes in an hour, 6*10 seconds in a minute, etc. All over the world in ancient times, days were divided into either 12 or 24 hours per. Why not 10? What's so special about multiples of 6?

I'm not sure that particular question was answered to my satisfaction actually... but lots of other neat things show up in that book. Bees build honeycombs in the strongest, most efficient shape possible (a 1 oz. chunk of honeycomb holds something like 4 pounds of honey). Surfaces that crack with age tend to do so in 4-sided patterns, but impact cracks tend to be 3-sided. And lots of the pure math stuff is just incredibly cool when you look at it the right way. And music! There is so much math in music, but it's easy to forget because it hits you in such an emotional way. And art... there's more geometry in art than I ever suspected, though whether that's because you can fit a pattern over anything if you try hard enough or because artists intentionally lay out pieces on a geometric framework, I'm not really sure.

Anyway. Stuff to ponder.

Ahhhh, GemStone III. The reason I haven't written much lately.

In addition to the Gosaena priest, I rolled up a crossbow/brawling rogue as an experiment. I was amazed at his 92 AS shooting and low 30's punching at level zero -- having played only spellcasters, that came as quite a shock; my 8th level cleric wishes he had 92 AS. But I don't know whether I'd like the greatly increased risk and complexity.

I'm seriously thinking about starting up Eillie again... as a brawling warrior or polearm rogue or something like that. (For those that didn't know her and/or haven't encountered the ancient, mostly out of date Eillie's Empath Guide, she was a Sylvan Empath who was very kind and very much focused on saving lives and helping people as much as possible. I retired her during the final DragonRealms-is-almost-beta rush when I lost all my free time.) It'd be fun to play that character with a new twist, and maybe bridge the gap between the old Eillie and the saint in DragonRealms. Heh.

On the other hand, I don't want to lose focus on that cleric. I'm thinking that I will actually want to be able to resurrect other characters when nobody else can... with a roleplaying twist though. Bwahahaha.

Someone pointed out a cool utility to us yesterday: heromachine.com. For those of us who couldn't sketch their way out of a paper bag, it'll generate roleplaying character portraits in mix-and-match fashion. This thing has a lot of potential and I hope they follow through with lots more options, 'cause the concept is a great one.

My cleric looks approximately like this, and here is a possible concept for the new Eillie. (Select all, copy, then paste into the load screen at heromachine). Better than a stick figure by a long shot!

(Note that when you paste the text into the load screen, you may have to backspace the last empty line away so that the cursor is sitting right after the ending # sign. I didn't have that trouble yesterday, but I do today. It is a beta product.)

I haven't written about politics in quite some time. I shared Suz's opinion of the election farce, and now that Dubya is in office I see he's already taking the steps I feared. He does not agree with the concept of separation of church and state, and starting on the first day he was in office, began working on tearing it down.

While I have nothing against the idea of government supporting faith, I worry about government meddling with faith. For one thing, the government is not necessarily qualified or competent in that area. For another, this could easily lead to a situation where the majority tyrannizes the minority.

Bush has said publicly, "We will respect every creed. We will honor the diversity of our country, and the deep convictions of our people." He's called separation of church and state "discrimination" against faith. But he's also said publicly in reference to Wicca, "I don't think witchcraft is a religion."

Honestly, I don't think he's going to hurt my church any -- not by himself. But he is trying to change our country's policy and values, and might be starting a trend -- clearing the way toward somebody like Buchanan getting in office. He may not be trying to create the society from "The Handmaiden's Tale" but he's taking the first steps down that road.

But mostly, I think he's going to be putting some of my tax money into the coffers of churches that I'm not part of but not into the one I am part of, and thumbing his nose at minority religions and atheists alike.