• There’s a stop-action animated film called ParaNorman slated for next August which features a 300-year-old witch’s curse. The film may turn out to be okay, but the witch-piñatas do not bode well.
• Sinfest has introduced a Big Wheel-riding feminist girl avenger who has been shaking up the strip and fighting The Patriarchy which led to this strip in which an animated feminist tome encounters the Bible.
• My guess is that the huge success of Game of Thrones is behind it, but there are now two different television projects in development based on Beauty and the Beast. (George R. R. Martin was a writer for the beloved TV series in the Eighties.)
• As the headline says at The Mary Sue, just take my woney.
• I missed this when PC game phenomena Minecraft officially launched in November, but the game has a surprisingly spriritual short story tacked on to the end. BoingBoing interviewed the author who is influenced by the writings of Joseph Campbell. Here’s taste of the end:
  

  and the universe said I love you
  and the universe said you have played the game well
  and the universe said everything you need is within you
  and the universe said you are stronger than you know
  and the universe said you are the daylight
  and the universe said you are the night
  and the universe said the darkness you fight is within you
  and the universe said the light you seek is within you
  and the universe said you are not alone
  and the universe said you are not separate from every other thing
  and the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own code
  and the universe said I love you because you are love.

Every Pagan above the age of consent should see Dark of Moon because it is exactly the kind of film we have been waiting for all these years.

Pagan parents should be aware of two issues, however. First, the dialogue is pretty liberal in its use of profanity. In fact, the very first plot point in the film addresses one of the character’s unrelenting potty-mouth. The film lands somewhere between the films of Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino in its “fuck” count. Second, while the film is visually chaste (a couple of botched scenes of implied male nudity, and some enthusiastic kissing) there is ample, frank, explicit, locker-room-level bantering about these twenty-somethings’ sex lives. If you are comfortable with your kids learning the name of one of the character’s dildo, then, by all means, let them watch this film.

Lest your expectations be set too high, be aware that Dark of Moon is by no means a well made film. The movie is riddled with minor errors of film craft: visual continuity errors from one shot to the next, awkward camera placements, static blocking, after-the-fact inserts that do not really match, unintentionally awkward dialogue, bizarre set direction (Why is that stuffed duck there in the kitchen? Why is it central to the composition of the scene? Why does it apparently have a white lace garter dangling from its beak?), and acting that occasionally gets down to community-theater levels of hesitancy and fumbled reactions. We are not talking Ed Wood or Harold P. Warren levels of bad film technique here: it’s just a sub-par indie film in terms of the craft. However, if you are the kind of viewer who is inclined to be knocked out of the film by these kinds of issues, then this film is, sadly, probably not for you.

Because, nonetheless, this film is great.
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As Pagans we are accustomed to being erased entirely from popular culture. Oddly, however, thanks mostly to the devout Roman Catholic J. R. R. Tolkien the default religious setting for Fantasy as a literary genre and Fantasy role playing games (RPG’s) in particular is polytheism. Middle Earth grew out of Tolkien’s interest in the Eddas and other mythic writings of Northern European cultures, and his wish that there were a similar literature in English. And it is fairly clear that the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, Gygax and Arneson, sought to leverage the popularity of Tolkien’s work in marketing their game. It did not take long until D&D was looking to other forms of polytheism as source materials for the game. Thus, when computer versions of RPG’s were created it became fairly de rigueur to create a pantheon as at least window dressing for the setting.

And so we come to the release this past month of Skyrim available for the XBox, PS3 and PC. Since this game is the fifth iteration of single-player CRPG’s in the same setting, the details of the religion of the world of The Elder Scrolls have become fairly thoroughly fleshed out. Furthermore, they are documented within the myriad of books within the game which some studious collectors have collated and published as free Kindle, Nook and iOS files.
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• A cogent comparison of Norse, Christian and Modernist eschatologies. By John Hodgman. At the Onion’s AV Club.
• For Laura: a good gallery of tiny houses.
• If you did not read the eulogy of Steve Jobs by his sister, you should if only to learn his last words.
• Speaking of Jobs, just what kind of Buddhist was he?

[Update: this interview was way too good not to sneak into the links here today.]

• “The human, not the hymen! That’s my motto.”