Development style

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to make a concerted effort to fill in some of Sutekh's documentation, since we are planning to release fairly soon.

As a result, Sutekh now displays icons in the main tree view, and has a plugin for importing card sets from zip files.

I'm prone to this development pattern, and, given the amount of feature creep you see in modern software, I suspect that it's actually quite common.

(There has also been progress on the documentation, though, and the icons feature is really nifty)

comics

Because they both throughly amused me today, and I have not punted either here previously:

Freefall.

Irregular webcomic. (warning, combine irregular webcomic and tvtropes at your own risk)

Both are well worth following.

Identity

Emotional stress is, amongst many other things, quite educational. For me, it's quite good at stripping away some of the layers of deception (self and otherwise) I engage in to make my life more comfortable. The last few weeks have been rather good at forcing me to re-examine who I am, and, in particular, I've been forced to confront the extent to which I am extremely coy about my Christianity [1].

There are various reasons for this. In part, I am an extremely private individual. I'm REALLY not comfortable with personal information leaking across my boundaries (and something as fundamental as my beliefs counts as pretty darn personal). In addition, I don't want to get drawn into the inevitably pointless debates about belief and religion - no-one ever got converted in either direction by rational debate.

There's an aspect of not wanting to be identified with the extremes of Christianity [2], and, let's face it, the crackpot extremes are really screwy, really loud, and, based on the available evidence, annoyingly common.

Disappointingly, however, a very large portion is due to simple cowardice [3]. My reluctance to trust that other people will tolerate my beliefs is both uncomfortably revealing and more than somewhat sad. While I've generally avoided explicitly denying my faith, far too often, I've simply found it comfortably convenient to avoid committing to any particular position. I'm not sure when or why I became so defensive about my beliefs, but it's hardly one of my better character traits, and represents a rather significant failure to live up to my personal ideals.

Overall, a failing grade, but hopefully with potential to do better in future.


[1] I'm not going to go into the particulars of what exactly I believe here, but it's sufficiently based on the traditions of the Protestant Christian church that the label will do. Some more details are available here

[2] Let's not even start on the history of Western Christianity, which, with some extremely vigorous white-washing of the really bloody bits, may just make it to the point where it can be described as an utterly horrific failure for a religion with "love thy neighbour" as one of the central doctrines.

[3] For example, I've spent far too much time polishing this post instead of publishing it, for very little gain.