Ages ago (way back in 1990-91, I think) one of my flatmates had the game OIDS on his computer. It ran just fine on a Mac Plus and on the new Mac LC’s that had just come out. Good memories of the flat all taking turns to see who could get the highest score.

Any now I find that there’s a version for Mac OS X available from Xavagus Prime Software. I downloaded it and all the game playing memories came back. Unfortunately, the old game playing reflexes haven’t come back with the memories – can’t seem to fly anywhere near as well as I once did.

Related link: Oids – MobyGames

Just finished watching Justice League: The New Frontier DVD borrowed from the local library, which is the animated movie of Darwyn Cooke’s “The New Frontier” detailing the formation of the Silver Age Justice League. I enjoyed it, and especially so because it dealt primarily with the characters of Green Lantern (Hal Jordan), Flash (Barry Allen) and Martian Manhunter (J’onn J’onzz) rather than the normal Trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.

The artwork style is very much 1960s, and for the comics enthusiast there are all sorts of cameo appearances and background details to note. And while it’s animated superheroes the plot and content (for example, the shades of grey in politics) are definitely geared for an audience above children’s level (The rating on the the DVD here is “M”). As the Line of Fire review noted below states: “This is a fine film, definitely geared towards adults, a little too violent for the kids, but for anyone who ever loved superheroes, you will find an appreciation of this film.” However, for audiences outside of the US there will be a few moments where the elements of the story may not resonate as strongly as they might for those brought up in the US context.

Related links:

Justice League: The New Frontier – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Justice League: The New Frontier DVD Review – Line of Fire Reviews – Comics Bulletin

Absolute DC: The New Frontier HC Review – Line of Fire Reviews – Comics Bulletin

Interesting series of quotes about what it means to be human from various scientists over at What Does It Mean to Be Human? | Wired Science from Wired.com.

Often our attempts to define this tend to be linked to particular understandings of the essential core that defines human beings, sometimes called the locus humanus. Typically, this is denoted by a set of attributes that human beings alone possess, such as the religious concept of an immortal soul, but is often a collection of psychological attributes such as reason, language, consciousness and self consciousness. And indeed, in the quotes in the link above some of these crop up.

Hat tip to Nouslife: What Does It Mean to Be Human?

Metanexus’ eMagazine/eJournal – Global Spiral – has a special issue this month on transhumanism edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson from Arizona State University.

See Global Spiral, June 2008 (Volume 9, Issue 3) – Special Issue on Transhumanism

Articles include:

• Engaging Transhumanism: The Meaning of Being Human :: Hava Tirosh-Samuelson :: Global Spiral
• Of Which Human Are We Post? :: Don Ihde :: Global Spiral
• Wrestling with Transhumanism :: Katherine Hayles :: Global Spiral
• Cybernetics Is An Antihumanism: Advanced Technologies and the Rebellion Against the Human Condition :: Jean-Pierre Dupuy :: Global Spiral
• Brains, Selves and Spirituality in the History of Cybernetics :: Andrew Pickering :: Global Spiral
• Transhumanism and the Posthuman Future: Will Technological Progress Get Us There? :: Ted Peters :: Global Spiral

I will have to make time to read them all in the next couple of weeks – perhaps one or two per day on the train?

The iBook power adaptor died. After years of faithful service the cable that wrapped around the yo-yo adaptor broke, and I’ve spent a reasonable bit of time trying to find an old style iBook adaptor to plug in. However, I found one this morning and we’re up and charging. Luckily, backups had been made so no worries there mostly. I can’t belief how expensive both Apple and third-party adaptors are, though.

The G3 lives on – and is still fine for word processing, music and podcasts, email, blogging, DVDs, presentations and basic web browsing. Not so good for video play back (Flash or MP4) though – and web pages with lots of Flash items etc. tend to drag.

The screen may die in a little bit though, so it may become limited to a desk with a monitor and keyboard for chidren’s homework in the near future

Damaris have produced some multimedia and study resources for schools and churches in conjunction with the new Prince Caspian movie. See Damaris Media: Prince Caspian.

Free CD-ROM of resources if you’re in the UK.

Stu, over at Definitive : a way of moving beyond the infinite wanted people to post their (random) thoughts on the future of (the) church.

So, I’ll post on and off over the next few weeks.

My first random thought about the topic is that we often forget that the Church (or church) is the Spirit’s. And that, while human endeavour and action shapes both its good and bad, ultimately the Church is the community formed, shaped and sustained by the Spirit of God. Sometimes, in our efforts to shape the church, predict the church’s future, and point out it’s good points and bad points we often forget that, as do lapses into Christomonism and such like.

The liturgical imperative, “Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church,” should be more proactively engaged with, rather than just passive background noise.