I've been dipping back into my Coptic reading materials recently, since I've forgotten half of it (trying to do the Hebrew and Syriac thing recently) and I started reading the really beautiful Coptic translation of The Wisdom of Solomon.  I was always really struck by it, especially with the central characterization of wisdom as being a quality not only of discernment and intellect but of compassion and righteousness.  It has a lot of really nice Platonic ideas coupled with some beautiful poetic imagery that recalls a lot of the great Jewish literature. 

Anyway, I decided to try to translate some of it just for fun.  I don't normally try to translate things, since I think it's a kind of vain exercise, but here it is.  The first part, anyway, I'm slowly working on the rest.  I also have to note that I was looking strictly at the Coptic, and didn't compare it to the Greek or any other versions, so any and all silly mistranslations are my own.

The Wisdom of Solomon

I

Love righteousness, you who judge the earth;    

Give thought to the Lord in goodness,

And you will find Him in the simplicity of your hearts.

For those who do not tempt Him will come to find Him;

He is revealed unto those who believe in Him.

The thought which is evil separates from God,

And His power in its revelation rebukes all thoughtlessness.

For Wisdom does not come into a soul which is evil;

Nor does it reside in a body given to sin.

For the spirit which is holy, the spirit of Wisdom, flies from deceit,

And it is distant from thoughts of evil,

And it reviles every essence of violence.

For the spirit of Wisdom loves man,

And will not justify the blasphemer;

For God is the witness of the inner self,

And he who seeks will find love in his heart, and he who listens will hear His words.

For the spirit of the Lord filled the world,

And he who accepts the whole of the world will understand its voice.

For this reason no one who speaks in violence will be concealed;

Nor will he escape the judgment which is forthcoming.

For the words of the unbeliever will be uncovered,

And the Lord will listen to his every word in revelation of his lawlessness. 

For the ear of His envy listens to every work,

And the voice of those who mutter in anger will not be hidden.

Watch that you mutter not in emptiness,

And restrain your lips from slander.

For no word which is vain will be hidden;

A tongue which spreads lies will destroy the soul. 

Do not envy, and perish, in the deception of your life,

Nor draw yourselves into destruction in the work of your hands.

For the God our God did not create death,

Nor does He rejoice in the destruction of what is living.

He created all things so that they might persist for all time;

And that they might be whole, the creations of the cosmos.

The poison of death is not in their hearts,

Nor is the kingdom of Hell upon the face of the earth.

But those without faith choose it in their works, and in their speech;

They take it to themselves as a fellow, they set it free,

They build upon it a covenant,

For they are worthy of the lot which is theirs. 

Galda's Revenge.

It will only become apparent after five minutes of speaking with me, but I love video game music.  I love video games, but I especially love the music.  So my friend The Knifemaster and I decided to start a video game cover band.  We named it Galda's Revenge, after the main villain of the classic Dragon Spirit: A New Legend, for the NES.  We're mostly interested in doing stuff from the NES and SNES era, but I can foresee a few more modern covers, too.

Anyway, we just recently finished our first song, a cover of the fantastic Dragon Spirit intro.  You can check it out on Youtube here. 

Galda's Revenge--Dragon Spirit Intro

So yeah, I plan to ramble a little about some of my favorite video game music here at some point.  And maybe blog about the Testament of Abraham or some other such obscure ancient text. 

Past Writings

I had two short stories published a while back, and I haven't had a chance to give a shout out to the magazines involved yet, not having had a blog, so here goes.  My story "The Gears Go Awry" appeared in Necrotic Tissue back in January 2011, which can be found here:

amazon.com

My story "Carmilla's Mask" appeared in Origins: Colliding Causalities, by Third Flatiron Publishing, this past December.  It can be found here:

amazon.com

Thanks very much to R. Scott McCoy and Juliana Rew, the editors of these excellent magazines.  

Uninvited, on the NES.

So I’ve been meaning to start a blog about random things that I like for a while now, and I’ve decided I’m going to start it off with a game I played recently that really touched on a lot of interests of mine.  It’s the great Uninvited, for the NES, and I absolutely loved it. 

I had to track the thing down, first, for which I have to thank Ebay (it’s getting hard to find these old games in the wild, now!).  It’s part of a series, of course, the renowned MacVenture series.  I had played Shadowgate before, and loved it, (even when having to resort to a walkthrough for one frustrating part) and I got Déjà Vu along with Uninvited.  I had a lot of fun just marveling over the amazing and cheesy cover art for the game, with a badly dressed and apparently crystal meth-smoking skeleton.  It just doesn’t get awesome like this anymore.    

As usual, the game starts off by throwing you right into the thick of things in an interesting way.  You and your sister are driving along a deserted road when a mysterious form manifests ahead of you, crashing your car into a tree and causing you to lose consciousness.  When you wake up you’re trapped in the car, with your sister nowhere in sight.  The gas is leaking out of the car at a dangerous rate, and if you goof off too long examining the car (like I did!) you burn up hideously in a ball of flames.  Pretty dark stuff for an NES game. 

Anyway, your sister has somehow been spirited away to a very dark mansion along this deserted road.  It’s the mansion itself that really captured my interest and set the mood for the game.  It’s august, and mysterious, and somehow quaint, as the doors shut behind you and you find yourself in a lonely, once-occupied home for a family apparently consumed with the occult.  There are all the usual books on arcane subjects, with silly faux-Latin names, and star charts, and maps of obscure places.  It seems to be a perfect home for people with interesting but useless interests, which is pretty awesome.  Apparently when they weren’t playing chess or wandering in their giant labyrinth they were summoning once-lost demons and reading long lists of names in a language that never really existed. 

There’s a genuine sense of danger in exploring the house, as it seems to emanate a very real malevolent spirit.  It will, in fact, kill you at every step.  There are also useless but once-needed relics of life in the old place, like silverware, and stores of food (and also a nearly unbreakable jar of cookies for a cookie demon) that all contribute to the sense of actually having lived in the house.  It strikes me as a kind of early predecessor to games like Shadowgate 64, which to me very successfully captured the spirit of isolation and haunting memory in a place once occupied by both sorcerers and grieving mothers and fathers. 

But yeah, much like in Shadowgate, you will die, and you will probably die often.  You have to love getting mauled to death by the infamous Scarlet O’Hara, and I rather like the very detailed zombie who is just waiting to destroy you.  The deaths aren’t quite as humorous or ubiquitous as in Shadowgate, but they’re pretty fun, and the images are often pretty disturbing for an NES game.   There’s even a malevolent ruby that will slowly invade your mind and cause you to more or less go insane and die while this crazy scary red skull haunts your every moment.  But the skull looks like it brushes its teeth, so maybe it’s not all bad. 

Another strength of the game is the music.  I would personally rank its soundtrack a little lower than Shadowgate’s, or Déjà Vu’s, but it’s a very strong soundtrack in its own right.  Daylight is the standout, a haunting, magisterial ode that genuinely captures the feel of the mysterious grounds of the manor.  The upstairs theme is great, too, a slightly more mischievous, upbeat number, and the labyrinth and reservoir themes are appropriately dizzying and beautiful.  And the cookie demon thing’s theme is just fantastic. 

I have to admit to having a weakness to games like this, because I have a genuine interest in crazy Latin and Greek literature and obscure Biblical apocrypha and things like that.  I think it’s always neat to see what popular culture does with the occult, and the abiding fascination it holds for us even now, when most of us (at least I’m assuming) don’t really believe you can transmute base metals into gold (even in a Jungian sense) or summon animal-headed demons with fancy names who will turn you invisible and this sort of thing.  There’s a sense of looking after hidden things, invisible things, which I think is important, much like fighting giant robots and searching for dragons. 

I also think it’s really neat that a lot of the story is told through journals and documents that you find locked away throughout the house.  Some of them aren’t even particularly important to the plot, but they reveal a little about both the owners of the home and the two principal students of the master. 

So in conclusion, and with a long breath, I have to say that I really enjoyed this game, and I’m a little sad it’s over.  I’d really like to see games like this still being developed.  It’s hard to find the actual carts, now.  They’re like little treasures at this point, which is kind of awesome.  My only criticism would be that it seemed to end a little abruptly, once a few things fell into place at the end, and much like in Shadowgate a lot of the puzzles and item usage didn’t make nearly as much sense as in Déjà Vu (or any sense at all, really, in a few cases).  But I really had a blast with this game, so I recommend it to anyone who likes the classic point and click games or pretty much anything to do with creepy mansions and that sort of thing.  It won’t disappoint.