• Midgard, Ice, and Denial

    by  •  • LifeStuff • 0 Comments

    Sunday was a Shutdown Day. I just didn’t want to do much today. but the day still went fine enough.

    In a random act of self-healing, I for some reason depressed the water dispenser lever in the refrigerator door to see if it was working this afternoon, and to my surprise, a decent stream of water came out of the spigot into my glass. Perplexed, I turned the ice maker on, expecting it to still not be working after I changed the water pump part a few months ago, but surprising me again, in about 30 minutes, I heard ice drop from the maker into the ice bin. What miracle is this? Ice returns in winter to my fridge!

    I was grateful to host game night this evening for the group. Us four regulars ate a nice dinner and then played a game new to us which I had studied up for a little this afternoon. It’s a game I had thought we might get to a year or even two ago, but we never did. It’s a worker placement game in the vein of Lords of Waterdeep, but the game, Champions of Midgard, features viking chieftains contesting for glory among their people. Workers win each player food, warriors, and option cards which prepare that player to defend the locality from invading trolls or draugrs (zombies), or equip them to take a fight to monsters across and beyond a mystic sea. We enjoyed the game pretty well once we got the mechanics down after two or three turns, and look forward to playing it more competitively soon.

    Earlier in the day, I also took time to watch a Netflix film that I’ve had at home for a little while. The movie, “Denial”, stars Rachel Weisz as American professor and author, Deborah Lipstadt, who is pulled into a trial for libel by British “historian” and Holocaust denier David Irving for brief comments she wrote about him in a book. Lipstadt and her publisher are subject to a trial in London where, contrary to the American legal idea that one is innocent until proven guilty, Lipstadt and her legal team are pushed to validate their claims about Irving as a liar and a promoter of racist ideas. It was an interesting film about a real event that essentially saw all of the experiences of concentration camp survivors put up as potentially fictional. Irving seeks to use terse legal turns and contrarian evidence to submit that exterminations at Auschwitz did not happen; Deborah and her legal team are faced with substantiating the actuality of events already recognized around the world as horrifically having happened, and Deborah, herself Jewish, has to wrestle with the anguish that lies in the fact this legal action even was permitted to exist.

    It was a good film. It’s hard to believe that Lipstadt was required to defend her assertions about Irving, and in the process, was essentially saddled with the work of proving that Auschwitz gassed people- a reality attested to by thousands who had lived within it and somehow survived the extermination rounds.

    Weisz is one of my fgavorite actresses, and she does well providing pluck and pushback as Lipstadt in this legal drama.

    About

    A web programmer by day, I somehow still spend a lot of time thinking about relationships, God, and the significance of grace and love in daily events. I am old school in the sense that I believe in the reality of sin, and in the need of each human heart for deliverance to the Divine. I am one of those who believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that you can find most answers to life's pressing issues in Him and His Word, the Bible. I ain't perfect, and a lot of the time I ain't good, but by God's grace and kindness, I am forgiven and free.

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