Supergirl

Kara Zor-El is an orphan, sent away as a child from the last city of Krypton to live on Earth like her cousin, Kal-El. She visits occasionally but spends more time on other worlds, trying to drown her pain in drink as she lives out a lonely existence in her spaceship with her dog, Krypto. One day, she encounters Ruthye, a girl bent on vengeance for her family, all of whom were murdered by the Brigands. Those same criminals will soon tranquilize Krypto, giving Kara just days to find them and the antidote. Kara and Ruthye both battle their inner demons as they wrestle with what it means to live in a broken world. Can Krypto be saved? What about their souls?

This film, the second entry in the DC Universe (DCU) after Superman, was darker than its predecessor (beware lots of violence and some language) but still wrestled with good questions and themes. Kara drowns her pain in addiction; Ruthye thirsts for vengeance. Both are wrong, both recognize that in the other, and both help each other find a better way. Ultimately, this film is about the reality of pain in our lives, helping each other through it, and doing good regardless of the pain done to you. Worthy themes indeed. I share more analysis (with spoilers) below.

Rating: B

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Brief analysis (with spoilers)

Kara and Ruthye both have deep pain . . . and deep problems.

• Kara doesn't really have a home . . . for her, home is wherever her dog Krypto is. Having left Krypton at a much older age than Superman, her heart is heavy. Her dying parents send her to Earth, where they know she will survive and have great power (drawn from any world with a yellow sun). Their message to her: "you must be good" and "protect the powerless." She does these things . . . sometimes. She carries her grief with her and would rather forget her cares in the bottom of a glass; when Ruthye asks her "When did you stop feeling angry?" Kara replies "any day now." She knows drinking won't solve it, but she keeps on.
• Ruthye is consumed with anger and a desire for vengeance. Kara recognizes it immediately and tells her "revenge is overrated," reminding her several times that "revenge won't get you where you want to go" and "if you kill him [the one who murdered her family], it won't take your pain away." Ruthye retorts that drowning in drink isn't the right way, either.

As the two women travel together, they both learn to confront their own weaknesses through the rebukes of the other (which leads to a temporary falling out). They later recognize reality: "I wish it never happened . . . I wish it could go back to the way it was before . . ." but know they cannot. So how do they deal with things as they are? They walk with each other through the pain, and help each other see the light. 

• Ruthye recognizes both the flaws and beauty in Kara, saying "you're not always perfect but you're good. Thank you for taking me with you." 
• Kara helps Ruthye walk away from an opportunity for vengeance, arguing that "your family is with you. Your life will be your revenge." As Kara's parents encouraged earlier in the film to live and do good for the sake of her family, so now she exhorts Ruthye to do the same. 

Intriguingly, after Kara helps Ruthye walk away, she returns to the antagonist and stabs him twice. "This one is for my dog . . . and this one is for what you did to that girl's family." This seems to fly in the face of the 'don't take vengeance' message she just presented to Ruthye. Is that hypocrisy? Potentially; on the one hand, it sure seems like it. On the other, the bad guy makes it clear he is going to keep on doing terrible things, so Kara may be doing it as a form of justice. She could also be taking the vengeance on herself so Ruthye isn't burdened by it. It's an intriguing ending that makes you think.

At the end, Kara returns to Earth and meets her cousin. She decides it is time to stay on Earth for a while . . . she will no longer run from her pain.

Kara is an interesting character. Several times she has the opportunity to get the antidote, but saving others always comes first. She consistently displays both good and selfishness. Watching her wrestle with that is the focus (and highlight) of the film. 

Midterm Report

image from here

Reflecting is important (more on that here). We're halfway through 2026. Each year, I set and present my goals for the year in January. Today, I remind myself of the goals and look at how it's going.

Spiritual
- Meditate more.
- Love self-forgetfully.
- Be thankful.

I don't meditate nearly enough. Loving self-forgetfully varies by the day (or hour, honestly), but I am doing a better job keeping it in my mind. And same goes for thankfulness; better than it was, but not where it should be.

Nutritional/Fitness
- Keep weight under 180 lbs.
- Develop underused muscles.

Meh. I stand at 185 lbs this morning, the point around which I have been hovering all year. I have put some muscle back on (after last year's shoulder surgery), but I still believe 180 lbs is my ideal. Need to bear down and be more disciplined. For underused muscles, I am making some effort there but not enough.

Reading
- Read 40 books.

This one is going well; over halfway there and enjoying the hobby.

Household Management
- Minimize/declutter the home.

We've made some minor strides here, but much remains to be done. It is hard getting the kids on-board.

Overall

Things are going okay, but could be better. The trends are positive but work remains.

Grade: B-

The Art of Asking Better Questions (J.R. Briggs)

"We live in a world that has conditioned us toward answers . . . asking good questions is a lost art." So begins J.R. Briggs in his book The Art of Asking Better Questions. An outline follows.

"Asking better questions is a mindset. It is a posture. A way of life." And when we ask more (and better) questions with genuine interest in, and love for, others, everyone wins. "Asking great questions has the power and potential to improve the quality of every single area of life—your relationships, your career, your faith, and your future." And so this book is "about questioning-asking, where we wseek to ask questions that emphasize honor, care, discovery, and growth."

Why do we ask questions? For clarity and engagement. To cultivate connection and intimacy. To "scrutinize our presuppositions and help to dismantle assumptions." The questions we ask reveal our values and shape our thoughts. Asking genuine questions means giving others attention, which is a gift and form of generosity; questions "make conversations go deeper and last longer."

The author's four essentials to asking great questions:

- Curiosity. "Curiosity shines a spotlight, brings awreness to our assumptions and blind spots, and opens doors."

- Wisdom. We must ask questions wisely. "The questions we ask, how we ask them, and why we ask them at all reveal a great deal about who we are at our very core."

- Humility. "Great question-askers are fully aware of and quite comfortable with their ignorance."

- Courage. We have "to be confident in our lack of knowing, to willfully admit we are ignorant about a particular topic."

And he provides the Four Levels of Good Questions:

- Level One: Questions for information (simple facts).

- Level Two: Questions for interaction (thoughts and emotions).

- Level Three: Questions for understanding (feelings and desires).

- Level Four: Questions for transformation (vulnerability and intimacy).

He then looks at various things, including:

- The questions we ask ourselves. What does that reveal? Do we assume others are asking the same questions?

- Why does God ask questions? What does that reveal about His heart? 

- Why does Jesus ask questions? Here, he looks at the centrality of questions in Jesus' life, the six reasons He asked lots of questions, the types of questions he asked, and more.

- What questions do we ask God? How does question-asking help spiritual formation?

He concludes with practical ways to ask better questions: nine ways to prepare, 20 practices you can do while asking questions, and how to look back and reflect.

He offers several resources in the back of the book, including a discussion guide, lists of questions to ask yourself, discussion questions for faith communities, and fascinating facts about the questions Jesus asked.

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I liked a lot of things in this book. I need to ask better/higher-level questions, and this gave me the tools to help. It reminded me of the importance of good questions and how they cultivate connection and community. It was valuable to study how God asks questions. This is a good resource.

At the same time, the book got repetitive; he spends a lot of time across several chapters convincing us of the need for and benefit of questions. I was sold early, so that got old and muddled the distinctiveness of each chapter. This could have been shorter.

I did like that he offered lots of questions throughout the book; here are my three favorite:

How can I be helpful?

Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?

Why am I bothered right now? 

Rating: B

The Two Towers Deck-Building Game

Today's review is of the 2013 release, The Two Towers Deck-Building Game (hereafter, Towers DBG). For 2-5 players, it takes 30 minutes.

Overview

You are one of the heroes from The Two Towers movie; your goal is to have the most victory points. In this deck-building game, each player starts with a 10-card deck (one of which is based on your chosen hero) and draws 5 cards per turn. On your turn, you play the cards to gain power, with which you buy cards in the 'path' or defeat arch-villains; in either case, the chosen cards go into your discard pile, which is shuffled to make a new deck when you run out of cards. Over the course of the game, your hand will get increasingly powerful. Can you prevail?

The game contents; image from here

This game is a sister to The Fellowship of the Ring DBG and nearly identical; the only difference here is wall cards which provide an alternate way to end the game. 

Review

In the same game family as the DC Deck-building Game, this has all the pros and cons of that line. It is quick to learn, fun to play, and a little strange that you can buy villains from the path to incorporate into your deck (though thematically I can buy it if you look at it as 'gaining experience' from defeating them). The addition of wall cards was a helpful way to accelerate the game's end (sometimes these drag on). Overall, recommended for a light experience. 

Rating: A-

Tournament at Avalon

Today's review is of the 2020 release, Tournament at Avalon. For 3-6 players, it takes 45 minutes.

Overview

You and your friends are invited to a tournament at Avalon, in the legendary time of King Arthur. Your goal is to have the highest health when the first person is eliminated (drops to zero health). Do you have the strength to prevail?

Tournament at Avalon is a trick-taking game . . . where you don't want to take tricks. You start with 400 health. Each player has a special protagonist and companion that grants them unique abilities (see below illustration). Companion abilities can be activated only after a player falls to or below the health level indicated on the companion card (and this varies by protagonist/companion). 

the protagonist/companion cards; image from here

Each round, players are dealt 12 weapon cards, passing three of their choice to their left (or right; it alternates). Then the player with the lowest health starts the first trick ('melee' in the game's parlance) by playing a card. In clockwise order, the other players follow suit (if they can) or play an alchemy card (wildcard) or special weapon card. If a player has no legal card to play, they are 'shamed,' discarding a card and taking 5 damage. The lowest number takes the trick, putting the card pile in front of them, then playing a card to start the next melee. Play continues in such fashion until one or more players have no cards left. Then each player tallies the damage from the cards they have taken (generally 5 points per card, but some do 10 or 25 points of damage), lowers their health total accordingly, and the godsend cards are dealt.

Godsend cards provide boons to players who are hurting, granting special abilities that can help them (or hurt others). These cards are dealt to players from lowest health on up; the number of players who get a card first depends on the total playing and the round. But then there is a second dealing of godsend cards if the current leader is 100 or more health points ahead of others, so it is possible for players to draw more than one godsend card per round.

The game ends whenever a person drops to zero health (probably after a round completes). Then the players with the highest health wins!

Review

This is a sister game to 2017's Tournament at Camelot, with largely the same rules and basic weapon cards, but with new character/companion pairs and godsend cards. The games (or cards in them) can be mixed and matched to suit your fancy, or combined to play with 7-8 players.

Overall, this one was okay. Thought I rated the sister game highly, this one felt too complex and chaotic/confusing when you added the godsend cards. (I looked at Camelot's godsend cards and found them a touch simpler.) It has its fun moments, but seems to drag on interminably (it took way longer than 45 minutes). It was fun to have new protagonist/companion abilities, so I'm tempted to just pull those out, put them in with the Camelot game . . . we'll see. This one is okay, but check out Camelot first if you like Arthurian lore and trick-taking games.

Rating: B-

A Field Guide on Gender and Sexuality (Ligonier Ministries)

This book, produced by Ligonier Ministries, "offers biblical answers to questions about gender, sexuality, and identity." It is separated into four categories with seven questions in each:

• Being Human
• Homosexuality and Transgenderism 
• Events and Associations
• The Gospel and Love

Topics include (but are not limited to) what it means to be made in God's image, the purpose of sex, thoughts on identity, sex, gender, and same-sex attraction, attending certain events, showing compassion, and more.

This work is a solid starting point for people seeking to learn what the Bible says on these hot-button topics. In general, it does a good job. Relevant Scriptures are presented well. In some places, the answers felt overly stark and perhaps not as nuanced as wisdom would require (I questioned an answer or two). And there is more to be said on these matters (but it is an introduction, so brevity is expected). Overall, recommended.

Rating: B+

Jack (Marilynne Robinson)

Jack is a love story. It is about John Boughton, a hopeless ne'er-do-well and preacher's son, and his relationship with Della Miles, a teacher and bishop's daughter. Set in post-WWII St. Louis, their interracial romance is illegal; Jack must navigate this tense situation while he deals with his own self-loathing and checkered past.

Jack is hopeless. "No one had done him any real harm, except himself." He clings to Robert Frost's verse as a life summary:

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

After a stint in prison (ironically for a crime he did not commit), he lives in a sort of self-imposed exile, living off his brothers' generosity and spending time doing odd jobs, being a bum, engaging in petty theft, or alcoholism. He believes that "he had nothing to give anyone, that his life was an intricate tangle of futility . . ." and takes to keeping away from people, figuring that "keeping his distance was a favor, a courtesy, to all those strangers who might, probably would, emerge somehow poorer for proximity to him." Intensely lonely, he wonders "How do people live?" Then came Miss Della Miles.

Della has bright prospects, fraught though they be with the realities of being a colored woman in that era. She has been to college, has strong family support, and has her life ahead of her. Through a series of odd events, Jack and Della meet and, shockingly, enjoy each other's company. They fall in love. Jack realizes "that there is nothing more I want from life. If I could imagine an eternity of sitting here with you talking nonsense, there'd be nothing more I would want . . . " But their relationship is star-crossed from the start as Jack wrestles with his past and how/why good should come to him, and what it means to love and be loved.

Jack tries to push Della away. He warns her: "I'm ridiculous. It never changes. Every day is a new proof." "I'm ruining things. I do that. I try to keep to myself, and it happens, anyway." He wrestles with her love and grace: "Flourishing seemed wrong in a man so disheartened as he was." He confesses to a pastor: "forgiveness scares me. It seems like a kind of antidote to regret, and there are things I haven't regretted sufficiently." He is confronted with the reality that "Shame was a very old habit with him. He had long considered it pentitential, payment extracted in the form of steady, tolerable misery, against a debt he would never settle."

As Jack wrestles, Della sticks by his side. His pastor reminds him that the good things he does are just as much a part of him as his failures. And that there is grace for the latter: "If the Lord thinks you need punishing, you can trust Him to see to it. He knows where to find you. If He's showing you a little grace in the meantime, He probably won't mind if you enjoy it." In this world where guilt and grace meet, what should be his focus?

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Set in the same world as her other novels (Gilead, Home, and Lila), it was a delight to find out more about the wayward son that was mentioned in them. As with the others, here Robinson writes powerfully and poetically on themes of brokenness and grace. She does that well. That said, I wish a few things were different:

- one scene dragged on interminably

- it was sometimes hard to follow the chronology of events; I couldn't tell the flashbacks from the current storyline in places. I couldn't tell if that was deliberate (an echo of Jack's internal confusion) or unintentional

- the racial theme wasn't covered nearly as much as Jack's internal wrestlings, making it seem mildly imbalanced

- you never see Jack and Della come home to Gilead; I had hoped for that (which was covered in Home) to be examined from his perspective

Overall, though, this remains an excellent and worthy read. I was engrossed and enchanted.

Rating: A-