domain:questioner.substack.com
Celestial-body-NOS
Supra tumulum tuum, astra nobis.
4m ago
religions that have nothing to do with Jesus whatsoever: Hinduism
Ackchyually, some Hindus consider Jesus to have been an avatar of Vishnu.
There are a lot of reasons why Muslims have a lower chance of assimilation: the religion allows for shame and correction and ostracization; they emphasize ritual purity, and every religion that does this has a stricter in/out group preference, eg gypsies and Haredim, because it conditions the mind to see others as unclean; they are inherently Arab and Arabized, because the whole religion is in Arabic and all prayers and all major commentaries, and the translations are not considered inspired, and all the centers of theology are in Arab countries, so there’s a constant pressure toward exclusion; Muslim countries want to sustain a strong Islamic in-group preference for biological and political reasons, which will always be stronger than Catholicism’s reasons of piety, and they are definitely finding ways to transfer large sums specifically for this reason; the story underlying Muhammad and the Quran is one of fierce exclusion and struggle, as opposed to the Christian story where the early Christians mingle freely; Islam has an entire corpus dedicated to how you present yourself publicly, so once your town or city becomes majority Muslim there’s now peer pressure for how you dress etc; Catholicism is frankly just a weekend lecture and nothing more for the vast majority of Catholics; Catholics were assimilating into a dominant culture that is, compared against Islam, 99.99% similar in all the important beliefs; the most extreme Catholics become priests and have a TFR of 0, while the most extreme Muslims become Imams and have a TFR of 3+
These are very basic things that a commentator should know. “Muslims will assimilate because Catholics did” is a really terrible take because it just ignores all the unique factors in both religions.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
36m ago
Wake up, babe. The release-date trailer for Menace just dropped, plus a Steam demo. The short version is that I am trying to remain calm about it and failing.
The premise sounds like someone took a Marine logistics officer, asked him what keeps him up at night, and then turned the list into a video game. You are the XO of a cruiser that is definitely not the USMC, dispatched to a distant system where governance has failed. You arrive underprepared, underequipped, with no resupply on the calendar, and your job is to impose order on chaos using a handful of professionals, some local goodwill, and whatever spare parts and recruits you can charm out of the nearest settlement.
The tactics layer feels like a love letter to small-units reality. We are talking platoon-scale fights, weapons that behave like their modern cousins, and engagements where suppression and angles decide the story more than crit rolls. The core loop is the canonical four-step sermon your squad leader gave you on a hot range: find, fix, flank, fuck. If you execute it cleanly, the map opens. If you skip a verb, the map closes on you.
Randomness exists, but it is escorted to the party and kept under supervision. Shots are not coin flips. They are more like probability distributions with manners (it helps that each bullet is individually simulated, and there are plenty of bullets). A poorly placed team can still win a duel through luck, just not reliably, and the game keeps reminding you that reliability is what we pay commanders for.
Structure matters too. There is very little of the superhero problem. No demigod hero units, no psychic artillery, no cool-downs that feel like a designer handing you a hall pass. The interesting choices happen at the margins: where you put your machine gun, whether you burn a smoke grenade now or save it for when the geometry gets unfriendly, how much risk you accept to clear a compound while you can overhear pirates shooting civilians. You're usually outnumbered, often outgunned, so it's handy that your cruiser can provide orbital fire support (in very limited doses).
Between missions the logistics fantasy takes over, and by fantasy I mean a spreadsheet with narrative lipstick. You have relationships with locals to cultivate so you can recruit and scrounge. Your ship is an upgrade tree with personality, and your squad leaders are upgrade trees with mortgages. The campaign asks you to befriend people not because friendship is abstractly good, but because friendship can be exchanged for 5.56.
I tried the demo after watching a few early-access runs. It is good in the way that makes you reevaluate other games that you thought were good. The maps push you to care about frontage and interlocking fields of fire. The suppression system punishes recklessness and rewards audacity, which is the correct moral. There are customization options tucked into every seam. I kept having the sensation that someone had finally smuggled doctrine into a toy and gotten away with it.
I have quibbles. My biggest is ammunition. LMGs and MMGs seem to go dry after roughly half a dozen bursts. Thematically it tracks with scarcity, and yes, machine gunners really do live at the intersection of mass and logistics. Still, there is a difference between teaching conservation and turning your base-of-fire element into a limited-use power-up. If the goal is to model the discipline of sustained fire, the numbers might want a second look. After all, a dedicated AT launcher modeled on a Carl Gustav allows you to fire 3 rounds, which is pretty realistic. The MGs need to scale better.
There are a few other aspects where there's a clear concession to game design over realism, such as RPGs or AT vehicles only killing a single unit of an infantry squad even on a direct hit, but eh, I can live with that.
But if this is what the vertical slice looks like, I am comfortable being publicly optimistic. The demo is already doing that annoying thing where you start composing post-mission AARs in your head while brushing your teeth. If the full release lands early next year on the same trajectory, I suspect it will become the default recommendation for anyone who ever said they wanted tactics that reward adults.
HereAndGone
38m ago
It reminded me so strongly of Belloc's riff on The Nordic Man that I had to quote it.
Now, he may be playing us all for fools and in the last instalment he'll reveal all - "what, you thought I was serious? and you guys think you are so smart?"
I hope so. I would rather be thought a fool than a knave.
quiet_NaN
39m ago
So Mormons can (politically) pass as Christians and self-identify as Christians, but theologically were assigned non-Christian at birth? Good thing we do not have separate bathrooms for Christians, then.
OliveTapenade
42m ago
I am trying to be nice here, and I genuinely do appreciate this guy's level of politeness when dealing with hostile comments. He always thanks and compliments commenters, and that's worth something. That said, I did accuse him of writing "a variant on the Gobineau/Grant Nordicist theory", and from what I've seen since then, I think that holds up. This reads to me like a 21st century update of The Passing of the Great Race. Is there a brilliantly clever twist lurking in the background somewhere? All I'll say right now is that it doesn't look like it to me.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
50m ago
I'm not sure you can code that left or right at all
It's amazing how this tranfers from one side of the culture war to the other as the natural excuse for an accusation.
2rafa
53m ago
I agree. There aren’t many Mormons in NYC (actually I grew up with a few and they have quite a strong network in finance, but the absolute number is low) and I highly doubt Trump is aware of Mormon theology or any differences with mainstream Christianity, and if he was he wouldn’t care. Mormons tell outsiders they are Christians (this is a big part of their missionary strategy) and they believe they are Christians, so why wouldn’t Trump take them at their word? Even many lay American non-Mormon Christians see them as Weird Christians, just like they do Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mennonites whatever.
quiet_NaN
54m ago
While I might also have made that particular mistake, I would also have looked up the LDS on WP and probably caught it before posting here. If I was an non-religious president elected by a bunch of religious people, I would filter any statements touching religion through a religious advisor.
Then again, Trump is not exactly cosplaying as an observant Christian. Approximately zero of the religious people who voted for him are under the impression that Donald "grab them by the pussy" Trump has lead a good Christian life. Still, he was the one who appointed the SCOTUS judges which overturned Roe v Wade, which was one of the big goals of the Christian right.
It seems that most of his voters are utilitarian enough to understand that while he may be a godless atheist, he is their godless atheist, CW-wise.
The Labyrinth at Hawara
In Egypt, there is an enigmatic labyrinth, greater and more lavish than even the pyramids, attested to by ancient classical sources which has attained almost legendary status in the Western world ever since Herodotus described it in his Histories:
"[T]hey caused to be made a labyrinth, situated a little above the lake of Moiris and nearly opposite to that which is called the City of Crocodiles. This I saw myself, and I found it greater than words can say. For if one should put together and reckon up all the buildings and all the great works produced by the Hellenes, they would prove to be inferior in labour and expense to this labyrinth, though it is true that both the temple at Ephesos and that at Samos are works worthy of note. The pyramids also were greater than words can say, and each one of them is equal to many works of the Hellenes, great as they may be; but the labyrinth surpasses even the pyramids. It has twelve courts covered in, with gates facing one another, six upon the North side and six upon the South, joining on one to another, and the same wall surrounds them all outside; and there are in it two kinds of chambers, the one kind below the ground and the other above upon these, three thousand in number, of each kind fifteen hundred. The upper set of chambers we ourselves saw, going through them, and we tell of them having looked upon them with our own eyes; but the chambers under ground we heard about only; for the Egyptians who had charge of them were not willing on any account to show them, saying that here were the sepulchres of the kings who had first built this labyrinth and of the sacred crocodiles. Accordingly we speak of the chambers below by what we received from hearsay, while those above we saw ourselves and found them to be works of more than human greatness. For the passages through the chambers, and the goings this way and that way through the courts, which were admirably adorned, afforded endless matter for marvel, as we went through from a court to the chambers beyond it, and from the chambers to colonnades, and from the colonnades to other rooms, and then from the chambers again to other courts. Over the whole of these is a roof made of stone like the walls; and the walls are covered with figures carved upon them, each court being surrounded with pillars of white stone fitted together most perfectly; and at the end of the labyrinth, by the corner of it, there is a pyramid of forty fathoms, upon which large figures are carved, and to this there is a way made under ground."
Herodotus describes it as a multi-tiered structure nearby a lake named "Moiris", with one set of chambers above the ground, and yet another set of chambers beneath it which outsiders were forbidden from entering due to housing the sepulchres of its kings. Just the surface level of this labyrinthine mortuary temple seems to have floored him to the extent he declared it superior to the pyramids, and superior to anything built by the Greeks. This labyrinth would also be described by the Greek geographer Strabo in his book Geographica 17, writing that at Lake Moeris there was a Labyrinth "comparable to the pyramids, and, near it, the tomb of the king who built the Labyrinth."
Despite likely never seeing this labyrinth himself, the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus would go on to assert that the labyrinth was constructed by a native king named Mendes, who "did not accomplish anything at all, but he did build himself a tomb known as the Labyrinth,48 which was not so remarkable for its size as it was impossible to imitate in respect to its ingenious design; for a man who enters it cannot easily find his way out, unless he gets a guide who is thoroughly acquainted with the structure. 3 And some say that Daedalus, visiting Egypt and admiring the skill shown in the building, also constructed for Minos, the king of Crete, a labyrinth like the one in Egypt, in which was kept, as the myth relates, the beast called Minotaur. 4 However, the labyrinth in Crete has entirely disappeared, whether it be that some ruler razed it to the ground or that time effaced the work, but the one in Egypt has stood intact in its entire structure down to our lifetime." So he even goes as far as to claim that Knossos was inspired by the Egyptian labyrinth.
It seems that the structure has degraded significantly from the time of Diodorus to now, because this mighty labyrinth appears to have been long stripped from the Earth, and barely anything remains. The Jesuit priest Father Claude Sicard identified current-day Hawara as the likely location of the labyrinth, drawing extensively from ancient descriptions of the location. There is a lake at that location, albeit shrunken from the original size of Lake Moeris, and sure enough, there is also a pyramid there - the pyramid of Amenemhat III, which is likely the tomb which Strabo recounts in his description of the location. When archaeologists investigated the location, things seemed to match up satisfactorily - except for the labyrinth itself. There was almost no trace of it, and few archeological remains could be found near the site. Flinders Petrie, upon visiting the site in 1889, found an enormous 300m x 244m artificial stone plateau - apparently the foundation of the labyrinth - and suggested the original labyrinth had been quarried for stone. This was the archaeological consensus up until relatively recently.
The Mataha Expedition, a geophysical study conducted by the National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics, was carried out in March of 2008. It was done with the permission of Zahi Hawass, president of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, and carried out with the support of Ghent University. They deployed ground-penetrating techniques to examine the site at Hawara, and their research "confirms the presence of archaeological features at the labyrinth area south of the Hawara pyramid of Amenemhet III. These features covering an underground area of several hectares, have the prominent signature of vertical walls on the geophysical results. The vertical walls with an average thickness of several meters, are connected to shape nearly closed rooms, which are interpreted to be huge in number." This nexus of rooms and walls that they interpret as a labyrinth is completely submerged below the water table at this point, and above it there is a much more haphazard set of observations which appear to be decayed mudbrick features - likely the remains of a Roman settlement. In between the two layers of this underground structure there is the large stone slab identified by Petrie, and the authors posit that this was not the foundation of the structure, but its roof instead. Upon presentation of the scan results at the Ghent University public lecture, Hawass requested that the team stop communicating their results, "intimidating the Mataha Expedition team members with Egyptian National Security sanctions."
In other words, the Labyrinth of Hawara may have been quietly rediscovered over 17 years ago, and this find seems to have been buried in a way where it has gotten almost no mainstream attention. As far as I can tell the original study that located the labyrinth released to nothing but deafening silence, with only a small handful of obscure tabloids covering it. The most mainstream it's ever been was when Joe Rogan hosted a content creator in his podcast who brought attention to the possible discovery, and that's pretty much the most high-profile coverage it's ever gotten. No proper front-page coverage in mainstream media outlets. Nothing that would bring it to the attention of your average Joe on the street.
Meanwhile, the results that the Mataha Expedition found have been independently reconfirmed multiple times now. In 2010, the authors of a study named "VLF-EM study for archaeological investigation of the labyrinth mortuary temple complex at Hawara area, Egypt" applied VLF-EM (very low frequency electromagnetic method) techniques to the site at Hawara, and found subsurface features consistent with descriptions by Herodotus. "[S]omewhat elongated and square filtered in-phase VLF-EM anomalies can be observed. They are approximately oriented in the SE-NW and NE-SW directions. These anomalies are produced from alternative positive (good conductors) and negative (bad conductors) peaks. These linear features may be interpreted as the remains of the labyrinth, which was described by Herodotus (II, 148–9): the visitor was guided from courtyards into rooms into galleries into more rooms and from there into more courtyards. Strabo (ca. 64 BC–19 AD) also described the labyrinth as hidden chambers, which are long and large in number and have paths running through one another that twist and turn." The location map they provide confirms this to be the very same structure the Mataha expedition analysed.
In 2023, yet another paper was written about it synthesising the results of both the Mataha expedition and the VLF-EM studies, and supplementing that with further evidence. Apparently there was even a 3d reconstruction of the subsurface features at some point, revealing at least two levels to the structure, but no accompanying scientific paper detailing their methodology was ever published, making it difficult to substantiate or check their findings. The author presents results from his studies of the site with Sentinel-1 C-band synthetic aperture radar, where he finds the following: "Below the pyramid in what is believed to be a mortuary complex are at least three returns that are rectangular in shape. One of the delineated regions (B) is about 275,000 sq. feet – almost the estimated size as the rectangular area excavated by Petrie. Another region (C) may be the continuation of the above structure. A second rectangular area (D) west of the Abdul Wahbi canal is also evident in the SAR image. The lack of visible structures in Google Earth imagery over these areas suggests the possibility that these returns could be subsurface features."
It really strikes me just how possibly staggering these findings are, yet they're completely unknown by your average member of the public - at least one that isn't highly interested in archaeology or Egyptology. If it's actually the site attested to by the ancient Greeks, this might well be one of the most interesting unexcavated sites from antiquity I've seen (second only to Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum), and hopefully more work will be done to preserve and investigate it in the future. And hopefully it gets opened to the public within my lifetime. I for one would like to be able to follow in the footsteps of Herodotus and see the remains of this massive mortuary temple with my own eyes.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Look, I'm not blind, and this is the Motte, where you are allowed to just speak plainly. It just feels like needless pussyfooting.
I've flat-out called this guy a racist and sexist, and that's what I think he's getting at. He's trying to tip-toe around all that by "ha ha, you dummies fell for my cunning ploy! No, I will reveal the real meaning in a later chapter!" but uh, so far, it's "the real meaning is racism and sexism".
I think I have established my "no I am not a progressive" credentials enough that if this reeks of 19h century racist anthropology to me (and I've read cheap mass-market reprints of old texts so I can say that with some confidence), that is what is going on.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
He mentioned it here. Professional obligations of some sort. He'll be back in a few months.
Corvos
1hr ago
Plausible, but it’s also just a much better political move at this time. Saying ‘Mormons aren’t real Christians’ at this time makes you look petty and unkind. Talking about ‘people of faith’ makes you look all that and mealy-mouthed.
From a pure optics POV, better to support the victims full-throatedly now and walk any problems back later.
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Hajnalis aren't 'white people' and Tropicals aren't 'blacks'
Could have fooled me with all the bullshit about melanin in the skin etc. Are you going to edit that out for your oh-so-important book that will solve all our cultural and societal problems when you remind white men that they are white men and should reawaken to their ancestral superiority?
HereAndGone
1hr ago
Oh and if you are just now dropping in and find something objectionable in the post below, ha ha, despair, for you have fallen for my devious and excessively-elaborate device
Oh, phew! Because it sounded way too near to "I am White Aryan Race of Kings riding around on horses waving swords conquering lesser nations Guy and I am sneaking up on A Modest Proposal: The Final Solution for all those pesky brown and black people Tropical Islanders" crossed with "The White Man's Burden, and boy do I mean White and Man".
But lucky for us, all the "them violent, dumb, criminal Tropicals, huh?" content is only a cunning fake.
cjet79
1hr ago
Having some thoughts about 4 dimensional spaces.
I've heard it said before that humans can't conceive of or perceive 4d spaces.
I was thinking that this isn't a mental limitation it's a perceptive and specifically a visual limitation.
Vision is basically a 2d sense, so it is limited in that it can only accurately perceive 2d environments (like a map). Our brains are able to do some juggling and work this 2d sense into perceiving our 3d environment. And it helps to have more than one eye to convert the 2d senses into a 3d understanding.
Some of our other senses are what I might consider 1d. Hearing and smell are just intensity detectors. They aren't really for navigating our 3d environment so we don't often think about how limiting they are in that way. Hearing doesn't feel 1d because we have ears that alter the sound and allow our brain to figure out directionality.
Here is the fascinating thing: we do in fact have a sense that it is 3d. Our sense of touch or our basic bodily self awareness.
If you try to imagine 4d spaces visually they make no sense, but if you instead imagine being able to contort your body inside a 4d space it can seem a little weird but not 'my brain is totally broken' levels of weird.
Simple exercise:
Imagine a bag of holding from dungeons and dragons. It's a small 6 inch round bag. But if you reach inside there is about a circular yard of space. This is a 4d space. Visually it's confusing as all hell, especially if you imagine the outer material of the bag being see-through. But imagining reaching in their with one arm while your other hand holds the bag is not all that confusing.
So by string together multiple 3d senses, via our sense of bodily space and touch, we can perceive 4d environments. We don't really have 4d environments so our brain doesn't have any built in hardware to make this easier.
5 spacial dimensions is where things might actually go off the rails. I have no idea how to even describe such a space. Certainty nothing as simple or widespread as a bag of holding. Curious if anyone else can think of 5 dimensional spaces used in fiction?
2rafa
1hr ago
I don’t think the specific nature of services, which vary hugely by culture and denomination, means much. Modern Mormon services often seem Protestant, as I understand it, but that’s quite temporal. In the 19th century assimilated Jews reconfigured synagogue services to become essentially Christian in the style of the time (adding sermons, adding organs, adding hymns), but they were still Jewish obviously, and some of those things later became less common - and were never common among the very orthodox.
zeke5123a
2hr ago
Being a foodie is arguably the sine qua non of pmc membership. Matt doesn’t realize how little it actually matters because it’s the air he breathes.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
2hr ago
It's a shame how all the really interesting SSCs are from more than a decade ago.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2hr ago
You forgot to mention that it's from the developer of Battle Brothers, an acclaimed game in the low-tech end of the same genre. (Unlike those of Battle Brothers, the characters of Menace do have legs.)
2D3D
2hr ago
sots1 was a buggy trashmess with broken damage profiles for their laser/missile/cannon mix. Kerberos had a grand vision and simply couldn't execute. a smaller scope might have worked better but then it'd have lost its magic.
however my own winner for overambitious nonsense is star citizen. it is the quintessential space sim, combining the worst of 90s suboptimal UI with 2000s busywork gameplay loop grind and 2010s predatory monetization. If there ever was a reason why a studio exec was necessary to keep a visionary in check, its anything to do with chris roberts. he shit the bed with freelancer being way too complex for no reason, and then developed star citizen in retaliation to fulfil his luke skywalker starfighter elite pilot roleplay fantasy, a fantasy shared by many a space nerd. whether people actually LIKE flying around in a claustrophobic cockpit in space flipping around the elliptical plane nauseatingly or spending 10 minutes travelling through jump gatea for the sake of "immersion" is secondary to roberts and his fans. what matters is that they get to pretend theyre really hanging out with luke about to take out the death star. a noble enough aim, save for the fact that they made flying a spaceship not fun at all.
Hieronymus
2hr ago
(The Catholics and Orthodox consider each other's apostolic successions and sacraments valid).
It’s a tangent, but is there a clear Eastern Orthodox consensus on this? E.O. attitudes toward the Western churches seem to vary quite a lot, and I have never been able to get a handle on which takes on the issue, if any, are mainstream within their communion.
The urbanite’s favorite social leisure activity is trying a new restaurant. They make plans in advance around it, it’s where they sustain their friendships, it’s where they experience novelty without drugs, it’s a whole big thing. There aren’t that many novel spaces that you can relax in which aren’t a restaurant in a city.
Humans also just naturally become addicted to new food and clothes, because they experience these every day. You see corrections against this in the Bible for this reason: “is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”, and “for the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit”. But where will an irreligious progressive hear a correction against becoming addicted to novel food, unless they’re into stoicism and mindfulness?
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