domain:vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com
TIRM
15hr ago
I thought it was the other way around. Lewis wasn’t a Christian for most of his life. He converted in his middle age and wrote those books. Not everyone was Christian.
Mormon cosmology definitely has something to do with it, but the "Banned Mormon Cartoon" doesn't have much in common with Mormon cosmology.
If you don't believe me (a Mormon), here are a bunch of bitter ex-Mormons saying the same thing.
As for the substance, it is largely accurate, in the sense that, for most things it says, you can find some quote where something like that was taught by a Mormon leader at some point. There are a few just plain misstatements like “Star Base Kolob.” No church authority has ever called Kolob a star base, as far as I can find anywhere.
But it is wildly inaccurate in the way it characterizes and connects things. If they were giving the Catholic Church the same kind of treatment, they would say that Communion is “Catholic ritualized zombie cannibalism.” And one could argue that they are technically correct. After all, Catholics believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And another word for a person who came back from the dead is a zombie. And Catholics believe that in a sense the Host is transformed into the literal body of this Christ. And another word for eating someone’s literal body is cannibalism. But calling it that communicates a wild caricature, that no Catholic would actually identify with. No Mormon would identify with the caricatures in the cartoon, despite the fact that you could find a seed of truth in most of the particulars.
Early Christians were put to death partly because they were said to be practicing cannibalism. This statement is much more true of Christians than most of the claims in that cartoon are of Mormons.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
16hr ago
Why is that an improvement? This seems like a terrible way to allocate capital.
Glassnoser
16hr ago
I'm confused. Are you regularly getting into accidents? It is definitely never worth the cost to get insurance for something that regularly happens. Insurance is for things that will probably never happen in your life.
Glassnoser
16hr ago
No, I think that in practice, private companies are much more focused on the long term than governments because they have very strong incentives to be. Most real humans aren't paid millions of dollars to run large companies after going through an extensive filtering process disciplined by markets. Most companies don't even survive more than a few years. The market selects for companies that are unusually well-run and mostly only allows them to survive, at least in competitive industries. It's not perfect process but I think it works much better than politics.
Glassnoser
16hr ago
The entire value of the company comes from the money it eventually pays out to its shareholders.
Glassnoser
16hr ago
Well, the shareholders care about the market's assessment of the long-term profitability of the company, and the shareholders elect the board of directors, so the company has a much stronger incentive to care about the long term than the government does. For the government to care about the king term, the voters need to be able to assess their performance and vote in that basis, and they just don't.
CanofWorms
16hr ago
As another commenter said, I think painting or wallpaper is going to be your best bet because this is the easiest DIY project and the most easily fixable if your kids make a mess. Other DIY projects are, while satisfying, not exactly fun.
Landscaping is a potentially good option, but I would have found gardening/landscaping as boring as watching paint dry when I was a kid.
Other ideas:
- Wall mounting a TV
- Pillow fort with wall hooks installed
- Putting glow in the dark stars up on the kids ceiling
- Installing new LED lights in the kids room (adhesive strip lighting is really cool even for adults lol)
- Adding dimmers or other custom lighting. Be careful if you're going to do any electrical/outlet work.
- Installing shelves
- Setting up a woodworking/art studio if you now have a dedicated space or garage
Reading this list, I think the custom lighting would be a really fun one for the kids.
Also, you should ask ChatGPT!
CanofWorms
16hr ago
WoW Classic is still the most addicting game I have ever played. Sometimes I will randomly think of Stranglehold Vale and get an insane itch to create a new character.
ulyssessword
16hr ago
I feel so seen haha. I also refused to watch the last one. Can't even remember its name if I'm being honest. Total fundamental drop off of interest.
I was disappointed at The Force Awakens, and dropped the franchise after The Last Jedi. My first instinct is still to call Episode 9 "From His Nap".
Quantumfreakonomics
17hr ago
Reading the text of the chant (“The power of one. The power of two. The power of many.”) is doesn’t sound so bad, but when you watch the scene itself it sounds like a cross between “Gen-Z boss and a mini” and a cringe college protest chant. Just absolutely awful sound design.
SnapDragon
17hr ago
Zootopia too. There's some woke messaging, but the story is a hell of a lot of fun.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
17hr ago
I finished Stranger In A Strange Land earlier this week, as I mentioned at one point in last week's SSQS thread. So now I'm on to the other book I picked up at the same time, an anthology of short stories by Harlan Ellison. Overall I have found it to be quite good, though I strongly recommend against getting the specific volume I got (a Barnes and Noble edition called "Greatest Hits"). First, B&N put a sticker on the cover that I didn't notice until after I got it home and ditched the receipt, and it left glue residue when I peeled it off. Second, it is tainted in places by the Current Year - there's a content warning saying that the stories have offensive thinking about women and minorities, and some editor thought it would be acceptable to change Ellison's text to say "Black" instead of "black" when referring to a character's ethnicity. Honestly, I would return it if I hadn't immediately thrown out the receipt, because editing an author's work after the fact like that is downright offensive. But c'est la vie.
For the actual content of the stories themselves, they are good (which is no surprise considering the author). I bought the book because it contained I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream (which I had never read), and I thought it deserved all the praise it gets. But surprisingly, I found "Repent, Harlequin" Said The Ticktockman (which I had not heard of) to steal the show thus far. The story is a classic sci-fi story type, the cautionary tale. It shows a version of humanity where society is so far in service to keeping a schedule that the tool of a clock has become a tyrant over humanity. I don't want to talk too much about it because it is a short story (only perhaps 30 pages), so it would be pretty easy to give the whole thing away. But I thought that Ellison does a great job of introducing the world, setting up a story that the reader cares about, and resolving said story in an effective way, all within a very short format. It is a really great bit of writing and I'm glad I got exposed to it even though it's not what I originally purchased the book for.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
17hr ago
Admittedly, almost none of these extremely well-dressed young people look like they can fight in their outfits, or do rock-climbing in heels... Form is clearly privileged over function.
It is very much a game for normies, you play as a pure-good hero. Sometimes the saccharineness of it all does get a bit over the top. But it is remarkable to think how far it can go into horror only for the artstyle to make it not-really-horror.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
17hr ago
I must give you props on accomplishing something I wouldn't have thought possible: you almost make me want to try Arma sometime, through the sheer enthusiasm and love you clearly have for the game. I strongly suspect I would hate it, as I tend to be not too fussed about realism in games (indeed, Battlefield is already the more realistic shooter compared to others I have played a lot of, such as Quake 3 or UT2k4) and so I expect I would find Arma somewhat frustrating. But there is something enchanting with the picture you paint of the kind of fun you unlock when you can study infantry tactics manuals to get better at a game, or the way it forces teamwork in a way other games simply do not even try to. Perhaps if I ever clear out my prodigious backlog, I should give it a shot.
This implies that the right wing and left wing argument about state control are entirely about morals and not about the effectiveness of capitalism, free markets and a hands-off government.
If "your rules fairly" includes doing things that you think are stupid, inefficient, counter-productive and extra prone to corruption (as the traditional small government conservative would think of governments owning companies) then doing it back would be nonsensical.
It only makes sense in a situation where the main argument to not do something is because of morals or tradition or law, rather than it being bad policy. Why hit our country in the face just because the left hits our country in the face sometimes? You just help to normalize and move the overton window on counterproductive self-face hitting among normies.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
18hr ago
Well that still wouldn't work since they would've caught up to the big ship since it was imminently about to run out of fuel, attacked it, discovered the crew were mostly absent, then traced it back to Crait.
However you're clearly right, I'm surprised the cloaking/stealth angle wasn't in the extensive plot description on the wiki where I checked first, before AI confirmed you: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_Episode_VIII_The_Last_Jedi
OliveTapenade
18hr ago
I wonder if there's a cycle - there was a phase, I thought, of really Catholic science fiction, works like A Canticle for Leibowitz, or A Case of Conscience, and prominent Catholic authors; Gene Wolfe springs to mind. Apparently some people think there's something there even today, though to my untrained eye the golden age of Catholic science fiction was in the past.
So maybe just different subcultures or groups get into particular genres every now and then. There may not be that much to it.
5434a
18hr ago
My take on helping people is that if I can I should
I used to feel the same. I don't anymore, but I used to.
It took me a long time and a lot of money/free labor to learn the "within reason" part
Amen. I never did it in the hope of being liked. I did it because I wasn't doing anything else with my time so why not pitch in. I stopped doing it because I reached the conclusion that doing nothing and losing nothing was preferable to helping people and ending up worse off, plus getting lined up to be volunteered to have the process repeat.
The last time I did a good deed worth talking about post resolution was when me and my gf at the time found a pair of debilitatingly intoxicated students in the park around midnight so I called a taxi and gave the driver £20 to take them home. They, a boy and a girl, were half naked and had just crawled out of a large water-filled ditch together. God knows what they'd been doing but it was clearly not working out and it was time to call it a night. When the taxi arrived the girl complained that she didn't want to share the taxi with the boy so I let her know that she could either deal with it or resume searching for her shoes. She wisely decided she'd deal with it.
In that instance I was pretty confident that I wouldn't become jaded from repeatedly encountering the same situation.
TitaniumButterfly
19hr ago
Here you go. Timestamped!
self_made_human
śāśvataṃ jīva athavā yudhyamāno mṛtyuṃ āpnuhi
19hr ago
Arma Reforger.
I am somewhat embarrassed to admit I have over 3700 hours in its predecessor, Arma 3. That is almost half a year of my life, and it wasn't all just leaving the game on idle. About 500 in Reforger.
For the unfamiliar, the Arma franchise is what happens when you take Battlefield and force adherence to a semblance of realism. Combined arms on the company scale, presented in either first or third person. Guns are lethal, you're not a super soldier, finding yourself facing a main battle tank in an open field, without effective AT only really ends one way. The maps can be enormous, and they must be, to accommodate the full spectrum of modern firepower.
Your role, in the grand scheme, is usually one of profound insignificance. You are a grunt. You might be a grunt with the keys to a fifty ton armored fighting vehicle, a helicopter, or a supersonic jet, but your fundamental state is that of a small, fragile component in a much larger machine.
To actually achieve anything, you must look to teamwork. You must find people willing to be the other cogs in the larger machine. You will find yourself reading the USMC's small unit tactics manual and applying it to great effect in a video game. In the limit, you could run a West Point course (and this happens, since a variant of Arma is marketed as a genuine military simulation for actual soldiers).
There's no one way to play Arma. You can play it single-player, either in its curated campaign, a wider sandbox, custom missions that push the bar for what the engine allows. You might play multiplayer, where experiences range from hardcore one-life ops with a hundred other human players vs AI, or even other humans, to people RPing a semi-functional society. Remember, DayZ and PUBG both began as Arma mods.
The reason why I have an ungodly number of hours in Arma 3 is a feature/game mode called Zeus.
This mode elevates one player to the status of a god, or more accurately, a Dungeon Master. From a top down, real time strategy perspective, the Zeus controls every facet of the unfolding scenario. They spawn enemies, call in air strikes, change the weather, and narrate the conflict, all in service of providing a compelling experience for the dozens of human players who have entrusted them with their Saturday evening. As a child, I arranged green plastic army men in my backyard. As an adult, I marshaled platoons of real people from across the globe. Among them, a cohort of astonishingly racist yet disarmingly hilarious British alcoholics, who, in a display of baffling camaraderie, adopted a young doctor from India into their virtual unit. I am scheduled to have a drink with some of these individuals in the physical world later this week. The kinds of bonds you can make in the game are sometimes ridiculous.
But Arma 3 is an artifact of a bygone era. It was never a paragon of technical elegance, and time has only magnified its flaws. The player controller is famously obtuse, the performance is inconsistent, and it lacks a constellation of quality of life features we now consider standard. It is, in a word, clunky.
Arma Reforger? It's very much a transitional product. Bohemia Interactive wanted to overhaul the entire game engine, and decided to launch a glorified paid demo to keep players busy till Arma 4 came out. Then, to the surprise of both the devs and cynical older fans like me, said demo blew up, and is now a genuinely good game which approaches greatness when modded.
The critical distinction is this: Arma Reforger is a superior shooter. The fundamental act of moving, aiming, and firing is vastly improved. You are no longer wrestling with an awkward digital puppet that seems determined to glitch through the terrain at the most inopportune moments. Clipping your car into a small rock will no longer reliably send you to space. The graphics, while not at the absolute cutting edge, are entirely serviceable and a significant leap forward. The friction between player intent and in game action has been dramatically reduced.
Alas, this reduction in friction has come at the cost of systemic depth. The simulation is not as comprehensive. The new equivalent of the Zeus mode is a pale, half baked imitation of its predecessor. The artificial intelligence of non player characters is unimpressive, and this is a damning statement when one recalls that the old AI was hardly a legion of tactical geniuses. Yet the core of the Arma experience persists, and a new dimension has been unlocked: the player versus player combat is orders of magnitude better. I now find myself genuinely enjoying large scale PvP, an activity I had long dismissed as a chaotic and laggy sideshow in Arma 3. The smoother, more responsive core mechanics make all the difference. Add to this monumental, DLC quality modifications like RHS, which transports the default Cold War setting to the present day, and you have a robust platform for tactical conflict. Getting a few friends together to engage in a firefight with other human beings is now a clean, enjoyable, and rewarding loop.
In a nutshell, Call of Duty and Battlefield use pretty pictures and the illusion of real world weaponry to sell the fantasy of being a supersoldier. Arma will have you feeling like a real and all-too-vulnerable soldier in the fire of modern conflict.
I have very high hopes for Arma 4 now. While I genuinely enjoy PvP at times, I yearn for the experience of herding human cats through my own campaigns. If done right, everyone has a great time you can't really replicate anywhere else, and you end up with drinking buddies for life.
thrownaway24e89172
Death is the inevitable and only true freedom
19hr ago
Minecraft. Mining. Relaxed.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
19hr ago
Where does "good deed" end and "codependent sucker prone to being taken advantage of by friends" begin? I've struggled with the latter in life.
That aside, depending on if we're counting friends or just strangers the most recent one was either giving a friend a few hundred bucks to help with immigration paperwork (She's been here for over 30 years but has been stuck in some kafkaesque green card renewal Hell since Biden was in office.) or driving a drunk guy home from the bar I'm a regular at. The latter can turn into a shitshow if they're too belligerent to cooperate or too impaired to give directions but the man in question was just irritated that the bartender didn't want to let him drive, knew where he lived, and it was a short drive. I got a free shot for my trouble and was able to do the bartender (a dear friend of mine) an easy favor.
My greatest deed doubles as a hilariously over the top act of simping. A woman I was very much in love with at the time and who was also crashing on my couch wrecked her car driving to my place, clipped a parked vehicle and ripped one of the wheels off the car. She was just about to pay the thing off and I didn't have the heart to have it towed to her mom's place knowing it would never get fixed and she'd wind up back at the beginning of the "buy here, pay here" treadmill so I said "fuck it", had it towed to my place, and all but rebuilt the front end of her car over the next few weeks. In total I replaced both lower ball joints, tie rod ends, and sway bar links (What wasn't damaged was worn out junk anyway and the parts kit was cheaper than I expected so I just bought the kit.) along with one hub/knuckle assembly, CV axle, strut, and a fender badly spraypainted to match (The latter set of parts were sourced from a friendly local junkyard.). It wasn't perfect (The subframe was either bent or just badly out of alignment due to the wreck/repair.) but I got it to drive straight enough and the repairs lasted the rest of the car's life.
My take on helping people is that if I can I should, within reason. It took me a long time and a lot of money/free labor to learn the "within reason" part. It also took a long time to learn that doing nice things for people in hopes of being liked isn't going to fix not feeling particularly likeable.
Subisides are just a strict loss of monies, and treasuries have abysmal interest rates. The superior growth rate of stocks makes them a means to raise government revenue without raising taxes.
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