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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • !Arthur Dent has his home demolished while humans simultaneously have Earth demolished by an alien race called Vogons, but him and Ford Prefect escape by hitchhiking onto the Vogon ship. They’re discovered and thrown into space, but miraculously saved by Ford’s relative (can’t remember how they’re related) and his ship The Heart of Gold, which is powerful but unpredictable. They wind up on a mythical planet due to that unpredictability, and learn that Earth was a designer planet created to calculate the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. (The famous “42” thing). The whole crew escapes the planet and decides to go to The Restaurant at the End of The Universe to eat and watch the universe end.!<

    Have I just stolen The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and given it to you?


  • Games are about entertainment. They’re not a career.

    They’re all skills that you have to develop, and things people do because they like doing them. And if you’re not willing to learn to develop those skills, you won’t be able to participate.

    Zelda games aren’t gatekeeping me when I die a lot and they don’t give me more health. Portal 2 isn’t gatekeeping me when I can’t solve the puzzles and they won’t give me the answers. Undertale isn’t gatekeeping me because I’m bad at bullet hells and they won’t slow down time for me. The whole point of the game is to develop a skill and overcome a challenge.

    I already named several mechanics Elden Ring gives you to deal with the difficulty, and engaging with them is what the game is about. It can be as easy or as hard as you make it. If you choose not to utilize those options, that’s your prerogative.




  • Some of us, especially older gamers, just don’t have the reflexes for that type of game.

    I hear what you’re saying, but to be fair, younger players don’t start out with those reflexes either. It’s probably harder for older players, but I’m not convinced it’s that much more of a challenge that it’s not worth trying. Maybe it’s my lack of perspective talking, but I’m willing to bet that if older folks can learn to play a guitar or code, they could learn to play Elden Ring given the same amount of practice and motivation.

    It took me over 6 hours total just to learn to parry, and even then I’d say my success rate is still only like 60% at best. I learned to do it for 1 specific DLC boss, and that was after 200 hours in the base game without using once, so I had to completely abandon my muscle memory. But man, the one run I managed to pull off where I hit just enough parries to make it out alive by the skin of my teeth, it was beautiful. I recorded it, and watching it back is like watching a dance. (Like a dancer with two left feet, but still, lol)

    Unfortunately for us, Fromsoft writes GREAT stories and Let’sPlays are still kinda boring.

    I don’t normally watch lets plays anymore either, but this one really hooked me. Gray and Lark both have a lot of charisma and bounce off of each other really well since they’re childhood friends. The stories they tell are entertaining enough that, for the first time ever, I decided to watch a livestream (instead of the edited version I linked).

    Vaati Vidya also has a lot of good videos if you just want the raw lore.






  • These words exist for a reason they mean different things.

    Correct, and you’re still misusing them according to the people who actually identify with these labels. Atheism is the answer to what you believe, and agnosticism is the answer to what you know.

    I don’t believe God exists and I don’t know if God exists, so I’m an agnostic atheist. For you to assume atheists are gnostic by default is like me assuming Christians are Mormons by default. It’d be even more ridiculous for me to go on and argue with Christians that “Christian” means “Mormon.”





  • I don’t think there is one single test that could encompass bad standards of evidence, but the whole “just have faith” thing is a dead giveaway. Hostility towards skepticism is another. Circular logic is also a pretty good indicator, like saying your holy text is the truth because your holy text says it’s true. I guess the simplest and most effective test would be to see if the standard of evidence could be used to justify any claim.

    And for good standards of evidence, I think it depends on the context and claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that. If you told me “I got a pet goldfish” the only evidence I really need is your word. But for claims about how the universe works and why it is the way it is, you might need much more sound reasoning, math that checks out when measurements or numbers are involved, a demonstration or test to serve as proof, etc…

    Lastly, by agreeing that there is not universality …

    The majority of people who smoke don’t die from it but that doesn’t mean cigarettes aren’t problematic. I’m not saying all religions are bigoted or anything, but I am saying having any sort of doctrine opens the door to outdated beliefs overriding what we’d normally consider moral, and that by itself is problematic.


    I’d also just like to say I think this has been the most civil conversation in the whole thread, so cheers to that lol






  • That’s true, they can mould their interpretation however they need to so it conforms to their own morality, but that doesn’t come from the religion.

    If you gave an alien any of the abrahamic holy texts and then dropped it on earth it’d probably behave pretty abhorrently. In order to behave more civilly it’d have to learn from the society it was dropped into, not the religion.

    Most churches and other theists do a pretty good job of doing that and that’s a great thing, but the way I see it, the religion itself is inherently problematic until people mould it into something resembling secular morality.