pachrist

Maybe if there were a story in a book about people not listening to NOAA and they were destroyed in a massive flood. Maybe, just maybe, that would help them understand.

And a $199 stand for it, sold separately.

You can’t use box office take to measure a movie’s success.

Shawshank Redemption is often regarded as the best movie of all time. It was a box office flop.

Battlefield Earth is often regarded as the worst movie of all all time. It was also a box office flop.

Using those two examples, obviously the only true measure of a movie’s long term success is whether or not they overuse Dutch angles.

If Folie a Deux doesn’t use a shit load of Dutch angles, maybe it’ll turn out OK.

Most standups are bad because they’re not used as a quick collaboration tool, they’re used as a demonstration to prove you’re working, and then the least productive people talk the most because they’re the most desperate to prove they’re working.

Bart Starr was pretty cool. Seems like a nice guy.

And infinitely more watchable.

I have a cool blog I made for class with lots of techy stuff. Can you check it out and tell me what you think?

http://localhost:8080

Women are not good for the new photo of the world around you and the world is the most beautiful thing in the world and in the world and in the world and in the world and in the world and in the world and in the world and in the world and in the world.

Gottem?

Hail LinkedIn, full of grace.

I don’t think many people rejected the conclusion outright, just the path of getting there. So much of the last season was totally nonsensical. Dothraki ride off into the darkness and get obliterated by zombies; next episode, they’re back! Everyone forgets about the Iron Fleet. Jamie ditches a 7 season character arc in a second. Arya subverts expectations and undermines the existential threat in an instant. The all-seeing, all-knowing Bran serves no purpose except to have “the best story” somehow. Dany heel turns from saving the world to destroying it on a whim.

Most of Game of Thrones, books and show, is predicated on causality. Things happen for a reason. And they happen realistically, not necessarily in the way we want. It was a breathe of fresh air in the beginning. Honor isn’t rewarded for honor’s sake. Strength is a tool, but a slippery slope. Travel takes time. When that realism is thrown out to force plot, it undermines the entire show.

So it’s not necessarily the ending that was bad, it was how it got there.

I liked it as well. The opening is great. It subverts expectations in the same way a lot of D&D campaigns do. Missing judge will be a co-conspirator, maybe in disguise? Nope, just a bird.

Subway spent a long time and a lot of marketing money training their customers that a sandwich should cost $5 and taste fine. Not great, but fine. But then the doubled the cost and halved the quality. They spent years teaching customers to avoid the sandwich they now serve.

Little Caesars had a similar problem, but instead of doubling the price, they raised it $1. Cheap pizza for $5 is fine, and cheap pizza for $6 still feels fine.

I have a son that loves ballet. He’s 3 and loves to dance. I could beat him, because ballet is arbitrarily "girly, " or I could encourage him to do things he loves.

I am much more interested in him being a kind, well-rounded person than I am interested in him being someone else’s stereotype of a man.

I kind of still dislike some of the even more nuanced discussion around gender because it’s goal can still be to categorize. More precisely, but still occasionally hurtful. I would love for everyone to be happy as they are, undefined by anyone but themselves. I’ve known people who came through so many awful experiences, and some found comfort in the group acceptance of a new gender definition, but the ones I know who are happiest eventually shrug that off entirely and find full self-acceptance. It’s so hard to do, and not everyone can, but gender acceptance is only a stepping stone in the path to self-acceptance.

Motion is lotion?

Everyone gets arthritic enough to figure it out eventually. Anyone who doesn’t understand is still young enough that getting a decent night’s sleep fixes all aches and pains.

I hate this approach to business.

Coupling subscriptions with forced obscolecence is a nightmare. If HP made the best printer money could buy, using it with a subscription model would be a hard sell. But they make shit printers that die at the drop of a hat, so coupling them with a subscription is asinine.

Logitech makes a decent mouse, passable webcams, and shit keyboards.

Just in case anyone from Logitech ever reads this, I own 2 MX Verticals, an MX Ergo, and an MX Master 2S. I love them all, but I’d rather use an OEM bog standard Dell mouse than pay for a subscription.

We live in a world right now where people can do good things but don’t, and they can also do evil things, but they don’t. That’s free will.

What I am saying that free will is an internal condition, it’s yours. If an external force is placing hard limits and boundaries on your will, it fundamentally cannot be free. Best case, it’s limited. Worst case, it’s nonexistent.

The traditional definition of evil for many religions, particularly the Abrahamic ones, is anything that runs contrary to the laws/decrees of God is evil. Forced conformation to that, regardless of how it’s done, cannot leave people with free will. God creates laws. God creates a law that forces compliance to his laws. By forcing me to choose to comply, there is no real choice (another paradox), and that fundamentally is not free.

I don’t think that God in this case needs people to choose evil to punish them, but there are billions of people who think Hell is super real and probably want for both of us to burn there, and they’d probably disagree. I think it is an safer assumption to simply say if that people who make a choice, whether it’s good or evil, are better in aggregate than people who can make no choice at all.

Yeah, probably would have been better to use dividing by 0 instead of 0=1 as the example, but the point still stands.

Yes/no isn’t a valid answer to a paradox. Can God create a universe where there is freewill and there isn’t freewill? Can God create a rock so large he can’t lift it? Can he shit so big he can’t flush it? All interesting, but in the end invalid questions. But shoehorning in a yes/no when the real answer is just undefined is incorrect.

It’s good fun for an internet comment section, or irritating some youth group leader, but in the end not a useful question.

My bad, that baggage is the capital G God primarily referring to Abrahamic tradition God. Zeus doesn’t pass the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent religion check, but Yahweh and Allah definitely have those claimed tied pretty innately to their being.

I think I would say that the people living in that utopia do not have free will. Their will is not their own, it’s God’s will imposed on them. They can operate within its confines and limits, but it is externally, not internally defined.

I think you have to separate out two things that are often conflated together, freedom of will and freedom of action. The difference is with freedom of will, I can want to fly, and with freedom of action, I can fly if I want to.

It reminds me of the classic Henry Ford quote about having your car in any color you want, as long as it’s black. If I want a black car, fine. If I want a white car, that’s a problem.

There are many good arguments against God. This is not one of them.

It’s a slightly more complicated version of whether God can create a rock so big he cannot lift it. Can God create a universe where I simultaneously have freewill and also don’t have the ability to do anything outside his will (evil)? Can 0 equal 1? The answer to that question isn’t yes/no, it’s that the question is invalid. Freewill does not equal non-freewill. It’ll confuse some unprepared Sunday School teacher, but that’s it.