Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that.

Semi-related, are there Leftwingers that are righties unwilling to even say the name of?

Arguably Joe Biden, they’ve been calling him Brandon for years. But they make up stupid little nicknames for everyone.

Fuck yeah, good for Mike. That sort of thing still works sometimes, but you have to be really, really good at what you do. But getting a good portfolio in the right hands at the right time is really all it takes.

How could I forget about Dolly Parton! I should be ashamed. The world could use a few more of her.

I did appreciate the story, thanks. And that’s about exactly how I expected it happened, lol. Minus the hikers, I wouldn’t have guessed that, but I can imagine exactly how it sounded when they told you to watch out for them bars!

With proper use of metamagic, every spell is potentially like five different spells. Poindexter over here might have two dozen different named spells written down in his diary, but I know two fire based spells and I can make each of them do about eight different things, half of which aren’t even fire damage.

It’s the difference between writing down a recipe, and knowing how to cook.

Don’t let my people monopolize that accent! It’s a beautiful accent, in my opinion. Shame about most of the folks it’s attached to. Most people hear a southern drawl and their mind goes right to white supremacy rednecks, which is unfortunately not incorrect of them to think. I wish we had some popular well educated folks to bring that sound to the larger populace so that it isn’t such a red flag.

I mean, that might be true, but I work on a lot of shit that’s right around 20 years old. It’s mostly metric. But I keep a set of standard sockets around that I’ve had to pull out once or twice. Sometimes it’s been because of swollen bolts but sometimes I’m pretty damn sure that’s a 5/16.

Mechanics work in metric mostly. You still come across some imperial sizes occasionally. Though recently that’s been getting standardized a lot better.

It’s “technically” a combat vehicle

“Have a nive day”

Not nice, nive, as in I hope your day is full of knives

To teach him that dignitaries on display are vulnerable to snipers

After reviewing this list I have neglected to mention Shadows of Forbidden Gods, a Civ like where you play as Cthulhu, and more importantly I forgot to talk about Deep Rock Galactic and will be hurling myself into lava as penance at my nearest convenience.

Hell yeah I would.

If you enjoy roguelikes, I got you in spades.

• Slay the Spire is currently $8 USD on sale and is one of my most played games of all time. Deck building roguelike.
• Caves of Qud is the single greatest modern classic roguelike that I’ve ever played and is also in my top 5 of most played games of all time. $20 USD. If you understand what the string of words “modern classic roguelike” means and that intrigues you then you’re in for a treat and a half.
• Dead Cells speaks for itself on its store page and is technically out of price range for this at $25 when not on sale, but it’s worth the extra five bucks. It’s also worth the additional $25 for all the DLCs, after you’ve sunk 200 hours into the base game already.
• Cult of the Lamb - ditto above about the price tag, you actually largely can’t go wrong with most things published by Devolver Digital. I own a significant percentage of their lineup and haven’t been disappointed. Devolver isn’t the dev company, but they take a lot of indie teams for publishing and I like them a lot. They’re good folks that sell good games.
• Risk of Rain 2 - is also $25 but worth the squeeze. I’ll try to keep everything else in the price range.
• Rift Wizard - $14.99, and the very similar but slightly superior Rift Wizard 2 at $17.99 are fun little strategy-heavy games about playing what amounts to wizard chess. The store page videos will describe this game better than I’m able to. It’s actually quite a good little game for people that enjoy games that require you to become ludicrously overpowered to survive.
• Balatro - $14.99, the significant buzz around this game is entirely warranted, cursed poker will consume the next four months of your life. You have been warned.
• Path of Achra - $9.99 A self described “broken build sandbox” that is, and very much looks like, a game made by one dude in his spare time. Don’t let the art fool you, I love it to pieces. Another game for people that enjoy games that require you to get super overpowered to survive.
• Tiny Rogues - $9.99 I only recently got into this one. Great game, great replay value, check out videos to see if it’s for you.

Outside of the roguelike genre there are also a couple good ones that I’ll name, though I do admit this list will probably be shorter:

• Siralim Ultimate - $19.99 is one of the grindiest monster collector games I’ve ever played but if you enjoy grinding that sort of game, you can build teams that would dunk your competitive Uber Pokémon team into the shadow realm. It has a ridiculous number of creatures with a ridiculous number of absurd abilities and you’ll find yourself farming this game on and off for like six years. Or I did anyway, I’ve been following the evolution of the game since Siralim 2 in 2016. You can also play any of them on your phone, which I actually find to be the superior experience for the most part because it’s a good game to play in 10-minute bursts over long periods of time. If you’re going to get any of them go straight to Ultimate, don’t bother with the others, it’s the same game significantly evolved over time.
• Exanima - $14.99 Top down physics based melee combat RPG. Check the store page videos and youtube to figure out if this interests you. It very much did interest me, and after several years of dev silence the game is now being actively updated again, which is very exciting.
• Ultrakill - $25 currently (I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t do this anymore…) Buy it on sale if you’re a fan of fast paced FPS games, say new Doom for example. Don’t read, just buy. Trust me on this one. I wouldn’t steer you wrong, I promise.
• Hollow Knight - $14.99 The greatest metroidvania of our age and spawned more knockoffs than the genre namesakes did. Pls give silksong.
• Sunless Sea - $18.99 This is a very slow and very story driven game about being a sailor in hell. Familiarity with the general setting of Fallen London is very beneficial but is not required. This game is slow. But if you can vibe with it, it will deliver one of the most deeply touching RPG stories I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. This game is truly a treasure that won’t be appreciated by most people. But even so I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t at least mention it for you to look at.

I have to stop myself here because I could go on about this all night and still not be done. Gaming is my main hobby and indie games are the main games I play. Name me a genre you enjoy and I’ll scroll around for recommendations if none of the above catch your eye.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito

As fake as hell as this sounds, no this guy was for real. Check out his list of total objects consumed.

At least:[3][8] [citation needed]

• 45 door hinges
• 18 bicycles
• 15 shopping carts
• 7 TV sets
• 6 chandeliers
• 2 beds
• 1 pair of skis
• 1 computer
• 1 copy of the textbook Gravitation by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler.
• 1 Cessna 150 light aircraft
• 1 waterbed (full of water)
• 500 metres (1,600 ft) of steel chain at once
• 1 coffin (with handles)
• 1 Guinness award plaque
• Assorted razors and bolts

It’s the golden age of indie games. I’ve got dozens of games on my steam library made by a team of between 1 and 12 people that I bought for $20 or less. Those guys are doing great, and doing great work. I rarely ever even give a second glance to big AAA releases anymore, with a couple specific exceptions.

To which I can fairly respond… no.

You can’t, though. Or, well, you can say it all you want but that doesn’t make it true. I’m pretty certain that cats and dogs and bugs also think they’ve got humans figured out and I guarantee you they definitely, definitely don’t, because it’s physiologically impossible for them to understand. They’re just not equipped for it. Just like mortals wouldn’t be equipped to understand the perspective of an immortal, all-encompassing being, it’s impossible for you to accurately place yourself in that perspective.

The ant farm thing was a little hamfisted but I think the analogy still stands for the purpose I introduced it for.

And what does “balance” have to do with ethical behaviour without you begging the question.

It is a possible explanation for the existence of evil. As in, the post we’re arguing in the comments of right now. Nowhere in there did I ever say “this is the way things are”, only “this is a possible explanation for a question we cannot definitively answer”.

If we assume the existence of god, we have to assume a lot of other things too" and…???

Please explain what part of that doesn’t make sense.

This is all theoretical anyway, if a god existed your understanding of them would be limited to whatever they decide you’re able to understand of them anyway, so the argument is largely academic regardless of feelings or underlying truth. The point I was trying to make here is that the difference in the sheer scale of existence between a mortal and a god is such that we may be as ants to them. We possibly could not understand them no matter how hard we try - we’re just not biologically equipped for it - and some things that we consider important may be so unimportant as to never even get noticed by a god. But none of this is provable or even falsifiable so it’s all a thought experiment anyway.

That was an excellent read, thank you!

More like, on the scale of mortal vs god, the things that are important to us either aren’t important to god(s) or may be so insignificant to be actually imperceptible.

As a thought experiment, say you get an ant farm. You care for these ants, provide them food and light, and generally want to see them succeed and scurry around and do their little ant things. One of the ants gets ant-cancer and dies. You have no idea that it happened. Some of the eggs don’t hatch. You notice this, but can’t really do anything about it. So on, and so forth. Now - think about every single other ant you’ve passed by or even stepped on without even noticing during your last day outside the house. And think about what those ants might think of you, if they could.

Now an argument that a god is omniscient and all powerful would slip through the cracks of this because an omniscient god WOULD know that one of their ants had ant-cancer and an all-powerful one would be able to fix it. But the sheer difference in breadth of existence between mortal and god may mean that such small things are beneath their attention. Or maybe he really does see all things at all times simultaneously down to minute detail. We don’t know. It is fundamentally unknowable to mortals. Our scales of ethics are incomparable.

We also don’t know if the ethical alignment of a god leans toward balance rather than good. It would make sense, in a way, if it did. Things that seem evil to us are in fact evil, but necessary in pursuit of greater harmony. Or in fact even necessary to the very function of the universe from a metaphysical perspective. If we assume the existence of a god for this argument it leads to having to assume an awful lot more things that we can’t really prove or test one way or the other. But one thing that seems pretty self evident is that the specific workings of a god are fundamentally unknowable to mortals specifically because we are not gods. We don’t have a perspective in which we can observe it so any argument made in any direction about it is pretty much purely conjecture by necessity.

Nah I’d believe that. That’s exactly the sort of four dimensional genius business move that Musk is known for.