in true Calvinist fashion it doesn’t matter what choices people make, there’s no action one can take to change their position.
Exactly. Like how all the "self-made men who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" slag off on AOC for having had to work a real job once.
I hate how playing in peaceful locks you out of crafting a bunch of very useful items. Since bone chips and slime balls only come from monsters, I can't make my plants grow big and pretty with bone meal or make a lead rope for my horse. I'm sure there are other examples, but those are the two I care about the most, lol.
I agree with everything you've said. I just have to be "that guy" over something real quick.
Jesus was either divine or was a lunatic
Lewis's Trilemma of "liar, lunatic, or lord" has always bugged me. There are so many other options that Lewis intentionally ignored. Jesus never said he was God, to start with, so there are a variety of other possibilities in the "lord" column that are significantly less prestigious, such as prophet or teacher.
Further, the existence of Jesus as a historical figure at all is simply not subject to the same standards of rigor we subject other historical figures from other religions to (for example, Sun Tzu either didn't exist at the time he was supposed to have existed, or he didn't write the book he was supposed to have written). "Legend" is, however remote, a viable fourth option.
In addition, there was almost certainly more than one person with the very common name Jeshua going around preaching fringe beliefs that didn't entirely line up with contemporary mainstream Judaism. Like how there are almost certainly a lot of journalists named Robert in New York City, but they're not all Robert Evans, and it would be very easy, 200 years from now, for a future Tacitus to claim all the acts of all the journalists named Robert, Bob, Bobby, and Rob were performed by Robert Evans. Therefore, "conglomeration" (of multiple different religious leaders) is also entirely possible (and would explain why the timelines of the gospels don't line up, and why there are three different versions of Jesus's last words across the four gospels).
Finally, it's entirely possible that the people recording Jesus's acts and words were genuinely mistaken about some or all of what they wrote about. The oldest gospels were written down roughly just before or just after 70AD (although I found a lot of non-scholarly religious figures claiming much earlier dates, the evidence they present for this is scant and often self-referential). That's almost or more than 40 years after he died, and as far as I know, none of the names attributed to the gospel writers are accurate (Matthew, Luke, and Mark, last time I checked, are all believed to have been written anonymously and named after Jesus's disciples later). So our earliest accounts of Jesus come from people who may not even have ever met the man, and if they had, given the life expectancy of the era, they would have had to be quite young (a charitable estimate would allow them to be in their early 20s). We're relying on a combination of 40-year-old memories, most likely of events from the authors' childhoods, and oral tradition. Considering we have modern people, with internet access, who believe bonsai kittens were a real thing and Al Gore claimed he invented the internet, and those things originated only twenty years ago, it's not absurd to suggest that writers in a more primitive society dealing with twice as much temporal distance could make mistakes, misinterpretations, or record downright falsehoods told to them by bad-faith actors.
Sex is a bonding experience with pleasurable physical sensations that takes time and planning to attain. Masturbation is a physical/sexual health act; this question makes as much sense to me as "How do you and your partner deal with showering?" or "How do you and your partner deal with pooping?" would.
I guess maybe the actual question here is something like: "Do you or your partner see masturbation as being in competition with paired sexual intimacy?" If that's the case, I'll use a simple food metaphor.
Sometimes I want to put together a nice steak dinner with all the fixin's, and sometimes I just want some beef jerky.
Like Russia and Ukraine are working together, vatnik?
Dude, look, I'm sorry Firefox killed your dog (or whatever). But please stop spamming your irrational hate-boner for Mozilla all over the thread.
Getting access to all the weapon skills is so much faster, which makes trying out new builds a thousand times easier.
Not having to find and speak to the quest giver before I can do the quest is great. I like just having to get into their radius without having to track them down before and after.
I'm a big explorer, so I really appreciate the rewards for exploring the maps (and the compass pointing me towards the things I missed).
The jumping puzzles are amazing.
The free mount not being a boring-ass horse is pretty cool. Mounts having different abilities is also cool. Not having to spend 120 real days upgrading your mounts is really nice.
Getting experience from harvesting and crafting. Not having to spend real-time months researching things to craft them.
Underwater exploration. Yeah, underwater combat is kind of a pain, but it's still cool to have the option.
The directed story mode complete with boss fights in instances that can be done solo.
Classes are all totally different from each other; there are no "meta" skills for a specific role no matter what class you're playing (eg, unstable wall, aggressive warhorn).
Enough skill points in the game to learn every skill and every specialization, along with the ability to switch builds on the fly just whenever (without having to go back to a shrine and pay to do it).
I'm not sure how I feel about having a centralized auction house. A lot of my endgame in ESO was shopping and flipping valuable things from one trader to another, but I have to admit it's really handy to just be able to go buy a bunch of crafting materials in any city for the lowest available price.
Like, I could just keep going; there are so many things, both little and big, that I love about GW2. But for some reason, I just can't get into it. Maybe it's that it levels me up so fast that I don't get to really enjoy the view and learn the class. Maybe it's because the elite specializations change the class so dramatically that most of what I did learn during leveling is immediately obsolete at 80. Maybe it's because the combat feels kind of clunky due to being a weird hybrid of action combat and tab targeting. Maybe it's how complicated the buff system is, that I can't really wrap my brain around all the different boons and when I need them. None of those are really big deals, just quirks of the game that make it unique, like all games have. But it's not doing the same thing that ESO did for me.
is this seriously what we’re arguing?
No.
I'm arguing that voter suppression cannot possibly account for the 65% of registered voters in Florida who did not vote one way or the other for DeSantis's second term.
I'm arguing that a substantial portion of voters in Florida were, if not DeSantis fans, fine enough with DeSantis to not bother going out to vote against him.
I feel like you're arguing that all of the non-voters would have voted against DeSantis, but did not because they are systematically oppressed. That 14 million citizens were actively denied the right to vote and the Florida gubernatorial election was stolen by voter suppression. If that's not what you're claiming, then we don't have anything to argue about; if that is what you're claiming, I'm going to need more substantial evidence that Florida's democracy is in the same state as Myanmar's and Zimbabwe's than what has been so far provided. If anywhere close to 14 million people in one state are being actively prevented from voting for DeSantis's opponent, that would probably be the biggest scandal, with the biggest cover-up, in American history by a wide margin. It makes the Business Plot look like the schemes of a grade-school playground clique.
1 million people being disenfranchised is awful. It does not prove that the 65% of registered voters who did not vote were directly oppressed by the government and denied their rights, and such a claim would be entirely hyperbolic, and would only serve to obscure the fact that a large majority of Floridians are fine with DeSantis and the GOP. I get that it's more empowering to believe that we can fight a few public entities engaging in voter suppression to free Florida from their minority rule, as opposed to believing that we'd be fighting to change the opinions of over 10 million individuals who literally don't care about us and who wouldn't bat an eye if we were all hunted down by DeSantis's private brownshirts.
I'm not trying to fight those people, or change them. I fled before Fox News told them it was time to "cut the tall trees", and I advise everyone else to do the same.
I left right before High Isle came out, but nothing I've tried since has really caught my attention the same way. Even GW2, as awesome as it is, and as many QoL features it has that I deeply missed in ESO, just... isn't the same.
Did they ever get the Champion Points re-worked into something that doesn't suck? I hate the way the green constellations worked, particularly; whose idea was it to say "Nobody harvests, chest-hunts, fishes, and searches for crafting recipes at the same time, so obviously it's silly to let players equip all those bonuses at once"??
Even if not, I think I might drop Netflix and re-up my subscription. If just to remind me why I left, maybe?
1 million voters is just under ~~half of one~~ five percent of registered voters. That's a far cry from 65%.
Edited to correct my stupid math.
Edit 2: Edited my original post in this thread to reflect the provided data.
The kind where Ken goes off on a super-badass special forces mission and says "Take a bullet for ya, babe," as he leaves the house.