Why are you reading this? Go do something worthwhile.

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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • One of the things that Game of Thrones did well early was always ensure the payoff was worth it. If you didn’t like an episode here or there, it was fine because it advanced the plot enough that you still followed the breadcrumbs and another episode down the line made it worth it.

    Season 8 was so bad because many people tolerated elements of seasons 5, 6, and 7 because they were hoping for payoff. When that payoff was underwhelming at best and utterly nonsensical at worst, people tuned out fast. People spent hundreds of hours over a decade watching the show and discussing it with their friends, and in the end, it wasn’t worth it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something disappear so completely and quickly from the cultural zeitgeist.





  • One of my favorite books is called Inherit the Stars.

    Mankind is starting to reach out into the solar system, but finds a man on the moon entombed in a space suit, and he’s been dead for 50,000 years.

    It’d make a pretty good movie, 2 hours tops.

    It does one of my favorite things, by strongly blending two genres: mystery, and sci-fi. A sci-fi show, movie, or book that’s purely sci-fi is rarely good. Same goes for fantasy. Season 1 of Game of Thrones is good because it’s primarily a mystery/drama story in a fantasy setting. A New Hope is great because it’s a western, coming-of-age story in a sci-fi setting. Rebel Moon is garbage (for many reasons) because it’s pure sci-fi schlock with no nuance.






  • I stopped Amazon Prime because it when from being “your package will be at your house in two days” to “your package might leave our facility in two days and arrive to you some indeterminate time later.”

    I also feel like anytime I get on Amazon now, I might as well be on Alibaba, but it’s 10x the price. It’s hard to find good things because there are so many cheap factory direct products with smashed-my-face-against-the-keyboard brand names. There’s a Jansport backpack for sale, but you have to sort through all the bags from JDOEBG, AHIXBX, and PRJAGG first.






  • 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.


  • pachrist@lemmy.worldtoCool Guides@lemmy.caA cool guide to Epicurean paradox
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    2 months ago

    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.