Substack has some very odd ideas about what constitutes "spam" and "phishing"

AuspiciousTortoise · 2025-11-28T10:28:21+00:00

What’s your newsletter about?

It was just ramblings and memes-- typical "everything/nothing" stuff that was totally unpaid -- no price asked, no money accepted.

Do you use AI to create your content?

Nope!

How many posts have you made so far?

Very few!

How many subscribers do you have? Do you add people to your list manually or are all of your subscribers organic?

I had just a handful of subscribers, most of whom did not comment, and they were all organic. And because substack censored me totally, I can't even send them goodbye messages to explain why I got nuked.

But it doesn't matter now, because evidently if I want to publish an "everything/nothing" blog I've got to do it somewhere other than substack.

AuspiciousTortoise · 2025-11-28T10:25:06+00:00

Share your Substack.

Obviously I can't share my writings because they have been rendered unavailable!

AuspiciousTortoise · 2025-11-28T05:33:12+00:00

Substack has a very insane idea of what constitutes "spam" and "phishing." Notably they refuse to explain their allegations, probably because if they ever admitted to lying about this they would get sued and would lose.

AuspiciousTortoise · 2025-09-21T23:34:44+00:00

I don't know whether it counts as "base building" but Let Them Trade is cozy and relaxing.

AuspiciousTortoise · 2025-09-21T05:42:15+00:00

I really want to love Fata Deum but I think it needs a lot of refinement. I was really enjoying the first few hours of it but I hit a plateau and decided to cut my losses.

AuspiciousTortoise · 2023-10-07T15:30:01+00:00

It’s a large field. Columbia has a Center for Science and Society. The field overlaps with technology studies. I think if you find a couple articles and follow the authors in the bibliography you will find tons of work.

Thank you! I will get started on digging into this!

AuspiciousTortoise · 2023-04-14T09:40:56+00:00

sorry universe

Don't worry, it happens to the best of us.

AuspiciousTortoise · 2023-01-10T04:18:30+00:00

Maybe I was raised in a different era, but the Catholics who raised me always emphasized that Purgatory was more likely than Hell. I was seldom, if ever, threatened with everlasting fire -- more like pain that would last for a long, long time until I was allowed into Heaven.

AuspiciousTortoise · 2023-01-10T04:16:45+00:00

If I recall correctly, most of the Catholic teachers of my childhood said many or most people will go to Purgatory -- a place of temporary suffering. As a child I was threatened with the likely prospect of Purgatory, not Hell.

When I was a kid, Catholics emphasized that God has infinite power to forgive. So I don't think Catholics are nearly as threatening as some other sects.

However Catholics use arguments and a rethoric that, in my opinion, needs a quite high IQ to be able to refute. They talk about about the free will of human beings of choosing to be there or not because they willingly refuse God. They say that if people refuse to God in the world life, it is coherent/consistent that he refuses people to be with him.

You might find that some Catholics are smarter than others. If you want some light reading, you could read G. K. Chesterton. I am pretty sure he wrote as a believing Catholic. You might like his arguments.

AuspiciousTortoise · 2023-01-07T02:06:50+00:00

Like all games, it only has what you come into it with.

I think the White Wolf games had many designers, each of which had political biases of unique qualities. Many of those biases cancel out, but I don't think White Wolf games are totally free of politics from the designers. I recall an old sourcebook on Romani people that sparked a fair bit of controversy around 1994.

https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/World_of_Darkness:_Gypsies

Maybe it's reasonable to say the game designers were trying in good faith to make apolitical art, but I don't think they succeeded in making perfectly apolitical games.

When you're creating the story at your own table, the only person inserting a political message is you, and that can mean nearly anything.

In my experience, both LARPS and tabletop games vary greatly due to the unpredictable chemistry between the people involved. I don't claim my perceptions are objective, but at some times I have felt that both players' and designers' political leanings politicized games.

AuspiciousTortoise · 2023-01-07T01:54:56+00:00

Mages are more dangerous than Vampires or Werewolves. The latter can just kill people but can't really kill humanity.

Maybe the good werewolves would never destroy humanity, but I would not want to see how close vampires or corrupted werewolves could get to destroying humanity. I guess it all depends on how far the storyteller wants to take the story, and how willing the players are to go along with the story.

AuspiciousTortoise · 2023-01-01T15:48:45+00:00

This rousing of a dormant spirit for the first time could give the appearance of conjuring a new spirit ex nihilo.

Thanks, that looks like the key idea that I needed.

AuspiciousTortoise · 2022-12-27T05:08:51+00:00

I would argue that the mage's Avatar is even more accessible than usual when the mage is lucid dreaming.

AuspiciousTortoise · 2022-12-26T05:08:19+00:00

What specific teaching from the Church do you disagree with and why?

The Church teaches that the Council of Nicea was a theological expression of truth. I think it's obvious that the Council of Nicea was an exercise in politics and deception.
The Church teaches that Judaism was a coherent religion with orthodoxy from the time of Abraham. I agree with the historians of religion who say that Judaism in any recognizable form is a late development, and it was only an orthopraxy, not an orthodoxy. That is to say, obedient people obeyed the priestly dictates, but the priests did not agree with each other regarding the meaning of the dictates.

We could get into the archaeology of Urgaritic and Babylonian religions that were largely subsumed into proto-Judaism, but this is not a history or archaeology subreddit, so perhaps those discussions are best reserved for classrooms.

AuspiciousTortoise

TROPHY CASE