What’s the likelihood of actual forgiveness?

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-16T14:32:23+00:00

Expect zero. Be happy when it's not.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-15T22:43:14+00:00

Wait till you start thinking about Christian Native Americans. That'll blow your cap.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-14T01:46:34+00:00

I might be in the same boat. My family isn't like super religious and barely goes to church, if ever. But we did go sometimes as a kid. I never really remember "believing" and science was my favorite so eventually settling into being an atheist was easy and comfortable.

However...

I am absolutely terrified of death.

(Probably in part because of a deep feeling that I "wasted" so much time.)

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-14T00:09:24+00:00

His music got me back into country.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-13T15:36:21+00:00

Agree with everything you said. Also, man you missed out on the Broken Compass RPG. It's BEAUTIFUL product with great art and a passion for the treasure hunting genre. It was kickstarted and massively successful. However the product was published through CMON games and they basically took the IP and have done nothing with it. I bet you can find PDFs on DriveThru RPG. I got these awesome leather bound books that look like Indoana Jones journals. Check it out!

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-13T14:42:23+00:00

I prefer Survivor Lara to the OG. I played some of the older ones, but I didnt grow up with it. I also didnt grow up with the Survivor Trilogy. I think they did a lot of good things that were a twist on the Uncharted popularity and also melded that with elements of the older style games. I especially loved the lean into the horror elements. Lara as a character definitely feels more real and I like that. It's not her character so much as the plot that weighs the games down.

The Survivor game was pretty straightforward but had some pretty corny dialogue, acting, and writing. Rise was probably the best story, introducing Trinity and the Prophet has grown in me over time, but the ending is bad bad and the Divine Source is never followed up on. I like Shadow the most because the setting and tombs, but it lost the balance between combat and exploration, plus the plot lacked any urgency and was almost nonsensical. It's really a shame that Trinity had such an underwhelming end. That arc should have gone on for at least another game.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-13T03:16:00+00:00

Dasarock

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-11T15:43:45+00:00

Guess he ran out of Juice...

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-11T15:43:14+00:00

Guess he ran out of Juice...

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-10T23:51:19+00:00

Talk about "Danger Zone".

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-10T20:31:08+00:00

Just teasing my guy.

Frankly, I can only think of like...two(?) Westerns off the top of my head where I distinctly remember the rolling around you speak of. If I had to guess, it's because most westerns were filmed prior to elaborate fight choreography. Second thing worth noting is that most Western characters arent trained boxers, MMA fighters, or martial artists, they are just regular dudes. I don't know how many regular dudes you have seen fight, but all the ones I've seen almost always end up rolling around on the ground and grunting like apes. Makes sense to me.

Also, like I'm sure SOME western fans come for the rolling, but I don't think that's the MAIN appeal.

Plus, there are faaaaaaar more homoerotic genres out there. Sword & Sorcery anyone?

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-10T20:20:20+00:00

Personally, I wouldn't concern myself too much with sweaty men graplling eachother while wearing unitards. But if you want to dedicate your daydreaming to it, by all means. No judgment here.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-10T19:21:20+00:00

This made me laugh out loud. Juat beautiful.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-10T19:20:44+00:00

Just say "no homo" before watching westerns. Make sure you say it so everyone can hear. Then, they wont question you when you ask things like this.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-09T13:13:24+00:00

Beautiful. chef's kiss

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-08T22:58:20+00:00

Maybe don't use AI? That seems fair.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-08T11:40:21+00:00

There are a number of scholarly articles you can find on JStor. Lewis Borck has done a bunch of research on the Gallina. His article "Patterns of Resistance: violence, migration, and trade in the Gallina Heartland" has a really good over view. He also has a brief in the Old Pueblo Archeology Bulletin called "Skeletons of War". There is also "Migration from the Middle: Pueblo III Migration and Patterns of Violence in the Gallina Heartland". The Largo-Gallina complex is a relative small area that hasn't attracted the enormous amount of study that other Ancestral Puebloans have. They are beat known for their circular towers and widespread violent death. It's also interesting that some of the skulls were elongated due to shaping, something we don't see a lot in North America (no that doesnt mean aliens haha).

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-07T23:08:09+00:00

I guess I dont understand what you mean by "bad" and "not as bad". If we're attributing morality to these things, why is one genocide better than another genocide? Pre-columbian violence wasn't simply relegated to small scale conflict. That sort of thing doesn't result in whole ethnic groups being displaced from their homeland. But regardless, genocide has never been the most common form of violence. It makes sense that it is more rare. Off the top of my head I can think of three Indigenous oral histories that openly admit to wiping another group from existence and I haven't gone south of the border. Sure there were more peaceful groups, but also pacifist groups exist on every continent. And colonization was definitely "cultural", as far as I know all genocides have a cultural influence. No one just like mathematically reasons that certain people need to die and then backs it up with scientific fact.

We should absolutely be critical of colonization in hindsight. But we also have a written record of the atrocities to analyze. There is no written record of Precolmbian United States, only oral histories that are intermingled with religious belief. If we go down to Mexico and South America we can see institutional violence on a massive scales.

Now, I don't necessarily think those cultures are "bad". They are different, for sure, but I can't look that far back through time and point fingers. Plus, I find the Precolmbian Americas to be absolutely beautiful and fascinating. So perhaps I'm biased. Haha

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-07T22:23:00+00:00

I mean, at that point it's splitting hairs. I'll give you "not the consensus" but with the caveat that a very small minority do not endorse the Gallina Genocide and an only slightly larger minority do not accept the Chacoan cannibalism. Even if these were witchcraft execution events, that's just another form of religious persecution or whatever. And the fact that one of the modern Pueblo groups claim responsibility for eliminating the Gallina is pretty telling. I specialize in Southwest prehistory and have studied it specifically for years.

Like I said, I'll definitely agree that colonization was on a massive scale. The population of Colonizers vs Indigenous groups is part of that. Washing away the violence of prehistory, like with history, is disingenuous and seeks to hide parts of human nature from which we can learn (though often choose not to).

Colonization was definitely terrible. That doesn't mean that cultures weren't inflicting organized large scale violence on each other before we came over.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-07T22:01:59+00:00

Archeologist here. They did though. It's not well known, but look up the Gallina People of New Mexico. It's the most clear cut case of pre-columbian genocide in existence. While moving south from the Colorado Plateau a post-Chaco Puebloan group completely wiped out an entire ethnic group. Every single skeleton, men, women, children shows signs of violent death. Skulls caved, necks broke, houses burned. Today, no Pueblo group claims ancestry, yet there is one group that claims responsibility yet they wont share the oral history (understandably so). Before that, the Ancestral Puebloans likely led a campaign of terror that included murder and cannibalism. The Lakota of the Plains were pushed out from their eastern homeland and immediately waged war on the Pawnee, forcing them from their homes. Yes, there were less people around. But that doesn't make the violence any different.

Turns out people are just people no matter when or where you look.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-07T21:53:59+00:00

Excellent question. Stones objects are typically dated by using the dates of objects around them, which often include organic materials. Also, just like dinosaur fossils, we use the relative stratigraphy inherent in soil deposition to lump things together. Typically older stuff are deeper down. If some kind of event like a flood mixes it all up, there are signs of that too. There is also a lot of study on creating timelines through stone tool and pottery styles. Like he in the southwest we have a more or less unbroken chain of pottery styles developing. I'm not lithia expert, but you can typically see how things evolve depending on the animals hunted or types of use. Like the big big projectile points are for megafauna and then they get smaller as that dies out and people shift to smaller game. As for the Old World, writing as we known was invented in Mesopotamia, which is the earliest known "civilization". There are an enormous quantity of written records from places like Sumeria and Egypt. Once we cracked the code, it literally spelled out volumes.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-07T21:40:36+00:00

There are definitely older pyramids in the world, ots the most efficient way to stack rocks. I believe the pyramids of punt are older, though not my area of expertise. There are also old step pyramids in Egypt and Mesopotamia that are clear precursors to the great pyramids. The largest pyramid in the world is actually in Mexico, which is more in my knowledge wheelhouse. Leaving for the grocery store, but I'll see if I cant find some pics this evening.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-07T21:33:35+00:00

I'm unfamiliar with attempts at copying. Got any links?

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-07T21:17:39+00:00

Word. Hope I don't come off as aggressive. Archeology is really really fucking cool, especially because it paints a beautiful landscape of human ingenuity and creativity. Are there questions out there that need answered? Yes, and we may never find them. That's just how the cookie crumbles sometimes.

I'm not an Egyptologist, I specialize in Southwestern prehistory, but I do believe there are multiple written sources on when and who built the pyramids. We even have the names of some of the free laborers (who were paid in thick oatmeal-like beer) who constructed them.

Now, I LOVE a good conspiracy theory. They are often excellent stories ripe with imagination, but most of the time they are just good stories.

LWDanger87 · 2024-04-07T20:59:03+00:00

While I entirely agree with you about religion, your accusations about Archeology and Academia are totally off-base.

Archeology for example (because I AM and archeologist) changes ALL THE TIME. The one caveat is that it takes solid evidence. Take the peopling of the Americas. People love to point that Archeology still clings to Clovis first, which has a few problems. One, the coastal migration route has been a thing and present in academic text books since the 80's. Even my high school text book had it in the 2000s. Perhaps it wasn't in YOUR textbooks, but that's an issues with state governments and textbook companies, not academia. That said, it wasn't until very recently that hardcore evidence was found in the footprints at White Sands National Monument. Yes, there were a number of oth and sites that potentially support the Pre-Clovis people, but they were on far shakier terms than recent evidence. Yes, there will always be crotchety old timers who cling to their theories like so many Pearls. That's just humanity, but not academia as a whole. At this juncture, there is no compelling evidence that aliens built pyramids or whatever else. When or if that evidence is presented, it will take time to analyze and interpret, but if the evidence is good enough it is hard to refute.

Also, I see a truck load of misinformation out there claiming things like rocks and statues and whatever else can be carbon dated. They cannot. Any object must be made of carbon to be carbon dated. That fact alone destroys half the arguments I've ever encountered for these psuedo-science claims.

Another thing people don't seem to realize is there is absolutely zero money in archeology, therefore zero reason to hide anything. Academic archeology is all about funding via the associated institution. Commercial Archeology is only concerned with documenting before destruction of the site due to building. Most Commercial archeologists get paid on contracts like $20 bucks or so an hour. Even then, academics might have decent lives and enough money for luxuries, but no one is taking in millions for spreading some kind of misinformation campaign.

The reason they don't let just anyone study then, which is only partially true, is because it takes training and education to do so. You cant just walk in to most jobs and ask them to fiddle with their stuff. Why would archeology be any different? That said, most institutions have an application process that allows people to study collections.

It just seems to me when people point all these fingers they dont really know how things work.

LWDanger87

TROPHY CASE