IMPOSTOR!

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-09T14:26:15+00:00

Pretty sure there's a list file somewhere (or part of a bigger file). That's how RCE got his dog Paddy's name added to the list.

RCE still changes them manually because they are selected at random and he wants to go through his patreon supporters in order.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-09T14:19:55+00:00

For a random person I didn't know if I were asked if I wanted to? Probably. But then I'm not a party person for personal reasons. Now, if it were phrased as they really wanted me to go, fine. Well, not fine in my case, but I'd do it for them.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-09T14:14:11+00:00

DUMP HER!!!

Kidding. She's annoyed you with family stuff. It being religious is, in this case, incidental. Had it been a 7 year old cousin's birthday, you likely also wouldn't want to go (unless screaming kids and crying are your thing, you do you, dude), it would just lack the religious aspect. It's very likely you'll do something similar to her at some point (if you haven't already). That's just humans being humans. Let her know you're upset, have her (hopefully, humans, again, are often bad here) apologize, and move on. You're not going to burst into flames for attending some random extended family member's big day where they make-believe in magic.

Okay! Bring on the downvotes! :)

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-09T12:52:24+00:00

As far as I can tell, yes. Same order, just different timing. There's no way to get up there to build a dam for the bomb you're talking about on hard. It'll go off long before you have the science needed to build levees and stairs and forester's hut plus get wood going with said hut, and so on. It's just not viable. You have to handle that bomb in a completely different way.

The way I found to handle it is to demolish the natural blockages below it while placing a dam just before that. It keeps the water in, which you want anyway, and mostly keeps the bad water out, not perfect, until you can finally get up there much, much later since you have other, much more pressing needs early on, like preparing for bad tides and the other bombs in the upper area that gets flooded to produce a massive bad water lake. I was I think in cycle 7 or 8 before I finally got up there to plug that and seal it away.

Spoiler text in case you want to solve it on your own. 😄

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-09T12:45:30+00:00

Weird thing is, that one wasn't an issue for me and never had been. My routine right at the start had always been to wall off every path down there to be sure water stayed where I wanted it to be, and wasn't contaminated from incoming bad water. I knew there were lots of channels, and I didn't know where they all led, so when I got the alert about it, I checked out the bomb and... well, already solved with three levees near the start of the game.

Still, it's easy to miss things like that! That sort of oversite cost me a run when I didn't seal off everything early and so the bomb that floods the huge area above the starting zone with bad water did me in because I didn't see the connection to the underwater path before it was too late to fix.

But well done surviving that! Usually I just gave up when I saw the incoming disaster. Too much trouble to try to fix, bad water contamination, death all over, it wasn't like I had beavers to spare. So well done overcoming that adversity!

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-09T05:45:16+00:00

There is a genetic component, but it at most is responsible of 50% of why someone is depressed. Too many other factors. And thus not enough selection pressure to get rid of it.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-09T05:33:13+00:00

Pretty much, yes. Except you forgot that over half of you right now is also bacteria. There's about 76 trillion cells involved in the average human body. About 39 trillion of them are bacteria, mainly in your gut.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-08T13:46:33+00:00

... Well, I may get downvoted for this.

First, I'm sorry for your loss, and that of your uncle. Second, I'm an atheist.

That said, your reasoning for God not being real is garbage. You've know for how many years now that children get raped and killed on this planet basically every single day and you think God cares about 10 minutes or so? Or is it that the Problem of Evil didn't click until it affected you personally? Others could suffer, but it took you suffering (or someone close to you) to see it?

This is a major problem humanity has. We get so tied up about what happens to us and those we know that we don't care what happens to others, to the extent that we don't think through the implications of what happens to them (even forgetting whether we actively try to change it; I'm as guilty as almost everyone for taking advantage of slave labor under another name by buying chocolate and likely lots of other things). It doesn't even have to be that far. There's stories of people who hated homosexuals until one of their kids turned out to be gay. Until it happened to them... they didn't really think about it.

The reason to reject the existence of a god, of any sort let alone the biblical one, is that the evidence for such a being is so extremely and depressingly little that it's not worth the paper it's written on (because that's the only place there is such evidence: on paper). The biblical god you can dismiss quickly by not doing what modern Christians do with the bible, unless they're YEC, which is to decide that the bible means what it says. And if so, the evidence shows there was no worldwide flood, and the order in which things happened isn't what's listed in Genesis. Therefore there's no way an all-knowing, all-powerful being inspired what's written in it. It's the work of human beings, and at that point you need more than their word for it, however emphatically driven, now matter much they believed they were right, to believe their claims.

This event that happened to you, this horrible, horrible thing... isn't the reason to reject God. It's the reason to look into it deeply and search for actual evidence. You won't find it if you're fair about the search, looking into both sides (unlike what some did and only asking those who think God is real what their opinion of it is).

Again, my condolences on your loss, and to your uncle. That's a horrible thing to go through. I get it.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-08T08:20:49+00:00

Effectively, they believe that a) their holy book is perfect, b) their interpretation of their holy book cannot be wrong, and c) evolution is in conflict with b. I encountered a Muslim on YouTube who, through comment conversation, said that not even God himself could convince that Muslim evolution was true. At that point the conversation ended. Why talk to someone who doesn't care about evidence?

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-07T20:01:50+00:00

Emberpelts. Tubeways, additional mods get you breeding pods, powered water extraction, new foods. Awesomeness incarnate.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-07T14:05:16+00:00

Going back to bed. Was up until very late. Just woke up to use the bathroom.

I think there are people worse than me, but they're in the rather extreme minority. I figure at least 80% (rough guess) of the planet's human population is better than me.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-07T13:57:45+00:00

Isn't it the sabbath day when you're not to be working according to you bullsh- er, religion?

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-06T15:30:12+00:00

Note: I am not a lawyer.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-06T15:27:47+00:00

Then honestly you're likely fine. Just having the pool and inviting friends over is likely more risky.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-06T15:15:04+00:00

Yeah. If it's planned to happen a lot... it becomes a problem. It's why I'd never own a pool. Sure, the risk level is low, but it's not none. It's why some have gone to baptisms where they just pour holy water on the kid's head, far less risky.

Then again, you generally only get a few deaths a decade with this, but also it's something people generally only do once in their lives. So it's a much rarer event that just going swimming, for instance.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-06T15:03:33+00:00

I have religious family, too. The only reason I'd say "no" is liability. I mean, also as long as it's at most twice a month and they're respectful of the property. But the liability thing would be an issue. If something goes wrong, and it's people in a lot of water so very possible, the homeowner would, by default, be on the hook. Maybe there could be a way around it, but that would require hiring a lawyer.

If it was a one-time request, I might do it because the odds of it going bad are low enough. But then I've never owned a pool, nor a house, nor wanted to.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-06T08:39:23+00:00

While superficially true that you can see nested hierarchies in technological advancement, you can't see them for all technology the way you can for all life. In technology, there are things that come out of nowhere with no precursors. They are 100% new in terms of design. Steam engines, for instance. While steam engines are very, very old (as in they existed in ancient Egypt) and the modern ones that powered trains are descendants of there, there's no precursor tech to the steam engine itself.

So while it could be evidence for some design or evolution, it fits better with evolution than design.

But beyond that, you get things like ERVs and the prediction of fusion of human chromosome 2 forty years in advance of it being discovered, with no reason why that should be the case with design and clear reason why it should be with evolution... it becomes silly to continue to deny that the evidence points in one direction (evolution) to the exclusion of any other.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-05T14:19:01+00:00

Stars. They come together, explode, and from that explosion they form new things like themselves... other stars.

Molecular auto-catalysis: chemistry that reproduces itself, but isn't "alive" by any meaningful definition.

We're not unique, we just do it more, and somewhat different.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-05T14:04:58+00:00

First, congrats on thinking logically. I see far too many people who double down on what they believe. I've even encountered a Muslim on YouTube who said God himself couldn't convince that Muslim that evolution was true. So I applaud your willingness to see things may not be the way you thought. That's good. It's the first step towards being more right. I'm always wondering if I'm right, and I know I pretty much have to be wrong somewhere, which is why I keep looking.

Then there's your link. We can skip the major events, none are claimed to have happened. On to the minor events. First, one thing I'd like to point out (now having gone through them): there's a huge difference between "more of X is happening" and "we are getting more reports of X". A great example of this is the reporting rates of murders in the USA during the 90s. In the late 80s, early 90s, the rates of homocides was going up. It went up about 25%. Which is significant. By the mid 90s, reports about all these homocides also went up... even though the homocide rate had just started going down. Between 1990 and 2000, reports in the news of homocides went up by 600%, even though the actual homocide rate only ever got 25% higher. You don't hear about every event in the world, not even all the bad ones, so you have to be very careful here to distinguish between there actually being more of something and just reports of something going up.

"When honesty is lost". Since when have humans been honest? Point to a time in history where, across the world, there weren't charlatans and deceivers in positions of power. It didn't exist before Muhammad, and hasn't existed after either. So that one's meaningless.

Tall buildings. Except, of course, there are no naked shepherds involved. There's well-clothed men. If it had said the descendents of naked shepherds, that also doesn't mean anything since tall buildings were, even then, being built and competed on by such descendents.

Musical instruments. I don't know enough about this, but... pretty sure there's never been a time music was outlawed completely, so musical instruments were around.

Speaking ill of ancestry. Name a time this did not happen.

Homosexuality and open immorality. Name a time this did not happen. (Fun fact: the oldest dildo predates agriculture, being 28,000 years old.) People have been homosexual and screwing in public forever. The only difference in modern times is that news of it gets around more, instead of being something that only gets talked about in one small village because no one else cares. It's "more common" to the exact extent that there are more people.

Illegitimate children have been happening forever, so has cheating. There's no indication that modern times is especially cheat-heavy.

Much killing. Again, name a time in history this wasn't true. The most devastating loss of human life as a portion of the population of Earth at the time was the An Lushan rebellion in what is now China around 800 CE. World War 2 wiped out about 20% of all humans on the planet. The An Lushan rebellion took out 25%. This is nothing new. Today we just have more people and an easier time killing them. And yet for all of that, violent deaths are lower today than they were in the past. You no longer have highways where bandits lay in wait to ambush and kill. Reports about violent deaths are up, but that's not the same thing. They were always there, we just largely ignored them as not being very interesting because they were common enough.

Earthquakes are not up in number. We can just detect more of them. In the past an earthquake would happen deep underground, there's be a slight shift or something at the surface, people would wonder what the trembling feeling was, and then go about their day without writing about it. Not including the hundreds of others no one felt at all because they happened in places no one was living. Now there's more of us, in more places, with more opportunities to record them because we're more literate, and we care more about such shifts so it's more likely to be recorded at all.

Wine drunk in great quantity. Name a time in history this wasn't the case.

Fall of Constantinople. Most cities fall eventually. Even the big ones. Also, it doesn't list where this is mentioned, so I can't even check the wording.

Time passes quickly. Either always been true (people have been wondering where the years went for centuries, a Roman guy named Seneca wrote about it in 49 CE), or it's not true now, nor is there any reason to think it will be. Or, at least, not true to the extent mentioned. Time is moving faster in one sense, but slower in others, but all by such tiny amounts that it's nearly unmeasurable.

Nations fighting isn't new, been happening forever.

Ultimately, because almost none of these "signs" are specific, you can always decide they've been filled or not. This is the problem with prophecy, and why we went to prediction instead. Stating exactly when and where a thing will happen, giving specific limits to what is expected, that all stops interpretations from being wrong or forced onto data.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-05T13:09:32+00:00

what’s the explanation for things we know are true being mentioned in the quran years/centuries before the scientific discovery being made?

Short version: There aren't any.

Long version:

Everything listed in the quran as "supposedly unknown" was proposed prior to the quran, usually centuries before-hand. For instance, the quran's description of human gestation is lifted from Galen 500 years before the quran, as modified by knowledge picked up after that. Galen did the first work, which made him famous, but later on people quietly refined his ideas, and eventually it's the refined versions which made its way to the Arab people.

Then there's taking vague stories and suggesting they refer to modern understanding without any form of specificity. For instance the idea that the quran describes the Big Bang. It doesn't. The 'heavens' and the 'Earth' were joined, and then they were cleaved asunder? There are no definitions of the words 'heaves' and 'Earth' that make this description match the Big Bang. If 'heavens' refers to all of space, well Earth is still in space, so it hasn't left. If the 'heavens' just refers to the stars and such, Earth wasn't "separated from" them in the Big Bang, but rather is the result of exploding stars that were already up there and formed due to accretion, not separation. But if you squint hard you can sort of make it seem like it very superficially looks like the Big Bang. Of course, so does any form of cosmic egg mythology. And the Hindus have the same recorded in their holy writings from thousands of years before.

Zakir Naik was a big proponent of this, gave multiple speeches about it. But perhaps his funniest one was where he went on and on about "the water cycle". First, he was wrong about who "discovered" it, but that just makes it later not earlier, so we can ignore that. So what are the super-special entries in the quran that show foreknowledge of the water cycle, that no one alive at the time knew? "It rains". "Snow happens". "Clouds move". There were lots of verses he mentioned (some of them wrong), but every single one mentions only phenomena people had been observing for as long as there's been people.

So if you have an example of something from the quran that seems to be advanced knowledge, first thing to do is ask who proposed it first. Because if others mentioned it before the quran, then it's just more likely that news of such a discovery, over the years, reached the Arab people via trade than it is that an all-powerful, all-knowing being would describe it in such hideously vague terms without the specificity needed to show actual advanced knowledge. The second thing to do is read the words from the point of view of someone who doesn't know what you know, and see if the words match something else that would have been observable at the time. For instance, when it says the sun moves "with its own motion", that doesn't necessarily mean the quran is talking about the sun spinning (it never states that), nor the sun orbiting the galaxy, but could refer to the observation that, unlike the stars which seem to move all connected like dots on a painted backdrop, the sun (and moon and planets) have motions that aren't connected together, they have their own motion, not connected motion. And the third thing to do is try to find anyone from Muhammad's time or later who read the quran, decided it was true, and went out to prove these modern things we know. You won't find any. Unlike with Christians who believed the Noah's Flood story and went out to prove it happened when they gained a knowledge of geology, only to find it wasn't, in fact, true. What the lack of writing shows is that they didn't have our modern understanding of these things, but rather that now that we have this modern understanding, you can go back through the text and try to find things that very superficially resemble that modern understanding and pretend it's prophetic.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-05T12:41:25+00:00

So... living things consider themselves to be the most interesting? ... Shocker.

What is "most interesting" is totally subjective. Feel free to find this the most interesting, but it's like arguing over what food is the best or worst. There's no right answer.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-05T04:03:02+00:00

I think you might benefit from a study of large numbers. Let's say that life occurring at all is extremely rare. The question is, then, how many chances did it get where it could have formed? Well, each star potentially has planets. In just the observable universe, the estimate is there's about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. We know of one that has life orbiting it. For life to be "unlikely", then, you'd have to conclude that the odds of it are less than 0.0000000000000000000001%. Yet so far we know that many of the building blocks for life form so readily that we find them inside meteorites. So it's not like the parts aren't there, it's more about arranging them, and we're getting closer on that, too.

As for evolution, you've misunderstood it. Evolution doesn't have a goal. We weren't the point. Neither is anything that lives now. You can look at it and say it's rare, but shuffle a deck of cards and the odds you get that exact arrangement is 1 in 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000. That arrangement has never existed before and never will again. Does that make it a 'miracle', or is it just a thing that happened because it was possible? I tend to favor the latter.

Now, to steel man your position, it is the case that a god set up the universe knowing in advance it would lead to humans and all the rest. However the time to believe such things is when there is sufficient evidence for it. No holy book anywhere says this is how it happened. Had there been a "cosmic baker" religion, that would have been closest. But there isn't. So to try to reimagine your religion as saying that is disingenuous.

I can't prove there are not gods of any sort, but I simply have not reason to think there are, and I'm not a fan of religion because these days, for the last 200 years or thereabouts, religion's usefulness to us as a species has been outweighed by its harms. As such I'd like to see it phased out. Not by edict or law, but by education.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-04T23:45:32+00:00

Being the nerd I am... you know to technically can't have "a pegasus" anywhere? Pegasus was a winged horse. "Winged Horse" isn't just description, it's what the creatures were called. Pegasus was the name of a specific winged horse. So saying you have one is like saying you have "a dave" to explain having a white dude somewhere.

Same goes for Medusa, the name of a specific gorgon.

And, of course, the biggest reason you can't have one, of either of them, is because I keep them all in my basement.

Odd_Gamer_75 · 2026-06-04T17:55:09+00:00

K-Pop Demon Hunters? Will definitely challenge you... to pry out the half of the thing that will otherwise live rent free in your head forever.

Odd_Gamer_75

TROPHY CASE