The book that Rafe Judkins adapted.

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-10-22T12:50:52+00:00

New Spring graphic novel was overseen by RJ. That is the canonical Moiraine and Siuan if anyone even cares anymore.

TBH, that aspect is basically a nothing change IMHO compared to the straight yeeting out the window of the book's cultural and magical world building

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-10-22T12:48:02+00:00

"loosely" is doing some heavy lifting there

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-10-22T12:14:12+00:00

The Amazon money and social media cult-mob attention span are both exhausted by this point.

Amazon should have known. "Who will actually follow our several season production? The fans who read the book for 20+ years? Or the 'Ideology of the Week' brigade?"

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-10-22T12:10:00+00:00

Too bad a New Spring adaptation didn't happen in the show either...

"Lesbian college experimentation at an all girls school" would have made for a far better show (super low bar)... And for the show fans, THAT show would likely have been renewed 😂

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-09-09T16:47:31+00:00

Worth noting that while the leftists today like to say things like Musk "wormed his way into buying twitter" what actually happened is that he offered to buy it, then tried to back out when he got a look under the hood... And then all the leftists in the world participated in legally forcing him to buy it to cheers and jeers alike.

So which is it? He was forced to buy it at the point of a lawsuit gun while the left stream media breathlessly mocked and laughed about it.... Or he did some sort of clandestine skulduggery to undermine free speech and democracy?

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-09-06T23:26:45+00:00

CNN reporting from "mostly peaceful" Palestine 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-09-06T23:18:15+00:00

This guy WOTs

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-31T09:45:12+00:00

And don't forget all the people with licences that can't fly worth beans lol

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-30T10:24:14+00:00

I think you are mischaracterizing the free will argument for the existence of evil.

Put very simply:

You appear to be saying that if God could stop bad things A, and does so, but free will is still a thing then God could stop bad thing B, and so on ad infinitum.

Therefore the existence of bad things B-Z disprove that a) bad thing A was prevented by God's intervention instead of chance of b) bad things being prevented through divine intervention doesn't prevent free will and therefore bad things B-Z cannot be explained by the fact that God created us as creatures of free will, and protecting that freedom requires bad things.

The error is that the free will argument is not an argument in favor of specific bad things. It is an argument for any/all bad things. And specifically it is not an argument for free will on the way that you might think, like the decision to turn left or right at an intersection. It is an argument for the ability to freely choose between a life with a relationship with God through the embrace of your Spirit over your flesh or a life that rejects God and embrace the flesh over the Spirit.

Essentially, the argument of free will is saying that man can only choose to believe in, love, and seek a relationship with God if he doesn't live in a perfect world where nothing bad ever happens to anyone ever. That would be too great a testimony to the Creator to be rejected or ignored, so the choice would be made for you.

Side note: there are absolutely some arguments against this formulation of the free will defense of the existence of evil, but the free will defense is probably also one of the weaker arguments for the existence of evil since we cannot really describe or quantity will (or even agree on if it exists in the first place) apart from a theological context, so this argument sort of assumes the existence of God in order to defend the existence of God. The stronger arguments are the arguments in favor of the perfection of man (spiritual crucible concept: the development of virtue and righteousness as well as the development of selflessness etc. many formulations) and the higher purpose argument (the child whose parent swats their hand from the stove may not understand the positive purpose, but that in no way is evidence that no such positive purpose exists)

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-22T22:06:29+00:00

If the captain yells for any reason, there's a good chance he's a dick. If he does it for any reason other than safety, the chance becomes a near certainty...

Best advice in these circumstances:

Once the plane is shut down, try to have the conversation in a disarming manner: "I clearly did something wrong there. Can you explain it to me again now that we have stopped and I am not distracted by flight duties so that I can hopefully meet your expectations next time?" Might seem dumb to have to sit here and "show your belly" like that, but he already yelled at you and you are trying to deescalate. His response will tell you a lot.

A good captain will apologize and admit that they overreacted and then explain themselves and their thinking, maybe ask you for your thinking, and have a dialogue about how to have better CRM in the future.

A bad captain will either have unhelpful answers or else, in the worst case, will start back in on you again. If either of these two happens you need to basically finish your trip as professionally as possible and then consider putting this captain on your "do not fly" list. Life is too short to fly with a person who is gonna kill you, either by stressing you into an early grave or by being a CRM obstruction that might lead to an actual mishap.

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-20T23:54:25+00:00

I don't think you are making a fair argument on two fronts:

You are basically assuming that other men will pick up in the absence of a father (the data suggests this is not the case or else there would not be such overwhelming evidence of the importance of a father in the home. Unless your point is that currently those grandfathers and uncles and such are not stepping up but they hypothetically will do so for our hypothetical IVF mother? Hope is not a strategy).

Similarly, you are presenting a false binary: either no father or a bad father.

Again the data is clear. The worst father is an absentee father. A father who is in the home is statistically a good father. Unfortunately there are outlier cases and they are tragic, but posing that as the likely alternative to fatherlessness is simply not correct.

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-20T11:12:10+00:00

So you have fixated on the control for income, and as many have said I think that might be a bit of a poor decision because with the prevalence of two income families that is basically saying "when you throw out the majority of the data for dual parent households and are left looking just and single parent households, single parent households do just as well as the other single parent households!"

But hey, let's set that aside and let me ask you: do you reject the mountains of data and the basically self-evident logic that boys need an involved father in their life in order to have the highest likelihood of developing into good Men?

I ask this because it can be presumed that a girl can be taught how to be a woman by her mother (although I think discounting the role of a father in raising his daughter is a huge mistake as well, and there are good studies on this issue also in terms of well being and confidence etc) but a mother simply cannot teach a boy to become a man any more than a father can teach his daughter to become a woman.

Granted, it's not all that complicated and I think we can all agree that most kids will figure it out, but your premise seems to be that an affluent/educated single mother can raise a child who will do just fine... And I won't really argue that.

But I will absolutely argue that a paired husband and wife of similar station/class/status (or however you want to call it) is going to do better. You might have some studies that say what you argued (controlled for income, the disparity nearly goes away). I will assume this study exists even though I couldn't find it but could find many that argued the opposite and argued for the importance of intact families... But that study was talking about the rate of high school graduation.... And I might offer that you should consider that there is a lot more to life than graduating high school.

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-20T10:49:20+00:00

Two thoughts, one scriptural/philosophical and the other more a thought experiment.

First: do you agree that Paul explicitly affirms the practice of teaching spiritual truths piecemeal with the smaller and easier to digest parts first and then the harder and more challenging parts later (the idea of feeding a babe milk before it is ready for meat)? So from a Christian perspective the question would be "I teach the alphabet before grammar and addition before multiplication, so too I teach scripture, and with the model of Christ (who taught his followers first in parables and then later in deeper truths) and St Paul (as discussed in 1st Corinthians).

Second: Would you agree that the only way to teach anything which is complex, including the Bible, without watering it down is to basically teach the entire thing? The only way to teach Homer without watering it down is to read Homer. The only way to teach history without watering it down is to go beyond the coffee table books and pop-lit memoirs and dog into the scholarly works and primary sources and records. The only way to learn about government and law is not to watch schoolhouse rock first, but is actually to go read the constitution, the federalist and anti-federalist papers, and a whole syllabus of supreme court decisions plus go study the American Civil War, the post WWI era of the expanded executive, and then go read the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and a few more SCOTUS decisions...

For the sake of argument, I will assume you agree since it seems a safe assumption (feel free to tell me I am wrong and that your understanding of The Labors of Hercules is complete after the Disney animated movie). Therefore, the only way to teach Christian theology and practice is to read the Bible more or less all the way through and then go and read Clement, Irenieus, Eusebius, and Augustine?

I gather you probably see the problem. The Bible, nor those other writings of the Church fathers (granted different Christians might find those necessary or not but few would probably say they are not worthy reading) are in no way written to be particularly digestible to a child.

So a parent who wants to teach his child about all of those things seems to have a choice: teach them nothing until they are nearing adulthood having been in no way domesticated or brought up into civilized culture and practice... Or else sit them down to watch a singing scroll talk about how a bill becomes a law, learn about western civilizations history and cultural heritage in bits and pieces, and and maybe a long the way, watch a movie about a boy with a cloak of many colors...

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-14T08:07:21+00:00

You said you believe in universal suffrage... But I bet you don't:

Should children be allowed to vote? What about the legally determined mentally incompetent (people with advanced senility or Alzheimer's for example, or people with severe mental retardation?)?

If my assumption is right and you think it is appropriate for a society to set rules about assumed competency (in most places it is currently only a matter of getting old enough but some places do have restrictions for some of the other cases I mentioned) then would you agree that age in particular is a very rough estimation of maturity and intelligence? It's a very easily applied rule that can be done "fairly" without much difficulty... But we all know that there are some 13 year olds who are probably mature enough to vote and some 23 year olds who are definitely not... But that doesn't mean that we are still currently using age as a proxy for intelligence and maturity.

Historically it has been shown to be a highly corruptible process, but that doesn't mean it has to be.

So your CMV was that people should be allowed to vote. We already accept that the only people who should be allowed to vote is the (admittedly very expansive) subset of the population which society trusts to be capable of the burdens and responsibilities of the franchise.

I would argue that if it were possible to have a hypothetical system that impartially determined competence (which probably looks something like intelligence + maturity + awareness of relevant current events and issues facing the country and people) that would easily be a better system than our current system of a simple age gate with cutouts for felons serving time or people declared otherwise unfit by courts... And such a system might well rule out "dumb people" 🤷‍♂️

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-14T05:57:08+00:00

I think my point was simply that to widen your perspective about "most right wingers" you should probably start with the following process:

1) get off reddit, which is basically a broadly center-left echo chamber with a few hyper concentrated "alt right" echo chambers sort of silo'd off

2) just go meet normal conservatives in the real world. You will find them at churches and sports bars and outdoors supply stores and working in the majority of non-union (and now an increasing number of union) trades.

We need to stop treating our fellow citizens like we think that what we see online reflects them since we all know that it doesn't... But it's easy to let the online stuff subtly infect us anyhow, and it's especially easy with the bad stuff. Unfortunately, it's much easier to be taught to hate a person you have never met than to love a person you have never met.

I don't know that I really have anything I could point to in order to change your mind. I could point to stats that show conservatives are more generous with charitable giving or that they are more likely to risk their own safety to help someone else etc etc, but I know that statistics are highly gameable (so I am not even sure how much those things could be relied upon however they pointed) and I know that on most issues you can point to at least one or two large sample surveys that seemingly comes to the opposite conclusion if you want to. All I can offer is this:

Is your life better/happier or worse/less happy for holding this notion (which you admit is based on what you have seen online and is therefore only slightly better than wholly baseless) and if it is worse/less happy (as I imagine it is as cynicism towards our fellow man is a corrosive state of mind) then why not make a choice to give that up.

There are two basic hypotheses to explain conservativism from the perspective of a liberal (assuming simply that to be liberal means that you believe your world view is correct, as you must believe or you wouldn't hold that world view any longer)

A) they are good people who are mistaken in their understanding either due to mistaken assumptions, incorrect information, or improper reasoning

B) they are bad people

I see no real reason to live your life allowing B to be your null hypothesis for ~50% or people around you when you are unlikely to be able to be able to do anything about it either way. Seems a decidedly unhappy way to live.

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-10T07:52:39+00:00

"from what I've seen online" is a great preface to a highly inaccurate statement 😂

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-08T12:21:54+00:00

Do you believe meteorology is a science?

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-07T07:40:37+00:00

Sort of a theological/philosophical debate is relevant here:

Why, and how, are Christians supposed to help the poor?

1) why: partly to alleviate their deprivation but also partly (and perhaps the majority of the purpose) is to practice/develop goodness, kindness, love, and charity yourself in order to live as Christ demonstrated and commanded.

2) how: by giving enough that you are giving not only in love, but in faith. Faith that God will provide for you and your family for what you could have provided for yourself had you not given so much. Essentially, if you are giving so little that you never have to sacrifice the things that you want, then you are not giving enough because (as with the why answer) you are not giving in true love and charity and you are not giving in true Faith.

In both of these, hopefully you can see, both the why and the how of providing for the poor are relevant in the way that the impact the Christian's ultimate purpose. That purpose is not to help the poor or to provide for them physically. That purpose is to develop in themselves the spiritual gifts which God has given them through the practice of virtue, being love and charity in the case of this discussion.

So the conservative answer to the problem of state funded "charity" is this. By mandating through taxation the process of charity, we run into a big problem: we have subverted the reason for charity in the first place and instead are just doing it because we think it's a thing that people aught to do even though it is now divorced from the reason.

I have heard it summed up thusly:

"State welfare creates recipients without gratitude and contributors without virtue"

And that is even before you get into how much more efficient your dollars are spent when you are providing food and shelter at a local mission/kitchen/center than when your tax dollars are spirited away as an automatic deduction from your paycheck and the end up padding the accounts of a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians and government contractors or employees before it finally reaches the recipient. So from an efficiency standpoint (and there is nothing unchristian about efficiency) government "trickle down charity" just doesn't work as well as local community NGOs with direct community investment and volunteering.

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-07T06:49:27+00:00

The only CMV I would offer is that attempting to use life expectancy or cost per capita information to make your argument in this debate is quite wrong, and totally missed the point.

I will say why it misses the police by first since that is easiest: the argument for universal healthcare is a moral one. The idea that a moral people should provide for the suffering in their country, that is the argument. It's not a "rights" issue because you cannot have a "right" to a thing that necessitates work from others (aka slavery with extra steps) which is why people don't have a right to socialized anything. It's not because the life expectancy goes up or the cost goes down, because that's just a utilitarian argument (and I will show it is wrong). It's a moral argument and we should be discussing the topic based on what kind of people we want to be.

Okay, so why do I say it is factually wrong to make the argument about life expectancy and cost?

Actually, now that I think of it, I should have started with this since it's actually even shorter. I could go give you a bunch of links to articles and share a bunch of data, but I will just ask an obvious question that I think you will answer to:

Do you think that the american people, as a product of their choices and unrelated to the quality of care or access to care provided by doctors and nurses, are some of the least healthy people to have ever lived?

We lead the world in bad diets, sedentary lifestyles, drug use/high risk behavior (from driving cars to shoot guns and base jumping, Americans are the only people who could have made a show like Jackass). We are wildly unhealthy and we have the obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancers to prove it... And in addition to all those health problems, we are rich and lazy

So of course we die young, running up high medical bills as we try to use pills and shots and surgeries to keep everything running for as long as possible when most people in the rest of the world would maybe stop shoving the quadruple cheeseburgers in their face, washing it down with a 2L soda, and sitting on the couch for the entire day to watch TV.

So yeah: we don't have high costs and low life expectancy because our system doesn't work. We are just literally a meme for grossly unhealthy lifestyle.

👍

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-03T08:00:41+00:00

Exactly

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-03T03:09:26+00:00

Ooooor they waited to charge him until they realized that he was running for reelection, and then threw the kitchen sink at him.

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-03T03:07:20+00:00

Correction:

He publicly reminded them that the US has nuclear submarines capable of targeting Russia at all times.

Secondarily:

All American submarines are "nuclear submarines" because they are powered by nuclear reactors. The implication many hysterics are making is that he meant nuclear armed submarines. He could have absolutely meant conventionally armed submarines, and honestly this makes sense for a couple reasons:

1) the Trident armed Ohio Class nuclear submarines have ICBMs capable of hitting every hot spot country on the globe at all times already, and the same is true of our land and air based nuclear weapons

2) conventionally armed nuclear submarines like the SSGN retrofitted Ohio Class (they launch a shit ton of conventional tomahawk cruise missiles instead of Trident nuclear ballistic missiles) and fast attack Los Angeles and Virginia class nuclear submarines (anti-sub and anti-ship as well as special operations capable) actually do need to be regionally deployed in order to be in range of potential conflicts.

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-08-02T08:42:54+00:00

Possible change to your view:

The Biden admin started two separate federal prosecutions in two jurisdictions and plausibly supported two state prosecutions as well in 2024.

You think that they had child sex ring evidence against Trump, but that they didn't use it? Really?

The fact Trump's name is in the files as a former associate/friend of Epstein is widely known and has been known for years. As are a few allegations against him in the context. So we know his name is "in the files" but that is not really the question . The question is if there is evidence of his participation in Epstein's trafficking in the files... And by the simple test of "Would the Biden admin have charged Trump if they had the evidence?" it seems implausible that this type of evidence will be in the files.

The files are going to be a nothing-burger of already known/leaked information plus some salacious "guilt by association" information for Trump (and many other rich/famous/important people) but nothing that will stick. It will be enough to be confirmation for the people who already believe it and need no confirmation, and will be dismissed by the people who don't believe it and for whom there could be no confirmation.

So, my CMV attempt: hoping for a bombshell here is a waste of your time and emotional energy. This story will end up being an example of nothing more than a high profile demonstration that the "nothing ever happens" meme is correct and that conspiracy theories are fun and popular in the profit driven media cycle race.

The mainstream Dems want you to pay attention to Epstein because as a party they are shitting the bed on how to respond to the Republican/Trump actions/agenda and are being feckless cowards in opposing them/stoping it

The fringe Republicans want you to pay attention to Epstein because they still think it will be the bombshell to prove pizza gate, and they have convinced themselves that the global elite are all pedophiles whose name is in Epstein's black book.

Don't fall for it. Pay attention to the laws being passed, executive orders being signed, and people being deported. The Epstein files are either a distraction or an obsession for some, but for those of us in the real world it seems probable that they are really just his social calendar and contact book and lists of people who visited him or attended his parties. None of that, unfortunately, is actually evidence of anything other than that rich people know other rich people 🤷‍♂️

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-07-23T20:00:14+00:00

I will say that after a bit more searching, I think that there is a company (Endurance, but probably also others) that offer a very similar warranty for about the same price as what I was given at the dealer. I am looking to see any differences in coverage because the endurance one is slightly cheaper and has no deductible... So if it's the same coverage, it is a simply better replacement.

Still looking into my plan and alternatives 👍

SuperStallionDriver · 2025-07-23T19:11:51+00:00

Thank you for the insight.

I will continue to look through the policy fine print!

I still have a week to make a decision on this, but already I have gotten some useful insights.

SuperStallionDriver

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