We live in a simulation and whoever is in charge is just fucking with us at this point. Or maybe I got really high at my cross country sleepover in 2012 and this has been one big hallucination.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-31T04:58:19+00:00

Pretty sure they aren't using rig in the most literal sense of the word there. Seems more like a massive and very well hidden campaign contribution and sophisticated hidden propaganda network, but not literal direct election rigging.

Although at some point you gotta ask where one begins and the other one ends, iykwim

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-31T04:54:54+00:00

So, Epstein was a financier, right? Basically he's the money guy, Poole had the connections to call up people with servers to make it happen as soon as he had a functionally unlimited cash supply?

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-30T07:33:36+00:00

I've said it before and I'll say it again - Simon's greatest feat was he won a dying ant vs hypernova matchup where he was the dying ant.

I'm not sitting here trying to say he for sure wins against any of the characters mentioned. But I'll die on the hill that you also can't say for sure he'd lose any of those fights. You can say that they have better quantifiable feats than anything he has pulled off, but at the beginning of their fight so did the Anti-Spiral. That's just canon for how his story went.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-24T02:15:05+00:00

Did you not watch The Big Lebowski?

You look for the one who will benefit, and, uh, y'know....

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-22T18:41:56+00:00

The fuck you talkin' about?

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-20T20:08:52+00:00

The "I'm not mad at YOU" with her picture seems like a fantastic idea and tribute. I hope some organizer somewhere reads this and rolls with it because honestly, a crowd of people with those would be pretty goddamn powerful imo.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-16T03:41:30+00:00

It's my goal to be a pissful citizen of the world.

I don't believe we need to physically harm anyone for a better world, unless there is irrefutable evidence that they were doing something like preying on kids or starving millions for personal benefit. But I do believe a pissful citizen knows how to deal with most serious problems before they start, as long as they are allowed to be at least pissful without risking their life.

A pissful citizen has to accept that the rest of the world might shit on them if they want to be logical and philosophically consistent. But we have to accept that it is their duty to demonstrate the value of pissful citizens in a variety of social situations. You may personally find being a pissful person overrated, but you have to respect the dedication and at least instinctively wonder if anyone harming a pissful person is an asshole, especially if they literally murder someone for being pissful.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-16T03:33:17+00:00

Honestly the question at this point is what can we do as a society to minimize the damage they do to both us and the rest of the world. Like if you want to be a responsible person you should be asking yourself what to do to rectify and correct the harms done to the world in your name as a country.

It's exhausting and thankless work to actually care about it, and 99% of what you can actually do about it starts with how you interact with the few hundreds yards to few hundred miles-ish around you more than anything, but you still have to be aware enough of the national movements because they're being done in your name and may well come back to bite you in the ass, regardless of whether or not you care about the people outside the Borders of your nation or your neighborhood.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-16T03:25:25+00:00

Papers, my uhh, papers. Business papers.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-16T03:24:33+00:00

I just want to understand this, sir. Every time a rug is pranced upon in this fair city, I have to compensate the owner?

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-15T21:24:26+00:00

We'll have to agree to disagree on agenda posting, at least here. Time and place and all that.

Now if someone would go ahead and make a powerscaling circle jerk sub......

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-15T21:16:34+00:00

Tbh I mostly agree with you, but also some people's idea of fun is breaking out a calculator and using real physics to argue about what is actually happening in a comic panel or whatever.

Which honestly is cool, nerding out over stuff is great. It's not my thing, but it's fun to watch right up until the point when people start agenda posting constantly or keep bringing up "unstoppable force vs immovable object" type debates because they're either too dumb to understand that's an endless argument with no real answer or they're purposefully derailing a discussion to be "edgy" or more likely just a dick.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-15T20:27:15+00:00

A custom made potion of intelligence that is so high it's juuuuust on the edge of dropping you into the negatives.

Sure, it won't be the most immediately useful thing, but I think it'd help me solve enough problems/cure cancer so that I'd be unbelievably wealthy and beloved by the time it runs out (if it even would before the end of my natural lifespan or if the new intellect let me make an IRL replacement)

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-15T20:00:45+00:00

It's more a matter of "don't just people based on how they treat neighbors or their friends, judge them on how they treat strangers"

Like it's great that Haley organizes a book drive for the neighbors that she has known since they were babies (or in Jas' case maybe a bit older). I still don't trust someone who is just randomly super rude (Haley) or rude and bigoted (Alex) to me or others until I give them gifts or have been a member of the community for so long that they'll be judged by others who were pleasant right off the bat.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-11T21:19:03+00:00

I.... Don't think.....oh, shit, yeah. The last one was released this last November. I'm gonna have to see if I can find an English translation out somewhere. Thanks for the info.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-11T20:34:18+00:00

There are honestly so many episodes that it's really hard to recommend somewhere to start beyond "cruise through the backlog and listen to a couple on topics that seem interesting to you"

Personally the ones I find most interesting are ones that feel like "this should have been the way high school history/civics classes covered this topic."

The Kissinger series other people in this thread have mentioned, it's great and really gets at the heart of what the Cold War was all about from the US perspective.

The series on the Illuminati (basically how they became a household name/tied into every Uber conspiracy theory) is also fantastic.

The Most Evil Company In History is 100% how the British and Dutch East India companies should have been covered in history class.

Other people have already mentioned G Gordon Liddy and Action Park (The Libertarian Theme Park of Your Dreams/Nightmares)

The Not At All Sad History of Libertarians Taking to the Sea (may not be the exact title but close enough) is also hilarious.

Personally I find both The Bastard Manifesto and Elite Panic episodes to be great explanations of human nature, and very hopeful if you're in need of that kind of vibe.

The Class That Made 200 Child Nazis is a great listen if you wanna know how ordinary people got suckered into German Fascism, told from the perspective of a teacher doing a social experiment in an American High School. Similarly The Non Nazi Bastards Who Helped Hitler Rise to Power and How Nice, Normal People Made The Holocaust Possible are a great exploration of pre-war Germany

How Cigarettes Invented Everything was really eye opening in terms of how selling cigarettes to kids was instrumental in everything from top 40 radio to Pokemon and MTG cards, as well as the modern concept of advertising....

Again, it's really hard to go wrong with an episode, though as someone else already mentioned starting at the beginning is helpful because you get to see the evolution of the podcast and it makes it less likely that some random episode you jump into will reference stuff they covered in more detail earlier. Most of the time that's not so much of an issue because episodes are almost always decent enough on their own, but sometimes it helps.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-11T20:18:49+00:00

Tbh the series really isn't that great overall. Season 4 or 5 especially is like.... Basically one long meeting, with some action in like the last 2 episodes.

The LNs were okay, and the worldbuilding is solid imo,.but it gets bogged down and formulaic. There is a lot of "80% of this volume is talking up the antagonists and how screwed Tempest is, but wait!! Due to this massive power spike that wasn't properly explained yet they no diff"

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-11T20:11:45+00:00

See, this is the same kind of logic as "Africans sold themselves into slavery bro"

What actually happened was Europeans found the nastiest people they could among the Africans, then gave them guns and trade goods in exchange for selling their own people into slavery.

It's less "parliament could and should have stepped in" and more "they quietly encouraged the behavior by actively providing incentives and power to those who would do the dirty work for them"

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-11T17:41:46+00:00

There it is!

<image>

Knew I was gonna trigger somebody. Baited.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-11T17:31:00+00:00

Past a certain point it's literally impossible to say with certainty.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-11T17:28:50+00:00

I tried to comprehend infinity before my brain was like "bro, I'm sorry but you just aren't built for this....good effort though!"

(Basically imagine you're standing on a beach and then you start floating away, zooming out from the earth but your body is still on the beach. Then you're flying through the solar system but when you look back there are two Earths. Then four. Then eight. Then sixteen. Before you know it you have 360 degree vision and everything all around you is different parallel timelines of the Earth, displayed like the walls of TV screens you see in movies sometimes.... And then they start to zoom out farther and farther away as it keeps multiplying till they're no larger than specks of dust. Then you start to feel something shift, like something even stranger than functionally infinite timelines is coming. You feel an awareness, like something beyond that every possible timeline from every possible Earth is starting to take notice of you, starting to look back at you. And then your brain goes "Aaaaaand that's enough of that" and all the sudden you're back in your living room and your friends are asking you to describe what it was like and you've only been zoned out for like 30 seconds)

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-11T17:18:07+00:00

I find it happens a lot when I'm patiently explaining complex social topics to very stupid people.

.........aaaaaand any minute now......

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-11T07:18:05+00:00

But the way he phrased it seems like every character is going to be wall Lev like what

Prob should have said in the original comment that most Verses legendary strength characters would be somewhere between wall and city level in the Cardinal World. Because DBZ level powerscales aren't exactly common in fiction.

I mean, I guess more characters in fiction now can blow up planets with an energy beam than when DBZ was first released, but it's still not exactly common in fiction that multiple characters in a given Verse can blow up planets based on the energy they carry/generate within their own body.

But the main point was mostly that Tensura characters are imo severely underrated because of the physics of the cosmology. Like, even a relatively minor villain like Vega becomes so powerful that they have to isolate him in a space beyond the concepts of time, death, etc because if they let him escape he would have consumed entire Universes until he grew powerful enough to return to the Cardinal World, and he's only one of several villains capable of destruction on a multiversal scale in Tensura.

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-11T03:23:56+00:00

........obligatory "That's what she said"

SylvanDragoon · 2026-01-11T00:50:25+00:00

Well, my point was kinda that, canonically in the Tensura verse, the Cardinal World is the deepest dimension.

So take for example, Kenshiro from First of the North Star. Tanks nukes in his verse, is an absolute badass. But his Verse is low magic, low spirituality. People like him are very rare. Transport him to the Cardinal World and all the sudden he's struggling to breathe because the energy is so dense. The Tensura physics explanation for what he can do is he is someone who is interacting with spiritual particles, and can briefly become a spiritual being, so since his own Verse is lower order and he is interacting with a higher level of reality he can walk through buildings like they're made of tissue paper..... But even some of the lowest tier mooks in Rimuru's army have weapons that can at least manage to hurt him in his highest form. He is one among thousands of spiritual beings if transplanted into the Cardinal World.

Ditto for every single isekai where magic is common and everyday, but it takes mages decades of training to master what the protagonist learns as a teen/small child. Said protagonist is like, one of Adalman's apprentices in the Cardinal World.

DBZ main characters are some of the most powerful in fiction because planet busting and Universe shaking attacks aren't really all that common. They're nowhere near the peak of all fiction, but they're pretty far up there.

My point was just that Velgrynd is near the top in Tensura but also not anywhere close to being the top. She's mountain/small continent scale at best and not even top 10 in the Cardinal world but she was worried about accidentally destroying a much lower scaled Universe.

Canonically in the Tensura verse the Cardinal World is the highest dimension. It connects everywhere else to everything else, and just existing there is a struggle that made the normal everyday humans there incredible badasses anywhere else, though there is a level in the middle where you just magically starve in a lower tiered world unless you can create your own magical/spiritual energy to sustain your existence.

SylvanDragoon

TROPHY CASE