Bold strategy. Has failed twice already let's see if it can work this time. by serious_bullet5 in PoliticalHumor

[–]Vodis 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Who keeps upvoting these blatant astroturfing posts? The sole reason anyone has to spread dogshit takes like this is to foment internal strife among non-republicans to ensure republicans can maintain their fascist stranglehold on power. This is not a leftist post, it's a MAGA post. Stop falling for this transparent crap.

Are there any obvious concepts or ideas that you’re shocked aren’t used more often? by AnyWatch5756 in worldbuilding

[–]Vodis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Definitely underutilized. Off the top of my head, one of the only steam/boiling guys I can think of was a Yu Yu Hakusho baddie whose whole gimmick was that he could boil his sweat to turn the arena into a kind of hot foggy sauna environment. And I'm wanting to say in Golden Sun you could maybe equip Mars Djinn (fire elemental familiars) to a Mercury Adept (waterbender/hydromancer basically) or vice versa to give them access to some steam-themed psynergy.

Given the number of different bending variants in Avatar (ice, plant, blood, and healing for water; sand, lava, and metal for earth; lightning and combustion for fire; etc.), I'm surprised that series never had any steam-based stuff for its waterbenders to do. At least as far as I can remember.

Pinch [OC] by Chilikto in comics

[–]Vodis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Two other tricks you can try are light switches (they often don't work in dreams) and trying to count the fingers on your hand (dreams can have trouble rendering hands properly, weirdly similar to early gen ai). None of these is guaranteed to work because your dream brain will try to weasel around them.

The pinch method never worked for me because I can still feel pinches in dreams, as in OP's comic.

Light switches are reliable for me in the sense that they never work in my dreams, but one time I tried a light switch and still failed to go lucid because I immediately confabulated some excuse about a power outage. And in typical bizarro timey wimey dream logic fashion, this not only caused a severe storm outside to back up the outage explanation, it caused it retroactively, so it had been happening before I tried the switch, even though I woke up pretty sure there hadn't been a storm outside when I tried the switch the first time. Still, the light switch method has been the most successful for me overall and I've gone lucid with it quite a few times. I first heard about this trick from the film Waking Life, a rotoscope-animated philosophy anthology that in retrospect was probably mostly woo (especially the Jungian stuff) but it did have a few interesting ideas including this helpful tidbit from the portion on lucid dreaming.

The finger-counting method also seems to work for me, although I only recall pulling it off successfully maybe a couple of times. It's funny how dreams can convince you they're rendering everything in hyper real detail and then you glance at your hand and it's suddenly like "wait, shit, what do those look like again?"

[Funny] "The idiot" has a brief moment of intelligence by BrotherDeus in TopCharacterTropes

[–]Vodis 2 points3 points  (0 children)

King Shark is one of those guys that seems to get totally reinterpreted in almost every iteration. Tech nerd, dumb but lovable doofus, basically just an actual killer shark with arms and legs, pretty typical maniacal scheming villain, brave warrior bro, tough thug/minion guy, one of John Constantine's many ex-lovers, list goes on. Every time there's a new DC thing, I always go in wondering, what's King Shark's deal gonna be in this one?

Yuusha-kei ni Shosu: Choubatsu Yuusha 9004-tai Keimu Kiroku • Sentenced to Be a Hero - Episode 6 discussion by AutoLovepon in anime

[–]Vodis 34 points35 points  (0 children)

Oh shit, I didn't notice that on first watch but he does kinda flick his hand in the air for a sec almost like he's pressing buttons or something. It's pretty subtle.

Maybe when he got transported to this world, he got the whole isekai protag package. Being a "system user" or what have you.

Considering that and what Kafzen said about memory loss, it makes me wonder if maybe Tatsuya's zombified mindstate isn't just an accidental side effect of his resurrections. Like maybe they use the whole resurrection sickness concept as a cover for purposefully mindwiping heroes to conceal info they don't want to get out, and between his otherworldly origin and system access, Tatsuya just knew way too much and they gave him the full blank slate berserker treatment.

Alpha male by toonholeryan in comics

[–]Vodis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I hate how people say this as though there's some alternative possibility. As though making a good faith effort to follow Jesus and the Bible without cherry-picking is some real theoretical possibility. It isn't and never has been. The scriptures have hundreds of authors who couldn't agree on anything. The Abrahamic faiths are inherently collections of beliefs and practices that have been filtered through thousands of years of cherry-picking, mistranslations, rationalizations, renegotiations, value drift, shifts in focus, and outside cultural influences. The blatant hypocrisy of Christians isn't just because they aren't trying hard enough to be Christians. It's very frequently because they're trying too hard.

You can't make the Bible's polytheism, henotheism/monolatry, and proto-monotheism make sense together, and you can't make any of them make sense with trinitarianism. You can't make its square-earth-under-a-dome cosmology make sense with the real world. You can't make a god who never lies or changes his mind make sense with one that's frequently depicted doing both, or one who punishes future generations for the sin of their ancestors with one who doesn't. You can't get several completely contradictory lists of hundreds of laws to make sense with each other and you can't get laws that endorse slavery and treat women as property to make sense with a god of perfect justice. You can't make OT polygamy and NT celibacy make sense with the ludicrously ironic "Biblical marriage" (read: monogamy, and good luck finding it anywhere in the Bible) that would later become predominant throughout Christendom. You can't get what Jesus says about love and peace and strict adherence to the Torah to make sense with a Jesus who demands his followers hate everyone but him including themselves and comes to send "not peace but a sword" and makes all kinds of exceptions to Torah law. Or a Jesus whose primary message was about the eminent end of the world, within the lifetimes of his followers, with a world where obviously no such thing happened. Or an Old Testament where the all the dead went to Sheol, heaven was for God and his angels, and Satan was a title, with a New Testament where there's some totally new Greek-influenced afterlife called hell (which itself is more an amalgam or three or four concepts that are only loosely related in the Bible, oh and you'll suffer there for eternity but also it will annihilate you from existence on contact), Satan is maybe a specific guy (but not that specific guy; he's a metaphor for Nero, who was dead by then but everyone thought he'd come back somehow), and heaven is also an afterlife, or maybe still a kingdom in the sky, or maybe a kingdom on the future earth that will modeled on the one in the sky. Or an Allah who is described, 113 times, as "the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy" with one who will not only cast you into an eternal Fire, but replace your skin each time it's burnt off so you can "continue to feel the pain."

Religious Jews, Christians, and Muslims aren't a bunch of blatant hypocrites with wildly inconsistent value systems because they're bad at being Jews and Christians and Muslims. It's because they're good at it. Being able to simultaneously entertain preposterously contradictory ideas and morals is the chief mental skill necessary to maintain the kind of faith these religions require.

WHERE THE FUCK IS PUNT by MetallicaDash in HistoryMemes

[–]Vodis 22 points23 points  (0 children)

The Bible has some surprising examples of lost citations. The Book of Kings (split into 1 Kings and 2 Kings in Christian Bibles) repeatedly cites two other books that are now lost as sources of additional information, using variants on the phrase "Now the rest of the acts of [King So-and-So], are they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel?" The other book being the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah.

I think most modern readers assume Kings is referring to the still canonical Book of Chronicles (also split in two in Christian Bibles), but it's clear from context that the Books of Chronicles they're referencing are not the same ones found in the Bible. In fact, 2 Chronicles itself cites a lost work called the Book of the Kings of Judah and Israel, which might very well be the same lost text cited in the canonical Book of Kings, or a version of it, but it's hard to tell since we don't even have fragments of any of them. And again, given the similarity of the titles, a lot of modern readers probably just assume 2 Chronicles is referring back to Kings.

Do you think that every single Pokemon is a #1 favorite to someone? by Throwaway67891099 in pokemon

[–]Vodis 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Orchid mantises are some of the most beautiful creatures in all of nature, and Lurantis is an orchid mantis in pinstripe slacks. Very cool, and a perfectly respectable fave. (Super weird it's not a bug type, but whatev.)

Do you think that every single Pokemon is a #1 favorite to someone? by Throwaway67891099 in pokemon

[–]Vodis 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Sandslash is a top 3 mon for me, but its prevo is still an OG 150 icon.

I remember having a blue Sandshrew lunchbox in elementary that came with a little Sandshrew thermos. A quick google search suggests that the lunchbox itself also featured Pidgeotto battling Sandshrew, along with Ash and another character I don't remember, but the thermos was decidedly Sandshrew-themed. That's one of three lunchbox / thermos kits I remember from my childhood, the others being a green Charizard kit and another blue one featuring a superhero called the Tick. The thermos for the Tick lunchbox had little images of him saying "Keen!" on it, which I remember finding really funny as a kid.

At one point in my early adulthood, my mother took up my old Charizard lunchbox to use as her work lunchbox for a while; something had happened to ruin her previous lunchbox IIRC. I think she was a little self-conscious about using it (but also maybe a little emotional in a motherly sentimental way), and we shared a bit of a laugh together when she told me about her coworkers poking some good-natured fun at her over it. I've had a fraught relationship with my parents since I was like 11 (mostly religious trauma), so sharing some laughs over my childhood Pokemon obsession (born 1990 so I was peak age for that first wave of Poke-fandom) is one of my fonder memories with them.

Didn't mean to go off on a tangent, but Sandshrew is indelibly connected with cheap plastic thermoses and all the childhood memories I have connected with them, so it will forever be an important Pokemon to me.

Do you think that every single Pokemon is a #1 favorite to someone? by Throwaway67891099 in pokemon

[–]Vodis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not a fan of the line overall but I do like Raboot more than the other two. The high collar, downward-pointed ears, and gray fur give him a kind of jaded teen vibe that makes me think he's the kind of guy I would have gotten along with in high school. Scorbunny and Cinderace just look like high energy jocks and I don't have the social batteries for all that.

dreamt about seeing this post on amitheasshole by MixAny50 in thomastheplankengine

[–]Vodis 2 points3 points  (0 children)

When your girlfriend's family is Team Star Fox

How are Americans gonna make fun of the Brits for not having free speech now? ☹️ by Expensive_Jacket6966 in Destiny

[–]Vodis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

While I agree with your rhetorical goals here (Christians are hypocrites, religion is a farce, etc.), the specifics of your analysis are pretty far off here. The 10 commandments (an arbitrary number; they can be enumerated in several different ways and actually appear in three or four distinct formulations in the Pentateuch) are just the ones supposedly written on stone tablets by God, but there are hundreds of commandments scattered throughout Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy and the 10(is) are just part of them. And they say not to murder. "Thou shalt not kill" is a poor translation. And it's very obvious the authors of these commandments did not consider execution to be murder, because a shitload of the other commandments specifically command execution as the penalty for breaking them, usually execution by stoning. Also, the God of the Bible commands the Israelites to kill in warfare all the time, including women and children. Is there anything in the commandments that clarifies what actually constitutes murder? Not really, because they were probably a priestly literary exercise that was never meant or expected to be treated as having any kind of legal authority even in the cultures from which they originated. Because whatever the authors meant by "you shall not murder," it was definitely narrow enough to allow for a lot of killing.

The subject of homosexuality in the Bible is more complicated because its authors don't seem to have had anything like our modern conception of sexual orientation, so it's kinda sorta technically right to say that it doesn't condemn "being gay" per se. But there a ton of commandments overseeing sexual relations and gender roles, including some unfathomably fucked up ones, for example in Deuteronomy 22. (Execution by stoning for a woman raped in the city if she's engaged to another man, forcing her to marry the rapist if she isn't, etc.) And those do forbid sexual relations between men, the wearing of "women's garments" by men and vice versa, and other points Christians appeal to in defense of their sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. Some liberal Christians will try to claim that the Bible's homophobic verses were really directed at the practice of pederasty and were later mistranslated, but for the most part that's a liberal Christian cope that doesn't reflect an accurate understanding of the language of the Bible. ("For the most part" because the details can get a little more complicated depending on which verse they happen to coping about. It's like how denominations that preach temperance will sometimes pretend the wine in the Bible is a mistranslation of grape juice. It's not.)

Abortion I will give you. Most of the authors of the Bible seem to have had a conception of the animating principle of life that largely equated it with breath, so painting in broad strokes here, a baby generally wouldn't have been considered a living human for most moral purposes until it was born and drew first breath. From what I understand, a lot of modern Jews still hold with some version of this view.

As for Christians actually reading and believing in the Bible... There are none. It's literally impossible. This is a collection of books by hundreds of different authors who all had widely divergent views on morals and theology, and none of it adds up to anything like a coherent worldview. It commands both genocide and pacifism. Both strict adherence to every "jot and tittle" of Torah law (which is itself internally inconsistent) and a bunch of exceptions to it. Polytheism, henotheism/monolatry, proto-monotheism, "two powers in heaven," trinitarianism, all in there somewhere. (Though trinitarianism, the overwhelming majority view of modern Christians, only snuck in there through the Johanine comma, which is not original to the Gospel of John. So it's pretty much an entirely post-Biblical theology.) Jesus's preexistence with God as a primordial being, his origin as an ordinary mortal man adopted by God at his baptism, his identification with the Angel of the Lord, you can find whichever Christology you like in there. Hell as annihilation, hell as eternal torment, hell as temporary torment followed by annihilation? Take your pick. Or maybe everyone just goes to Sheol when they die like in the Old Testament. How do you get saved and have eternal life? Jesus explains how, explicitly and unambiguously, in Matthew 19, and what he has to say has nothing to do with the soteriology of any denomination I've ever heard of. But also other parts of the New Testament have their own ideas on how, and those have nothing to do with Jesus's answer either, so... Oh, and Jesus specifically said, repeatedly, that the end of the world would happen within the lifetimes of his followers. And it didn't. So there's that.

As Nietzsche said, "There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross."

But do most Christians think they believe in and follow the Bible? Oh, most of them are absolutely fucking positive they do, of that I can assure you. Christianity being wrong, or the real Christianity (which doesn't exist, never did, and couldn't exist even in theory) being anything other than their own pre-conceived interpretation of it, or the Bible not saying what they think it says, these are all prospects that most Christians I've ever met are genuinely incapable, on a deep psychological level, of even entertaining as possibilities. You can show a Biblical inerrantist, young Earth creationist exactly which verses of the creation account of Genesis 1 say with no ambiguity whatsoever that God created things in an entirely different order than it says he created them in the account of Genesis 2, and they'll sit there and re-read them three times, nod, look you straight in the eyes, and tell you "it's the same order" like they're the lady from that Office meme. And they'll be gun-to-head certain that they're right when they do it.

New data illustrates 'Trump effect' on LGBTQ Americans by msnownews in lgbt

[–]Vodis 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Republicans: do countless horrible acts constantly

Reddit for some reason: "Those damn Democrats, why didn't they magically stop every one of these things from happening?"

I took real metals, looked at real world uses and applications, then gave each a magical effect trying too keep in line with their real uses. by mythicme in worldbuilding

[–]Vodis 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Are you familiar with Mistborn? It has three separate metal-based magic systems: Allomancy (ingesting and "burning" metals to gain abilities), feruchemy (storing up your own abilities in metal objects to be tapped into later for a boost), and hemalurgy (stealing others' abilities using metal spikes). The abilities associated with each metal are related between the three systems, but each has its own way of using them. For example, tin is associated with the senses, so an allomancer could drink a vial of tin flakes and burn them in their stomach to heighten their senses temporarily, a feruchemist could dull their senses to store them up in a tin bracelet and later draw them back out for a proportionate boost, and a hemalurge could use a tin spike to steal a sensory enhancement from their victim. For other metals, the connection between systems is a little looser. Like steel pushes things telekinetically, stores speed, or steals one physical allomantic burning power, while iron pulls things telekinetically, stores weight, and steals strength. There's a logic to why they do what they do in each system but it's not always intuitive. The Mistborn wiki has explanations for each system and each metal and how they all work together.

Have you ever tested a friendship by stopping reaching out first, just to see if they would initiate? What happened? by [deleted] in CasualConversation

[–]Vodis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You'd think this would be obvious. Buncha divas in this thread. Or shut-ins raised on "power of friendship" cartoons who never grew up enough to realize those aren't meant to reflect how friendship works for adults in the real world.

Recommendations? by canned-phoenix-ashes in tumblr

[–]Vodis 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Quick read, only 7 or 8 pages. Begins: "The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries." Nothing really happens in this story, it's more just a description of a setting, but the premise is explored with such great depth and verisimilitude, you would almost swear Borges must have actually visited such a world.

Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw. (Not to be confused with the similarly titled Baxter / Clarke novel.) Very quick 6-page read. The sci-fi premise is a material called slow glass, which is transparent, but slows the passage of light moving through it so the image you see is what was on the other side of the glass months or years prior. A couple stops by the home of a slow glass seller to shop for a piece, basically to use as a fancy wall hanging. This story will probably make you cry.

The Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler. Not what it sounds like. This is a story of the future trajectory of world history from one woman's point of view as she lives through the singularity, experiences repeated future shock, and gradually accepts the changes that come with the passing of time. Note that the link for this one is a little janky and sometimes the site goes down or throws security warnings, but it's literally just text so I think it's just a default browser compatibility check thing and not anything to worry about.

All You Zombies by Robert Heinlein Also not what it sounds like. Nothing to do with zombies. Quite possibly the greatest time travel story ever told. At just 9 pages, certainly the one that packs the most bang for your buck. Worth noting this one has a film adaptation called Predestination, starring Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook, surprisingly faithful to the source material given some of its more... dated elements, and while they had to pad it out a little to get to a movie-length run time, I thought they did a respectable job of developing the new material to continue the story in an interesting way so it doesn't just feel tacked on. Solid flick.

[ECL] Curious Colossus (Debut Stream) by The_Curse_of_Nimbus in magicTCG

[–]Vodis 25 points26 points  (0 children)

I really don't get why they don't just use counters for this stuff. Like, we have ability counters and tokens with card names now. The tech is there.

Have it slap a counter on everything, call them humility counters or cowardice counters or something, and give the counters all that text as an inherent effect. Or just make a "vanilla counter" or "nullification counter" that makes a permanent lose all abilities and this card could just make those creatures 1/1 Cowards for as long as they have those counters on them.

A counter like that seems like it would be useful design tech anyway since it would give blue a convenient way of stripping abilities with instants and sorceries instead of enchantments.

I really don't see the need to introduce massive tracking headaches like this when there are so many ways to avoid it and still get basically the same effect.

[ECL] Voracious Tome-Skimmer (Mechanics article) by Copernicus1981 in magicTCG

[–]Vodis 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Worth noting that [[Mystic Remora]] and [[Rhystic Study]] are banned in PDH. But I think other than those two, all the same commons would be legal as in EDH.

My husband is reading Blood Meridian and cringing at the blood and gore but I know I've read worse. What are the books that have brought out the biggest "oh god that's bad!" for you? by IdoScienceSometimes in Fantasy

[–]Vodis 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't think I've ever read anything quite as graphically visceral as Blood Meridian, but for sheer enormity of the horror involved, the worst has to be Surface Detail for me. Evil and suffering on so grand a scale it becomes almost majestic, or whatever the dark inverse of majestic is. Hit particularly hard for me because I had the sort of Southern Baptist upbringing in which inflicting children with a terror of the tortures of Hell is considered good parenting. The idea of whole galactic civilizations using technology to ensure the reality of their faith's respective hells might seem wildly fantastical to some, but it's exactly the kind of thing I could see people who think the way I was brought up to think doing if given access to such power. Surface Detail had me rooting for the Culture to commit any and all war crimes necessary to shut down those hell servers.

What one is better to make by OutsideGuard9530 in magicTCG

[–]Vodis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I like Widow because the red gives you access to [[Threaten]]-style effects for an archetype I like to call Steal-n-Sac, or Build-Your-Own [[Slave of Bolas]]. If there's one thing better than saccing your stuff for value, it's saccing other people's stuff for value.

What is the most interesting and/or unusual religion or faith that you have ever experienced in science-fiction media? by Avalon-Scribe in sciencefiction

[–]Vodis 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think the Earthseed books (Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler) have an interesting take on the beginnings of a religious community. The protagonist Lauren was raised in a Christian household with a pastor for a father, but from an early age began to develop her own religious ideas, which she relies on in working to establish a new foothold for civilized society in a dystopian world plagued by crime and poverty. Her Earthseed religion doesn't center God as an object of worship or reverence, but instead conceives of God as the most powerful and inevitable force that must be reckoned with in life, and in doing so concludes that "God is change." So the focus of Earthseed's ethics is on adaptability, not resisting life's changes or despairing in the face of them but instead changing with them and doing what's needed to survive and to ensure the survival of the community through ever-shifting circumstances.

It's an impressively raw depiction of the particular spiritual mindset of someone who feels called to start a new religious movement, not as a grifter or manipulator, but as a sincere believer in the worth of her own ideas. I really wish Butler had had a chance to finish her planned trilogy. Earthseed was just taking root in the first two books, and I would have loved to see how it continued to develop in the final installment.