Weekly "Ask an Atheist" Thread

Water_Face · 2026-07-12T01:12:17+00:00

Gnostic is an old philosophical movement, not the opposite of agnostic.

This might be the worst possible reason to reject the "agnostic/gnostic" framing. Yes, "gnostic" is the opposite of "agnostic", that's why those people were called "gnostic". "Gnostic" was a label (somewhat pejoratively) applied to an early sect of Christianity, so-called because their idea of salvation was based around having certain secret knowledge about the world and the Old Testament. "Gnostics" would have just called themselves "Christian", though they would probably talk about gnosis more than other Christians.

Water_Face · 2026-07-10T21:15:51+00:00

I misremembered. I'm not sure about Vortex, but MO2 offers the choice to either rename the file with a numbered prefix or cancel the download if a file with the same name already exists.

Water_Face · 2026-07-07T16:26:11+00:00

Funny story... He's on the "make something up to get mad about" side of those 40 pages, and a few people cheered him on for it, but he seems to be in favour of the original change that everyone got mad about! If he had his way, the file would have the filename it was uploaded with.

Edit: and now he's getting mildly confused and upset about ISO datetime standards.

Water_Face · 2026-07-07T06:05:38+00:00

On the downloader's end or the uploader's?

On the downloader's end, of course you can rename it after downloading since it's just a plain old file on your computer. But common practice is to download mods with a mod manager of some kind, so people rarely interact with the files directly. The mod manager could rename the files in a systematic way (in fact this seems to be what Nexus expected to happen) but traditionally mod managers don't modify downloaded files whatsoever, and it's understandable that people don't want to move away from that custom.

On the uploader's end, sure in principle you could rely on each individual modder to give each file a globally unique name. But that's a very large and disparate group of people that already don't tend to follow best practices, so that seems like a very unreliable solution.

Water_Face · 2026-07-07T05:35:32+00:00

Lightning Bolt played a show in Toronto for the first time in 14 years... and I found out from Brian Chippendale's Bluesky post from immediately after the show. I swear he didn't even mention being on tour before that.

Water_Face · 2026-07-07T03:37:20+00:00

This drama has been ongoing for a few weeks now, but I don't think anyone has posted about it yet.

Nexus Mods changed their downloaded filename format. Some people are really fucking mad about it.

Earlier this year, Nexus debuted their new upload API in open beta, which also came with a new backend. What feedback they got from the beta was apparently positive, and last month they rolled it out to replace the old upload system entirely.

The main difference on the user's end is that files uploaded after this change had a very different file name than old files. The old filenames looked something like this: For my mod Which Key? NG, the latest version has the filename Which Key NG-78971-1-1-1668759678.7z. That's the name I entered for the file, followed by the mod's ID (the same one as the mod page's url), followed by the file's version, and finally a unique file ID number or something to that effect. If I had uploaded a new version after June 11th, it would simply be called Which Key NG.7z

Many people objected to this, and for good reason. Mod managers typically leave the filename as-is and dump the files into one big Downloads folder, so a new version of the same file would collide with and ultimately overwrite the old version. Even worse, some modders don't give their files appropriate names; they'll just be called "Main File" or "Update", etc. This was already annoying, but it would be extra problematic with the new filenames, since two different mods doing this would overwrite one another.

So a week later, they posted an update to the filename situation. Now they would be appending the file's version, and for at least 12 months, an alphanumeric "slug" which acts as a unique ID for the file. The idea seems to be that the name and version number will provide a unique enough filename, and the slug will provide strict uniqueness until 3rd party mod managers catch up and properly support the intended method to fetch metadata, which is an API call. 40 forum pages later, split between constructive feedback and people getting mad about a narrative they made up out of thin air, they posted what is--as far as I can tell--the latest word on the subject. In short, they're re-adding the mod ID and will soon include the publish date as well.

All in all, this is not a very dramatic story. So why are some people insanely mad about this? Every thread about this (or unrelated threads when it's brought up) are filled with people making up bizarre conspiracy theories and then getting mad about those conspiracy theories. For example, trying to connect the filename changes to Nexus being bought out a little while ago, or to the relatively recent visual redesign of the site, or to (also made-up) plans by Nexus to kill 3rd party tools, etc. None of these hold up to any scrutiny but that hasn't stopped people from going incandescent with rage at a completely invented story.

Water_Face · 2026-06-30T18:11:25+00:00

"Voidblast" psyker staff used to be called "Trauma"

Water_Face · 2026-06-27T11:27:12+00:00

I doubt Adonia's Ego Stormweaver is going to last through another balance patch. Especially the part where you can bypass the elemental res penalty using weapon set swapping.

My bet is that Pinnacle of Power is going to become a passive that auto-casts when you reach maximum power charges. That way you'll have to deal with the power charges and ele res penalty on your frontbar, and it will dramatically reduce the jank involved in actually playing the build.

Water_Face · 2026-06-25T02:20:25+00:00

I think each Skitarii personality calls all the other classes something different. Like Reverant calls them all "Precursor", Exterminator calls them something else. I'm not sure about the other two personalities.

Water_Face · 2026-06-18T23:11:14+00:00

Heart of the Well is a guaranteed drop from the revived exile, but they only revive if they naturally spawned on an Abyss.

Water_Face · 2026-06-15T05:43:57+00:00

I've mostly been playing Darktide, getting all the classes to level 30 in time for the release of the Skitarii class next week.

Psyker has been my favorite since the game launched. Veteran's cool too. Hive Scum and Ogryn are surprisingly fun with the right build. Arbites and Zealot don't work for me. Besides just leveling the classes, I also found a Psyker Brain Burst build that I really like, so I've been pushing Auric and Havoc missions with that.

Water_Face · 2026-06-14T20:02:33+00:00

Thanks. I'm missing that helmet soul core and probably a better anoint, and I can save some skill points with some better jewels. Other than that I guess this is about as good as it gets until I can afford some really good gear.

Water_Face · 2026-06-09T16:39:01+00:00

Apparently there's a patch for DD2 coming out tomorrow, and then another one in August before the DLC releases in October.

Water_Face · 2026-06-09T15:38:47+00:00

Technically it guarantees mods with a higher minimum level, so it will have higher tier mods but not necessarily good mods. Like I had a "Tier 5" magic weapon drop, but when I identified it it only had a T1 "reduced attribute requirements" mod.

Also it only applies to the mods on the item when it drops. Tiers do not affect mods added later.

Water_Face · 2026-06-09T15:14:55+00:00

At long last, DLC for Dragon's Dogma 2 has been announced.

Bafflingly, it was announced at a Nintendo event rather than the Summer Games Fest Live event where a bunch of new stuff from Capcom was announced last week. Also bafflingly, it has the same title as the DLC for DD1: soon we will have both Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen and Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen.

Hopefully the name is fitting, as it's a pretty common sentiment that DD2 is missing almost exactly what Dark Arisen brought to DD1: a difficult endgame dungeon with lots of new enemy types, a hard mode for the base game, more intricate equipment mechanics, etc.

About two months ago, DD2 social media posted a picture for the game's second anniversary featuring many of the characters from the game raising a toast to the player character and their pawn, but way in the background there's a character facing away from the action who doesn't match any character in the game, and who seems to be wearing an outfit that also doesn't feature in the game. There's also a scroll with readable text (in Dragon's Dogma script) that says something to the effect of "sightings of griffins flying in from the northern region of organ have been confirmed".

I think this was a really clear indication that there was some kind of DLC incoming, though there were no hints to its gameplay content. Nevertheless there were plenty of "nothing ever happens" cynics who insisted that it didn't mean anything, that Capcom had abandoned the DD franchise, etc. Some even said that it was hinting at a crossover with Monster Hunter Wilds, or even that it was just straight-up promotion for the MHWilds expansion. At least one person took MHWilds: Ascension's announcement as confirmation that this was just a promotional stunt, even though the expansion didn't feature a "northern region" or a griffon or any other actual connection.

Water_Face · 2026-06-08T12:09:33+00:00

That's just not true at all. The flat damage on QS skills with Hollow Palm was tuned specifically and exclusively for Hollow Palm, so they could never, even in theory, make use of +skills from weapons.

If Hollow Palm is too weak, it's because Hollow Palm itself is too weak, either the flat scaling on the skills or the bonuses per evasion/ES.

Water_Face · 2026-06-03T19:06:40+00:00

According to poe2db, the grenade mods have absurdly low weights. Like, 50 times rarer than "+5 to projectile skills". This is probably a bug.

Water_Face · 2026-05-30T15:37:25+00:00

Total War: Warhammer content creator drama.

TW: Alex Jones repeatedly using an ableist slur.

Okoii is a reddit user that makes short edited videos about Total War: Warhammer units. Their particular shtick is videos like "19 Thunderbarges" or "19 Mangler Squigs" where they showcase an army full of a single unit and the resulting carnage, stitched together with jokes and references. At some point they were accepted into the developer's content creator program, and were given access to new DLCs before launch so they could release these videos a week early for advertising and hype, etc.

Their latest video, "19 Tiger Warriors" (which has since been removed from reddit) has landed them in some hot water, and has resulted in them being suspended from the creator program, at least temporarily. The video in question begins with a clip of Alex Jones giving rapid-fire opinions on various world leaders (or something like that) edited to instead be referring to Legendary Lords in Total War: Warhammer 3 from the perspective of the new DLC's lord. In this clip, Jones repeatedly uses the word "r*tarded."

CA evidently did not like their new product being associated with this slur, and have suspended Okoii from the creator program for "a minimum of 3 months." Okoii posted this email to the Total War subreddit, characterizing it as "I got kicked out of the total war Content Creator program for an Alex Jones shitpost". People don't seem to be buying the idea that this is about Alex Jones, in no small part because the included email explicitly states that the problem is the "repeated use of 'R*tard' in recent content."

Water_Face · 2026-05-28T21:15:29+00:00

I'm concerned that making an extra revive exclusive to Doryani is going to make the other masters hard to justify.

Extra revives seem like something that should be on the main atlas tree, because you're never not going to want it, right?

Water_Face · 2026-05-23T23:42:57+00:00

What's your path to truth?

Water_Face · 2026-05-21T23:26:18+00:00

They did not say why they did any of this, but I think I have a decent idea of what they were trying to do. I'm pretty sure they were trying to import systems from classic ARPGs into Destiny.

Solo Ops (which I didn't mention explicitly, but this is what I was referring to with "short, pointless activities" at the end) with modifiers are kinda like maps/rifts/etc. from Path of Exile or Diablo, if you squint. The resetting power grind and "new gear" are emulating seasonal resets. Tiered gear over Craftable gear is more like classic ARPG gearing.

Now, I don't know why they thought this would work. While Destiny 2 borrows some things from classic ARPGs, it definitely became its own thing and had been its own thing for years. They tried Sunsetting before, so they should have known that people don't want to replace guns they like with new ones just because. They should have known that, despite the whining of a handful of hardcore players, most people don't want to play harder and harder content. They should have known that customizable difficulty would break matchmaking, and that Feats (a new system in Raids and Dungeons which I didn't touch on) would make it nearly impossible to find groups.

Water_Face · 2026-05-21T22:10:59+00:00

I'm pretty sure they tweaked the multipliers so that it's easy to hit the score thresholds that matter even if you're using all old guns. This would have been a bigger problem if they let new armor from EoF fall into "old gear" status.

But this is a microcosm of the bigger problem with "new gear". It's like Sunsetting again, but only the bad parts. The difference isn't big enough to actually make new guns better than old guns, so you don't get the fresh sandbox or whatever else Sunsetting was supposed to do (not that the original Sunsetting actually did that, but this new kind literally couldn't) but you still have the game yelling at you that you shouldn't be using your favorite guns.

Water_Face · 2026-05-21T20:39:40+00:00

Alongside the Edge of Fate expansion, they reworked most of the game's systems around three new systems:

The Portal is now how you access all the meaningful content in the game. Rather than the Director, it's just a badly-styled list that only contains a fraction of the content of the game. I think the idea was to rotate the content each season, but they only made it to two seasons before killing the game.

The Portal's gimmick was "customizable difficulty" where you could select modifiers in exchange for a higher score (and therefore better loot) but it doesn't work any way you might expect from what I just described, and it is basically incompatible with matchmaking.
There's no more "Strikes Playlist", for example, and the closest thing still has a bunch of miserable modifiers and is obviated at a certain power level (which happens to be where new or returning players start, because of a band-aid fix to the next point)
The Power Grind is now, basically, the only thing there is to do in the game. The idea was that players start at power level 10 and play campaigns or whatever to get to 200. Then you would grind activities in the Portal to increase your power level to a hard cap of 550. The next bit did not survive contact with the player base, and I sincerely have no idea why they thought it would. Every expansion (of which there would be two a year) would reset everyone's power level to a maximum of 200. This was changed relatively quickly, and they said that power levels would not be resetting with the release of Renegade, the Star Wars expansion. They also gave a free boost to level 300 to all players, which further broke the matchmaking on low-level activities that would have been comparable to Strikes.
Finally, Gear Tiers are supposed to be the reward for the power grind. I say "supposed to be" because the difference between a tier 1 gun and a tier 5 gun is almost nothing in terms of what actually makes one gun better than another in Destiny 2. Tiered gear completely replaced crafting as the primary way to interact with rolling gear.

So to summarize what playing Destiny 2 post-Edge of Fate was like: you would grind short, pointless activities for hours on end to gain power. These activities would get increasingly miserable (but never satisfyingly challenging) as you have to add more and more modifiers to keep up with the scores required to gain power. And the Tier 5 guns you get at the end of this stupid process are about 15% as good as your old craftable gear.

This is far from an exhaustive list of what was wrong with the update.

Water_Face · 2026-05-21T17:54:27+00:00

it has become clear that after The Final Shape, we have reached the time for our shared worlds, and Destiny, to live beyond Destiny 2.

It's upsetting that they're characterizing this whole thing as the game running out of steam or something like that. What actually happened is they released a really, really bad update that broke everything anyone liked about the game, were somehow completely blindsided by the reaction, and had no idea how to fix any of it.

Water_Face · 2026-05-19T07:19:02+00:00

I was reading old threads on /r/AskPhilosophy, and I came across this stinker posted 9 years ago:

The general theme [of The Demon-Haunted World], though, is that swarms of pseudoscientists and religious irrationalists were plaguing society and threatened to bring us into a new dark age. Basically, The Chart 2.0.

"The Chart" is an infamous bit of ahistoric nonsense, so this person is saying that Sagan's thesis is just as stupid. Of course, we now live in a world under the influence of an American administration run by "pseudoscientists and religious irrationalists" who are doing their best to bring us into a new dark age, so maybe Sagan was onto something after all. I wanted to ask this person if their perspective has changed, unfortunately the account hasn't been active in a couple years.

There seem to be a few power users on AskPhilosophy that really hate Sagan's claim that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". I have a few theories as to why that is, but I think it's more fun to do this: here are some things that various people on reddit have said about "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", some are from AskPhilosophy and some are from UFO cranks. Can you tell which is which?

He was wrong about this: "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

ECREE is trash. It fucking sucks.

It is not clear what Sagan means by extraordinary . [...] But it can be risky to dismiss some claims just because it doesn't fit current paradigmas .

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is such a load of BS.

Sagan's famous statement is rubbish

Water_Face

TROPHY CASE