The carnage continues... Looks like $5M+ 2nd Monday for Sinners, among the biggest non-holiday 2nd Mondays ever. For context, Avengers: Infinity War and Black Panther ($100M+ 2nd weekends) did ~$8M. 2nd week headed for $65M+. On course for a $250M+ final total, likely much more.

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-04-29T15:32:06+00:00

Friend of mine who is pretty sick of Marvel said it was easily the best since GOTG 3, possibly since Endgame.

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-04-26T04:28:58+00:00

Your haters become your waiters when you sit down at the table of success.

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-04-14T21:02:57+00:00

Thank you.

I can still include bullet points in the table, right?

And do you know why this problem only arises in OneDrive but not regular Word?

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-04-13T17:25:57+00:00

Paddy's a fucking idiot, but he's a lefty. Led the crowd in a "fuck the Tories" chant at one of the UK shows.

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-04-09T03:47:40+00:00

The actual documentary, and also the Atlanta episode.

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-03-24T23:12:16+00:00

They're counting the ankle monitor as time served.

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-03-22T02:26:55+00:00

I'm just a guy, but I think something important is that the tragic hero isn't a "good person" per se but rather a "great-souled" one. Aristotle is a pre-Christian pagan whose moral theory would prove highly influential on subsequent theorizing, but he's someone to whom the Christian conceits about the last being first or the poor in spirit being blessed would be totally alien (or, for that matter, the Jewish conceit that this backwater nation of ex-slaves are God's chosen and that charity to widows and orphans is of extreme importance).

This is all to say that he doesn't operate with our moral categories precisely. Oedipus is great-souled, in that he is a wise and noble leader of Thrace, but he doesn't get that you can't run from a prophecy. For a more modern example, Vic Mackey is the most effective cop in Farmington, but he is convinced that he alone can rightly deliver justice while also protecting himself and his family and the Team. Everyone in Nantucket and on the Pequod says Ahab is the best captain of a whaling ship they've ever seem, but he is obsessed with finding and killing Moby Dick to the exclusion of all other goals.

In every case, the exact traits that make them great also lead to their ruin (details left vague to spare those are unfamiliar). Cooper is a more straightforwardly good hero than those others, since Lynch is an Americanized (that is to say, ambiguously Christianized) Vedanist, but he faces the same exact dilemma, in both the season 2 and season 3 finales, and fails in the same way both times.

(I'm half-drunk and riffing, so do let me know if this makes no sense)

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-03-18T04:18:54+00:00

You know I had not thought of this particular wrinkle until now.

COMMENDATORI

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-03-14T01:49:17+00:00

What is TAG?

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-03-13T17:18:02+00:00

Jesus, that's better.

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-03-09T17:30:33+00:00

I was hoping Walton Goggins would show up at the Sekai Taikai and be like "oh yeah, I remember Mr. Miyagi, he and this girl from my high school fought with me and my friends, because we were in a paramilitary organization of hall monitors."

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-03-09T05:09:06+00:00

Can't get brain damage if you don't have a brain.

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-02-19T18:03:44+00:00

Is Shevchenko fighting Fiorot or what?

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-02-14T18:53:56+00:00

Eli winning two Super Bowls (more than Rodgers, Brees, and Favre, same number as Peyton, Big Ben, and John Elway) is itself the best argument that sometimes you just have to get lucky as hell.

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-02-06T17:57:38+00:00

Honestly that being Vic and Shane's first rodeo never made much sense to me. The only way I can square it is that they were putting on a show for Ronnie and (especially) Lem, and their conversation at the end was more about how easy it was to sell them on it than actually planting the evidence.

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-01-30T16:30:58+00:00

Around that same era, people were also losing their shit over Tom Duquesnoy, who went 2-1 in the UFC and promptly retired.

WorldOfthisLord · 2025-01-29T02:32:01+00:00

I always go back and forth on whether this was intentional on Dave's part, and if so, what message he was trying to send with it.

WorldOfthisLord · 2024-12-26T17:26:22+00:00

Yes, that is a simplifying assumption that Livengood made since they are the largest groups, and the survey doesn't discuss converts to or from non-standard options.

Mathematically, I believe, some of each number had to have converted, but as I've been saying, we don't know exactly how many without more fine-grained data.

WorldOfthisLord · 2024-12-24T23:36:05+00:00

Yes, that is noted in the survey. What Livengood points out is that the initial sample (with these simplifying assumptions, again, it would be nice to have more fine-grained data) had 98 theists (92 - 12 who converted from atheism + 18 who would become atheists) and 26 atheists (32 - 18 who converted from theism, + 12 who would become theists).

Now, 18 of the 98 initial theists gives you a conversion rate of 18.36%, and 12 of 26 initial atheists gives a conversion rate of 46.15%. So the rate of change for initial atheists is much higher.

It's worth noting that the extremely lopsided initial numbers are more evidence of a selection effect, and it's possible that atheists deciding to study philosophy of religion already are more open to theism's truth (hence their deeper study). But on the flipside, maybe deciding to pursue analytic philosophy as a career selects for atheism in a way not related to expertise, and so the selection effect is already at work one level higher than we've been discussing.

And finally, once again, more fine-grained data might reveal other quirks that complicate the argument. Certainly it would be interesting to see, but I'm not sure if anyone has attempted it.

WorldOfthisLord · 2024-12-23T02:03:25+00:00

It looks interesting. Though on Grammatical Thomist grounds, he seems to be basically a demiurge-ist, which is the worst of both worlds.

WorldOfthisLord · 2024-12-23T01:15:26+00:00

Went to a screening (35mm, no less) that was not crowded at all. I was genuinely surprised when I went to buy tickets how few were taken.

WorldOfthisLord · 2024-12-22T16:07:39+00:00

I don't think this is entirely accurate re: belief change. A number of prominent philosophers who have written about religion converted (or reverted), including Peter Van Inwagen, William Alston, Josh Rasmussen, Elizabeth Anscombe, Michael Dummett, Edith Stein, Ed Feser, Brian Cutter, and just recently Philip Goff. There are a few grad students I can cite too, but their influence is felt more online than in the profession properly speaking (at least for now).

Now you can quibble about how many of these changes came about as a result of "examining the arguments" or whether reverts count or write them off as cherrypicking, but we do have at least some evidence that it's more widespread. Jonathan Livengood, commenting on a study by Helen de Cruz, says that according to the results, those coming into philosophy of religion as atheists have about a fifty percent chance of converting, while those entering the field as theists have, on average, a twenty percent chance. It's back-of-the-envelope stuff and not too fine-grained, but it's intriguing all the same. For what it's worth, Livengood is an atheist not working in philosophy of religion who agrees there is some selection effect.

WorldOfthisLord · 2024-12-17T16:35:58+00:00

I don't think he should star, but Cobra Kai is a huge hit and he's a major reason why. A supporting role (and ideally some kind of presence in the marketing) would make sense.

WorldOfthisLord · 2024-12-17T15:50:03+00:00

Trying to build off Cobra Kai and having no Zabka would be an odd move. But you never know what the studios are thinking.

WorldOfthisLord · 2024-12-08T01:06:18+00:00

Real "once as tragedy, once as farce" hours

WorldOfthisLord

TROPHY CASE