The point is if there is a god the dude has bigger concerns.

The clock-maker is not concerned exclusively with the largest gears.

We’re on our own, there’s no sign that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

“God doesn’t care about small things” is the antithesis of Biblical teaching. Both the Old and the New Testaments go through great pains to convey how the most humble individuals in the most basic circumstances still receive Divine Attention.

If you’re arguing with a Christian on these terms, you’re queuing yourself up for an ass kicking. They’ve got much better poetry than a grainy photo of a galaxy that isn’t even the Milky Way, btw.

• Evaporated Milk

• Condensed Milk

• Whole Milk

• A Secret Fourth Thing

A lot of the early stigmas and taboos about diet, clothing, and hygiene emerged from ritualized practices intended to prevent disease and promote human health. The lack of understanding meant the ritual divorced itself from the real best practices over time. But prohibitions on eating shellfish and chopping off the foreskin of your dick and keeping menstruating women out of the house were ultimately primitive efforts at avoiding food poisoning, curbing the spread of STIs, and managing the bloody mess of periodic period flow.

There’s entire branches of theology undermining every major world religion that dedicate themselves to rationalizing the Divine Bureaucracy. “God doesn’t care, because he is big and I am small” is as true as “The American President doesn’t care what I’m up to in Venezuela, because he’s very far away and I’m not that important in the grand scheme of geopolitics”.

What zealots are inclined to believe in is the Angelic Delta Force and its capacity to inflict sudden, horrifying, and indiscriminate violence on the wrong kind of person. If you study the history of Cargo Cults you’ll discover people who experience traumatizing, inexplainable phenomena can often build up superstitious rituals in an effort to control things that are fundamentally beyond their grasp.

It isn’t that “space is fake” nearly so much as “There are things beyond my grasp that bother me, so I’m changing my personal behavior in the vain hope it will protect me from these anxiety-inducing events”.

Setting aside the ins and outs of religious-based sexual morality, the galaxy being very big does not negate the consequences of your behaviors on your immediate neighbors, your peers, or your descendants.

Epstein was still a bad dude, despite the vastness of the universe.

Found another flat earther

I mean, “car crashes into a stationary car” often gets the same response.

The idiot behind the wheel is somehow never at fault.

The Lich system was pretty close to the mark. Possible that developers gave the underlying features of SoM a wide berth out of caution, but so much of this seems to boil down to “we don’t want to risk the possibility of a lawsuit” rather than “we can’t just do our thing and see if WB’s lawyers care enough”.

So long as you’re not directly ripping off the code from another system, patent courts have been pretty generous in interpreting overlapping abstract concepts.

But any kind of suit is scary, particularly for studios that aren’t geared up to fight them.

Any time you put electrical tape on a cat and use it as a prop, I reserve the right to describe the film as low budget

Millions of fake IDs have been leaked.

Yeah, some of these criticisms are bad just on their face. Godfather is too slow for you? Come on. Is Rambo to slow for you as well? What about Speed?

Some of this just feels like kids who just graduated from watching Paw Patrol deciding they should veto what anyone else puts on the TV.

If you want to throw a fit because everything isn’t Marvel, I guess that’s fine for you. But don’t be shocked when you’re not invited back to College Movie Night.

I mean, which version?

I almost think the early low budget adaptations are better because of how zany they get with the art and effects.

The Timothee Chalamet version is just another action movie. But Lynch gets wild with it.

But it’s just vanilla combats with predictable outcomes.

So they invented… the first dozen seasons of the Pokemon cartoon?

They patented a very specific algorithm for a very specific kind of game. You can still do knock-offs of the system in the same way you can make RTS games without asking Blizzard’s permission or platformers without asking Nintendo’s.

I would suspect that SoM’s system is complex enough that nobody’s been eager to try and replicate it. But they high level concept of randomized enemy generation isn’t something you can patent. Neither is randomizing story elements between NPCs.

Why did the Romans fail?

I remember learning that the Romans fell because they were too gay and debauched and woke, so they lost their manly vigors.

Nevermind, history doesn’t like copypasta

I suppose its worth noting that the Roman Empire lasted centuries (millennia, if you see the Byzantine/Ottoman Empire as a continuation of Roman history). The UK is more comparable than the US, which flourished after WW1 and made it barely a century before fumbling.

But also, the book is hardly closed on the US as an empire. China, India, Persia, Rome, France… they all had their ups and downs.

The US writes the history books, runs the universities, and manages the international media networks.

Like tankie never really meant anything before

I mean, its historically described Soviet policy in Eastern Europe and Chinese domestic policing (Khrushchev putting down the Hungarian fascist revolt with armored infantry and Deng sending tanks into Tienanmen Square).

Now it just means whatever the opposite of neoconservative policy is, updated daily.

Being against tanks makes you a tankie at this point.

Everyone knows that if you’re against US tanks, you must be in favor of non-US tanks. You’re either with US or you’re with the Tankie-rists

Crazy to see people smile benignly while US Presidents shake hands with Saudi Kings and Egyptian Dictators, only to discover their love for democracy when a socialist they don’t like secures a 7-pt election lead.

If the J6ers had all been Venezuelan, I wonder if liberals would have stood back and let the US Congress get lynched?

It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.