vaguerant

There’s already several comments saying “depends on the beliefs and how important they are,” and obviously there’s that.

I’ll add that there are beliefs people don’t immediately think of when talking about religion. There’s religious humanism, which is a secular religion based around behaving ethically which also has a bunch of traditions similar to spiritually-based religions, minus the spirituality. Adherents (can) attend church and hear sermons on ways to be a better person, etc.

I’m not a religious humanist but they sound like they’re probably decent enough people. They’re quite different to my generic fediverse atheist/irreligious views, in the sense that I don’t have any desire to attend congregations of people who identify as religiously ethical, but I don’t harbor any strong objections to their beliefs.

Personally, I understand it more as something that might be nice for people who have left spiritual religion but still want the trappings of a place to go and be with a community of like-minded people, but that’s not my experience. Ultimately, that’s probably about as far as I’d be comfortable, where we have roughly equivalent spiritual views but highly divergent religious views.

Cook’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by screwing up git commands.”

They were conceived on an adult film shoot.

His Tenacious D bandmate, Kyle Gass, made a joke about assassinating Donald Trump. Black put out a statement criticizing and distancing himself from Gass while also placing the band on hiatus, cancelling a then-ongoing world tour. People feel he threw a longtime friend under the bus in order to protect his public image.

I think of it as, if you got shot halfway through telling me the date of something, “December” on its own is more useful information than “12”. Technically, “12” narrows it down to fewer possible dates, but it could be at any time of year, while December only happens once a year, in March or whatever.

Perhaps the most relevant of all: time of day. 9:30. Hours first, then minutes. I’m not from a location that does month-day ordering, but I think largest to smallest works excellently for time measurement, hence ISO 8601.

My answer is current era regardless, but do we keep our memories and go back, or is it as if we were born in that era? If you went back 500 years with the knowledge that the Super Nintendo and the Internet exist (the two inventions we have that they didn’t have in the 1500s), that would be unpleasant. But if you didn’t know that and were accustomed to getting your entertainment from court jesters and public hangings, I guess that would be slightly less awful.

Like everybody else has said, there’s a lot of things we have now (by which I mean two) that are better than anything there was 500 years ago, even for monarchs. Regardless of whether I knew about those things in monarch form, the version of me that’s making the decision knows, so … nah.

alive and somewhat kicking
freenode

Haha. I think you’re a bit out of the loop, Freenode “died” like four years ago. Some fucking weirdo who claims to be the rightful king of North and South Korea bought it, started selling advertising on the web site and tried to turn the IRC network into a “cybernation” with himself as ruler. Cool, right?

The people who actually ran Freenode all left to found Libera.Chat and basically everybody moved to either there or the OFTC. Meanwhile, original Freenode was shut down entirely (i.e. all users, services, etc. dropped) and booted from scratch as … whatever the fuck it is now, some coked-up royalty LARP.

• ABC iView v4.16.1 [4148], the last version of the Australian streaming service before they started requiring a login, IIRC this doesn’t even work any more so I just stopped using it
• the legacy version of Discord, more specifically the Aliucord mod which backports some modern features along with a bunch of optional plugins
• Simple Solitaire Collection, an open-source card game collection; the developer took it closed-source and ad-supported so I just stopped updating
• Skype on the last version before they added Copilot, but with Skype shutting down that’s not really useful information to anybody

Sometimes I think about how shitting is one of the few things that unites everybody, across class lines. There’s plenty of unpleasant things that the rich can pay somebody to do for them, but world leaders, movie stars, crown royalty, they all have to go into a room and shit in some kind of hole.

A soft, fatty foodstuff made by churning the cream of milk

The movie with Jet Li and Jason Statham? I get it.

Which one is the wrong one?

I like the idea that these were your first impressions of China, as in you stepped off a plane, had one look around and thought “Wow, this place seems like a ruthlessly effective technocracy that has achieved very impressive outcomes for its citizens but it’s certainly a cultural-slash-societal system I never want to live in.”