Adderbox76

Don’t you find that just a tiny bit wrong?

Nope.

I save my empathy for people who actually have empathy of their own.

And also, finally, coalitions in our government are a reality. In Canada, minority/parliament dynamics make “vote + apply pressure” a real lever.

A-fucking-men to that. It frustrates me to no end that people (conservatives) don't understand that that's precisely how a minority goverment is supposed to function.

You'd watch Pierre Poppinfresh get on his stump about "collusion" between the NDP and the Liberals like it's some kind of conspiracy when in reality it's just how shit gets done. Negotiation and compromise.

The conservative party (at least those that are on the MapleMAGA spectrum) have a binary view of governning; if they're not the ones in power, they would rather not contribute to the government by negotiating and having a hand in shaping policy, because doing so would give the Liberals a "win" and that is anathema to a modern hard-C Conservative.

So instead of actually actively taking part in government, they stump around shouting at the other parties that do.

You and the Candles by Hawksley Workman

At this point there is nothing that they could do to make Creation Engine feel "new". I don't understand why they keep beating that dead horse.

A couple of months ago, I had some extra money, so I bought Starfield because I had an itch to go back into my Crimson Fleet character.

The problem was that a couple of weeks before that, I had also purchased a game that I had wanted for years, but could never justify spending the high price of new games on, Red Dead Redemption 2. In comparison, Starfield just felt so....lazy... in ways both big and small, beyond the common issues like repetitive dungeons, barren worlds, loading screens, etc...

The biggest thing I noticed immediately was the effect of bumping into people as you're walking. If you compare a Rockstar Game (Or even an assassin's creed game), where npcs will make a comment, will move out of the way, get upset, etc... Whereas in Bethesda can't be bothered to do anything except slide you to the right when bumping into a character, who doesn't react or flinch in any way.

I started noticing those little things fucking everywhere. And I have to believe that little limitations like that are because it's running on an engine that is older than dirt.

I don't know how he ended up with the Captain Kirk lighting setup. But I'm here for it.

This was honestly my biggest fear for a lot of FOSS applications.

Not necessarily in a malicious way (although there's certainly that happening as well). I think there's a lot of users who want to contribute, but don't know how to code, and suddenly think...hey...this is great! I can help out now!

Well meaning slop is still slop.

My theory is there are 100s of timelines where humanity nuked itself. 100s of timelines where I was never born, or got kidnapped during that “running away” incident, or got murdered by my brother during a fight, or died of suicide.

From a quantum theory, wave function collapse perspective, that's as good a theory as any, and it's also one that that personally subscribe to.

What pissed me off the most about Lost is that, very early on, I pegged onto the fact that they were naming a lot of characters after prominent social philosophers; all of whom wrote about things like inequality, the social contract, human nature, etc...

• John Locke (John Locke, Liberty and the social contract)
• Desmond Hume (David Hume, treatise of human nature)
• Danielle Rousseau (Jean-Jacque Rousseau, discourse on inequality and the social contract)
• Boone Carlyle (Thomas Carlyle, the importance of belief)
• Juliette Burke (Edmund Burke, Philosophy of Conservatism)
• Mikhail Bakunin (Mikhail Bakunin, Russian Anarchist)

And a few others. As they introduce these characters, they set them up in opposition to each other and I'm thinking "okay..this means something. They're trying to say something about society in a Lord of the Flies type of way.

I remember myself and a friend of mine discussing the show endlessly after each episode wondering what it all meant in that context. And then...nope...they were all just dead all this time. It meant...precisely...jack...shit.

And it couldn't have been an accident that they so many promininent social philosophers showed up. They CHOSE to name those characters that...for no other reason than a fuck-you-red-herring.

I can't even begin to describe how much that angered me. I've despised JJ Abrams ever since.

Life finds a way...if there is a reason to do so.

My point is, once we've secured all the resources in the solar system, there is no reason to find a way.

Does alien life exist somewhere? Yes. Absolutely. It would be impossible for it not to given the size of the universe and the laws of probability.

Is that alien life multicellular? Again. Yes. For the same reason as above. In a functionally infinite universe, the roll of the dice is going to come up at least a few times.

Is that alien life intelligent? Maybe. But in my opinion, probably. Intelligent life arose here after many many stops and starts. It's probably that given enough kicks at the can, multicellular life can evolve intelligence on any planet where it arises if the conditions are right.

Has that intelligent life visited us? No. No intelligent life has ever left their own solar system except possibly in the form or a one-way generation ship.

Life evolves, either biologically or technologically, because of competition for resources. From the most basic amoeba competing for the heat from a steam vent at the bottom of an ocean, to humans competing for oil and minerals, life is about resources gathering.

So what happens when we finally are able to access the resources of the solar system, which are effectively limitless (at least from a human perspective)? Nothing. We stagnate. There's no impetus to go further than that. Scientists may want to. But pure science is a myth. People paying the bills are what drive us forward. and it's reasonable to assume that any life that evolves would do so facing the same pressures.

Obviously Brian May from Queen.

Can't go fishing witout bait.