Xhieron

We all called it. Didn’t matter. Time to move to the next box.

The problem with a punishment mesmer, defensive juggernaut anything, and turret engie is that they result in degenerate gameplay. Turrets can’t be allowed to succeed in PVE (see: Lake Doric), and none of these class fantasies can be allowed at all in PVP.

Turrets and juggernauts turn into turtling bunkers that either grind play to a halt or turn into raid bosses, and the only way to balance them is to essentially make the style of play unfun for the person who wants it. “Being unkillable” or “controlling this space” can’t be supported in a competitive game mode. Now, you can balance this by just splitting everything and making the specs unplayable or wildly different in competitive modes, but that means you’re now devoting the dev resources to build the thing twice (for both modes), yet players can only really enjoy it in PVE. From a design perspective, that’s a really poor return on investment for an elite spec.

Punishment mesmer worked in GW1 because you had much better defined roles in all game modes with less overlap, and there was ability parity between players and NPCs, so you could interact with an enemy mob essentially the same way you’d interact with an enemy player. In GW2, you can’t punish a playstyle because playstyles aren’t that well defined, and you can’t create a niche for hex gameplay because they gave everybody else the mesmer toys (see: Torment and Confusion). If you try to make a spec that depends on them even more than certain mesmer specs already do, the byproduct will be turning revs into gods (again). There’s also no energy denial in GW2, and you can’t give a player a bar full of interrupts because everybody already has as many interrupts as the game can support without being catastrophically unfun. GW2 is just the wrong kind of game for GW1’s mesmer–like a lot of things that were better in GW1.

If you ask me, we don’t need more elite specs. We need more non-elite specs–stuff we can combine more freely with what we already have–and we need the elites to be “de-elited” so that the power level of the vanilla specs have better parity with their elite counterparts. I know they’ve taken a pass at this before (or two or three), but it has clearly not panned out. The presence of multiple options for ranged elementalists, for example, is definitely something that needs to be supported.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

As a young teenager: Do not start working until you have to. Once you start, you’ll never stop.

Thank you for this. That was a fantastic survey of some non-materialistic perspectives on consciousness. I have no idea what future research might reveal, but it’s refreshing to see that there are people who are both very interested in the questions and also committed to the scientific method.

We have not created the heavens and the earth and everything in between except for a purpose. And the Hour is certain to come, so forgive graciously.

15:85 Quran

I’m incredibly fascinated by the ghost comparison. Is the probability that ghosts are a real physical phenomenon higher or lower than the probability that aliens exist or have visited us? That’s an extremely interesting question, and I’m sure someone could do a statistical meta-analysis comparing the incidence of, say, UFO sightings with the incidence of paranormal experiences (if such an analysis doesn’t already exist). Both questions seem like the things that should be generally empirically falsifiable (and indeed, specific instances certainly are), but humanity’s curiosity about both has proven remarkably durable despite centuries of curiosity and myriad efforts to settle (negatively) both questions once and for all.

Your quote never appears anywhere in any of those citations.

That the Bible–a collection of religious texts, many of them advancing directly or indirectly the ethnic and national interests of their authors’ people groups–would have stuff in it about killing people for lots of reasons is no surprise.

But your purported origin of the common proverb in the Bible is a fabrication. It’s not in there, anywhere.

Also Christianity doesn’t advocate killing non-believers as a matter of doctrine. Plenty of Christians have done that historically, but it’s not a teaching of the religion, and it’s never advocated in the Bible, anywhere.

There’s plenty to criticize Christians for. I don’t understand why you felt you needed to make something up.

Where, exactly, in the Bible does it say that?

Really? I’d be very interested in seeing a peer reviewed article in Nature in which someone reputable claims to have disproven the existence of the soul (especially without making a bunch of other ontological assumptions first). Can you point me to one?

As far as I can tell, the existence of a soul, like the existence of God, is inherently a non-scientific proposition–i.e., it is not falsifiable. But correct me if I’m wrong.

🎶 Letting the days go by 🎶

“You look like a good joe.”

Is that realistic? Not a rhetorical question: I’m genuinely curious. I ask because the last time I tried to update a single (desktop) part, it was more cost-effective to replace the whole Pc and migrate the salvageable parts since the only thing I could have held onto would have been the ram, SSD, and PSU.

I suppose with a laptop you have the monitor to also consider, and admittedly I know nothing about laptop boards, but it just seems like 6 years is replacement time anyway, at least for a daily use computer.

Military parade in my capital. Compel my legislature to grant me lifetime tenure as First Citizen. Annex the country. No exit strategy.

Peace in our time.

I can’t believe I’d never read that before despite being a fan of Doctorow in general. Thank you. Exceptional work. Should be mandatory reading.

It’s not abstract at all, but my favorite is the Living God. It’s an old one (Elohim khayyim), but I strongly empathize with the sentiment: if there is a God, God must be alive. She must be able to do things–God must have volition. He isn’t just a product of natural order (e.g., the Sun). He might be a prick sometimes, but His actions are better than chance. If your god is a coin toss, your god may as well be a coin toss. Whichever God demonstrates Her existence is the real One. Everything else is make-believe at best, a long con at worst.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

That is to say, the error is to conflate law with morality. They are not one and the same.

Crime. That’s the answer. I don’t suggest or recommend it, but people who genuinely can’t survive or achieve any meaningful quality of life while participating in the social order will violate it instead. Some people shoplift; others engage in elaborate plots to rip off their landlords and creditors, but there’s no squaring the circle. I’m not in the same boat, but I’ve been there, and it’s only a stroke of good fortune that kept me from a very different road.

Not what I was talking about. Fortunately you can believe whatever you want.

Yes, and yes to the OP. It’s very similar.

An older family member once asked my siblings and me, as older teenagers, whether we believed in Santa. We scoffed, laughed, and incredulously said of course not.

She responded that she believed in Santa, and she gave this explanation: Santa is a cultural shorthand for generosity. Do you believe in the spirit of giving? Do you want to see smiles on children’s faces on Christmas morning? Do you want to make the people you love light up because you had special, almost supernatural, insight into their heart’s desire and made it real?

I don’t believe a magical man in a red suit gives presents and coal to kids. I similarly don’t believe in a white bearded cloudy Jewish giant in the sky.

But I believe that there’s something sublime and immaterial in the love we can have for one another, something only partially explained by ecologic survival pressures and biochemistry. I think there is something out there beyond what we can perceive on a daily basis, and for lack of a better lexicon, “spiritual” is as good a term as anyone for the realm of the imperceptible.

So I think there’s a God, and I think there’s a Santa. I don’t understand either, and I think they’re neither anything quite like we expect. And God the Creator is certainly an asshole sometimes. But I think there’s Someone out there.