First drop of doubt for me began at a Wednesday youth service. Not only was I such a strong believer that I went to church in the middle of the week, I drove myself because I was the only one in my family who wanted to go. The youth minister was giving a class on cults and the more he spoke the more it sounded like my entire life was being part of a cult. Following that thread led to me finally admitting to myself that I don’t believe anymore about 6 years later. It was a long road with lots of doubt and denial but that one sermon on how to identify a cult woke me tf up.
The first thing was how the catholic church handled the sex abuse allegations.
The second thing was how they taught that the Bible was “the literal word of God”, then changed church doctrine away from the Bible whenever it suited them.
The third thing was how, when my son died at 15, everyone was ok with that being “part of God’s plan”. What the fuck kind of God has a plan that requires 15 year olds to die?
That’s actually hilarious. By all accounts, religions are definitionally cults. Though colloquially we tend to define cults as ‘dangerous’, even though there are many cults which are arguably more tame than some ‘religions’.
That was basically the answer he gave me when I asked what separated us from a cult. He must have forgotten all the evil done in the Christian God’s name because Christianity also has a history of being dangerous.
sometimes I feel like Nintendo’s Custom Robo series counts as only 2 games ever existed outside of Japan: Custom Robo [Battle Revolution] for Gamecube, and Custom Robo Arena for DS. Luckily there’s been 3 spiritual successors since then: Cyberspace Colosseum,WizardPunk, and Battlecore Robots.
There’s also this B-movie from the 60s called The Creation of the Humanoids. It’s not that spectacular per se, but it is the source of the “You are a robot” sample used in Powerman 5000’s When Worlds Collide and the Metal Arms: Glitch in the System theme music.
Given the amount of videos on these games you’d think they were super popular and well known, but when they were brand new nobody knew about 'em. To this day, I rarely find anyone who actually played them when they were first launched on an actual DOS computer and not through GOG and DOSBox.
Even today, it’s rare that I run into people who know how awesome they are. They had it all; bitchin’ graphics, insane action, amazing FMV with actual acting and costumes… Other than the controls, they still hold up today.
If your release contains a single change and something goes wrong, you’ve got a pretty good idea of where the problem is before you even start to look.
If the friction of creating a release is low (with automated tooling) and updating is (typically) automatic there’s not really a good reason to not release as often as possible in most cases.
When you make this argument, do you argue the point yourself or do you quote and attribute Peterson? If so, with what purpose? If the argument holds by itself, there is no need to attribute everything in a casual conversation - unless that provides context, or authority. Context, in the sense of the greater opinion or works of the person; or authority, in the sense of "this topic is complex, this expert provides this view".
If you say "I find that way of thinking self-limiting", people might be willing to engage in conversation and why the disagree - or not; if you say "Jordan Peterson finds that way of thinking self-limiting", the conversation is with an external party, who happens to have said a bunch of other shit, and who happens to be introduced to people exactly like that, in shallow self-help bite-size edgy but not too-out-there videos.
As an aside, if you send people this link and you get a strong negative reaction, it might be because it is just not very good. It takes a naive and silly understanding of "you are okay the way you are" and proceeds to strawman it for a while, getting all sappy towards the end. When discussing sincerely held ideas, misconstruing the other party's position is a pretty fast way to get a hostile response.
I use a strategy for some gifts which I call “luxury consumables”. Get someone something that they will use up (food, cheese, chocolate, olive oil, soap, booze, tea, etc) but that’s a bit nicer than they would get for themselves. If you can afford that!
For instance, flavored oil and vinegar for the chef. Fancy chocolate for… everyone. And in this case, smoked cheese! Sounds tasty AF.
Hell yeah this has been my tactic too. My family had stopped making the habit of gifting because of the unnecessary gifts, and so this is a great way to ensure they’ll actually use the gift.
For the most part our family has decided to not get gifts this year. We just spend time together, eat something nice and enjoy each other, except for the one child in our family that of course still gets something.
For my wifes side of the family, we decided to do secret santa this year and cap ourselfs at 30.- CHF for value.
Byo food in this case? Lest this causes more than one person to bring potato salad, lol.
Best tip for this is to designate types of foods instead of asking what they’ll bring to avoid back and forth. Eg. Someone’ll make the salad, someone’ll make a pastry, someone’ll make dessert, etc.
I used to own a Kobo Aura One and was very happy with it, until the battery decided to balloon and it got destroyed.
I did a bit of research for the replacement. Initially I was happy to go with another Kobo, but the Mozilla Privacy Not Included article about Kobo e-readers made me reconsider. It’s from 2021 so maybe by now they’ve changed their policies but it prompted me to look a bit further.
In the end I bought a Pocketbook Verse Pro and I’m very happy with that one. It has a nice screen, is small and fast enough and comes in pretty red (which is already covered up again with a protector :) It supports all the usual formats and that’s about all I really need from it.
Pocketbook is a Swiss company, so I’m not sure if you can get them easily in the US.
Well, you don’t need to give your Kobo network access to get ebooks on it. Transferring ebooks via USB cable works fine.
Their privacy policy might still be bad or they may have improved it.
Either way, they can’t collect data if the device isn’t online.
That’s true, and I’m not saying that Kobo is a bad buy or anything. For me the reasoning was that if there’s another company that has a better privacy policy and delivers a similar or better product. Then I prefer to choose the other one on principle.
Your reasoning makes sense.
I just wanted to point out a way to use Kobo readers without privacy issues for people who already own them. I should’ve stated that more clearly.
People still looking for an ebook reader should consider leaning onto your reasoning.
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