magarnicle

My argument is that the world being built is uninspiring, and the endless, arbitrary rules of the world are communicated in clumsy ways.

There's a lot of problems, but the main one is that it just is a pile of arbitrary rules that all the characters just constantly explain to one another.

Imagine the first third of The Matrix was cut and you just start with Morpheus explaining it all to Neo. That's Inception. And on top of that, it's not even a particular complicated idea: it's just Russian doll dreams.

And lose half the charm?

Memento yes, Inception definitely no. The worst experience I've had in a cinema.

One huge addition that she created entirely in the edit is the "ticking clock" during the final battle. Originally there was no count down to the Death Star destroying the base. Imagine how much tension would be lost without that.

https://www.rogerebert.com/tributes/the-woman-who-saved-star...

My flip phone runs a very limited Android, but enough to install Aegis for MFA. https://opelmobile.com.au/product/touch-flip/

Maybe this is what they meant by "pacing"?

Maybe how different things look with sunglasses on vs off?

Here are the predictions and observations for Australia: https://www.arpansa.gov.au/our-services/monitoring/ultraviol...

The whole paragraph titled "Isn't this just Tidelift again?" is exactly how Claude describes something it is excited about.

I do a similar thing. It really is functionally exactly the same, just a bit more piecemeal.

It felt like unedited, unstyled Claude output. e.g. "No, and the difference is the important bit."

That wasn't my point, or the point of GP. It's that modernism has become acceptable. So much so that everything from our buildings to our cars to our phones have the same style.

The message is also "love your neighbour as yourself", and this "Lord" that people bow to is, according to the message, someone who died instead of taking that Lordship by force.

While it might be true that "Missionaries bring aid because they bring the Gospel" to some degree, it is also true that the Gospel brings aid. It is the message that generates the desire to help people.

Your accusations of "assimilation" are just too simplistic. Take, for example, bible translation. In Australia, Anglican missionaries did not put much effort into translating the bible into indigenous languages as the had essentially hooked their mission projects up to the assimilatory 'White Australia' policy of the government. BUT that was in stark contrast to their actions in the rest of the Pacific, where they put great effort into translating the bible into native languages.

> Whatever Catholicism they appropriated will inevitably erase and obscure their culture and identity

This again is just completely dismissing the agency of the converted people. Not to mention easily observed cultural particularities across the world. For example, I experienced a group of Solomon Islanders praying. In my Western culture, we would pray one at a time, but they all prayed out loud, all at the same time. Western values of a particular view of orderliness hadn't overridden their culture.

> I'm more willing to believe the word of a native over a Christian missionary, all else being equal.

Fair enough. I do not deny at all the paternalistic, violent, coercive and assimilationist past (and still present) actions of the church. It is shameful and inexcusable. But I don't for a minute admit that this is because the church was being faithful to it's mission and founder. It's because it wasn't being faithful to the message that it perpetrated these crimes.

But again, it is reductionist to say that this is the only experience. Australian Indigenous culture, Maori culture, traditional PNG cultures are still alive and well, and Christian members of these people groups still choose to be Christian. A simple appeal to "power imbalances", "assimilation", "indoctrination" etc. to explain why they remain so is to rob them of agency.

I wish local councils wouldn't insist on putting in shrubs that block the line of site across the roundabout.

Don't get me started on our houses. For some reason we build the same houses in Queensland as we do in Melbourne: no eaves or awnings. I guess the idea is you just turn your AC up even higher in summer.

Isn't that exactly their point? Every new building looks like an iPhone: sleek glass and metal.

All that has been true, but it was not always true, and it is only half the truth.

You've used "never" and "always" as if Christianity, Christian missions, and the cultures they try to reach are a monolith and the same everywhere. You've also insisted that any aide must only be to strengthen the power of the missionaries, and has nothing at all to do with the character of the very message itself.

You've also underestimated the agency of indigenous cultures and their ability to appropriate Christianity, so much so that some Tiwi Islanders (islands to the south of PNG) insist that they converted the Catholic church when it embraced them (https://researchportalplus.anu.edu.au/en/publications/going-...)

> It's morally indefensible in my opinion for a bunch of random people from many thousands of km away to go off to some pre-technology rural villagers' home territory and basically say "everything you believe is wrong, here's our god, you must follow and believe in him or you're going to hell".

But...why? If they are just saying that, why is that indefensible? The villagers' are free to reject that message (or a more accurate version of it), as are you or anyone else.

I installed a serif font on my phone. An excellent decision.

Right. But you didn't quote it in full either, so I couldn't figure out what you thought it said.

So yeah, there's a base unit of meaning which is well beyond one or two verses (something I wish the church would learn).

How much do you think they cost?

If you have a season ticket to a Premier League team you're going to be in that density once a week or once a fortnight. Whatever the percentage of time that might be, that seems frequent enough to not be an edge case.

But now I don't know what you think it means. Who do you think "you" and "we" are in this quote?

It needs an Intel ethernet card too.

This definitely requires "extra mile" kind of work, but it sounds like what you want: https://youtu.be/nROKp0BpFek?si=msJJrdpq143W3nEf

I drew a wasp and still managed to catch him.

It didn't get real wings until the Extra High version.

Go use Nodejs + typescript for it. Why pick on just Python?

I know this isn't your point, but world clock widgets have been a think since Windows Vista at least.