I realize this post is 3 weeks old and Animorphs is basically ancient…

… but … did any one in the books, at any point, make a beef yeerky pun?

These puns have me in stitches!

So I wasn’t there for 2042. I don’t know what the rationale was, but for me, it’s like the team tried something new.

The rationale was to make a 128 player battle royale ala PUBG or Fortnite. You know, shameless trend chasing!

It was supposed to basically be a spin off, non mainline BF game with the potential to be the next big thing while the next mainline game was being produced, but that only works if BF5 has staying power.

Which it did not.

And EA want MONEY, BIG MONEY ASAP!

So then BF2042 got massively reworked in a tiny amount of time to try to make it into a mainline series game by throwing a ton more developers at it than originally planned, ending up as a rushed, buggy, undercooked mess with tons of crap (half baked half reworked game modes) thrown at the wall to see what stuck.

That is why distinct armies were replaced with a cadre of mercenaries, as well as the entire 2042 timeframe setting in a world where nation states had basically collapsed already.

It is also why the maps are gigantic and seem like they were designed for a battle royale.

I’m guessing also their original plan was to have the much hyped dynamic weather systems serve a similar function as the the closing force fields or bubbles of death that battle royale’s have to force players into conflict and games to eventually end, but they couldn’t actually figure out how to make that work.

Any questions Vince?

No, the point is that the driver could just drive away with the truck and its contents and attempt to sell the truck, strip it for parts or whole, fucking over whatever entity is paying his wage.

I mean yes, initially it is risky, but perhaps a contract was signed, or perhaps the oyster owner owns so many that he sells to local restaurants or market vendors that he figures worst that happens is i lose 2% of my regular oyster haul, best that happens i make a bit more money off of that 2%.

If I am not mistaken the actual episode(s?) where Arya does the oyster selling show a relationship between her and whoever she’s getting the oysters from.

As far as real world examples: anyone who has ever been hired to drive a cart or wagon or car could just attempt to make off with the vehicle and/or its belongings…

Except even more practical and simple to produce/distribute in that … its a coastal town with a good deal of fishing and aquaculture and whatnot going on.

Arya would just have to go to the docks, find somebody with a huge bag of oysters and say hey, gimme a cart, i’ll go roam around and sell these before they spoil, you keep 80 or 90% of the money when i come back with the empty cart.

In that sense its basically a farmers market: extremely local goods.

Modern hot dogs have to be manufactured in a factory and then sold to a hot dog stand operator, shipped halfway across the country or world.

Sure Christianity has just one god, but there is an awful lot of different versions of him

Are Mormons Christian? They say they are, many other Christians say they are not.

One of many reasons: They don’t do the whole Trinity thing.

According to the LDS Church, God and Jesus are separate, distinct. Father and Son yes, but in a literal sense, not as distinct manifestations of the same thing. Holy Ghost is a totally distinct entity as well.

I have for about a decade now, as a hobby, just followed various biblical scholars, archaeologists, ancient language experts, historians, a few esotericists, etc who give interesting lectures or youtube video presentations, publish books based off of their peer reviewed research, or other youtube channels of basically laymen with similar interests who make a point of interviewing such experts and getting their assistance for finding texts that are not well known outside of academic circles.

…

I’ll tell you right now, I’m not gonna be able to help you find any spiritual truth.

Using the terminology I think you are using, I am gnostic atheist, I don’t believe in spirits or souls as any kind of real thing, don’t believe in any Gods at all, and am quite convinced that such things I’ve read about in ancient stories are logically and physically impossible.

I think these texts and traditions are all fascinating bits of history, interesting stories that have shaped human history, but I don’t literally believe any of it, or that there is some hidden, actually factually correct or true religion.

I was once religious, dove into it more and more to try to discern some kind of spiritual truth, but came away seeing more and more contradictions, came more to see these works as literature that evolved out of previous stories and traditions, over different ages and in different places.

…

I tend to land closer to your last line, but its not a placebo… its an addictive drug.

Constantly seeking hidden meanings within meanings and patterns within patterns can give you a kind of high, as if you are always just on the threshold of some kind of utterly revolutionary discovery that will change your life or the world, that places you above others in some regard.

Try to connect too many ambiguous dots and you might at some point realize there are not actually any consistent rules governing how you are connecting them, and then it all falls apart.

Thats when the drug doesn’t bring you a high anymore, it only brings rage and despair as the grand, uberidea you had been so studiously working toward for so long… no longer seems even the least bit consistent, coherent, or possible.

Its ok to just be, without expecting the impossible of yourself.

The varying competing sects and later official churches did exactly that, cherry picking various texts as official canon, in either proposals or meetings of high church officials, for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus.

The first known to propose a list of canon texts was Marcion… who was ironically deemed to be a heretic as he rejected the Old Testament God and the Old Testament itself.

Then you had all kinds of local and regional and imperial Symposiums and Councils to decide what worked and what didn’t…

And surprise surprise, this didn’t even achieve a unanimous consensus!

Even today, major world and regional Christian denominations include books other consider apocryohal, omit books others consider canon, and divide or combine books differently, and a whole lot of that goes back to all of this squabbling in the 3rd century CE basically going unresolved and creating or laying the groundwork for major schisms.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon

Check out the Canons of various Christian traditions sections.

It gets especially strange when you end up with a canon book that explicitly quotes and refers to a book that … isn’t canon, in that particular tradition.

I don’t know if there is an actual commonly used scholarly term for that concept in general, but yes, the idea has certainly been a cornerstone of many groups and sects.

‘Gnostic Philosophy’ is actually … basically an anachronistic term that modern scholars do not like to use.

It originated back when all that was really known was that people originally seen as ‘proper’ early Christians referred to various heretical groups as Gnostic.

More research has revealed that there were actually very many different ‘heretical’ groups, such that it only even makes sense to call them heretics after Orthodoxy was formally decided on.

The early Christian movement was extremely diverse and contentious with many groups including or discluding many different texts and theological elements, and basically all of them were simultaneously arguing with, reacting to, and borrowing concepts from each other.

There isn’t really a singular Gnostic version of Christianity or Philosophy. Its an outdated catch all term for distinct and specific groups such as the Valentinians, the Sethians, the Marcionites, Manichaeans… many more.

Many of them actually do have, written down, the secret knowledge that is said to grant one enlightenment or a ticket to heaven upon death once one knows it.

Many others only describe ways of living, thinking and acting that lead one toward the goal of the ‘secret knowledge’ without actually describing the knowledge itself.

Also, a great deal of syncretism, or merging of other religious or mythical tales and philosophical ideas from outside of Judaism and what we now know as modern Christianity was going on, mixing in concepts from Greece, Egypt, Persia, etc.

…

Gnosis means knowledge. Gnostic means one with knowledge or one who knows.

Agnosis mean ignorance. Agnostic means one without knowledge or one who does not know.

They are opposites, not equivalents.

…

At least the Gospel of Judas seems very much to be written with the idea that Yahweh / The Judaic God is actually evil.

A good number, though not all, ‘Gnostic’ sects wrote about or just rewrote the story of Genesis to make it much more plain that God was actually the one who lied in that story, and viewed the various other cruel acts of the God of the Torah as irreconcilable with a fundamentally ‘good’ deity.

…

Long story short, you couldnt reconstruct some kind of ‘true, original’ Christianity if we somehow had a copy of every text of what every various sect in the 1st and 2nd century CE held dear: There are irreconcilable differences and incongruities between the amount we so have.

But thats not so dissimilar from today’s widely varying religions and theological concepts that all identify as Christian.

Is the next post a picture of Chris Benoit?, fucking hell.

If you’re talking about the Gospel of Judas, that isn’t from the Dead Sea scrolls, but was its own distinct finding.

The Dead Sea scrolls are a collection of texts of a cult based around a messianic figure, rooted in Judaism, but dated between the 3rd and 1st century BCE, discovered in the 1940s.

They do not mention Judas, but are interesting in that the actual messianic figure himself seems to have written some of the texts, that he uses some of the same verses and stories from the Torah to identify himself as the Messiah that would later be used by (attributed to being used by) Jesus, that some of the texts were written by others of the same cult after his death, and show how they theologically cope with their Messiah seemingly failing his own prophecies and claims.

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The Gospel of Judas, on the other hand, is dated to the 2nd century CE and was …well, the story goes it was found in Egypt some point prior to the 1970s, then got traded around by black market antiquities dealers, spent about a decade in a safe deposit box, nearly totally disintegrated, and was eventually shown to a proper academic expert in greek and coptic, leading to it being painstakingly reassembled, radio carbon dated, linguistically verified as not being a much later forgery, and translated, first publicly widely available in English in 2006.

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The actual story in the Gospel of Judas is stunningly bizarre:

You start off with Jesus literally mocking and laughing at all his disciples other than Judas for seemingly not understanding anything he’s ever said.

Later, privately, Judas confronts Jesus saying that he does understand Jesus… that Jesus is from the immortal realm of Barbelo.

Jesus then goes on to describe that yes, he was making fun of the other disciples because they think he is the Messiah of Yahweh / The God of Judaism, when in actuality Jesus is a human incarnation or avatar of a completely different divine entity, that Yahweh is actually Saklas / Yaldebaoth, a mad, malformed demiurge descended from a long line of other, superior, more wise and beneficent divine entities in an elaborate and historied pantheon (which Jesus admits his own knowledge of is not total and complete), that Saklas / Yaldebaoth falsely believes himself to be the supreme God of all reality when in fact he only has domain over the Earth, which is basically an innately evil realm, and that all humans were accidentally created with a tiny bit of the pure divine spark in them but are all here trapped and cursed to suffer as basically slaves and playthings of Saklas.

The fragment ends with Jesus explaining that basically his master plan for saving all of mankind involves sacrificing himself to help more people realize their true inner divinity, and that he only trusts Judas, his wisest disciple, to make that actually happen.

…

To me, it reads like someone took acid or shrooms and wrote a fan fiction drawing from the 4 more mainstream gospels. Its truly wild.

The ‘Judas was actually a good guy’ part is basically a footnote compared to how totally out of left field everything else is.

IIRC, Saklas or Saklos basically transliterates to ‘The Blind One’, which is a name you’d expect a Lovecraftian entity to have.

https://www.gospels.net/judas

Over a decade ago now, when Tennant was still The Doctor, (I think during the airing of either the 1st or 2nd season with him), I managed to learn a fairly close approximation of his English accent and verbiage from a few online friends I had at the time (I am American with a PNW accent).

Halloween was coming up. I managed to find a blue pinstripe suit at a thrift store. Told all my friends who were hosting a Halloween party to just pretend I was an exchange student.

It actually worked, I was able to convince everyone who wasn’t in on it that I actually was English.

Sadly, practically no one knew of Doctor Who.

I remember multiple times saying ‘why I’m the Doctor’ as a response to ‘What’s your costume?’

This was then followed by ‘Doctor… Who?’ to which I would reply ‘Precisely’ or ‘Yes, you’ve got it’.

To which they would make a confused face and I would then suggest drinks, as one of my multiple hearts broke and died each time someone had only the vague notion that I was some strange Englishman, out of place, perhaps even out of time.

Don’t add to the conspiracies lol.

There are a substantial number of people that believe she died or was killed and has since been replaced by a lookalike or clone.

There are a substantial amount of Republicans that think RATM is raging against what they are raging against.

All they heard was ‘Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me’ and … well literally none of any of their other lyrics apparently.

Its an enormously overproduced Overwatch clone with zany characters that seem to be going for Guardians of the Galaxy, an art style that is basically just bizarre, and gameplay from a decade ago.

Sony wanted their own Overwatch, after seeing its success, then spent a huge amount of time and money developing it, and this is what they came up with.

Oh, right, it isn’t free to play, costs 40 bucks, and then also has an astounding amount of microtransactions.

EDIT: Based off of current active player count, Concord has cost approximately $200,000 dollars per active player to produce.

Better hope they are all omega class hyper whale spenders, I guess.

Because 90% of people only recognize the chorus of most songs, or even just a few words from the chorus.

Republicans in particular have a history of using ‘Born on the 4th of July’ even though the entire song is very critical of American society. The chorus, alone, isolated from context, seems to be about patriotism though!

Similarly, My Hero has a chorus about My Hero, so when played near Trump, that means he is their hero. Don’t think about the rest of the lyrics, they don’t matter.

So, sorta like in Animorphs when Visser 3 wants a new host body?

I recently got denied for a public housing program in the US.

I did not find out about this until I was at the local public assistance office for another reason, where I just randomly happened to be told that I was denied by the person who was apparently my case manager.

She said she mailed it a few days ago and was surprised I didn’t get it.

2 weeks later and the actual denial letter never arrived.

…

Keep in mind, almost all government assistance programs in most of the US will correspond by you via mail only. If they email or phone call you, well you still need to show up in person or mail them for most important applications.

And… if they mail you something, they’ll often give you maybe 10 days (not business days, even though everything they do takes business days) to respond and have your response be received by, or they’ll permanently bar you from whatever you are applying for and file it as ‘refused to provide documentation.’

So if your shit gets lost in the mail, fuck you, nobody cares!

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I have said this in various places on lemmy at other times and people seem to think I am joking, but I am not: If anyone from a functioning country wants to do a sham marriage for tax benefits and I can immigrate there, please let me know. Living off of disability payments alone fucking sucks here.