@lv_hunter

Normal difficulty compared to D2 simply feels far too easy. I recall D2 Act 1 was also quite easy, but from Duriel, really through to the end of normal, the game picked up substantially. I found almost the opposite here, while it is fair for them to ease players in early on, for me the difficulty spiked towards the end of Act 1, maybe early Act 2. From there the game was just a complete steamroll through to Nightmare.

Sure you get to replay it 3 more times, but plunging through the game at this pace for first impressions really ruins the gravitas of the stakes the story is trying to paint.

@mentality

I've heard this notion bandied around, but combining ideas from multiple games and perfecting them is still a form of innovation. And even on that measure they played it far too safe on D3.

D2 felt like a huge leap on D1. Randomized dungeons, huge increase in class and especially item variety, introduction of a vast swathe of new environments. In comparison critically looking at D3, while it does have an expanded skills system, at the end of a prodigious 11 year development cycle, D3 has far less item variety at launch, and arguably simplified gameplay mechanics on a number of levels.

Personally, I happen to also think the story is a let down, the tone of the game has been inappropriately been made cartoonish (art design non-withstanding).

@dystopianfuturetoday

I think you go about prostylization the wrong way. I see you as kind of a digitized version of the guy who stands outside of bars with a megaphone and a sandwich board, passing judgement off on revelers that just don't care at best, and want to pick a fight with you at worst. Well intended, but not persuasive or well received.

I went about things the wrong way when I first arrived here, being somewhat of a neophyte to evangelism, which set the tone for the rest of my time here. Along the way, I've made some mistakes and said some things which further served to marginalize me, which the antitheists here have throughly capitalized on.

I was more hot blooded when I arrived, and cocky, being throughly schooled in all manner of philosophical argumentation, and having been *experienced* in the transcendent, I was more interested in dismantling arguments than showing the love of Christ. I regret that, but what's done is done. What's true is that God makes everything new.

My main failure was to take the bait of the innumerable insults that have been thrown my way. This was simply an immaturity in my faith, not really understanding what Jesus said about how I should react to them. He said to love that person, no matter how much they hate you. Pray for those who persecute you and despitefully use you. The insults are not as bothersome anymore. I'm more interested now in love than argument.

You write these large blocks of text filled with Bible verses, judgement and a good deal of fire and brimstone. FYI: Bible verses, judgement, fire and brimstone only work on people who already believe in and fear God, just as you probably have no fear of Xenu, Allah or Mitt "White Horse" Romney (google it - funny story)

I have a wide variety of conversations on the sift, many of them on historical, philosophical, and scientific topics. People ask me questions about nearly everything, and so I think it would be difficult to pigeonhole my comments this way. Certainly, I have witnessed the truth about Gods judgment, but this isn't my main focus. As far as fearing God goes, you're right, many do not, but their conscience is still witnessing against them.

I'll look up Mitt "white horse" Romney.

The Christians in my life that make me most sympathetic to Christianity are the ones who express their faith through actions, not words. I've only met a handful of these people in my life, but they've all made a positive impact on my life. These are the people who exude love, empathy, understanding and compassion. These are the people that say 'I love you' when you really need to hear 'I love you.' You feel it almost like an aura around them. And, in every case, I had to inquire about them to discover their faith - with none of that uncomfortable evangelizing that comes off more like used car sales pitch than deep expression of faith. And, unlike the used car sales pitch, when I did learn of their faith, I felt a genuine respect for it.

Certainly, Christians should be doing good works at every opportunity. Faith without works is dead. Scripture advises two approaches to reach people. It says some save with mercy, and others with fear. Some people are so hardhearted that the only way to pierce their armor is to make them realize that they will have to answer for their secret sins, the ones that people hide behind their masks of public purity. To let them know that they didn't actually get away with it, whatever it may be. That's kind of why it kind of amuses me when I hear someone say something like "If I saw God I would tell Him off", as if God doesn't have them dead to rights on a list of sins 5 miles long.

Others are like a fragile flower, which must be handled very carefully and gently. Ones who have been abused by the church, for instance. It is truly sad how common this actually is. Of course there are many situations inbetween these two approaches, but in general, it is some combination of the two, leaning towards one of them.

I appreciate what you're saying about your friends. Perhaps this is the way the Holy Spirit has called them to deal with you. They are most certainly praying for your salvation. Again, it depends on the situation. It depends on the kind of relationship, and how much time you have to invest in someone. It is usually expedient to share the gospel in most cases.

Ultimately, it is out of our hands. I can't save anyone; only the power of God can change someones heart. When someone is saved, it is a true miracle.

Of course you can't choose what you believe; what you believe chooses you, so none of these people have brought me any closer to God. But that's OK, because they've done something much more important, they've brought me closer to my fellow humans. They've shown me the power of empathy (not that I'm always the most empathetic person - I've a ways to go in that category) and how contagious just being a good person can really be.

You believe according to your experience, and how interested you are in what is actually true, versus what you appear to see. If you believe that you are generally right about everything, then you will never look beyond your preconceived notions. I only changed my mind about God because He showed me the spiritual reality. I could not logically believe in naturalistic materialism as being a legitimate description of reality after that.

It's wonderful that your friends have taught you something about life, especially concerning the love of God. What Jesus teaches is that every human being has intrinsic value and is worthy of respect and love. He teaches us to love unconditionally and sacrificially, disregarding our own preferences for the good of others. If you can move past all of the contentious issues that surround these topics, and look to the words of Jesus Christ, you will find a transcendent love superior to the wisdom of this world. He gives us a standard of behavior that is impossible for any human being to live up to (without His help). Jesus asks more of you than any other person, in this time or any other, ever will.

I'm not sure if this helps you, especially considering it's pretty hard to refute aggressive atheists if you don't talk a great deal about your faith. Maybe a better path would be to understand where these atheists are coming from and what you have in common. Mutual respect. I don't know.

It does help me, and I appreciate your advice. There is always a better path when there is an argument, although, there is simply no avoiding having to debate certain things, when certain misconceptions are presented as the truth about what Christianity is. Even though you may be predisposed to agree with religious criticism, you must notice the distortions that are bandied about in the atheist community about Christianity and religion in general. I hear the same ones, over and over and over again.

I mean you no offense by this comment, my religious spite phase has mostly passed. I'd like to see you have a little better time on the site and not be the subject of scorn. Many of the discussion you have with atheists seem like a waste of time for all parties, because it's just a clash of worldviews rather than an attempt to find common ground and make progress. Some of the atheists on this site can be very cruel. I don't really follow these long back and forth theological battles anymore, but if someone crosses that line and is cruel to you, I'd be happy to join in on your side. If that appeals to you, drop me a PM.

I'm glad to hear that you are no longer in the business of giving theists a hard time. There are certainly enough people working doubleshift on this that you can walk away with your head held high. Yes, I agree, common ground should be sought out as a matter of course, although it is not an exaggeration to say that convinced atheists and theists typically disagree on almost everything. It's also hard to approach this on a human level, being that this is the internet, and the medium is far inferior for interpersonal communication. It is good for certain kinds of communication, but when it comes to empathy for instance, much is lost.

In any case, I genuinely appreciate your offer. Thank you for your magnanimousness. I may take you up on it sometime. I might also ask you how you see humanity avoiding a dystopianfuturetomorrow.

>> ^dystopianfuturetoday:

For true connoisseurs of terrible, this is an exquisite specimen. The hastiness of the production. The general tone of awkwardness. The complete lack of chemistry. The overt racism just casually bandied about as if they were sharing recipes. It turns out that Victoria Jackson the political pundit is (unintentionally) far funnier than she was back during her brief comedy career. I love that the woman on the left clearly does not want to be there; and how the woman in purple studied up on the issues only to realize that she was only hired to prop up Victoria Jackson. The blond on the right has no clue of how badly things are going and Victoria.... WOW... You are out of your fucking mind. TIL Holding a ukelele whilst on a political roundtable discussion show makes you look insane. Playing it doubly so. This is so awful I bet even @quantumushroom would cringe. Please make more episodes! Please!!


QM won't respond. He may be many things... racist, xenophobic, small minded, inflammatory, hateful, bigoted, intellectually inconsistent and dishonest but above all other things he's a coward.

For true connoisseurs of * terrible, this is an exquisite specimen. The hastiness of the production. The general tone of awkwardness. The complete lack of chemistry. The overt racism just casually bandied about as if they were sharing recipes. It turns out that Victoria Jackson the political pundit is (unintentionally) far funnier than she was back during her brief comedy career. I love that the woman on the left clearly does not want to be there; and how the woman in purple studied up on the issues only to realize that she was only hired to prop up Victoria Jackson. The blond on the right has no clue of how badly things are going and Victoria.... WOW... You are out of your fucking mind. TIL Holding a ukelele whilst on a political roundtable discussion show makes you look insane. Playing it doubly so. This is so awful I bet even @quantumushroom would cringe. Please make more episodes! Please!!

@GeeSussFreeK

The whole "what is True/Real?" is a ridiculous posture to begin with, since we know full well that our knowledge is limited by our sensory input and mental faculties as homo sapiens (one of Hume's main points if I remember correctly). "Reality" and "facts/evidence", when spoken of in science, are always taken with that knowledge in the background, which is what allows one theory to be replaced with another or refined, i.e. scientific progress. Who cares if this is all a computer simulation, or a butterfly's dream, so long as the science works? Well, religious people do, and they are usually the ones to bandy around words such as TRUTH with a capital T, what with their god being omniscient/omnipotent and all.

So no, the uncertainty underlying scientific theories has nothing to do with the uncertainty of religious beliefs, and especially not with the Abrahamic faiths, which paint themselves into a corner by being so specific about their god and his creation/functions.

When I watched this news meltdown video, I immediately thought of this comment stream where the phrase "dumb bitch" was bandied about over and over again.

I know you won't think they are related, but I do. I believe strongly in the power of language. I think it shapes the world.

Right after I watched the news vid, I saw your little list which brought up the dumb bitch thing again.

I probably shouldn't have sent the link to you. Waste of your time. Sorry.

In reply to this comment by budzos:
Your point?

In reply to this comment by bareboards2:
http://videosift.com/video/Someone-left-the-news-directors-mic-on

In reply to this comment by budzos:
Things I learned from this thread:

1. Women can't hurt you so don't bother defending yourself
2. Women get one free slap at your face while you're at work
3. If someone jumps the counter after slapping you and is advancing with their friend in an unmistakably hostile manner.. pfft don't worry it's just two women you're not being assaulted
4. Using a weapon to even the odds or ward off an attack is actually offense and not self-defense.
5. Always let the attacker keep their upper hand, otherwise you are now the one committing assault
6. All violent altercations are immediately settled when any party's gluteus maximus touches a horizontal ground plane.. so stop hitting and start passing out hugs
7. Any use of the word bitch makes you a horrible misogynist
8. Screaming your head off and contributing even more stress and clamor to a tense and violent situation is commendable
9. If you react violently to being attacked, well you're just a big ol' egomaniac!

Again, if I had it my way this type of video wouldn't be on the 'Sift.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

If it's walls of text meant to be just an annoyance - yes, I would agree with you. If it's a few paragraphs of supporting information and links that someone who is interested in the video might want to read, I would have to disagree.

I have to be honest and say I haven't even watched this video - which is why I haven't voted on it - (9/11 overload) but everything seems to be in order here. To be clear, I don't think this rises to the level of trolling or spamming - which is perhaps bandied about a bit too frequently.


>> ^MycroftHomlz:

@dag, no man. I think I have been pretty clear here. Spamming a post with cut and paste text is trollish. It has nothing to do with the content.

LOUD NOISES!

But seriously, this is why this protest is important to me. I don't know if anyone can claim these guys are all libertarians, first off. That label tends to be bandied about freely whenever someone or a group of people exercise civil disobedience.

Secondly, civil disobedience is extremely important to stave off tyranny early. If you wait until the brownshirts are kicking in your door, then it's too late. You have to start early and often.

And third, let's keep this in perspective. These people are dancing in a public place. If you're justifying the actions of the cops and legislators who want the Memorial to be 'dance free' then you have to ask yourself why. It's dancing. It's never been a problem at the Memorial (or any of the tourist locations in DC) in the history of it being built, so why now do we need a law banning it? Was dancing turning into a big issue at the Memorial prior to this law? No. Then why? Because some legislator somewhere wanted to show the world the size of his cock. I say civil disobedience is the correct response to pathetically worthless laws that make victims out of the innocent people committing these victimless "crimes".

@dystopianfuturetoday agreed on all of the above. I'm definitely not one of those people who thinks the entire fix for education is coming up with inventive pay schemes for teachers, I'm just trying to point out that even if you are one of those people, the kinds of things you see bandied about aren't designed very well. Well, unless the design was to look like it's meant to make education better across the board, while really having the effect of making sure that only wealthy people have the ability to provide a good education for their children...

My gut feeling is that a lot of our educational problems are actually general economic disparity problems, coupled with the usual conservative brain damage keeping our schools persistently underfunded, and in many cases systematically sabotaged by ideological nuts on the school boards (see Texas).

There's probably something we could learn from other countries in terms of how to do it better (since pretty much all of them do), but mostly our issue is that generally we've let that conservative brain damage really infect our social psyche to the point where every discussion of public policy is always, without any exception at all, being a nasty debate between "do something" and "do nothing", rather than people coming up with competing solutions to a problem that we all agree needs to be addressed.

>> ^quantumushroom:

I like Penn, admire and respect him. And I understand the rejection of the contradictions of the Bible. While faith is a personal matter, rejecting any religion on its contradictions alone seems narrow-minded. Life itself is fraught with paradoxes and contradictions. Many liberals believe in higher taxes on the wealthy, yet no one can make sense of the US Tax Code, filled with more than its share of contradictions, paradoxes, hypocrisy and passages that should have been ignored long ago.
It's possible to Believe and have faith in something without it being "perfectly" understood.


Agreed, but religion is a special consideration because it claims to know of a divine, metaphysical truth of enormous importance. Being an atheist, I've no issue with people subscribing to religion - not at all. I take issue with religion being imposed on children, inserted into the wrong canals of education and being so significantly involved in politics and government.

If a national leader, as an example, relies upon their religious faith for aspects of decision making, that strikes me as uncomfortable but tolerable - if their decisions have honest merit. However, it's grotesque when politicians bandy about their blind faith as if it were to their credit, and I don't believe there should be any religious references in the structure of government. Likewise, children should be educated about religion but not have it installed into them; on such an important matter, the decision to become religious needs to be made by a fully autonomous, intelligent person.

I'm not an anti-theist, but considering the (especially Abrahamic) religious claims, the stakes could not be higher. Religion deserves great attention and scrutiny for exactly that reason.

Many words are bandied around in descriptions of people.
Courageous and brave are two that can be correctly prescribed to her.

Bandy Toaster!!

Other uploads of "A woman kills her husband on cheated!!! Live television mayhem. Uncensored!"

http://www.google.com/search?q=A+woman+kills+her+husband+on+cheated!!!+Live+television+mayhem.+Uncensored!&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&client=firefox-a&rlz
=1R1GGGL_en___US359

Veoh three weeks ago.

Unrelated, but Profiler 1 also appears to be pseudo-scientific junk. I think we should *bandy this about.

Hmmm, quite a knowledgeable lot here. One thing that makes me want to dole out helmets is total disregard of a core scientific principal. Is the statement/observation true? Have you in fact been able to reproduce it for yourself? What happened to K.I.S.S?

In law, the judges go to great lengths to state; [don't tell me what he/she told you or what you think they knew. It's hearsay!]

In science, you first have to reproduce the phenomena, accounting for assumptions and all sorts of other things before suggesting a governing dynamic. Incidentally, this is what the whole Myth busters premise is. They reproduce then they explain!

..apples and oranges, powers of observation, listening skills, brain teaser, certainly NOT scientific, an experiment, observation or {i got a giggle with this one; something mythbusters 'debunked'. Yeah right}

The respondent was 'having his chain yanked'. He responded with the anticipated reply 'bollocks' (NOT bullocks but bollocks! on television! You see, it isn't word you want to use in polite company let alone be renown for bandying it about. Still dodgey to use this kind of language on terrestrial telly. [x-rated but you can google what it means across the pond].

Fry's reaction, 'i knew it' was in reference to the fact that it was the kind of response the gentleman would give.

No offence r1ok, but terry pratchett is an intellectual of the highest order. Easy for me to say 'genius', but i won't because it's bandied around too much. His books are filled with such amazing philosophies and opinions, explained and parodied in such subtle ways often and never preachy, he always shapes it into the fiction of his novels. In the genre in which he writes, he is unparalelled. He's one of the greatest wits in the world. He's friendly, he's caring.

To attempt to ridicule THIS MAN because he has read the same material as you but forms a different opinion borders on the farcical. You engender the 'bible-thumping' stereotypes by doing this at all. Terry is more intelligent than you or i, more witty, far more experienced, he's read more than most of us ever will - yet when he expresses his opinion on a writing, you try to call him small minded.

SMALL MINDED? Terry fucking Pratchett? Who the fuck are you anyway?

And as for you mentality - that's a hard one. Discworld of course are his best books (he has done some others), and within that series of books there are different spin-offs. Some are written from the perspective of the witches of discworld, some on the wizards (unrelated to the witches), some on the police, some are randomly based on a few individuals.

My dad started with the book about the police (or The Watch, as they're known in discworld). I let him start from the 1st book and he really didn't enjoy it, too fantasy for him, but fortunately he quickly realises comedy rather than fantasy is his niche. So while the very early books are a good read if/when you love discworld or fantasy, they're not always the best starting point.

I'd recommend therefore the City Watch books, as i did with my dad. They're an easy starting point. In order:
* Guards! Guards! 1989
* Men at Arms 1993
* Feet of Clay 1996
* Jingo 1997
* The Fifth Elephant 1999
* The Truth 2000
* Night Watch 2002
* Monstrous Regiment 2003
* Thud! 2005

I would recommend starting at the start if you mean to go on. The characters become more familiar and often you find the stories more sentimental and humorous if you know the characters. This list includes my top 3 favourite books of his, so definitely a good starting point. The books about Death (the character Death) are very good too.