The sims don’t really build anything on their own. I play the Sims 2, because it’s got decades of mods available at this point. The newer games don’t really seem worth it - the Sims 4 is very much focused on parcelling our everything as DLC.

Basically, I have a bunch of STALKER and Fallout 3 assets ported into the game and use them to decorate my little post apocalyptic setting. I try to destroy/rebuild in a way that looks sorta organic - having them squat in abandoned bowling alleys and the like.

Imho the Sims 2 is worth getting into. We’ve reached the point in the nostalgia cycle where the ridiculous early 00’s clothing is endearing. It’s a really open ended story telling tool, and with modding you can do things like historical simulations or weird sim cults or prisons… but even just playing the vanilla game has a lot of charm of its own.

My favorite thing to do in the Sims is to use a bomb mod to bomb pre made neighborhoods, and institute a post apocalyptic “Handmaid’s Tale” setting where most of the women are put into re-education camps.

Not a splatter movie, but Stalker was a hell of a movie on shrooms. 11/10 experience

From Acrylic Painting for Dummies - Colette Pitcher

It’s primarily a Jewish and Muslim thing. Christianity doesn’t really require it.

He was also a eugenicist!

Covering the organs with a cage has been practiced with entire success. A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision, especially when there is any degree of phimosis. The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anaesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases. The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice, and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed.

John Harvey Kellogg - Plain Facts for Old and Young

Matthew was written about 80 CE. Nero was emperor until 68. Nero rather famously took a eunuch as a “wife”, Sporus, which most in the Roman empire and likely the author of Matthew would have been aware of.

For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.

Matthew 19:12

Putting it directly on the over rack at 350 usually works fine for me.

(Not owning a microwave teaches you patience…)

No slavery in England in the 19th century. You’d have to go to a colony or the US.

Children in the US are basically the property of their parents.

Parents can deny their children an education (essentially unsupervised homeschool is entirely legal in many states), refuse to vaccinate, refuse medical treatment, etc.

The US does basically no regulation on “troubled teen” schools. Parents can sign a contract with a school which allows staff to physically assault their kids. There is no recourse. (Fun story - trying to get the state to address sexual abuse at one of these schools can net you a restraining order 😊)

“Just walking, Mr. Mead?”

“Yes.”

“But you haven’t explained for what purpose.”

“I explained; for air, and to see, and just to walk.”

“Have you done this often?”

“Every night for years.”

The police car sat in the center of the street with its radio throat faintly humming.

“Well, Mr. Mead,” it said.

“Is that all?” he asked politely.

“Yes,” said the voice. “Here.” There was a sigh, a pop. The back door of the police car sprang wide. "Get in.”

“Wait a minute, I haven’t done anything!”

“Get in.”

“The Pedestrian” - Ray Bradbury

It’s not just literary analysis - it’s historical.

A text being historical does not mean it is a 100% true telling of the events. That is the entire point of analyzing your sources.

Herodotus tells us that a guy got a person escort of dolphins to port when some treacherous sailors threw him overboard and other insane bullshit. That probably didn’t happen. However, he is really really useful if we want to understand the rise of the Achaemenid Empire and pretty accurate there.

If I want to analyze the beliefs and politics of post Exilic period Hebrews, the Bible is an excellent resource. Even things that are mostly mythological are extremely useful. Eg, King David was a historical figure - there is independent corroborating evidence of this. The stories in the Bible about him are probably mostly mythological because they were written a few centuries after his rule, but they are useful in that they indicate a desire to create a shared cultural history - to unify the tribes into one polity.

Every time the Bible comes up on lemmy, it feels like everyone here must have failed every high school history class they took. History has a different methodology than science does, because it is a different field and way of understanding.

SnapCircuits!

They have a bunch of different kits, there’s like a music one that’ll even let you make a circuit that plays music from a phone.

They are absolutely a WONDERFUL introduction to electricity for a kid.

Bible scholars who are aren’t apologists start from the baseline assumption that it is not divinely inspired. Academic biblical scholarship which comes out of most mainstream universities treats the books of the Bible as they were written by human hands without divine intervention. It’s not even about trying to get some sort of moral message - it’s about understanding the world that ancient Hebrews lived in and how it changed through different periods of time. Gods existence or non existence is completely irrelevant to the process of analyzing the historical text. A good scholar is looking for biases in what the human author wrote. This is going to be the case for anyone that isn’t at like Moody Bible college.

Look up when Tacitus was writing his histories versus when they happened. Most ancient history is written years after the fact.

They also give us historical information about the time they were written, even if we can’t trust their accounts of the time they claim to describe.

Also, most books in the New Testament were written within a matter of decades.

Y’all really need to take some history classes. We don’t treat sources as if they are infallible depictions of events. We think about bias. We think about corroborating evidence. And if there are problems in a source, that doesn’t mean it has no value.

Emmanuel Macron enters the chat

I love the black and white thinking. Obviously, I must be a Christian because I don’t think the Bible is nothing but “kill all unbelievers” scrawled repeatedly in blood.

C’mon Mister Logical - can you tell me what a false dichotomy is?