Copilot is the most gamer-y of all the chatbots I’ve seen.

Which is wild as it’s just a snapshot of GPT-4 behind the scenes.

My best guess is that there’s a context bias by its association in the System prompt to Microsoft which brings it closer to topics like Xbox and gaming than models that don’t have that alignment cue.

Only six fingers. Clearly it’s AI generated, so it isn’t real life gore, and thus not rule breaking.

Do you have a source for that? I’d be interested.

I’ve suspected for a while given an 8th century BCE mention of an Assyrian anointing oil of olive oil, myrrh, and cannabis that the original recipe before Josiah’s reforms was similar, especially given the find linked above at Tel Arad, but I haven’t seen anything about pottery residue in Israelite or Judean sites.

I mean, kind of.

A dude can suddenly talk to God through a burning bush, and then continues to talk to him face to face in a double layered tent he goes into after anointing himself and whenever he’s talking to God a cloud appears at the door? Sounds a lot like Herodotus talking about the Scythians anointing themselves, going into a tent, and burning cannabis inhaling the fumes…

And yet all the fun stuff has since been removed.

Yeah, because it’s not like theater has a longstanding history of having people play characters that are a different sex from the one they were born as or anything…

I’ve never seen a racist stroke before.

It was likely initially a story about famine before it was reworked to incorporate the Babylonian flood mythos.

The caption is BS and the markers don’t actually correlate with the topics, even though the topics are all present in there.

And actually there’s a pretty interesting history of empowered women buried underneath the later misogynistic revisions, which is the case for both the OT and NT in separate developments.

Not even once you find out it’s plastic?

This is the Marvel movie I need in my life.

Read what you are replying to letter by letter

Really? 35 hours of great content?

Exactly what parts of Starfield struck you as great?

I’ll agree that around the 30 hours mark of my playthrough I was thinking the game felt big and expensive and was excited to spend more time in that universe.

But it wasn’t long after that even the faction quests ended up just so repetitive in scope and even level design that I was over it.

The number of loading screens just to go from point A to B for a fetch quest is probably the worst of any open world game…ever.

It’s like they finally had SSD tech so they just decided to throw any concern over loading out the window in game design.

The story is mediocre, the voice acting is meh, the gameplay loops are extremely repetitive.

The thing you like is the one thing I also enjoyed of ship combat with boarding enemy ships. That was done well, outside of the fact you can’t physically go outside your ship.

And “you can play 35 hours without hating it” as the barometer of whether a game is satisfactory sells yourself and your time short. You as a consumer deserve more, and making excuses for outdated and poor game design doesn’t do yourself any favors. Legitimate complaints about games getting their fair amount of attention leads to better games, as happened with games like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk. The only way Bethesda’s game devs are going to get the appropriate resources from management to focus on making a game that doesn’t waste your time with repetition on the next one is if there’re enough complaints about the repetition in this one that management is concerned about repeating bad press which might impact sales.

You do yourself and the devs disservice minimizing or dismissing complaints and only do the execs a favor.

That’s great if you don’t feel that way. I’m guessing that as you put more hours in the title you’ll feel different, but hope that’s not the case and your enthusiasm remains. But for many players that were quite excited for the game, it ended up being rather disappointing.

I really don’t understand how they green lit that design choice.

It was like Ubisoft towers on crack.

“Let’s take the least interesting gameplay mechanic possible, and then gate one of the only interesting mechanics behind it. And then let’s also make it take a few minutes of jetpacking around a barren planet to get there beforehand, to really jazz it up.”

Todd: “Yes, exactly! See that temple over there? Your can go there. And go there. And go there again. And again. And again. And again. Again. Again. Again.”

Devs look at each other…

“Is Toddbot broken or is this good gameplay design? Kenny, are you writing this shit down?”

What part of Diablo 4 is behind a microtransaction wall? Some skins?

The problem with both games is they disrespect the player’s time by turning everything into a slog.

That’s way more of an issue with modern game design trying to maximize hours played while minimizing actual content than paid skins. Those may suck, but to be fair it was Bethesda who introduced the damn thing in the first place. I’d rather pretend the premium skins don’t exist but have a fun game than have no microtransactions and a boring 150+ hours of empty world with a total of 35 hours of interesting beats.

The entire time I was playing Starfield I was thinking “man, Cyberpunk 2077 was a really good open world RPG after all.”

Nothing quite like juxtaposition to make something shine.

Grave of the Fireflies

There’s a very similar format in saying 29 in the Gospel of Thomas which is one of the most interesting things in all antiquity IMO:

If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.

Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.

For context, this was at a time when there was a major debate in philosophy between intelligent design (Plato, theological circles) and evolution (Epicureans).

While extra-canonical, it’s pretty wild to have a quote being attributed to Jesus that’s not only entertaining but straight up calling the idea of the mind/spirit arising from naturalism as more amazing than arising from intelligent design.

Though its conclusion ends up a bit dissimilar from OP, in finding the mind, not physical embodiment, as the greatest wonder in the universe.

More likely that it was added in during the late first century.

It’s anachronistic for Judea in ~30 CE given there was no personal tax, no coins with Ceaser’s image on them, and the term 'Ceaser’s to refer to the emperor hadn’t become a colloquialism to the best of our knowledge.

But had an author of a gospel been writing in, say, Alexandria later on where there was a personal tax and there were coins with Ceaser’s image on them and it had become a way of referring to the emperor, you might expect to see that line added in.

Similarly is the emphasis on marriage being between a man and a woman.

Perhaps less socially relevant before Nero married two men while emperor of Rome, which takes place after Jesus was crucified but before most scholars think the first Synoptic gospel was written.

Then on the flip side of the survivorship bias are things that a historical Jesus probably said that aren’t in canon, such as saying 81 in the Gospel of Thomas:

Let one who has become wealthy reign, and let one who has power renounce .

Quite relevant to Pilate’s reign when Tiberius had inherited being emperor rather than earning it through merit and had abandoned the throne to party on an island for years but didn’t hand over the position to anyone else.

Also a line seemingly referred to in 1 Cor 4:8.

And yet it shouldn’t quite be surprising that the version of texts decided to be canon right after the emperor of Rome had converted to Christianity doesn’t include the pithy line decrying dynastic rule.

Unfortunately my best recommendation is reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical - though I’m hoping to eventually pull that community over to Lemmy.

It’s a pretty neat place where you have a range of bright minds from various degrees of experience discussing a lot of topics like this.

In terms of the topic of proto-Mark you can see Burkett’s book on the subject.

And then for the relationship between Paul and the gospel of Mark there’s the aforementioned book.

But one of the challenges with the book route is that you typically get a lot of a single perspective, whereas in communities debating the books you can quickly get to some of the interesting overlaps or differences between perspectives.

That sub is probably the only thing I really miss from Reddit.

After I saw a paper on increased personal reference (i.e. talking about yourself) in writings by vulnerable narcissists, I analyzed the relative personal reference across all the Epistles and the undisputed Pauline letters cluster together significantly higher than the undisputed non-Pauline ones.

So it’s worth considering if Paul was a vulnerable narcissist, prone to expressing both shame and grandiose intermittently as long as the focus was on him.

You can also see the charming multiple places he swears he’s not lying, such as Galatians 1:20 or my favorite in Romans 9:1 where he swears to the Holy Spirit (though I must note all of Romans 9 is missing in Marcion’s version, and this kind of swear he’s telling the truth is repeated in 1 Timothy which is almost certainly a 2nd century forgery).

Paul even declared himself lawless in 1 Cor 9:20 and acknowledged converting by signs and wonders - which is a curious degree of overlap with the description of the “lawless one” in 2 Thessalonians 2 (projection much?).

There were other traditions of early Christianity that were much, much more interesting - particularly with the hindsight of modernity. But they lie buried under the efforts of Paul and those following after him.

Also, tangentially I get the creepiest vibe from Paul’s language around being ‘Father’, his oft conflicts with towns he’s residing in, and his described relationship over time with the much younger Timothy. It’s worth remembering that as early as the 2nd century the Roman satirist Lucian is positioning the early church as providing refuge for someone who was in trouble for molesting a young boy.

I’m not much of a fan of Paul, to say the least. (Though I do think he was brilliant at manipulation, like most narcissists.)