a lot of people end up using atheism as a an excuse to have shitty values

Citation needed. This is a total straw man argument.

“Morals” are a completely man made concept. With or without religion, it is immaterial. They did not and do not have to come from somewhere else. They come from us.

And what is and isn’t “moral” changes over time as society evolves. As I am positive you know, quite a few things in Judeo-Christian scripture were considered “moral” in their time but are now viewed as unquestionably heinous. Have you ever stopped to think why that is?

You’ve said absolutely nothing of substance, here. Just platitudes. You haven’t explained why Yahweh is legit but, say, Zeus isn’t.

Agreed. And Kefka was way cooler anyway.

(I firmly believe most people gush over FF7 so much only because it was their first exposure to a mainstream console RPG in non-Japanese circles. FF7 as a whole was a fairly meh entry into the series anyway, if you ask me.)

Not only did Kefka have real style, twisted though it may be, he also for all intents and purposes actually managed to win. He fractured the world, scattered the heroes, built his goddamned tower, and was lording it all over everybody with a penthouse view. He didn’t have angst; he was just nuts. It was frankly a complete fluke that he got the shit whacked out of him by a little girl with a paintbrush, a 8x per round attacking Moogle with Genji gloves, a senior citizen, and a mime.

The Doctor.

We get it. You wish a dashing eccentric gentleman with an English accent will appear out of the blue and whisk you away from your situation to a life of adventure. But it’s not going to happen, sweetheart.

It doesn’t help that Doctor Who has always been crap sci-fi, but gets a free ride due to having such a long history stretching back to before anyone knew any better. The series as a whole is one of those I find also dragged down by a subsection of rabid insufferable fans, at least the modern incarnations, right up there with Rick and Morty and Supernatural. (I see I already kicked the beehive.)

You son of a bitch, I’m out.

Because Jesus or any other mythical figure is not required for anyone to have the same or similar values.

Your logic doesn’t follow. Evidence for the existence of Jesus and god – either the Yahweh or any of the other ones – is scant (in the case of Jesus) or nonexistent (in the case of his dad). Sharing similar values to what Jesus allegedly had is not evidence for his existence, nor that of any gods. In this context, the “real” Jesus is as he is depicted in scripture. That doesn’t necessarily mean he was a real person in reality, so don’t get that part twisted. What the poster you’re replying to is interpreting a character as he was written.

It’s exactly the same thing as claiming, “Captain Picard would not do XYZ, because it is inconsistent with how he was written in every single episode.” That may be so, and maybe we all know who Captain Picard is and what he does, but that still doesn’t make Picard a real person. Having a taste for tea, Earl Grey, hot does not require that any person actually believe that Picard physically existed, nor that his published actions were anything more than the fancy of some scriptwriters.

I have never found the Gex series to be “exciting,” even when it was new. Gex was always a shallow also-ran mascot in the time when everyone was trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle without understanding how it actually worked, and desperately trying to recreate what Sonic and Earthworm Jim and to a lesser extent Toejam and Earl had.

He was marginally less annoying than Bubsy. That’s about all I can say about Gex.

If I really decide to play some sub-par 90’s platforming stuffed with stilted and dated TV and movie references, my 3DO still works. Yes, really…

“Homeopathic” does not mean organic, or good for you, natural, wholesome, effective, or inherently safe to consume.

It is, in fact, a code word for no active ingredient.

Ditto on the regular remote. I have one if those keyfob sized ones that goes perfectly in the otherwise useless sleeve pocket in my jacket.

I have probably about a quarter million dollars worth of stuff in my garage between the bikes, tools, and machinery that I busted my ass working to afford. So I don’t need to have my garage door connected to the fucking cloud, thanks. I sure as shit don’t need any software trying to determine when to open the door automatically. One dumbass software glitch, one incident of the door being open and unattended even for a few minutes when I’m not home, and the methheads will be making off with most of everything I’ve ever owned.

Fuck that. When I press the button, or not at all.

Based on this exact comic - which I surely must have read in the newspaper at the time in 1987 – when I was a kid I saved a snowball in the freezer. What I did not know until later, and was mildly disappointed to discover, was that parking it directly on the floor of the freezer compartment put it in contact with the defrost heater mechanism. Which caused it to melt away to nothing by summer.

Darn it.

You should check out an original Famicom, then. Not only are the controller cables only about two feet long, but they’re also permanently affixed to the console. Well, unless you’re willing to dismantle it, anyway.

It seems Nintendo expected gamers to keep the console in front of them and connected to the TV via a cable running across the floor, rather than our now familiar methodology of keeping the console under or next to the TV and only bringing the controller(s) with you. The limited amount of space in Japanese households may have also had something to do with it.

Anyway, if you’re a modern western gamer nowadays it’s annoying as hell. Big N made the right choice when they brought the system to the US in not only making the controller cables significantly longer, but also unpluggable.

Your yearly reminder that the original Paddington Bear stuffed toy was designed and made by Shirley Clarkson and given to her son: Jeremy Clarkson.

Yes, that Jeremy Clarkson. You know, the “Speed and Power!” guy.

(Although this was not the origin of the character himself. Michael Bond bought a generic toy bear from a toy shop and named it after nearby Paddington station. He wrote some stories using the bear as a character, and then they got published, and then he probably got very rich.)

This means that we may face a situation where hobbyists, small businesses, and aerial photographers who make a living with drones can suddenly no longer fly them, but cops will.

That was always the goal.

China (and probably Russia still) have satellites that can read the headlines on your newspaper from orbit. The notion that they’d need or use noisy, unreliable, and easily noticed commercial hobbyist drones for this purpose is laughably absurd. Even if they are planning on secretly snooping on the feeds of privately owned fliers, which is probably not actually feasible at scale anyway. How is the data supposed to be transmitted back to China? Magic? Through the cloud via the user’s cell phone data, with no one noticing? Gigabytes and gigabytes of it per flight? I’m not buying it.

The real reason the US government is so scared of drones is because it will allow the citizenry (i.e., us) to document abuses and authoritarianism in a manner that’s pretty tough to stop with the usual billy clubs/guns/tear gas/water cannons method. Think BLM, Occupy, future climate protests, and all of those sorts of things. Unchecked aerial photography and video that contradicts the Official Narrative from whatever today’s incident happens to be making it out to the internet and going viral would be highly inconvenient, wouldn’t it? Someone can be capturing video of the police shooting protestors or whatever and easily be half a mile away from where the drone itself is located.

It speaks volumes about the pathology and mindset of American legislators and law enforcement that they inherently see drones as a “spy” technology. That’s because this is exactly what they plan to use them for, and are terrified that someone else might do the same thing to them.

Well, tough fucking titty.

The Legend of Zelda… & Knuckles. I like it.

It’s obviously a turkey anyway.

My perennial recommendation for this sort of thing is the Kershaw CQC-6K. Either the D2 or 8Cr14MoV versions, your choice. Normal people probably want the 8Cr one. Like all of the Emerson derived wave openers, it can be snapped open automatically when drawn from the pocket by way of a hook on the back of the blade. Drawing and opening it are not separate actions, or at least they don’t need to be.

I hope your friend knows what they’re doing re: trying to use a knife for self defense. I suspect they don’t. As others here have mentioned, doing so is not for the uninitiated. It doesn’t work like it does in the movies. Pulling a weapon escalates any situation and should not be done unless you’re prepared to use it immediately and are justified in doing so. Pulling a knife and waving it around in front of punks on the street is, let’s say, very unlikely to produce the results you want. Especially if you are not already of a stature to kick their asses to begin with, even without the knife.

A Leatherman tool and a can of pepper spray may be a wiser purchase.

In case anyone asks, my scale of self-defense options places a pocketknife squarely at the bottom well behind guns, bear mace, tactical airstrikes, swords, polearms, keeping a Doberman in your pocket, or just not putting yourself in sketchy situations to begin with.

And even the KJV edits did not manage to paper over the fact that there are in fact 18 if you count Sky Daddy’s recitation/rant in Exodus after the whole golden calf incident.

FYI, there is no “better” way to use hydrogen that will result in extracting more energy from it than it physically contains and can be released via oxidation. This is not a matter of “development” or “breakthroughs.” It is physically impossible. The standard enthalpy change of combustion of hydrogen is 141.83 MJ/kg. Period. That’s it. That’s all you can ever get out of it, provided you achieve perfect efficiency (which currently we don’t). Ongoing research is surely working on getting is closer to 100% efficiency, but it will never get past it. You can’t defy the laws of physics.

Insofar as I am aware all current hydrogen vehicles already use fuel cells to generate electricity and use that to drive electric motors for motive power. No one is burning hydrogen in a combustion engine in vehicular applications. There are some power plants that are doing it, though, mostly as a mechanism for storing and later reusing excess energy generated from other sources. You can go cross-eyed reading up on it here, if you are so inclined.

There is the notion of the “hydrogen economy” floating around, that is the use of hydrogen as an energy storage and carrying medium – not, notably, as a fuel for actual generation of energy – but it’s pretty certain that outside of some limited applications this will always be a worse deal than just taking the energy in the form of electricity and putting it in a wire.

Hydrogen is a dead end. The only company left trying to chase that particular dragon is Toyota, and I predict eventually they’ll be forced to admit that it’ll never work en masse for private vehicles. Ordinary consumers can already barely be trusted with gasoline, which is neither under high pressure nor requires industrial grade refrigeration to keep it in liquid form, and is a lot harder to ignite… The delivery systems for hydrogen are extremely complex and must maintain an absolute 0% failure rate or else somebody will either get blown up or frozen to a pump. Gasoline is at least a liquid and behaves predictably when spilled, and doesn’t phase change instantly when it leaves containment. And a mechanical failure in the delivery system can be mitigated by simply shutting off the pump. You poke a hole in a hydrogen filling system and you’re going to have a very interesting time. Current systems have redundancies on top of safety devices on top of redundancies for this reason which makes them fantastically expensive.

Hydrogen also has crap for energy density (around 8 kJ/liter in liquid form, compared to 32 kJ/liter for gasoline) and even if you’re producing it via electrolysis or something is a wildly inefficient way to store and transport energy. If you’re going to use electricity to create and compress hydrogen to transport it and create electricity with it later, it is monumentally more efficient to take the electricity and put it in batteries. So you may as well just to that.

The thing with battery swapping is that it will absolutely require strong government regulation to ensure standardization and fair treatment of owners. Replaceable batteries in consumer devices obviously aren’t a new concept, and before proprietary lithium packs took over everything, every single consumer device was powered by AAA, AA, C, or D batteries which were very well understood by everybody and were – and are – completely interchangeable commodity items that are readily available to this day. That’s the only way it’ll work. Manufacturers will have to be forced to standardize on a set of pack sizes because without oversight they’ll inevitably try to turn everything into a subscription-only walled garden pretty much exactly as you have predicted. But if there is a thing as an equivalent of an AAA vehicle battery (for motorcycles and scooters), AA vehicle battery (for city microcars, NEV’s, golf carts, etc.) and C vehicle battery (full size passenger cars) and D vehicle battery (light trucks) etc., and nobody is allowed to try to make up their own bullshit, then no one will have to give a rat’s ass about battery health, the dealership, lock-in, or anything else. If you buy a used vehicle with a knackered pack in it or your battery gets cacked, you could just bop down to your local AutoZone or whatever and buy a new one. Or push your car to the nearest swap station. You’ll turn in your old one for the core charge. Exactly like how 12v vehicle batteries work now.

We’ll have to get people used to the notion that, yes, these things will be kind of a battery lottery and you may get swapped in a pack that’s in slightly worse condition than your last one if you go around pack-swapping all the time. But you know, the next time you swap you’ll get a different one again. And you can play already this game right now if you want to – just go buy some fuel in a third world country.

You just need one water bucket.

Glunk. Tss, tss, tss, tss, tss.

You bought a diamond pickaxe too, right?