It can’t hurt.

I don’t know what the local version of the Samaritans is where you are, but I suggest you talk to them instead of whatever you’re planning: https://www.samaritans.org/

Lol, I hadn’t even noticed that. The pro-car people are uniformly rude and ignorant and all the anti-car people are offering polite corrections.

My faves are all the people going ‘How could I possibly run errands on foot/bike/public transport?’ I do that every day! How weak are these guys? Literally yesterday I ran a half marathon on the other side of the city then went for a meal out and used walking and public transport every step of the way… except for the 21k I did running.

So, fun fact, St Augustine, who is considered one of the Church Fathers, explicitly argued that if the ‘Antipodes’ (i.e., southern continents not connected to Europe, Asia or Africa) actually existed and had humans living there, that would prove the Gospel was untrue.

The reason for this is as follows: Christians of his era believed that the reason God had allowed the Romans to destroy the Second Temple and push the Jews into exile was to prepare the men of all nations (as understood at the time) for the coming of the Gospel. The idea was that the Jews had taken the Old Testament, and the prophecies of the Messiah therein, across the whole world. Augustine argues that if the Antipodes contained human beings who had never had any kind of contact with Jews, and therefore no contact with the OT, and no contact with Christians, and therefore no contact with the New Testament, either, that must mean the Gospels are false. Why? Because there’s no conceivable reason that a just God would have deprived entire civilisations of the chance of redemption.

Of course, we now know that at the time Augustine was writing (4th-5th century AD), there were literally millions of people who had never had the slightest contact with the Jews or Christians and, furthermore, wouldn’t do so for another millennium. So, per Augustine’s argument, all those millions were condemned to Hell (the concept of Purgatory didn’t exist at this point, but condemning them all to no chance of Heaven, just because they were unfortunate to be born a long way away from Jersualem, is clearly also unjust). Either God is incredibly unjust and unmerciful, which means the Gospels are untrue, OR the Good News wasn’t actually spread to all men, which must also mean that they’re not true.

The upshot of this is that one of the Church Fathers has, in retrospect, irrefutably argued that the Gospels are untrue. The amount of special pleading required to make out that, actually, the Maori or the Easter Islanders or [insert any other uncontacted peoples here] had an opportunity to accept Christ and somehow missed it entirely is far beyond any sane interpretation of the evidence.

Now, as you might have noticed, this hasn’t stopped people from believing in the Gospels. I don’t see why the discovery of life on another world would dislodge people from a belief that is transparently false when nothing else has.

I’ve been saying Spappel. I hope this helps but I know it doesn’t.

Given what we’ve heard about Illyrian society in SNW it doesn’t seem particularly enlightened! Honestly feels like they should just have had Pike have that conversation with someone else, but stuck with Una just because they didn’t have anyone who had spoken to Batel onscreen.

Yeah, I assumed that quite some time had elapsed and that was why Pike didn’t have an answer for Batel when she put him on the (imaginary) stand.

”I like her,” Number One says of Batel, the woman who arrested her in “A Quality of Mercy”, and prosecuted criminal charges against her based solely on her species in “Ad Astra per Aspera”.

Yeah, Una’s attitude towards Starfleet in general and Batel in particular does seem a bit unrealistic. Does she respect duty above everything? Can’t be that, because then she’d never have let Pike cover for her!

Capital ‘N’ is written differently; ‘U’ and ‘u’ are unambiguous.

Ha, quite funny that I keep finding people I know elsewhere on the Fediverse!

Lemmy’s good so far. I like the format for discussions but it’s a bit ‘quiet’. How about you?

Yeah, I was similarly baffled!

Like this kind of thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker#Vacuum_tube_technology

Divers by Joanna Newsom. I could’ve picked about ten different albums as my all time best, but you said you liked great lyrics and this album has them. The basic question of the album is ‘How is love possible when death is inevitable?’ and Newsom spends forty minutes giving various answers to that question, drawing on Percy Shelley, James Joyce and Albert Einstein, among others.

If that sounds more like an essay than an album, that’s because you need the music, too, to fully appreciate what Newsom does. The lyrics aren’t arbitrary; they always speak to the lyrics and vice-versa. This includes fairly obvious audio-verbal puns, as when she hits a sustained chord on the piano as she sings the word ‘sustains’, and also more recondite use of motifs and key changes that complement the complex lyrical ideas that she’s exploring. The upshot is that I think you’d know this album was about love and loss even if you didn’t understand a word of the lyrics.

I agree with you about Strange and Norrell. The pacing was poor and it was over-long.

But!

Susanna Clarke’s next book, Piranesi, is actually really good. Like, really, incredibly good. I recommend it to everyone and so far no one has said anything but positive things about it. I rarely re-read books but this is one that I’ve come back to.

As it happens, I read Piranesi first, so I found JS&MN a bit disappointing, but I’m glad I read them that way around otherwise I might have skipped Piranesi, and that would have been a mistake!

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack was really bad. It was meant to be ‘experimental’ but it was literally just a very boring story with, get this, no punctuation (an ‘experiment’ first conducted about a hundred years ago). There were literally pages and pages where the narrator complained about a building with poorly poured concrete foundations at one point (yes, really). It was quite short, so I got through it, but it was just totally pointless!