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CatBus

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Join date
18-Aug-2011
Last activity
22-Sep-2025
Posts
5,979

Post History

Post
#1184753
Topic
Religion
Time

moviefreakedmind said:

Mrebo said:

moviefreakedmind said:

Even if you don’t believe that it is literally fire, the point is obvious that Jesus Christ meant that hell is a place of unimaginable torture.

As for chyron’s point about “our perceptions” coloring things, I think it’s fair to judge God by the standards that the Bible claims he judges us. We’re supposed to love our enemies, God tortures his enemies for eternity. I’d imagine that if I personally kidnapped a nonbeliever and tortured them myself because they weren’t Christian, I’d be rightfully labelled an evil maniac. But that’s what Jesus Christ proudly proclaimed he does. Saying that a character that does such a thing is loathsome is not unfair at all.

Isn’t it a basic tenet that only God can judge? I see CatBus’a last paragraph as a plausible scenario. It’s an idea I entertain.

He doesn’t live up to his own standards based on his behavior in the Bible.

That was a long time ago and I was a lot horn… oh, wait, you weren’t referring to me. Nevermind.

Post
#1184728
Topic
Religion
Time

Hell works fine with pluralism, it just doesn’t work well with pluralism and theological rigidity at the same time.

Lemme 'splain. Back in the old days (meaning the Stone Age), pretty much every valley had their own unique belief system, and their own god or gods. Eventually people could travel further for trade, agrarian societies became large, and something needed to be done about these disparate religions that were encountered through alliances, mergers, and conquests.

The Greeks formed a pantheon, a family of gods, polytheism based roughly on their alliances and mergers, but also a pantheon of the defeated (the Titans, etc) for their conquests. Similarly, the Hindus did a “multiple aspects of the same god” pantheon, which could be polytheistic or monotheistic depending on how you looked at it. Other groups incorporated the gods of other cultures into their pantheon, but mostly as demons, not gods. So that’s how you get Satan, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, etc. Our valley worships the real god, all the other valleys worship demons, was basically how it went, and today’s “all other religions go to Hell” belief is pretty much a straight line from there.

Theoretically, Christians could simultaneously maintain their belief in Hell and choose not condemn other religions to Hell if they followed the “multiple aspects of the same god” example, and in fact that does seem to be a feature of some more modern conglomerate religions like Sikhism, Baha’i, and Unitarian Universalism. You also see this concept in statements that refer to Christians, Muslims and Jews as “people of the Book” or some such thing. Not saying many would, but there is a path out of Gehenna that does not involve rejecting Christianity at all.

Post
#1184417
Topic
Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo
Time

Discussion of the various legal implications of firing Mueller.

With the world’s unhappiest conclusion IMO.

But I predict it would not come to that. If the crazy scenario that got me to this point in the hypothetical decision chain materializes, Congress would rise up quickly to stop the President, and the pressure on the cabinet would be enormous as well. If I am naive in thinking this, then we are indeed in trouble.

Emphasis mine.

Post
#1184166
Topic
Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)
Time

This is reason #479 why for all languages, SUP is the best option. They always look the way they’re supposed to.

If you simply must use an SRT (which I don’t recommend), then for RTL languages, the -compat file is probably best. The trick is that there are so many embedded players (i.e. Smart TV’s) that it’s fairly likely someone writing the player code for the TV will just grab some text-rendering code off the Internet and accidentally make RTL text render correctly. I definitely have heard about Smart TV’s that display RTL subtitles, er, I hate to say wrong, but let’s say unexpectedly right. Generally when there’s a player that does BiDi correctly, people who use RTL SRT files learn to just avoid using it.

Yes, your description is accurate. There’s also the tractor beam controls in Star Wars which qualify as onscreen text, but those are always present in the video in English, so you’ll only ever see those subtitles in other languages.

I rephrased it yet again, since I think I know where the trip-up is now:

native: no onscreen text is subtitled, designed to accompany video that already includes burnt-in alien subtitles
nocrawl: the opening titles and crawl are not subtitled, designed to accompany video that does not include burnt-in alien subtitles

Post
#1183691
Topic
Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo
Time

From the “Why did this even make it to court?” files.

Anti-racist protester DeAndre Harris, who was brutally beaten by a group of white supremacists, had the assault charges filed against him dropped after a judge said on Friday the 20-year-old black man was defending himself.

Basically a reminder that Nazis were also reviewing the Charlottesville video footage, looking for more targets to attack, legally or otherwise. There are also some other incidents that may just be coincidence.

Post
#1183684
Topic
The Cult Leader Appreciation Thread
Time

I think in seriousness if a “cult” is big enough (i.e. millions), it must include seemingly normal people. There are different degrees of cult devotees. In Rand’s case, there are the full-on-Kool-Aid-literalists who think the world ends when they die*, and there are people who just think the Golden Rule is for saps who don’t know how to leverage their advantage. Paul and Greenspan are toward the latter end. Their thinking is infused with her philosophy, but they probably would still be standing in a Jonestown scenario. They believe as much as benefits them at the time, which I guess is sort of meta-objectivist.

* Yes I realize there’s a symbolic philosophical thing going on here, but it’s still effed up.

Post
#1183659
Topic
Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)
Time

The -compat business is really baffling to me. I think you’re right, it just blows me away that media players have all standardized on a completely effed-up SRT file format for RTL languages. I saw a media player that handled correctly-formatted RTL subtitles once, and, sure enough, there was a bug filed that it didn’t work with the vast majority of RTL SRT subtitles already in existence.

On the latter issue, the description is confusing but correct (I may work on that). “native” means Greedo’s lines aren’t included in the SRT/SUP file, because they are expected to be burnt-in on the video. “nocrawl” means the translated crawl is not included, but Greedo’s lines are, if the video doesn’t burn in Greedo’s lines. For example, if the English version of the video doesn’t have Greedo subs, then you’d want the Greedo lines in your SRT/SUP files but you would still not want the English crawl text in your subtitles, because that’s still in the video. Unless you’ve got the German Krieg der Sterne video, in which case you want -eng-full. It’s a bit of a mess, but that’s what I get for trying to cover every possibility.

EDITED TO ADD:

For clarification on what the difference is between -compat files and normal files… if you run Windows, Notepad is a great artifact of primitive Unicode text technology. In Notepad, if you open a -full RTL file, it will look all messed up (primarily punctuation on the wrong side of the text). If you open the -compat file, it looks fine. But try that using some more modern Unicode text-handler (a browser, word processor, whatever), and the situation is exactly reversed.

A crazier example is if you open a -compat file in Notepad (which looks fine), and then copy and paste into a browser – the characters get all jumbled around in the paste operation, because they were never in the right order to begin with, Notepad just displayed the jumbled characters in a jumbled way that made them look like they were okay when they actually weren’t.

Argh! Unicode solved this problem decades ago!

Anyway, all of this seems a little academic until you consider that I have scripts that read the SRT files and render images based on that text, and I can’t afford to be messing around with scrambled text. And I copy the subtitles and paste them into Google translate all the time, to make sure I’m working on the right line, where, again, text scrambling is unhelpful.

Post
#1183557
Topic
Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo
Time

SilverWook said:

Mrebo said:

SilverWook said:

Well, in the event you do get in, start a rumor Obama prevented a proper release of the OOT. 😉

You better believe it!

If I could get the truth about UFOs revealed and the OOT released from the Library of Congress then I’d be a happy camper.

I’m a bit crestfallen Trumpy hasn’t bragged about us having crashed UFO tech and dead aliens in freezers over at Area 51. Unless they really do keep the President in the dark about such things ala Independance Day.

Give Alex Jones a few more minutes. He just needs to snort type a few more lines and that’s your headline news for the next news cycle.

Post
#1183552
Topic
Info: School me on rTorrent (or convince me to do something else)
Time

Anyone know if qbittorrent is Organ-compliant? They seem to have special client requirements there, and I chose rtorrent simply because I knew it was a compatible CLI Linux client. But if that part’s the same and there’s relevant feature differences, I could go for something else. Not looking to do magnet links or public trackers. Just an old-school .torrent file on a private tracker. Or chicken out and have someone else do it again, that’s also a strong contender.

Thanks for the tutorial by the way. I knew some of that, but it can’t hurt to assume I don’t know even the most basic things.

Post
#1183541
Topic
Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo
Time

Working for the White House does look good on one’s resume (more prestige than just getting a job somewhere because your were a friend of the owner’s family), and as a public servant you could do things like, whether you agreed with the administration’s decisions or not, you could make sure they were using good, accurate data upon which to base those decisions, etc.

At least that’s how it used to work.

Now… wear a wire. Not to convict anyone, but to ensure you don’t take the fall.

Post
#1183472
Topic
Politics 2: Electric Boogaloo
Time

Mrebo said:

I’m no engineer, but somebody made a huge mistake.

At least six people were injured Thursday afternoon when a pedestrian bridge at Florida International University collapsed onto eight lanes of road traffic and police believe multiple people have died.

The bridge was installed just last week. During the ceremony, FIU President Mark Rosenberg said, “FIU is about building bridges and student safety. This project accomplishes our mission beautifully.”

It’s easier to get the low-bid contracts when you cut corners.

Post
#1183251
Topic
The Place to Go for Emotional Support
Time

I wouldn’t know anyone here from a stranger if I met them in real life, and maybe I even have. We all spend more time stewing in our own shit than thinking about other people’s shit, and that’s just the human condition, not selfishness. Nevertheless, Possessed, I would encourage you to stick with this existence. This tiny corner of the world that hardly anyone knows or cares about would be emptier without you. You would be missed. By a bunch of strangers, perhaps, but missed nonetheless.

Post
#1183234
Topic
Religion
Time

Mrebo said:

Does this go here or…?

Reminds me a bit of doubleofive’s post here which I can’t link directly because I can’t figure out how to do that anymore unless the post has been edited.

http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/General-Star-Wars-Random-Thoughts-Thread/id/12545/page/31

…from 2011. Can’t remember what I had for breakfast half the time but I remember that post.