RicOlie_2

AntcuFaalb said:

What's your opinion on this, d_e? http://cesletter.com/Letter-to-a-CES-Director.pdf

I came across it on Reddit recently.

 Ender, could you elaborate on your thoughts about the following specific points outlined in the letter (or whatever it is) that AntcuFaalb linked to?:

• Why were there multiple, contradictory accounts of Joseph's first vision? That doesn't seem like the kind of thing one would forget enough to contradict oneself on (p. 23 in the PDF);
• There is, of course, the issue of Joseph translating Egyptian artifacts which were later translated yielding a completely different result. I believe you've explained this before in this thread, but if I recall correctly, you simply (I don't mean to imply that you're a simpleton here, just that you don't have complicated beliefs on the subject :)) believe that the Egyptian texts have a dual meaning, and I'm curious why you believe that (pp. 25-30);
• Joseph Smith was shown to be unreliable with his denial of his polygamy, so it seems quite possible, if not likely, that he was unreliable in general. If he got thirty-one witnesses to sign in testimony against Joseph's polygamical practices, should one consider the testimony of the witnesses to the golden plates any more reliable? If Joseph Smith was known to lie, and used his leadership to pressure numerous women and girls to marry him, while forbidding polygamy to all other Mormons, how can anything else he said and claimed be trusted ? (p. 34);
• Some of the witnesses were apparently unreliable (I forget what you wrote previously about the witnesses, so perhaps the others make up for the following): 

Martin Harris had mortgaged his farm to finance the Book of Mormon, and thus would not be an unbiased witness (and not to the golden plates themselves, but a cloth-covered object supposed to be the plates), not to mention that he had belonged to five other denominations previously, testifying to the truth of all of them at various times, and Mormonism wasn't the last (pp. 52-53);

David Whitmer later testified that he had been instructed by God to split off from the main LDS Church, so one must either pick and choose among his testimonies or join his sect (p. 54);

Oliver Cowdery has a stronger case, but he was still a scribe and co-founder of Mormonism, so he could have easily been in cahoots with Joseph Smith in fabricating the Book of Mormon (p. 55);

• James Strang split from the LDS Church, and though I don't know much about the history of that, it seems that most of the witnesses followed him. If they were duped by James, why not by Joseph (pp. 57-60)?;
• There exists no extant copy of the testimony of witnesses of the golden plates (in the oldest copy of it, the "signatures" are all written by the same hand), so there seems to be no conclusive evidence that the testimony was actually signed and agreed upon (p. 60);
• The Testimony of Three Witnesses, which included Martin Harris, stated that they had beheld the plates and the engravings thereon, yet Martin Harris stated multiple other times that he had only seen them when covered with a cloth, and also that he had seen them with a spiritual eye. All three of those are very different things, and he seems not to have remembered what he saw. It appears he was making things up, and though he never retracted his statements, as far as I am aware (and from what I understand, left Joseph's church for James'), so it seems quite plausible that all the eyewitnesses were making it up (pp. 60-61);
• On the witnesses never retracting their eyewitness statements, see page 60 (although I take issue with the fact that he says none of the Marian apparitions were true ;));
• The summary in the conclusion about the eyewitnesses is also something I'd like you to address, if you don't cover it in your answer to the above.

Take your time answering me, and don't feel like you have to answer me all at once. I expect that some things you have a ready answer or set of links for, but I can wait for anything you want to spend a bit more time explaining. If you already explained something earlier in the thread, and I've forgotten about it, then link me to your post to save you some time.

I look forward to your responses.

CatBus said:

Fatty Bolger, Tom Bombadil, the Barrow Downs, Scouring of the Shire, I was very pleased Jackson et al saw fit to cut all of these out. Let alone Tolkien's more overt royalism and racism.

 I agree that Tom Bombadil didn't belong in the movies, but the scouring of the Shire? I loved that part of the book.... I suppose it would have made the movie too long, and made the ending feel less bittersweet and more bitter. Frodo leaves the Shire quite a few years after returning to it in the book, which wouldn't have worked as well in the movie. Still...

generalfrevious said:

RicOlie_2 said:

I think the movies do a reasonably good job of it. At least a large amount of the material he's using to supplement the Hobbit movies is from other works of Tolkein, if not The Hobbit itself.

 Scouring of the shire.

I don't think mixing the Hobbit source material with other middle earth stories is exactly the best route to go in hindsight (LOTR and its appendices work better though). And isn't Evangeline Lilly's character in the Desolation of Smaug a completely made up person that never existed in Tolkien's books?

 True. Among my favourite chapters in The Lord of the Rings was the one about the scouring of the Shire, and I hated the addition of the girl elf falling in love with a dwarf and Legolas's interest in her. However, there wasn't a whole lot else I didn't like. The movie dragged a tad at times, but I didn't mind much. The book isn't much different, and I'm a book guy, not a movie guy, so I have no problem with long, slowly-paced movies.

"Spoiler Alert!" it says. "If you don't want to see it, stop reading!"

And it has the picture at the top of the page, just cropped a bit more and blurrier.

I don't like it. He looks far too much like Darth Revan, or a generic Sith Lord. I'm hoping for something a bit more original in the final film.

I think the movies do a reasonably good job of it. At least a large amount of the material he's using to supplement the Hobbit movies is from other works of Tolkein, if not The Hobbit itself.

But it didn't get lost, did it? We still have the gospels, which contain Jesus' words. The question is whether or not God would have allowed the truth to be corrupted, and let Christianity go off track for almost two millennia.

Matthew 16:18b provides a stronger case against the Mormon (and some Protestant) positions:

NASB: "[...]upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the netherworld [many translations have "hell"] shall not prevail against it."

While we're on that topic, why do so many Protestants condemn what the Catholic Church teaches on that subject if our beliefs on it are so darn similar? Not to mention that James summarizes the Catholic teaching exactly and we still get criticized for being "unbiblical."

I'm not directing that at any one person, and my question was mostly rhetorical, but it bugs me that so many of our differences are only imagined.

I think it sounds better, but it's hard to tell with my current audio equipment. I like the song itself, anyway.

Exactly. Text can be skimmed if one is short on time, but there isn't usually an option to speed up audio, and even if there is, people start sounding like Mickey Mouse when you use it.

I'm glad you noticed that, as I completely forgot about guarding the pleasure garden (luckily I can get it back under cover in one move). :P Hopefully my dad doesn't make a clever drop that I'm not expecting, or we could be in trouble again.

LOL, so true.

And when a real train loses control some how or other, the same thing goes as for an electric train.

B*12uv

check

Ender, do me the favour of dropping your pawn on 3xy when you have the chance. Unless I'm missing something, that should keep that nasty king out of your territory for now. Let me know if you see a whole in my defenses. I don't want to lose my bishop because of a silly oversight (or a non-silly oversight, for that matter).

R-14wx

Iron Man 3 falls far behind the other two Iron Man movies, in my opinion. And LOL at your response to Tobar. :)

darth_ender said:

By opposite corner, and maybe it's not the best term, but I mean the southeast corner, facing your dad in the northwest corner.  Start closing in on him from the opposite side so that he has less and less room to maneuver, that's my theory.

 Good, we're on the same page.

S-13xy

By "opposite corner" do you mean the one towards you? I'm planning to move my rook more into the open within the next few moves, and the bishop drop will follow.

P12wx

Yes. None of them were very good compared to yours. I think I saw one actual cover, but even then, it just copied the song as closely as possible, without any interpretation.

I'd pool my money for some nice headphones if it weren't for the fact that I'd never use them once I got back to Alberta. I'm hoping my remaining earbud stops working soon so I have an excuse to get a new pair... :P

Possessed said:

RicOlie_2 said:

If I understand the video description correctly, every track in the song is replaced with a new cover by you, whether done digitally or recorded. Is that correct?

 I'm not sure I understand your question correctly.  Are you asking whether I made the backing track from scratch or just used a template one I found and played over it?  If that's the question, the answer is I made the backing track from this one from scratch in a midi then used soundfonts to "bring it to life" so to speak.  In the video I'm only playing the guitar, but the bass and drums and keyboards are all "programmed" by me.  In the soundcloud files I play the guitars and the bass, and the drums and keyboards are programmed.  Sometimes by me,  sometimes with the help of midis I find on the net, but always spiced up by me.

I make the backing tracks from scratch sometimes, sometimes with the help of midis, but even in that case I still at least edit the midi, plus set the tone controls and instrument patches for the sound tone of it.

 Yup, that answers my question, thanks. There's definitely a bit more personal touch and interpretation in your cover than the others I listened to yesterday, which in this case is definitely a good thing.

I haven't seen enough movies to readily distinguish CGI from physical models, so the same goes for me as well.

You're giving TV's Frink a bad example, Tobar!

Who, my dad? He's not young.

*runs*

*returns after remembering his dad is sleeping and will be for a few hours yet*

It's still working for me.

Possessed said:

Which version, the video or the one with the layers?  The video was more of a novelty to prove I could actually play it.  I did videos of "Hades", "Follow the Reaper" and "Rust Never Sleeps" too.

 The version(s) you have on Soundcloud.

I forgot to ask: are all your covers covers of music by the same artist?

G-13rs