pachrist

I don't think many people rejected the conclusion outright, just the path of getting there. So much of the last season was totally nonsensical. Dothraki ride off into the darkness and get obliterated by zombies; next episode, they're back! Everyone forgets about the Iron Fleet. Jamie ditches a 7 season character arc in a second. Arya subverts expectations and undermines the existential threat in an instant. The all-seeing, all-knowing Bran serves no purpose except to have "the best story" somehow. Dany heel turns from saving the world to destroying it on a whim.

Most of Game of Thrones, books and show, is predicated on causality. Things happen for a reason. And they happen realistically, not necessarily in the way we want. It was a breathe of fresh air in the beginning. Honor isn't rewarded for honor's sake. Strength is a tool, but a slippery slope. Travel takes time. When that realism is thrown out to force plot, it undermines the entire show.

So it's not necessarily the ending that was bad, it was how it got there.

One of my favorite books is called Inherit the Stars.

Mankind is starting to reach out into the solar system, but finds a man on the moon entombed in a space suit, and he's been dead for 50,000 years.

It'd make a pretty good movie, 2 hours tops.

It does one of my favorite things, by strongly blending two genres: mystery, and sci-fi. A sci-fi show, movie, or book that's purely sci-fi is rarely good. Same goes for fantasy. Season 1 of Game of Thrones is good because it's primarily a mystery/drama story in a fantasy setting. A New Hope is great because it's a western, coming-of-age story in a sci-fi setting. Rebel Moon is garbage (for many reasons) because it's pure sci-fi schlock with no nuance.

There's a really bad birthday suit joke/pun here somewhere. Best to back away and avoid it.

Subway spent a long time and a lot of marketing money training their customers that a sandwich should cost $5 and taste fine. Not great, but fine. But then the doubled the cost and halved the quality. They spent years teaching customers to avoid the sandwich they now serve.

Little Caesars had a similar problem, but instead of doubling the price, they raised it $1. Cheap pizza for $5 is fine, and cheap pizza for $6 still feels fine.

Yeah, but we sure kept Saddam from nuking anyone with his many, many WMDs.

They're also a little out on it. Hell really relies on those NOAA metrics.

I have an Ashley reclining couch that I love. It's super comfy and is perfectly molded to cradle my ass.

But it's brown, so Vance might deport it instead? Or maybe because it's so suave and sensual, it's "one of the good ones?"

Poster shows the metric system giving Uncle Sam giant balls of steel?

Imperial emasculates.

Intel has been on the i3, i5, i7 naming scheme for a while though. I think the oldest ones are probably ~15 years old at this point.

We live in a world right now where people can do good things but don't, and they can also do evil things, but they don't. That's free will.

What I am saying that free will is an internal condition, it's yours. If an external force is placing hard limits and boundaries on your will, it fundamentally cannot be free. Best case, it's limited. Worst case, it's nonexistent.

The traditional definition of evil for many religions, particularly the Abrahamic ones, is anything that runs contrary to the laws/decrees of God is evil. Forced conformation to that, regardless of how it's done, cannot leave people with free will. God creates laws. God creates a law that forces compliance to his laws. By forcing me to choose to comply, there is no real choice (another paradox), and that fundamentally is not free.

I don't think that God in this case needs people to choose evil to punish them, but there are billions of people who think Hell is super real and probably want for both of us to burn there, and they'd probably disagree. I think it is an safer assumption to simply say if that people who make a choice, whether it's good or evil, are better in aggregate than people who can make no choice at all.

Yeah, probably would have been better to use dividing by 0 instead of 0=1 as the example, but the point still stands.

Yes/no isn't a valid answer to a paradox. Can God create a universe where there is freewill and there isn't freewill? Can God create a rock so large he can't lift it? Can he shit so big he can't flush it? All interesting, but in the end invalid questions. But shoehorning in a yes/no when the real answer is just undefined is incorrect.

It's good fun for an internet comment section, or irritating some youth group leader, but in the end not a useful question.