@kviiri Disclaimer: I didn't watch the video from the Game Theorist, nor I am that interested in doing so. But I will say that cherry picking is indeed a common strategy for many Youtubers - they need to make video, and what's best than a flashy tittle about a mostly made up story?

I mean, I could play the game too.

> The third angel sounded, and a great star fell from heaven, burning like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of waters. 11 The name of the star is called Wormwood; and a third of the waters became wormwood, and many men died from the waters, because they were made bitter

something that spreads corruption?

Ok, easy peasy. Terraria hard mode is based on religion too. The corruption/crimson spreads and poison things.

The main character is obviously evil, because they sacrifice the Guide to enter Hard Mode.

The guide voodoo doll is thrown into the sea of lava at the bottom of the world - must be hell. And I think the Guide respaws later, so there is resurrection too.

Now, let me see if any of the random names the guide may get fits my narrative.... :P

Obviously, I am bringing this to extreme extends, but I do think that sometime people love to see themes that aren't there for the sake of making videos and getting more subscribers/views.

I mean....

Yay!!! Wily is clearly the good guy!!!

Despite being the masterminds behind every game in the series, from the original one to X, to Zero, to ZX....

controversial thumbnail not backed up by the actual video content

not something unheard off - many Youtubers love to make videos (especially gameplay ones) with titles that imply events that never happen in the video.

"I use shortcut and win in Fall Guys" -> they don't even win the race, and there is no shortcut.

YouTube thumbnails are a refined form of clickbait

@Derpy I think the theory goes beyond individual tubers and has been around since the game's release, roughly

But it doesn't really matter

@kviiri Oh, yes, I didn't mean they were the first to make those claims, only that it is easy to use weird claims to make videos

And of course, the Bible has inspired countless adaptations and references of its events in art and pop-culture, many of those spawning countless adaptations of their own... so it's ultimately not very telling if a work has a touch of Biblical parallels to it.

@kviiri True, but then you get people claiming Secret of Mana is based on King Arthur because one of the forms of the sword is called "Excalibur"

@Derpy one of my favorite memes from alt-history works I'm following – Kaiserreich and The New Order in particular – is to scream "OMG IT'S A <name of work> REFERENCE!" whenever one of the relatively obscure IRL people prominently featured in these works appears in some real-world context

I'm also fond of people trying to be all smart about Biblical references but acting like "born of a virgin and came back from the dead" wasn't a common enough claim to be boring to the Romans of the period.

Like "yeah, and so's the other three cults I met this morning."

haha, yep :D

@BESW Wait, I though Romans were more into the "born from Zeus and some random woman, hated by the rest of the pantheon" :P

Nah, the Romans of that period treated secret god cults like hashtags on Twitter.

Can't remember which novel it was, but one of the books I read – probably by Edward Rutherfurd – had a segment regarding the cult of Mithras and I found that interesting

VERY syncretic, they didn't really care about tying it into the "traditional" pantheon. So long as you weren't trying to discredit the emperor nobody cared.

Mithraism was one of the bigger cults of the time, yeah.

It's derived from Zoroastrianism.

Oh, i didn't know that

They also had a cult for an adaptation of Isis, and all of these "mystery cults" were co-existing and non-competing with the state religion (the emperor's divinity), whatever "ethnic" religion the locals preserved, and the religions of the philosophers.

It was a very different way of thinking about religion and faith than we tend to have now through our cultural lens of exclusive monotheism.

Heh, the general exclusive monotheist understanding of religion breaks even with the relatively mainstream faith of Judaism

not that most people really understand Judaism enough to see that

Iz troo

I recall trying to explain the concept of shabbos goy to my ex-SO's aunt, when something related came up in a TV documentary

"That's violating the rules isn't it! You can't just have someone break the rule for you can you?"

I couldn't get the point through, despite the effort

@kviiri Somehow unrelated, but at least you get actual documentaries. I have to live with things like "Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives"

Yay for docufiction still being presented as actual documentaries

@kviiri 'Drunk people should not drive; if you are drunk, hire a driver' seems like a perfectly secular counterexample (i.e. an example where the rule applies to one person but not to another, and hiring another to do the action is seen as perfectly acceptable, and not a 'break' of the rules overall).

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica ??? the driver is not drunk, so why is the driver violating any rule?

@Derpy Exactly.

The drunk client is not violating any rule because it is the sober driver who is behind the wheel.

Then I don't think I get the relation. Wouldn't the thing be more of a "My faith/religion doesn't allow me to kill people, so I will just hire a killer instead to dispatch my enemies"?

@Derpy But that's a very different kind of rule than 'members of the religion should take a day off, defined thus-and-thus, on this day', isn't it?

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica oh, that is what shabbos goy is about? Yep, makes sense then, probably should just have googled it

Put another way, from a different assortment of religions: if priests are prohibited from touching dead bodies, that doesn't mean that they can't ask underlings to move a body out of the temple, right?

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica ants, they will just teach ants to move the body out.

(sorry, this reminded me an old tale about a bridge built with help from the devil in exchange for the soul of the first living creature that would cross it. And then the devil is tricked because the first living creature is a dog - which apparently either has no soul, or deserves to be sent to hell)

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica It is, but that's precisely the difference that is lost to many people.

The common Western everyday understanding of the religion wouldn't get the drunk driver example, because there's the underlying assumption that each religion represents what they believe to be universal moral law – to mirror the drunk driver parallel, a world where everyone's drunk, and some people just don't realize it.

There are secular parallels, though – many cultures have a non-religious ritual way of doing certain things and take great pride in doing their thing their way, without expecting, assuming or even wanting others to mimic their practice.

@kviiri Yeah, my faith makes distinctions between rules for us, and general principles that we think everybody could benefit from following. And some of the rules for us, we'd actually be upset if somebody tried to follow independent of the rest of the "belongingness" bits.

Aye, I've understood the same is true for Judaism. There's the Noachide law that applies to everyone, the halakha which applies to Jews only, and IIRC there's also a general prohibition that non-Jews shouldn't observe certain parts of the halakha

I'm not an expert on the subject though, I just like to read

There's also, I think, a tendency for modern Christian-saturated pop understanding of religious laws to be more on "don't" end than the "do" end.

Like, one of our "just for us" laws is monetary donation. If anybody else wants to give money, we direct them to public-facing organizations we've set up so that the money can't possibly go into the religious institutions themselves; instead it goes into stuff like education and welfare programs.

Which reminds me

CK3 has done simultaneously a great job at improving the hot mess of religious system that was in CK2 and introducing new problems of its own

This is a good review on an actual student of Islamic history, on what parts of the political and religious situation of the Islamic world CK3 gets right... and what parts it gets wrong.

There's more of the latter.

In particular, CK3 cuts down many large faiths into smaller, regional schools. It's particularly noticeable with Islam, where the massive Sunni juggernaut is now composed of Ashari, Mutazila, Muwalladi, etc.

@kviiri Haven't viewed (nor played any CK), but I bet the conclusion with these things amount to 'games/films/whatever sometimes have neat closeness to real life, but ultimately always have artistic license or the like'. Sort of how the Martian seemed like a neat reall-scientific sci-fi work, but had the iffy martian storm and the ironman sequence (and surely lots of other stuff).

No one's really expecting 100% accuracy.

I'm reminded of Kyle Kallgren's "Who gets to be a civilization" video essay from several years ago.

That was a good one

But yeah, so often the discussion around representation descends into mere factual accuracy, and that's almost never an actual primary concern, if it's a concern at all. Maybe people pivot to it because it's easier to have an "answer" when it's about factual accuracy? The more important concerns don't really work in a "find one solution and the problem is gone" framework.

Debates about factuality are easier to turn into arguments with winners and losers, which doesn't actually help anyone.

@kviiri I've been thinking about this, and I'm not so sure that's the case. For example, clerics are forbidden to marry in various Christian subgroups, but that doesn't mean that 'marriage bad' is a universal moral law.

That is, at least some religious principles seem to be non-universal - largely those related to special religious status.

@vicky_molokh-unsilenceMonica People have a much better understanding of the law within a single religion.

The deal about universalism is the expectation that the religious law, in some cosmic sense, applies to everyone, not whether the law is conditional or not.

Since it was mentioned yesterday....

@Derpy It's an enchantment creature from theros!

@AncientSwordRage You mean the bear?

@Derpy yup!

@AncientSwordRage nope, just MLP writers thinking that Ursa Major must obviously be a big angry bear made of stars.

@Derpy I mean... it's obviously not an enchantment creature from theros

I'm just saying words

oh, I am just waiting for someone to recognize the original picture that was turned to ponies :P

::shrug::

@Derpy those characters are less recognisable to me

@Derpy I recognise Toriyama's art but not the characters

Lol

@Derpy if it's by game theory it's guaranteed worthless

so

[shrug]

wiley was bad, game theory just needs material

@Carcer That's the cover art of Chrono Trigger, but it's amusingly error-laden (w.r.t. actual gameplay)

The most glaring errors being that Marle (the spell-casting lady in the back) is wearing something rather unlike her in-game clothing (a rare case of a female video game protagonist being LESS revealing in cover art!) and using fire magic while her in-game spells are ice magic

That said, it does illustrate one of the cooler things about Chrono Trigger: combo techniques (where two or three characters combine their attacks into one larger move, such as one enchanting another's blade for an elemental strike)