Brass: Birmingham - the art quality and dark Victorian aesthetic of the board and cards are evocative of the early industrial revolution. This game also gets the “most improved” award, when compared to the original edition. The add-on iron clays are fantastic. The other components are very average though.

War of the Ring - beautifully painted over-sized cards

Pax Pamir: top notch, unique components and a cool cloth board, but the card design could be better.

Everdell for the card art, of course. They give you the feeling that there is a story behind the game.

Beyond the Sun. Just kidding. It’s a great game but the art is pretty much non-existent.

That dude is a mod now. He roams around news communities endlessly antagonizing any user who doesn’t toe his anti-Israel stance. That’s why he has a ridiculously high comment count.

Agreed, at least for some species like deer. I can’t think of too many others, though, especially with global warming. Most of the animals that thrive despite human encroachment, like coyotes, crows, and raccoons aren’t animals that we hunt.

Yes, there is that. I am personally against hunting because I figure wild animals are already under enough pressure from habitat destruction and climate change.

Hunting is largely cultural now and isn’t needed for sustenance except in very remote places. At the same time, I’m not sure if it is fair to classify a cultural practice as being for mere pleasure. It is a bit more complicated than that. Certainly, in Canada, indigenous peoples and the descendents of early settlers think so.

I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding your comment, but killing animals for pleasure alone is already largely illegal in Western countries. And that includes hunting. You aren’t allowed to just hunt an animal for fun and then leave it unharvested. It is hard to enforce, obviously. But you can definitely be charged for killing deer, moose, ducks, even fish, without a license and at least the intent to eat it. For example, you can’t kill a bear, cut off its paws or gall bladder, and then throw the carcass in the bush. You also can be charged for killing or treating an animal inhumanely or in a way that causes it distress. That theoretically applies to all animals, including pets, livestock, aquariums, wildlife, and even small animals like mice and bats.

I might quibble about the Catholic Church being the “original” church since Catholicism only came about after Theodosius I made Christianity the official religion of the Roman state in 380. You could argue that Catholicism started a bit earlier under Constantine I at the First Ccouncil of Nicaea in 325, which is when the Roman state started to consolidate the various early Christian beliefs under an official “catholic” orthodoxy. The word “catholic” literally means “including a wide variety of things”. The point being that there was already a wide variety of Christian sects prior to the Council of Nicaea.

The Protestant argument against Catholicism boils down to the belief that the Catholic Church is a corrupted Christianity, not that it is non-Christian. And there is some truth to that. The pre-Nicaean churches were free-wheeling spiritualists with a wide variety of beliefs, but that all changed when the Roman state decided to create an orthodox, singular religion under its control. Protestants argue that this adaptation of religious belief to the needs of maintaining state power is the original corruption of the Catholic Church.

Now, two key facts influenced the early history of Roman Catholicism:

1. The Roman state recognized the descendants of Caesar, the Emperors, as the Pontifex Maximus, or head priest, of the Roman state. They also required that everyone adhere to the cult of the Emperor. This was purely ritualistic and was meant as a bulwark to the power of the state.

2. The vast majority of the Empire’s citizens were pagan.

Because of #1, the Roman Emperor became the head of the newly formed Catholic Church, which was a unification of Church and State. This is called Caesaropapism, and is also why the Catholic Church retains a hierarchical structure to this day and its seat is still located in the heart of the Western Roman Empire. The Pope is the spiritual successor of the Western Roman Emperor.

Because of #2, Catholicism is highly ritualistic, like paganism, and early Catholicism adopted the worship of saints, which are basically small gods. Saint worship was the bridge between paganism and Christianity.

During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, Luther and others made the point that the union of state power with Christianity was a corruption of “original” pre-Catholic Christianity, which was more spiritually-oriented and valued personal conviction over state orthodoxy. Interestingly, the split between Protestantism and Catholicism in Europe also more or less follows the geographic outline of the Western Roman Empire, with southern Europe largely retaining Catholicism and northern Europe largely adopting Protestantism. This implies a political dimension to the schism, not just a religious one. England is the odd man out here because their response to the schism was to create the Church of England, which is basically Catholicism without the Pope, substituting the English monarch as the head of the Church and toning down the saint worship.

The great irony of any Protestant movement that craves Christo-fascist state power is that they are advocating to become the very evil they swore to destroy back in the 1500s.

Societal collapse wouldn’t be a return to a simpler life. There are too many of us and we are far too urbanized. Check out Haiti for an example of what societal collapse looks like.

No, just that one.

What’s got all y’all’s balls in a knot, youse folks?

folks, y’all, youse

The redneck trifecta!

But y’all makes you sound like an idiot.

Deoodorant is the gift you give to those around you. So, if someone needs deodorant so bad that they need to steal it…I’m thinking you should just let them have it.

The subject of the arguments is certainly politics (and war and religion), but the source of the arguments is strongly differing world views.

Despite what we’d like to believe about ourselves, humans are not well-adapted to being exposed to a wide variety of differing viewpoints. We evolved in small, racially and socially homogenous groups, for the most part. Up until the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of humanity lived and died within 30 miles of where they were born, and only had daily interaction with what was essentially an extended family.

Travel, mass immigration, and the Internet changed all that. Being exposed to such a diversity of opinion on a daily basis quite simply breaks our brains. It causes a tremendous amount of internal conflict and stress, for some more than others. That constant strain becomes more intense when there is war, such as in Gaza and Ukraine, or particularly divisive politics. There are obviously some extremely contentious elections coming up, including the US election, which has tremendous global implications. There are, no doubt, people on Lemmy right now for whom the result of the US election is a matter of life and death, and yet they aren’t US citizens and can’t vote.

We should all take a chill pill and try to be less confrontational and use less emotionally-charged language when it comes to hot button issues. The politics and news subs are an avalanche of charged words and phrases like genocide, fascist, apartheid, Nazi, racist, transphobic, anti-gay, religious zealot, and many others. Those are fighting words. Deserved or not, words like that not only reflect, but also create, a lot of emotional dissonance and stress, which lead to emotionally charged arguments.

I think that is still true. It isn’t that hard to immerse yourself in the free web. There is a ton of high quality and user-friendly FOSS software these days, much more than in the old days. I actually think we are living in a golden age of FOSS software right now. Other than games, I don’t have much need for commercial software anymore.

The same is true of information. There is a spectacular amount of free information available online now compared to 30 years ago. You can leaen to fix damn near anything nowadays just by watching free YouTube videos. Not to mention high quality, well-produced free videos, free podcasts, free databases and reference materials, journalism, etc. about any subject you can think from history to computer science, math, biology, literature… the list is endless. It wasn’t like that 30 years ago, that’s for sure.

Even on the commercial side, $15 a month for my whole family to access almost any music, anywhere, anytime? Shit, I used to pay $15 for one CD and the only way to get music on the internet was to pirate it! Cheap, high quality, comprehensive music catalogs availabe everywhere at the touch of a button is what we used to dream about and now it is a reality. And video? I remember the first video I ever watched on the internet. It was a tiny, grainy, 20 second video of a Shuttle launch being streamed over the internet… and we sat in awe with our mouths hanging open watching it over and over, lol.

That isn’t to say that the internet is perfect. The tracking nowadays really is horrendous. But, damn, it is much better now compared to the old days in terms of content.

If that’s what you want, it does exist. It is called Usenet and it predates the world wide web. There are still active discussion communities, though most of its bandwidth is used for file-sharing nowadays.

https://www.maketecheasier.com/best-usenet-newsgroups/

The EFF is great. Perhaps going a little bit off-topic, the EFF creates plug-ins, but I wonder why the EFF doesn’t create a privacy-based ecosystem similar to Proton?

A VPN provider or a system like Proton with encrypted mail, VPN, etc. is entirely based on trust and yet we trust our privacy almost entirely to for-profit corporations, which are inherently untrustworthy over the long haul. It would be cool if a non-profit with a long history of defending privacy, like the EFF, developed such a system. Mozilla seems to be moving in that direction, but it seems like a good fit for EFF too.

Phone charger cords.

Well, I’m a Windows user who just installed Linux Mint and spent a day setting up the free software media streaming server stack. It was a fun project, and it is impressive how well the many parts work together.

So, I’m just here to say THANK YOU to all of the FOSS developers out there. I am truly amazed at the incredible work you do!

Probably true. And as soon as I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch, and MASH become the most popular downloads, you’ll have a great point.

Also, to be clear, I’m not against piracy. I subscribe to Gaben’s view that piracy is largely caused by poor service. Its one of the few ways that average consumers can fight back against corporate greed.

Online piracy is about getting free stuff while not having to face any consequences or look any “victim” in the eye. Getting free stuff is pretty rational at an individual level, even if it requires a certain level of willful moral blindness.

Same with vegetarianism. Meat is delicious and satisfying, even though we know eating a high-meat diet is bad for the Earth. It is perfectly rational for an individual to want to eat meat, but most of us don’t want to kill the cow or think about the environmental costs, so we put that part aside so we can continue to eat succulent steaks.

Few things in life are 100% free of any potentially negative consequence. The ability to compartmentalize and hold disparate views is a necessary evolutionary adaptation to having a large brain. Otherwise, you would be paralyzed by indecision over the short- and long-term consequences of our actions.