A very well-reasoned answer, thank you!

Thanks. Good point!

I’m just a peon on mint.

Here’s a question: if you know the steak isn’t real, having copied only your memory of it from the matrix, but you know that the original had to have been based on the experience of killing a real animal, is the nonexistent steak vegan? What if all cows are already extinct, like in the world of the Matrix?

A great point, but I wonder if it would have reached that point if cypher had been given relaxation time and good experiences in the construct from the start.

So, as Cypher made clear, the main draw of the matrix was that he didn’t have to spend his entire life being miserable, with shit to eat, and nothing enjoyable to do. Soo… What about the constructs? If they could simulate people and sensory input with enough fidelity to “learn kungfu”, couldn’t they simulate the experience of a juicy steak? Why, when they weren’t actually spending their time outside the matrix doing much other than sitting in a spaceship, wouldn’t they just spend 6 hours a day in the construct? Wouldn’t that have given them all much more practice with breaking the construct of the matrix, and also let them have the nice stuff that the matrix offered, and also knowing that they were the masters of their own destinies? It seems like Morpheus was just a shitty manager, and Cypher was unfulfilled in his job.

Be forewarned: it’s definitively from the 1870s. They didn’t yet understand cellular respiration, there are a couple of seriously racist paragraphs (most notably one in which the article author states as a well known fact that the “hyperborean” people are all candle thieves, because supposedly they ate the candles. They didn’t yet understand the nature of dinosaurs, either. However, the chemistry experiments seem fun, if potentially deadly at times, including some terrifying instructions on how to make chlorine gas, capture it, combine it with hydrogen gas, seal the container, then expose it to light and watch it explode as the photosensitive reaction makes hydrochloric acid. Fun times. Anyway, it’s a very entertaining read, and there are six volumes of the stuff. I’ve only gone through the first thus far.

It would be like sticking your penis in pineapple juice. It contains digestive enzymes that are very similar to stomach acid. The reason that butterwort (another carnivorous plant) is called by that name is that you can use the plant’s dew to curdle milk. Just like how you can use acid or enzymes to cure food, it would cure your penis (in fact, volume I of the book “Science For All” from the 1870s has an entire chapter on carnivorous plants, and they give a fascinating description of how you can cure meat using sundew or butterwort dew) The curing (effectively cooking) would not occur very quickly (it’s not like it’s piranha solution), but it would happen, and that tingly, prickly feeling of eating a pineapple that you get on your lips and in your mouth when you eat a bunch of pineapple at once? That would happen to your penis, but it would happen faster, and burn more, because the penis is a very sensitive organ.

I agree with most of that, except for this: Theseus clearly didn’t give a flying fuck about angering the gods, because right after kidnapping Helen, he went into the underworld to try to kidnap Persephone, the wife of the Lord of the Dead. You can’t expect me to acknowledge that Theseus was devout enough to think a fever dream was a sign to abandon Ariadne and that she’d be fine, but not afraid enough of the gods to try to kidnap a goddess out from under the nose of the lord of hell.

I would say the title is like the name of the ship, since the title can’t change without the URL changing.

“Ship of Theseus”? It’s in reference to a ship which was used to row out to Delos every year for a ritual, but it was very specific that it had to be the same boat that Theseus used. So, as the pieces broke and had to be replaced, eventually every original plank, nail and line would have been replaced. After all of those replacements, which occurred one at a time over decades, is it still the same boat? If you collected all of the old replaced bits of the original boat, then put them together into a boat, would that be the original ship? At what point does it stop being the “ship of Theseus”?

If you’re talking about History repeating itself, the joke is that the wikipedia page is, itself, now a ship of Theseus. It has the same URL (we call it the same thing), but none of the original remains. Is it still the same article?

Also kidnapped Helen of Sparta when she was prepubescent so that he, already in his later years, could groom her and forcibly wed her. Also left the person who gave him the thread, who betrayed her entire family to save him, on an island in the middle of nowhere —as far as he was aware, left to die— without even giving her the decency of a goodbye, according to some sources. And no, don’t come back at me with “Dionysus told him to do it in a dream”. First, not in all sources, and second, do you make it a habit of immediately doing whatever your drunken night terror tells you to do, as long as you dreamed it, when the life of your paramour is on the line?

No, fuck Theseus. Should have been left to rot with his ass glued to a chair in hell.

Yes, silver nitrate. Also, she would have had that lesson painted on her face for at least a week.

The person asked the question, specifically, why Christians conflate the two, and whether it is true that they are always the same person. Notice that the question asks not just for a dogmatic response, but a comparative religious analysis. While it is true that “modern Christians treat them like the same person”, saying “they are the same person” doesn’t answer the question.

Literally ignore the other people. They clearly don’t know what they’re talking about, though anise is at least close. The name Lucifer originally referred to Venus, the morning star. It comes from Roman Latin, long before Christianity was a thing, and literally just means light-bringer. The Hebrew name for Venus is mentioned a single time in the bible, referencing a Babylonian king who was given the title. You can probably thank St. Jerome for replacing the Hebrew name for the planet with “Lucifer”, but I’m not certain on that one. I’m not a scholar of mediaeval church Latin. Never, not once in the bible, is Lucifer conflated with the devil. In fact, even the original Satan was called the Adversary not because he was YHWH’s adversary, but because he was effectively God’s District Attorney, prosecuting the wrongs of mortals. The entire conflation with Satan as evil happened between the recording of the Hebrew bible and the development of Christianity. Hence why Satan is pretty much only mentioned in the New Testament.

Pretty much every single thing modern Christians believe about the devil, or especially hell, was made up in the middle ages, and a hefty amount of that by Dante alone.

I recommend reading the wiki pages for both, since they’re interesting reads, but you should definitely check me on this. Don’t take my word for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer

Check their earliest histories.

This is an AI slop Spam Bot. Every single post it has made in the last two hours stops in the middle of a sentence, with each comment being at best sycophancy, and at worst a total non-sequitur. Everyone should report this spam from an undeclared bot account.

Actually, the grout does look more puke-green than it should.

Bold to assume the mint gives you a choice in whether you “keep” it.

I think they want fewer brambles, because blackberries are neither the most-voluminous nor the most-annoying part of the bush.

Should definitely be in the “penguins” zone.

*Royal Institution

Faraday’s lab was at the RI.