Trans flag tiling colors in the background 🏳️‍⚧️

Surely that second building is AI generated or something right? Surely physics would not allow such a monstrosity, nor would any city approve it… right?

Sehn-tar, because I am American and that’s how I learned to say it. How am I meant to justify a common pronunciation?

Obviously it was god’s plan for them to pray for that specific outcome!

Which, again, negates free will, and also means their prayer didn’t do a damn thing to change the outcome of things.

Honestly the whole god’s plan thing invalidates sin, since sinning must have been part of god’s plan.

Don’t worry, you were always going to sin and didn’t have a choice in the matter, but you are still going to be punished for eternity for it.

It gets better. “God’s Plan” and free will are incompatible, yes. But also, Christians love to pray for stuff. “Make mama get better”, “Let the Cowboys win”, “Get me the job I want”, etc. And they LOVE to say that “prayer works”. But at no point do they consider the implications of that notion, that praying for things changes the outcomes of the world.

A) Anything, prayer or otherwise, that can change the trajectory of events is, like free will, wholly incompatible with the notion that the universe is following in lockstep with “God’s Plan”.

B) If absolutely anything would be part of God’s Plan, according the Christian faith, it would be the birth and death of every human. This is directly incompatible with prayer saving someone’s life.

C) Changing the outcome of any choice a person is going to make (such as hiring decisions), is also wholly incompatible with free will.

D) The very notion of prayer causing change places human agency over God’s will. Yes, presumably, God could choose whether for not to grant a prayer. However, if he changes his prescribed outcomes based on your prayer, then that means either that he decided your idea was better (which seems odd for an all-knowing being) or decided to capitulate to you for some reason. Either way, you hold sway over your almighty god’s will for the universe. This thought is SUUUPER narcissistic to believe in.

E) Other people’s prayer holds sway over you. If your prayer can cause God to change the minds of others, then their prayers can likewise cause God to change your mind in turn. Neither of you then has free will. Moreover, it is not just God, ultimately, that can negate your free will, but any other Christian that prays for it. That’s troubling, to say the least.

F) Bad things, things unjustified by karmic justice, things unrelated to human free will, happen all the time. Things like natural disasters, disease, animal attacks, genetic accidents, etc. Those things happen to good people, Godly people, innocents, infants, the unborn. People pray for these things not to happen. “God, Protect them”, “Bless them with your Grace”, “Watch over them”. Yet they still happen. If prayers works, unless God decides to not answer them, then God must have decided to ignore those prayers. Prayer working is, itself, incompatible with the idea that there is a holy plan that must be followed, so that is not a justification for choosing to ignore those prayers and allow such things to happen. That means God could have stopped it and did not. God is directly responsible for these evils. There is no way around that.

On that happy note, enjoy your Sunday service guys!

I’m a software/data engineer, so for work I obviously use a computer all the time. I also have a very nice personal computer but it doesn’t get as much use anymore as it used to. I play the occasional game on it, use it for tracking our budget/finances and stuff once a month, manage my plex server, and do the occasional random task on it that requires things like typing or photo editing. But it’s not been getting a lot of attention since I finished school, even less since having my daughter. Also I have automated a lot of my tasks so that I don’t need to manage it as much.

My phone is my main device for most of my entertainment, web surfing, news reading, banking, etc. plus it keeps my todos/shopping lists, my wife and I’s shared calendar, my alarms, digital coupons for groceries, GPS… all of my regular day to day task helpers. Not to mention is takes and stores my photos, allows me to call and text people, and gives me mobile access to my cloud files and services. It’s definitely my primary device.

But I still love my desktop and wish I had more time to do my own work on it.

Global science community once again held back by shitty xenophobic governments.

As a data engineer, testing with production loads is critical to performance checking, as well as finding edge cases where your assumptions about what can be expected in the data are curb stomped and send you back to the drawing board to cry and think about what you’ve done.

Spock on a Cock?

Vulcan on a Hulk Hen?

A Star Trekker on a big pecker?

Resting scowl and a giant fowl?

Half breed and an avian steed?

S’Chn T’Gai on a mount that can’t fly?

Serving multiple data streams

200: “I gotchu, bro. Here you go. Have a good day.”

401: “You’re not on the list. Get lost.”

402: “Pay me or get lost.”

403: “Everyone get lost.”

404: “You are lost.”

500: “Ooopsss.”

501: “Knew I forgot something…”

504: “I can’t do this shit all day.”