Holiness Gatekeeping

When people come into an Apostolic church for the first time, I’m pretty sure that we all agree that we should welcome them “as they are,” befriend them, listen to them, guide them to the altar, and answer questions about scripture. Right? That’s what Jesus did, when people came to Him. He didn’t wait to eat with sinners until they sanctified themselves with the temple priests. He didn’t withhold healing from people until they had worshipped God to His satisfaction. We’ve been taught for a long time that we should let God lead and guide them, and help them sort out their issues. It’s part of being disciples and making disciples.

But somewhere along the way, something changes. People in church make a decision that a person hasn’t made it as far as they should in their “walk,” by however long it’s been since they first turned their heart to the Lord, and then the people feel like they should start nagging them about spiritual matters in which they feel they’re not measuring up. And what else is there to talk about, except visible, outward things? So this journey of the spirit starts being judged by the path of the flesh. Someone doesn’t do enough of this, or does one too many of that, so we “correct” them.

Why do we do this? Is that really what God wants? Why don’t we just continue to love them, point them to the altar, and answer questions about scripture, all throughout their journey? At what point is it appropriate to step into God’s shoes and try to tell someone that they’re not being spiritual enough? If there are specific things that a person is doing that is causing disruption or harm to someone else (or to you), that’s a separate issue. Maybe I’m crazy, but I don’t think it’s ever our job to try to convict someone about behavior that is between them and God. It’s probably not going to work, anyway.

Lying

We Apostolic Pentecostals get real picky and choosy about what sins we get upset over. People have affairs, and we get them counseling, and try to restore them and their marriages. People get caught up in substance abuse, and we help them get into rehab and nurture them back to health. This is great! This is proper. This is the work of the Good Samaritan.

But if someone supposedly violates one of our standards of holiness? Out comes the whip; it’s time for a public flogging! Even if it’s just based on rumor or speculation, we feel the need to run them out of church on a rail! I mean, think of the children! We don’t want anyone getting the wrong impression that we approve of such things, do we?! Of course not! And, if we don’t overreact, the horror will spread! Ug. This is nonsense, and absolutely not in keeping with Christian charity, nor even with our previous attitude.

And then there’s the opposite of the self-righteous extreme. The sins we think just don’t count. What about lying? And I mean bald-faced, straight-up lying? Repeatedly? Unashamedly? Some people apparently think this is fine. I guess they think it’s acceptable as long as it’s done in service to a cause they believe to be righteous. But do they really think God cares what purpose they think it serves? And if you only hear about it from someone else, you think, “Nah, they can’t have said that. That would be ludicrous. No one would try to say that, would they?” And you wind up giving them the benefit of the doubt, and the lies continue, and worsen.

The “Right Amount” of Prayer

Pentecostal preachers like to tell stories about how they were counseling with someone, found out that they weren’t being very spiritual, and then point out that all the trouble in their life was because of this. I’ve heard this many times. The lesson is that, if you would just pray, your situation will improve. And, sure, we Christians will all nod and agree with that. That’s part of the basic premise of a relationship with God, right? But if we draw a line through those two points — first, that life is terrible if you don’t pray at all, and second, that life is “better” if you pray “more” — then there must be a third point on that graph at which you pray “enough” that you don’t have any more problems. Except, I don’t know anyone like that. Does anyone else know someone that doesn’t have any problems? If you do, please point me towards them, because I want to find out how much they pray. I want to know the amount of prayer it takes to not have any problems. I’d settle for how much it takes to just get me past the health problems I currently have. After almost 3 years, I still have no clue how much that is, and, if I’m being honest, I’m kind of tired of trying to figure that out.

My ESO DPS Journey

I started Elder Scrolls Online a few years ago. I read up, got some gear, tried to do “weaving” as I played, and thought I was getting somewhere. I mean, I could beat the “hard” overworld creatures, so I was good, right? Then I discovered the Combat Metrics mod, joined a guild, ran normal Sunspire (trying to farm that sweet, sweet False Gods gear), and saw that I was doing something like 8K total, and contributing 3% of the DPS, when my bogey was 12.

Depressed, I re-tooled, learned how to “hump a dummy,” worked with some kindly rando who helped me one night, at his house, to understand that I needed to slow down. I got my parse up to 25K, and then quit the game in disgust, because I concluded that I would never hit the magical 70K mark most guilds require for vet trials.

I quickly got pulled back into the game due to peer pressure from IRL friends who were still playing. So I worked on getting more meta gear. I leveled trees from which the build guides recommended using just one skill. I hoped that making my build exactly like the Alcast builds would magically get me those numbers. I managed to get up to 42K.

Then I watched some Youtuber parse in different setups, and demonstrate the effect of using purple and gold on your equipment, and how using various levels of CP affect the numbers. Through this, I finally came to the brutal understanding that 80% of hitting high DPS numbers in this game really is about skill, and not about the equipment. At this point, after all this time and effort, I was still only about half way to where I need to be to run vet trials, and I had no idea how to do any better.

I quit in disgust again.

Fast forward a couple years.

In a very, very long story I have yet to write about, I developed chronic pain (almost literally overnight) to the point of being pretty much home bound. I had started playing Fallout 76 on my Playstation 5, so I decided to try playing ESO on the console, too. This turned out to be pretty fun. I liked using a controller much better, despite the fact that running writs, surveys, and treasure maps are kind of a pain without mods. Additionally, I found that the economy on consoles is not “broken” like it is on PC. The gear you loot and sell actually means something there, meaning that you can buy significant things with it. Like, run some random dungeons, and you’ll have enough money to buy a perfect roe on console. On PC? You’ll need to run 100 of them. I decided to live with the tradeoffs. I decided to just go ahead and play for fun, to help pass the time, and deal with my mental situation.

I found a decent guild. I discovered “oakensorcs” and the new Arcanist class. I pulled the Oakensoul Ring together, did my best to copy a build, and found that I could do about 53K. I had some discussions on the forums and Reddit, and found out that my substitutions were costing me a lot, and again focused on making my build exactly like the build guides.

Along the way, I learned why my substitution of Knight Slayer for Storm Master — even though both are “heavy attack sets” — mattered. I learned about how heavy attacks deal damage per tick. I learned about setting off-balance and using Exploiter to take advantage of it. I get all the way up to 68K.

My friends hear that I’m playing ESO again. They want to play. So I move back to PC to play with them. I buy a whole new PC for the thing. Then, naturally, they quit playing.

Sigh.

I find a guild that only requires 65K for running vet trials. Yeah, that might be too low. We fail a lot, but the company is good, and I continue to pick up bits of non-perfected trial gear. Discover several others in the guild are in the same boat as me, in that we couldn’t do more than low-40’s before oakensorc and Velothi-based arcanist builds came along. (It’s curious to me that there’s a natural breakpoint around there, but I don’t know what it means.)

I continue to improve my gear. Get Pillar body in all divines. Sell some Crowns and buy Deadly Weapons, including one dagger, which I then reconstruct a mate for. Gold everything out, including the Slimecraw helm. Make sure all my enchants are correct. Learn that bloodthirsty on jewelry really is a must, though it’s “expensive” to remake them with that trait. Find that I’m reaching 83K now with my oakensorc. Learn that they nerfed oakensorcs such that 90K is probably the upper end of my possible output, and figure that crit farming is the difference, but I don’t want to fuss with it, and I am NOT changing my morph to Twilight Tormenter for the extra damage. Matriarch is just too good of a burst heal, which can also help someone else at the same time. My DPS still doesn’t hold a candle to the stamarc’s in the group, but I am leading the rest of the DPS’s in the runs, and I figure that’s enough to hold my head high.

I have one more skill morph I’m leveling, and then I will have literally all skills on this toon, so that I can put anything a build suggests in my rotation. Based on someone’s comment in guild comms, I try my own theory crafting, and swap Deadly for Undaunted Unweaver. Coincidentally, it’s clear why no one suggests to do this, even though it looks good on paper. 🙂

I’m finally starting to get some of the prominent buffs stuck in my head. Where am I getting major prophecy and sorcery? If I take the Ring of Oakensorc off, where do I make these up? Where am I getting crit percent, crit chance, and penetration? You know, these kinds of things. I build up a simple two-bar, two-pet, stam-based sorc build. I get some off-meta trial gear together. I find that I can parse 53K with actual weaving. I’m not sure that’s any better than a 42K from years ago, because of “DPS creep” in the game, but at least it’s a start.

I see people post parses from CMX on Reddit, and notice that they have near-millisecond weaving timing. Like, seriously, one dude’s weaving was 0.03 seconds. That’s 30 millisecond timing, over several hundred clicks, over the course of about 3-5-4 minutes. I don’t understand how this is possible without programmatic help. But even if they are using a script or some automatic button clicker, I know that these are the theoretical maximum numbers that should be possible, and that’s what I can aspire to with their setups.

Toxic people on the forums and the subreddit want to say that “anyone” can learn to parse 80-90K — even in non-set gear! — if they “want” to. Unfortunately, this assertion is trivially disproven by just trying to run pledges. I ran all 3 undaunted pledges yesterday, doing 40-50% of the damage AS THE TANK in all of them. (And, sure, I can parse 83K with my DPS build, but I don’t want to wait for randoms queuing as DPS.) “IF they want to” must be doing a lot of heavy lifting here, because it’s my experience that random DPS’s hardly ever do more than 10-15K, and no one can say, with a straight face, that their experience in random dungeons is materially different. It’s probably a 1-in-4 chance that we have the DPS to just breeze through. So either almost no one “wants to learn,” or it’s much harder to parse at vet-trial-level DPS numbers than these kinds of people want to admit. My money is on the latter.

There’s just nothing for it but practice. Lots and lots of practice. This is the part that gets elided in these discussions because there’s so much else going on that is concrete, and takes the focus, but the skill required to hit high DPS numbers is very real, and requires a LOT of practice. One of these days, I still want to be able to do 100K with a sweaty, 2-bar, complicated rotation. Some how, some way, some build. And I’m going to have to practice. A LOT.

The reality of the Danish fairytale

The point is that the Danes understand that they can’t both have a safe, open society where young children can be out alone at night, take the metro by themselves, and enjoy the play parks by themselves, if they also allow druggies, vagrants, beggars, and the mentally ill to roam the streets on their own accord. A strong civil society relies invariably on strong norms that are judiciously enforced by both customs and cops.

Source: The reality of the Danish fairytale

This article provides a counterpoint to the supposed utopia that American liberals like to reference in Denmark, and the compromises to liberty and income it incurs.

Jeffrey Epstein ‘victim’ Johanna Sjoberg claims predator told her ‘Clinton likes them young’ in bombshell newly-released court documents | Daily Mail Online

Johanna Sjoberg, who was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell when she was 20, told the lawyers in 2016 that Jeffrey Epstein told her ‘Clinton likes them young, referring to girls.’

Source: Jeffrey Epstein ‘victim’ Johanna Sjoberg claims predator told her ‘Clinton likes them young’ in bombshell newly-released court documents | Daily Mail Online

By the numbers:

  1. The UK press doing the job the US press won’t do.
  2. We knew about Bill from the flight logs. Lots of names show up on the list once or twice. Clearly, people were allowed to use the plane as a sort of manifest laundering exercise. Bill flew a lot.
  3. He denied everything. Who wouldn’t?
  4. So he’s finally, directly implicated. Who cares? Everyone knows that Bill Clinton is untouchable. He proved that with vigor in the 90’s.

Seems like a non-story, and from several points of view. If “the list” is “in the wind” now, where are the rest of the names?

Office of Public Affairs | Attorney General Merrick Garland Statement on the Agreement in Principle with Cummins to Settle Alleged Installation of Illegal Defeat Devices in Engines | United States Department of Justice

Engine manufacturer Cummins Inc. today disclosed that it has reached an agreement in principle with the United States and State of California to pay a $1.675 billion penalty to settle claims that it violated the Clean Air Act by installing emissions defeat devices on hundreds of thousands of engines.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland: … “As part of the agreement, the Justice Department will require Cummins to pay $1.675 billion, the largest civil penalty we have ever secured under the Clean Air Act, and the second largest environmental penalty ever secured.”

Source: Office of Public Affairs | Attorney General Merrick Garland Statement on the Agreement in Principle with Cummins to Settle Alleged Installation of Illegal Defeat Devices in Engines | United States Department of Justice

I’m not clear what Cummins has done, or what they even could have done. I work here, and I just can’t imagine anyone in this modern, enlightened environment doing anything like what Volkswagen did. Despite my initial dismissal of that case as most-likely being run by a few, well-placed, rogue elements, it turned out to be a surprisingly deep engineering effort that extended all the way up to one level below the boardroom. Maybe more facts will come to light, but, right now, this feels like a shakedown, by a liberal administration, of a company that makes a product that’s politically-unpopular with its voting base.

Starfield’s Steam rating falls to “mostly negative,” can Bethesda still save its RPG? | TechSpot

Starfield, an RPG that excited gamers for years before release with the promise of being Skyrim in space, is ending 2023 with its Steam Recent Reviews rating at Mostly Negative. Even the overall rating is Mixed, which will doubtlessly disappoint Bethesda and Todd Howard.

Source: Starfield’s Steam rating falls to “mostly negative,” can Bethesda still save its RPG? | TechSpot

I was definitely salty when Bethesda was bought by Microsoft. Like so many others, I’ve been a long time fan of Fallout and Elder Scrolls, and was really looking forward to this one. However, as a PS5 player, I realized that Starfield and TES VI would never be coming to Playstation.

I eventually bought a new PC for the Elder Scrolls Online, and tried the digital deluxe pre-release version of Starfield on Steam. I refunded it after 12 hours. While I could see all the criticisms people are talking about with regard to the game, my particular problem was that inventory management was the worst of any open-world game I’ve seen. After this amount of time, I had collected enough “stuff” to require me to start building bases to store them, so that I could eventually build the interesting items, and start working on ships.

I discovered, to my dismay, that unlimited storage containers do not exist, as there are in Skyrim and Fallout 4. Not only that, but it was going to take precious resources to build containers that were — at their largest — still pitifully small. By the time I realized what was happening, I only had enough resources to build a single-base’s limit of storage containers, and it barely made a dent in my inventory.

The whole thing came crashing down at once. The exercise of breaking down and storing my junk — which had become a very efficient and quick abstraction in Fallout 76 — was going to be many, many more hours of work to tame, and it would never not be a chore. To me, there was simply no excuse for this.

So not only do I now view Bethesda suspiciously (even though I continue to play ESO), but I also hate Microsoft from “back in the day,” because I’ve been a fan of Linux since the start, and I watched them buy up any and all competition in the 90’s, and then use the courts and their bought-and-paid for trade press to try to kill Linux.

And above all of this, I hate the trend towards nation-state corporations having more power than governments, and I hate the reduction in choice and increased price by such moves, all while they funnel all the profits from becoming more and more integrated straight to the top.

I’m not trying to start a fight with Windows and Xbox fans. I just say all of this to preface saying this, in response to this news:

And I hope they have a terrible time with The Elder Scrolls 6 now, whatever it will be called.

How Can Sharing a Screenshot from the PS5 Be this Frustrating?

I’m GenX. I’ve been programming since I was 10. I’ve been programming professionally for 30 years now. I live with computers and software all day, every day. I am comfortable in macOS, Windows, and Linux. I want to share a couple of screenshots from my PS5 to Reddit. Seems simple, right? So how do I get them off the console, and onto a computer?

  • I see that I no longer have the option to upload to Twitter, which I had done before. (Has Sony officially joined the ranks of the He-Man Musk Haters Club? Or did Musk kill the API that Sony was using? Both possibilities seem equally likely.)
  • I also have YouTube, Discord, and Twitch accounts linked on the console. I have no options for sharing to any of these services either. What is the point of even having the option of linking them!? What is this doing other than just giving Sony permission to go fishing through those accounts?
  • I use the only option I see to upload them to the PS “app.” What is this doing for me? They don’t seem to be available anywhere on the Playstation website.
  • I install the PS+ app on Windows. It sticks for some time, so I kill it, only to see that Windows has hidden the UAE thing, so I never saw it. I try to install it again. It works.
  • I “sign in” to the PS+ app. I answer a stupid catcha, despite having 2FA on my account. Nothing happens.
  • I log in again. NOW I see my account. But I don’t see any way to access my screenshots. It’s just an ad page for a bunch of games that Sony should understand by now that I’m not interested in.
  • Grasping at straws, I install “Share Factory.” I shouldn’t need another application, but the name suggests possibilities… Aaand it’s a basic editor. Again, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get this media off the console. The only “sharing” option I see is to friend groups on the console. For this, it’s titled “‘Share’ Factory?” Are they serious?
  • I finally notice that the mobile PS app has the ability to look at my screenshots, and download them, but I don’t want to download them to the mobile device’s photo bank. I don’t want to allow the PS app access to my photos. I want to pull them to the PC, where I can more easily post them to Reddit.
  • At the end of all of this, the only option seems to be to put a USB memory stick in the console, and transfer media via sneakernet to my PC, like it was the 90’s all over again. The bottom line is that this seems — incredibly — to be the least amount of hassle to do what I want.

A rant on Reddit — before it was removed — surprise, surprise — confirms I’m not missing anything. I’m 54 years old. I live with bad apps and software and services like this every day, and I get sick of it. I have no idea how regular people are dealing with all of this “technology.” It makes no sense to me, and I’ve literally grown up with it. How can this be the best “we” can do here? Why aren’t we living in the future yet?

44 Years Later

The nostalgia is strong with this. I loved being able to make forms with the glyphs on the Vic-20 and Commodore 64. These keycaps have been “out of print” for a long time, but Signature Plastics is now making them to order. I thought the grey colored accessory keys were going to be more of a lime green color, but that was too bold anyway, and I like this color better anyway. It’s much more similar to the color of the function keys on the original keyboards.