While Evangelicalism emerged out of Protestantism, it has diverged significantly. It often bears more in common with the Anabaptist tradition, characterized by a radical individualism, than with the historical streams of Presbyterianism, Anglicanism, or even Lutheranism. This fourth branch has developed specific traits that distinguish it from the historical Protestant heritage.

The point of this post is this: if you’re going to use “the game is Japanese” as the central point of your criticism you have to know what you’re talking about. If you can’t approach the criticism with class at least approach it with knowledge and insight.

So what happens when the millennials who grew up and explored this place like the pioneers they told they were realized that they have no real homestead but an irl and online apartment in the city, with no marriage or children to prove they made it or have something to show to themselves or others? That’s a bone-chilling question to ask.

Millennials came of age with an enormous existential burden on our shoulders. These factors (and more, please comment if you think of any others) each had a snowball effect, cumulating into something that has sapped the life out of my generation.

We’re entering the Choose Your Own Adventure era of the games industry, where the stability of the corporate ladder fades away. But in its place, there’s reason to hope that more flexible arrangements will start to emerge and become viable.

It’s all about attention span! And attention span is all about the phones.

To begin, I want to talk about a cybernetic framing of worldmaking that we will carry around as we proceed to visit topics such as the planetary and geoengineering into a construction of utopia.

American pop culture typically goes country when the White House goes Republican. But there’s a wrinkle this time around — a veritable renaissance has come for country music over the last decade, as Black, Hispanic, Indigenous and queer artists have staked a legitimate claim to the genre. In fact, they’re still collectively pushing to be included in a genre that wants their rhythm but not their blues.

Collect true fans one-by-one for long enough, and you’ll eventually end up in an artist-writer’s paradise, free of pigeonholes and the usual reindeer games. Do that, and you’ll be able to embark on crazy ventures that the book-a-week crowd could never pull off.

Integrating SOGS into PlayCanvas is a game-changer for web-based 3DGS: 🗜️ Massive File Size Reduction: We're talking serious compression! The church scene above, for example, was reduced from ~1GB to 55MB (a ~20x reduction).

“We have all been primed and conditioned to expect this to happen,” he continued. “We’ve been talking about creating artificial life and fantasizing about it since ancient times, and it’s like we could become gods ourselves, creating a new life form. That’s a very powerful metaphor that has persisted through fiction for 5,000 years. So, it goes back. Way back.”

Ultimately, Xi Jinping’s attempt to reenergize the state apparatus and to reinvigorate the Communist Party through anti-corruption drives, funding technological innovations and bringing party symbiology back into public life, has put the Reform Chinese state on a crash course with its own contradictions. The State is more energetic in both reform and ideological performance, even as a roaring private sector brings exploitation down on the heads of many of the fervent young Communists that the Xi administration has sought to cultivate and inspire. The ultimate question facing Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is whether the Party and the state can prevent […]

To escape stagnation—and thus slow the rise of the far right—Germany needs a policy approach that renews the economic model and generates broadly shared economic gains. Instead of the one-sided approach of the Merz government, Germany should be embarking on a real and balanced reform of the debt brake and European fiscal rules.

In Computer Power and Human Reason (1976), he recalled his secretary, who had watched him program ELIZA over many months, sitting down to test the system for the first time, typing in a few comments, then asking him to leave the room. ‘I knew of course that people form all sorts of emotional bonds to machines … to musical instruments, motorcycles and cars,’ Weizenbaum wrote. ‘What I had not realised is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.’

I worry that the existing tendency for divergent experiences depending on cultural capital (the range of symbols available to you, the fluency with which you articulate them etc) in which Claude 3.7 can literally do things for users who can write a lot in a specialised way which it can’t for users who lack these characteristics.

Most of us have watched too much Star Wars. If you have watched zero Star Wars, congratulations! You have watched a perfect amount of Star Wars.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

Jollimore, who has been teaching writing for more than two decades, is now convinced that the humanities, and writing in particular, are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket-weaving. (..) Williams, and other educators I spoke to, described AI’s takeover as a full-blown existential crisis.

Red-chip art may not need the traditional art world to keep growing. I’m not confident that the reverse is true.

Coming face to face with lionfish in the warming waters of the Aegean Sea, James Bridle traces the unfolding of geology, evolution, and empire that not only occasions this meeting, but binds us in relationship with this “invasive” species.