This is a tough one, because Catholicism still has the legacy of claiming it is the sole source of salvation. This stance has somewhat lessened in the last 50 years, but only insofar as going from saying they are “certain everyone outside Catholicism will rot in hell” to instead saying that “it’s possible…

I can’t make excuses for this crime—it is horrible in every way, and he should have been convicted decades ago.

Don’t shoot the messenger here, but in Catholicism, it’s called the Seal of Confession, where a priest revealing the contents of a confession, no matter how serious, is considered a grave offense worthy of automatic excommunication.

Nah, it’s more like 47 years ago starting with the Nixon-era “Southern Strategy.” Absolutely everything that the GOP has done in this time started from there—it’s been about using culture wars, initially about race, then also about abortion, gays, guns, feminism and the transgendered, to distract from the fact that…

I’ve been getting a sneaky pop-up where after I click “disagree,” it wants you to enter your passcode where, in small print, it will then schedule an update to iOS 11 overnight unless you happen to notice what’s happening and click “not now” or something at the bottom of the screen instead of entering the passcode.…

I kind of wish we didn’t have adverbs in the first place, as a lot of languages get along just fine with adjectives serving in that role as well—but then some added clarity/nuance would probably end up lost along the way, and if there’s one thing English loves, it’s ten different ways to say essentially the same thing.

For Japanese, I think it’s not a question of how easy it is to start, but of how difficult it is to fully master. Despite katakana and hiragana, kanji is an integral part of the language, so you still have to memorize like one would in learning written Chinese, but you also have the extensive system of honorifics in…

Yet, language is an inherently lazy medium. Compared to Old English, for example, we’ve dropped grammatical gender and cases, lopped off syllables to words where we decided we could still be understood by saying less, and radically simplified verb conjugation where the only difference in most English present tense…

The funny thing is, the use of “literally” as an intensifier has a history that stretches back to the 18th century—that is, this isn’t even a new development. And the concept of a word that evolves into an opposite definition—an auto-antonym—is also nothing new.

Having replayed FF12 after FF15, I really wish they could have implemented some sort of modified gambit system for this game. Aside from Noctis, the other characters are overly weak and contribute relatively little to battles, and even then, there are many times where Noctis just sort of randomly flails around in the…

Honestly, if we ever reached a true “Dark Ages”-style apocalypse, where all money is no longer of value and electricity goes kaputt, Bitcoin and all other cryptocurrencies are likely to end up equally useless—a bunch of bits stored on hard drives are of little value when you don’t have the sophisticated infrastructure…

The Church of England, despite explicitly being founded as a vehicle for Henry VIII to get a divorce, is traditionally rather prickly about it, but especially for monarchs, as they are also the head of the church, so they’re expected to set a good moral example for everyone else. Of course, as society changes,…

It’s essentially not all that different than how party leaders are nominated in Canadian politics—you can be a popular figure with the public, but you’ve got to drum up that support with the party faithful and its machinery first. The most popular figures don’t always win Canadian leadership contests either. Sanders…

Yeah, the last hunt is Yiazmat. He’s unchanged, I believe, but he’s easier because of changes made to weapons (damage no longer capped at 9999, plus some added super-powerful weapons that didn’t exist in the original) and the new ability to speed up combat time significantly. HP is the same, though.

That one, Omega Mark XII, was lowered from 10 to 1 million from the original Japanese to North American PS2 release. There is no further change in the PS4 remaster. I’m not sure if another boss was altered along the way.

One of the most coveted sprite trophies of all was Yiazmat, one you could only get by defeating the boss of the same name. At over 50 million hit points that was no small task. I tried once and he killed me in under an hour (the fight takes several). Maybe this time I’ll finally beat him.

Honestly, my thought is that YouTube is just a bad medium for kids; it’s far too decentralized and reliant on algorithms. YouTube will fix it “this time,” and meanwhile those looking to exploit the system will just seek out the next loophole.

It’s theology—ultimately, any of this comes down to what they say it is.

It didn’t help that “Mad TV” had made an “iPad” joke way back in 2005, and people remembered. Nonetheless, that joke eventually ran its course, and people may similarly get used to the notch—or maybe Apple will change its design with the notch eventually being forgotten entirely.

I mean, glass half-empty/glass half-full. You’re right when you say that Trump still has an enthusiastic voter base, but he also narrowly won in a few key states because of a lack of enthusiasm on the Democratic side.