u/Shyam_Lama

This is about season 3 episode 4, "There's a Last Time for Everything".The central idea of this episode is that an original could take the place of her/his own clone, without the person who made the clone being aware of the switch: Trevor clones Aeon for the purpose of having a lifelike copy of her by his side, but what Trev doesn't know is that the real Aeon and her replica collude to switch places.

Interestingly (imo) this idea was very closely copied in a 2001 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, namely season 5 episode 18 titled "Intervention". In this episode, vampire Spike gets romantically and sexually involved with a "Buffybot" that he built for himself to gratify his desire for the real Buffy. Just like in the Aeon Flux episode, the original Buffy ultimately switches places with the replica without Spike being aware of it, and then confronts him about the perverseness of building a Buffybot.

Don't know about y'all, but imo this can hardly be a coincidence. Either the makers of Buffy watched Flux and ran with the idea, or alternatively the same makers were involved behind the scenes. (Or should I call them the e-makers?)

Anyway, that's just my two cents worth for today. Just thought some here might be interested in a little harmless trivia.

Does a BH have internal pressure? And if yes, is it possible for the pressure and gravity to arrive at a static equilibrium for some time? Perhaps even for a long time?

Black hole theory tends to employ examples involving individual particles or hypothetical observers' spaceships, and if we limit ourselves to such scenarios the idea of pressure inside the black hole is strange. But what if we imagine a black hole in the middle of an extremely large and homogenous gas cloud? Then we would have gas flowing into the black hole very evenly from all sides and evenly over time. Wouldn't that support the idea of the black hole possibly having internal pressure? I see no reason why the gas, after passing the event horizon, would suddenly be "without pressure". In fact the opposite seems more intuitive to me: as the gas gets compressed inside the BH, it's pressure would presumably rise. Can it rise to the point where it offsets the gravitational pull? Not near the singularity, it would seem, but how about a couple million miles away from it, but still inside the event horizon?

Would like to hear y'aller thoughts.

The No-Mind state is typically called "mushin" or "mushinjo" in Japanese. The Japanese/Chinese characters for "mushin" are 無心, but it's unclear to me what the character for "jo" is, or what the syllable even means.

Jinshu:

> Our body is the bodhi tree / And our mind a mirror bright. / Carefully we wipe them hour by hour / And let no dust alight.

Hui Neng:

> There is no bodhi tree, / Nor stand of a mirror bright. / Since all is void, / Where can dust alight?

The trouble with Hui Neng's poem is, of course, that from it immediately follows that no change is necessary or even possible.

Jinshu should've been the next patriarch.

PS. How does one break lines inside a quote, on Reddit, without interrupting the quote bar on the left? IIRC there used to be a long-quote mark-up for that but apparently that doesn't work anymore.

I met this lady today who had the name "Angelo" tattooed on her chest, in Chinese characters. The only character I recall now is 安, the first syllable. What characters would normally be used to transliterate the second and third syllables?

This morning I looked up the character 沶 in Pleco and discovered the strangest thing: the character is present in the dictionary, but apart from the pronunciation (yí) and stroke order, Pleco offers no information about it whatsoever. There is no translation into English, no mention that it is used as a name only, no mention that it is a "meaningless bound form" or a Korean "kyukyel", and no example words or sentences. Just nothing. It's basically an empty Pleco entry. Pretty weird imo.

I searched the web for the character, and interestingly only Chinese-language pages came up. No Wiktionary or anything like that. I tried reading some of the Chinese pages but they seemed to mostly offer example phrases containing the character rather than any explicit explanation of what the standalone meaning of the character is.

Anyone care to explain what it means?

"Like a sinner before the gates of Heaven, I'll come crawling on back to you."

I propose that this is the greatest line in all Meatloaf's oeuvre—insofar as I know it. The interesting thing is that the song itself doesn't clarify whether the crawling will lead through the gate into Heaven, or that—equally possible—having arrived at the gate of Heaven, Meatloaf does a 180° and crawls away from that gate in order to head back "to you".

The song leaves it ambiguous afaik, but I'll take my hint from the title of the follow-up album, which of course was titled "Back into Hell", not "Out of Hell and on to Heaven." Y'all catching my drift?

Do let me know what y'all think.

Meatloaf sings that he'll do anything for love, but he "won't do *that*". What is that one thing that he won't do? I don't think the lyrics make it clear, but maybe someone here has some idea?

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Original (i.e. your own) ideas preferred, btw, not "in this here YT vid one of the roadies who were with Meatloaf in '85 says he overhead a convo during which Meatloaf said that he thought of this line when he bumped his toe into a mic stand, yada yada yada." Please tell me what *you* think it means.

See title. I'm not looking for the answer that "once a photon has passed the event horizon it cannot escape because its velocity is insufficient to overcome the gravity pulling on it." That part is perfectly clear. My interest is rather to do with what happens to the photon when it falls inward toward the singularity. It's easy to find variegated write-up about what happens (or may happen) to baryonic matter (e.g. torn apart due to tidal forces, but ultimately extreme compression into the singularity) but I can't find any theory about what happens to photons. Surely even inside the event horizon they cannot be "sped up", nor torn apart, nor compressed or disintegrated into constituent parts the way protons, neutrons, and electrons can, right? So then what?

(B.Sc. Physics, so no toddler talk please.)

See title. I don't mean to ask if it's possible to pray to Ao inside any of the FG video games or tabletop campaigns—I'm pretty sure it isn't. Nope, this is more of a philosophical question as to whether such a thing would be possible in principle.

I'm aware of course that Ao is the Overgod who hardly—if ever—gets involved in the many thorny situations that mortals get themselves into (or are tricked into), and I'm also aware that mortals normally pray to the regular gods for assistance in such situations in order to improve their fate and get out of a nasty predicament. But the regular gods can also "lend a hand" when one isn't even asking for that, i.e. they can influence the individual's fate when he'd rather be left to his own devices, i.e. against his wishes.

What if one were tired of (indeed fed up) with these divine shenanigans? Could one then appeal to Ao directly, not to request a specific boon (because for that one should once again turn to the regular gods), but rather to request that He make the regular gods back the h*ll off and leave one in peace? Would such a thing be possible? Or is there no way for mortals to supplicate Ao directly? IMO the comments that Cyric makes in Throne of Bhaal suggest that Ao does sometimes take an interest in the fate of a mortal, so what I'm proposing doesn't seem altogether impossible.

Let me know what y'all think.

So... the timeline in the Divinity franchise is split up into AR (Anno Rivellonis, nice Latinicism) and AD, which of course (because of the latter) evokes the real-world BC vs. AD. I'm thinking both the in-game and real-world division might as well have been called BWWS vs SWBC:

• BWWS: Before We Were Screwed
• SWBC: Since We've Been Screwed

This, of course, is taken from the viewpoint of the common man, either in Rivellon or in the (so-called) real world.

What y'all say?

One of the practical difficulties of living in Portugal is that whenever you want a large decaf, you need to use the words "um abatanado descafeinado (e) cheio", or, alternatively "um abatanado cheio descafeinado". Which is better? That's my first question.

Either way it's 13-14 syllables. I have no trouble with the pronunciation, or with stringing these words together, but nevertheless I think it's an awkward mouthful.

Maybe the Portuguese can agree on an abbreviation? Maybe they already have and I don't know about it? That's my second question.

Thanks all.

Somewhere in his many videos about Divinity lore, Mortismal (the YouTuber) points out with some emphasis that Lucian was not the first Divine; that there had been an earlier one, albeit a long time before Lucian became the Divine.

Is there any lore or other information about who this previous Divine was? And was *he* the first? Or was there yet another one before him, and so on?

And most importantly: what *happened* to the previous Divine? and to his predecessors, if there were any?

(Note: I initially posted this thread with the title "Did Satan trick Jesus after all?", but this got insta-removed by the modbot because this sub requires that every thread title be phrased as a thesis not a question. I would've preferred for it to remain a question as it's somewhat less likely to cause offense that way, but alas I must comply with the rules if I want to post this at all. Anyway, here goes.)

Earlier today I replied in a thread about a "veil" in the backstory (aka "lore") of a particular computer game, an RPG. Here's the comment. I replied that it made me think of the veil that is rent when Jesus dies on the Cross, Matthew 27:51. While this may seem like a stretch, the association is actually not so strange because the game's backstory is full of religious concepts.

This got me thinking: did Jesus know that the veil would be rent? If not, are we to conclude that (some of) the consequences of the Crucifixion were. unintended? If so, that would put it up for debate whether or not Jesus fully understood what he was getting into by going to Jerusalem. Did he? If not—which means he was to some extent mistaken about what the ultimate consequences would be—howcome he was deceived?

When thinking this over, I was reminded of the final scene from the movie The Devil's Advocate that I recently watched again. In this film the protagonist (Kevin, played by Keanu Reeves) seems to escape the trap that the Devil has set for him by committing suicide at the last moment, which resets his life to the moment when he first came under the influence of the Devil. But the final twist is that in the last scene the Devil reappears under the guise of a journalist, and successfully tempts Kevin into giving an interview, thus once again bringing him under his influence. The Devil then grins into the camera and says (to the viewers): "Vanity, definitely my favorite sin."

Now, as we know, Jesus was tempted by the Devil when he spent 40 days in the desert, and he turned down the Devil's offers and challenges, thus defeating him—or so it seems. But right afterwards Jesus commences his ministry, and goes about telling prospective apostles that he will make them "fishers of men", performing miracles, and lecturing people about how to live life, and how belief in Him personally would save them from perdition—all of which has since long struck me as not being altogether free of vanity, precisely the sin that the Devil mentions at the end of the aforementioned movie as his favorite sin, presumably because it's the sin that allows him (the Devil) to bring a man under his influence.

So... while this may offend the sensibilities of staunch mainstream Christians, I can't help but wonder if perhaps, after Christ thought he had successfully rejected the Devil's temptations during his stint in the desert, fell for the subtler temptation of vanity after all and thus ended up doing the Devil's work without ever becoming conscious of it.

Which brings me back to the veil being rent. If we take the reasonable interpretation that the veil represents the separation between Heaven and Earth—as I argued in the other thread, see there—we may well ask whether it getting rent was that a good thing. Aren't Heaven and Earth supposed to remain separate? I suspect they should, and that therefore the rending of the veil wasn't exactly a good thing; and this makes me wonder if perhaps by submitting to Crucifixion Jesus brought something about that wasn't exactly beneficial for mankind.

If this notion causes offense, I understand, but I ask you in earnest to either bear with me, or, if you find the idea quite insufferable, to simply ignore this thread. For me, it's an open question. I am willing to listen to well-argued defenses of the traditional view that by submitting to Crucifixion Jesus did work the possibility of man's salvation. It would in a sense be a relief if someone restored me to this view. As things stand though, I'm not so sure.

Do comment.