Threadjacking!

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

Ah, Zuckerberg's presentation isn't sinisiter or alien, it's just the kind of gaping void of charisma you'd expect from a gormless nerd.

If it makes you feel any better: Facebook owner Meta sees biggest ever stock market loss

TL;DR: Last Thursday, Facebook saw it's first ever decline in active users, MetA lost $230 billion, and wee Mark lost $31 billion of his own personal fortune. Worse still, no one has started a GoFundMe for him.

My interpretation of why, in order of significance, is as follows:

1: Apple introduced new tech that prevents Facebook or any other social media apps from tracking you. This is the probably the real reason, the most reasonable explanation. The rest of this is me speculating

(b) Nobody wants the Meatverse [sic]*. mETa have banked a lot on VR, they released new Oculus headset at a surprisingly low price-point, hoping it will be a loss-leader. But VR headsets are nowhere near the point where they will replace screens. They're an oddity, a toy for hobbyists with big disposable incomes. People are addicted to screens, why try to ween them off? Nobody really wants VR in its current form, but MEtA's hubris just assumes that's the same as 18 years ago when no-one wanted Facebook, which brings me to my next, least provable, point.

[iii]Nobody wants Facebook anymore. When it started, nobody knew they wanted Facebook, but when they saw, it seemed great. It was like a phonebook/roledex that updated itself in real time. With pictures! It was a way to keep in touch with people that scheduling and/or geography and/or court orders may have prevented in the past. It was pretty cool in its early days. Until mass-adoption gave us a gross runaway mutant version of the Eternal September. I hardly need to go over everything Facebook has done wrong, but I often like to compare social media sites to real life social spaces like pubs. For all Facebooks claims to champion freeze peach, there's a name for pubs that don't have a problem letting Nazis in. I wouldn't go to a pub that turns a blind eye to its customers being harassed. I think during the pandemic, when people couldn't go to real bars, they realised they didn't want to hang around in Zuckerberg's virtual online Nazi bar.

FOUR- Tiktok

*not correcting that typo, it amuses me too much

[Funt Solo]

Linking in with the idea of bad behavior in online spaces, there was this article about women being harassed in the Meatverse*: Meta moves to tackle creepy behaviour in virtual reality


*Adopting.

[Funt Solo]

Getting us back on topic: The Olympic curling stones crafted in Scotland

[Proudhuff]

It's just been on the telly in the pub where I'm currently having a pint. How does one discover that one's talents lie in sliding teapots along while someone cleans the floor?

Its Scotland, not a lot else to do in winter.

[Funt Solo]

One-word gaffe invalidates thousands of US baptisms

TL;DR - the man doing the magic ceremony to indoctrinate thousands of babies into a belief system they have no knowledge of said the wrong magic words, so the magic didn't work, and now they're not proper humans.

[Dandontdare]

One-word gaffe invalidates thousands of US baptisms

TL;DR - the man doing the magic ceremony to indoctrinate thousands of babies into a belief system they have no knowledge of said the wrong magic words, so the magic didn't work, and now they're not proper humans.

It's okay, the Pope's 10th level he can just cast "infallible bull" and reverse the spell, especially if he has enough dead medieval wizard bones.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

If any of those babies had died, would they have been eternally damned to hell because of a clerical error?

[JayzusB.Christ]

I believe so. Not cool, Grud.

[Proudhuff]

This could be a bureaucratic nightmare, the queues in purgatory will be, retrospectively, massive.
If you get baptised again do you claim born again or clerical error, there isn't a tick box for that, back to the end of the line!

[Dandontdare]

It's just anti-catholic slander to say that those babies will go to Hell or Purgatory.

Unbaptized infants go to Limbo, a featureless grey plain where they wander until Judgment Day lamenting their separation from God. He's not a monster you know.

[JayzusB.Christ]

To be fair, they eventually bump into Grant Morrison and find out he's been writing them the whole time.

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

If it turns out tangible planes of reality only exist because of Grant Morrison's imagination, I would be OK with that, but it's also the most Grant Morrisony bullshit ever.

It's just anti-catholic slander ...

'Round these parts, that's just the local assembly's policy. My wife, who had considered becoming a nun*, pointed out the whole limbo thing to me when I raised this story with her.

*and regrets not doing it since marrying me....ZING

[The Legendary Shark]

Now it may confidently be said that, as the result of centuries of speculation on the subject, we ought to believe that these souls enjoy and will eternally enjoy a state of perfect natural happiness; and this is what Catholics usually mean when they speak of the limbus infantium, the "children's limbo."

So, that's all right, then...

:-/

[Tjm86]

I'm assuming that everyone knows that the largest religious group in the world is 'lapsed catholic'?

NB: as a member of that group and having read the bible cover to cover, there is no biblical basis to purgatory.  The old testament (Jews) did not believe in an afterlife, or at least there is no real reference to it.  Limited reference to be sure e.g. Sheol.

It is only in the New Testament that it starts to come up and even then only in a handful of places.

NBB: the Catholic Bible is not the same as the King James / Non-conformist Bible.  There are several books in both the Old and New Testament that do not appear in other Bibles.

Mind you, this is from someone who still holds to the Pascal gambit so who am I to speak?

[Funt Solo]

It's nearly always fascinating to watch organized religion rub up against (careful!) reality, and stumble around punch-drunk for a moment before slapping on a straight face and letting you know that they've figured it all out now for real - but this time it's definitely kosher (sic).

I assume that religion smells of mothballs.

(I wrote this prior to Tjm's post, so this is not a response.)