Jump to content

Mason Wheeler

Members
  • Posts

    747
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    2

Everything posted by Mason Wheeler

  1. One that I keep coming back to is 2 Nephi 9: 28-29. It's an important reminder to be humble, particularly in our day when we always hear people say that the Gospel and its principles can and must be discarded as outdated nonsense, and that we have a far better understanding today with all our science and technology. Because inevitably, if you wait long enough, you always see these "new and improved" ideas collapse and cause great suffering. Well, those of us who paid attention to the Gospel, and anchored our souls to the Lord (Hebrews 6: 19) to not continue to be "tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine" (Ephesians 4: 14) ended up avoiding all that suffering. I'll always remember, in the early 2000s, my stepfather's employer offered a new plan to invest their retirement savings in the stock market to help it grow more quickly. Everyone thought this was awesome and jumped on board... except for him. He thought back to President Hinckley's advice to get your houses in order and be cautious in temporal and financial matters, and he turned down the opportunity. He missed out on a few rip-roaring years in the stock market, but he also missed out on the 2008 crash that wiped out his coworkers' gains. In the end, the only one to profit was the one who listened to the Prophet!
  2. Has anyone asked Brandon this? "Will the eventual development of fingerprinting technology make it harder for kandra to impersonate somebody?" Unlike facial features, fingerprints cannot be inferred from bones, nor even from DNA. (We know this because identical twins have distinct fingerprints.) So unless a kandra gets a person's body while it's still fresh, and knows exactly what to look for, you'd expect that they'd have no idea how to recreate authentic fingerprints.
  3. 56:04: Argent: "I guess Hoid just... got better? " Have you read the ending scene of Dragonsteel Prime? While it's of dubious canonicity, it does show that Hoid's ability to "just get better" is for all intents and purposes limitless.
  4. It even works on higher-level leadership. I heard a talk in sacrament meeting a while back, it went something like this: If you met some random guy on a ski lift, would you ever suspect it's someone whose face you really should recognize, when they're not wearing a suit? But here he was, just out enjoying the slopes, some random guy on a ski lift like anyone else.
  5. When I was in high school, I was involved in a theatrical production authored by one of our high councilors, called Abinadi. (No points for guessing what it was about.) The role of Abinadi was played by a councilor in the stake presidency. One day during rehearsals, he was reading one of his lines, and someone in the scene with him made a joke, and he cracked up so hard it took him over a minute to stop laughing. Finally he took a few deep breaths and said "we're going to need to rewrite that line, because I'm never going to be able to say it with a straight face again." This really drove home to me that, underneath the mantle of authority, he was just a guy like anyone else. I've found church leaders a lot less intimidating ever since.
  6. Some Jasnah fanboys disagree, largely out of motivated reasoning, but it seems quite clear that Jasnah is a psychopath, of the charismatic, pro-social variety that is largely overrepresented among CEOs and politicians. There are plenty of reasons to believe this, but the most obvious one is the way her go-to solution to every problem is murder. For example: Don't like your brother's new wife? Hire an assassin to keep tabs on her, and don't so much as bat an eye when the assassin points out that assassins aren't hired just to keep tabs on someone. Thugs robbing people downtown? Use a Soulcaster to brutally slaughter them all. Trouble with the Fused? We should find some Heralds and kill them. Something fishy going on with Renarin's spren? Better murder him; it's the only way to be sure. She doesn't always go through with it, but it appears to always be the first obvious solution that pops into her head. Because she's a psychopath. Having her on the throne of Alethkar is horrifying.
  7. Is it unpopular? I haven't seen too much support expressed for this pairing that really seems to have come out of nowhere.
  8. Agreed. There I don't agree. While I'll admit it's been a while since I read them — last time I read anything Stormlight was when the last book came out — and it's possible there are scenes I'm forgetting, I do remember him shedding the evil clown persona and being far more sober and compassionate when talking with Shallan. Jasnah... it really depends on the scene, but he's generally a lot more serious when he's alone with her as well. With Kaladin, on the other hand...
  9. It's worth noting that, in the Stormlight Archive at least, this is him performing his job duties. The purpose of the King's Wit is to be an offensive jester who will humiliate people that the king needs humiliated, because it would be beneath the king's dignity to do so personally.
  10. We've got a lot of people in this thread who are from the central Utah area. For any such participants who enjoy uplifting entertainment, check out Heart + Voice. Rachel Ellingson, one of the founders of the group, is a childhood friend of mine, and they've got a new show coming up next month, put on for free at various local meetinghouses, about Alma the Younger and the Sons of Mosiah. Their previous shows have been really good, so I'm looking forward to this next one!
  11. Now, if all three letters were capitalized, I would immediately think of a Byte Order Mark, which is a painful, arcane detail programmers have to be aware of when dealing with Unicode text.
  12. Wow, I wonder what rating platypus leather would get? You may not know this, but standard cow leather is rated on its quality, and the biggest factor tends to be where the cows grew up. In lush, well-watered areas, cows have nice, soft, supple hides and often get rated A. Cows raised in harsh desert environments, on the other hand, have much poorer quality skin, and are commonly D-hide-rated!
  13. My first area on my mission, my companion was in the Branch Presidency. That's how I really knew I wasn't in Kansas anymore!
  14. The problem with the second one was that it set up a third movie that cannot deliver on the promises it made. And it doesn't feel like the writers ever even realized any of this.
  15. The first one only, please. The first Spider-Verse film was great, but the second one was really bad because the writers had no clue what they were doing, and all the cool style in the world can't save a poorly-written film.
  16. I liked it a lot. The Graphic Audio adaptation of Elantris, though, was abysmal, nowhere near their usual high standard of quality.
  17. The bigger issue is people cynically exploiting this, using minorities as a shield against well-deserved criticism. You make a bad product, you put a minority front-and-center as the face of it, and then when people point out that your bad product is bad, you deflect criticism by accusing the critics of being racist/sexist/whatever. I really hope the Cosmere never ends up in the hands of Disney, or any other producers who will engage in this sort of crap! Especially given the recurring "tell" that the best way to spot a Worldhopper is their ambiguous ethnicity.
×
×
  • Create New...