Lurker > adjl

Monopoman posted...

the challenge of SSF which I do on occasion in Path of Exile is also fun.

I generally ended up playing PoE mostly SSF (informally), just because I wasn't a fan of trading (and, specifically, the fact that gaining currency mostly required farming *and* the effort of pricing/selling the loot from that farming), and it's a perfectly functional and enjoyable game in that format, but the ever-present sense of missing out on a ton of really interesting builds because I hadn't obtained the rare gear needed to enable them really put a damper on the experience. That's not necessarily the wrong way to approach loot and builds, but I personally found it kind of frustrating at times.

That said, GGG really needs to get off the fence as far as trading goes (at least, they did the last time I played, though that was a few years ago and it may have changed). They've said outright that they don't want to do anything more efficient or accessible than PoETrade for trading because they don't want to ruin the game by making rare uniques too easy to get, but they're still designing the game around the assumption that players will trade for those uniques as needed and just not caring that the trading system is incredibly cumbersome and inconvenient. Either the game should be designed around trading and have a proper trading system/auction house in place, or it should be designed around playing mostly self-found and treating trading as a supplement to that. Trying to occupy some kind of middle ground between those two philosophies is just awkward.

Of course, I say this, but I still put a solid 500 hours in before drifting away. It's a great game, just held back by a loot philosophy that I feel puts too much emphasis on playing the economy instead of playing the game.

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Pikazard1 posted...

and Reeses peanut butter is the best peanut butter, on record

You can effectively make Reese's peanut butter by mixing icing sugar with any smooth peanut butter. It takes some trial and error to get the ratios right, but it's really quite easy to approximate it for yourself. Then you can put it in/on anything you want, rather than being constrained by Reese's candy.

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SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Sports are suppose to be a distraction from politics. Then sports became political.

You think they aren't still being used to distract from more significant political issues? Arguing over which league trans people belong in isn't exactly a major issue, it's just one that a lot of people feel strongly about, allowing politicians to score PR points with their base if they take the right side on it, which in turn leaves them free to make significantly more impactful changes elsewhere that people don't notice because they're too mad about trans people.

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Nichtcrawler X posted...

Politicians are allowed to change their mind, they have advisers and receive reports for a reason.

Whoa whoa whoa. Change their mind? What kind of commie nonsense is that? Everyone knows that once a politician states a position, that is the only opinion they are ever allowed to hold, no matter what new information they receive or what changes around them. Otherwise, they're just hypocrites and must be discredited with this information at every possible opportunity.
-Zeus, probably

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blu posted...

One great feature about the new format is the ability to selectively hide individual topics.

That's potentially helpful (though not something I've ever felt a need to have), but it doesn't make up for making the whole site look like a screenshot of a .txt file.

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In some ways, I liked that BL2 made target farming certain legendaries easier, and also that legendaries had more unique properties that made them build-defining, since it meant you had something to deliberately work toward for the sake of improving your character. On the other hand, though, that did mean fewer random legendary drops just for playing through the game, forcing specific farming instead of pretty regularly finding upgrades while going about your business. It made min/maxing less frustrating, but regular play became a bit less rewarding.

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Same.

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TaKun782 posted...

I see...with that being said, im a bit skeptical on the vaccine itself after hearing from people close to me ending up with blood clots.

You're about 1000 times more likely to get a blood clot every time you fly in a plane than from the AZ vaccine. It's a risk that's worth considering, but in practice you're very unlikely to encounter the effect and it's going to be far riskier to remain unvaccinated.

TaKun782 posted...

From what i dont seem to understand is that when someone is fully vacinated, why wear the mask at all if you are?

In truth, masks aren't really needed at that point. They help to stamp out the remaining risk of infection (vaccines are never 100% effective) and limit your ability to act as an asymptomatic carrier (it's pretty well established that being vaccinated reduces your risk of transmitting the virus, but it's not completely certain just how significant that reduction is), but the vaccine is doing all of the heavy lifting there and the mask is mostly just an extra precaution.

In practice, however, there's really no practical way to enforce "masks are required unless you're vaccinated." People will happily lie about being vaccinated to avoid having to wear a mask, and even if they don't, those responsible for enforcing the mandate are generally going to be less inclined to confront maskless individuals if there's a plausible excuse for not wearing the mask than if there isn't. Masks continue to be required not because they make a huge difference to vaccinated individuals' safety, but because relaxing those requirements would inevitably lead to increased transmission.

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Personally, I think I like Grim Dawn's loot philosophy better than PoE or Diablo 3's. With PoE, the lack of targeted farming and the preponderance of build-defining Uniques pretty much requires players to trade in order to be able to use many builds, which is a cumbersome system that ultimately limits build flexibility a lot in a game that has such massive potential for variety. Diablo 3 avoided that issue by having build-defining legendaries drop often enough that pretty much any build was accessible, but the sheer quantity of skill-specific bonuses offered by those legendaries (and particularly by set bonuses) pigeonholed those skills into being used in certain ways and ended up really only allowing a fairly limited number of different builds. Those builds also came together so quickly that there was rarely any room to farm for more meaningful upgrades than getting the same legendary with better stats, which is kind of boring.

Grim Dawn, on the other hand, has relatively few items that would be considered build-defining/enabling, and the majority of those are target farmable. That means there's a ton of build variety available just from guaranteed drops, but even so, there's still enough room to improve on those budget builds and/or enable more gear-dependent ones to make farming feel worthwhile. Some of those builds end up feeling a bit samey (often just different elemental flavours of similar skills, or sometimes even the same skill) after trying out enough of them, but ultimately, I think it's my favourite approach to loot of the three.

Of course, the other approach is to just eschew the idea of build-defining gear pieces in general so that's never an issue, but I'm less keen on that. Finding a piece of build-defining gear is exciting because it meaningfully changes the way you play. There's a fine line between offering that excitement and making it mandatory to get those drops in order to function (which D3 crosses), but when it's done right, I find it to be a much more interesting philosophy than having every gear piece just make the numbers get bigger.

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The only other game that's really captured that feel for me is Kid Icarus: Uprising. Brilliant game, that.

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Zeus posted...

As much as people bitched about Trump trying to "erase Obama's legacy," Biden has gone a lot further and faster in reversing Trump-era policies yet... not a peep!

Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, it's not about "erasing legacies" or any similar pointless attribution of glory to basic government work, and instead about doing good/bad things to the country? Nobody cares about those specific aspects of Obama's legacy for the sake of preserving a legacy, they care about it because they feel those were good changes and that undoing them is a step backwards. Similarly, reversing harmful Trump-era policies is felt to be a good thing, and the complete worthlessness of the concept of "Trump's legacy" means that legacy's preservation doesn't even factor into that value judgement.

It only looks hypocritical if you treat politics like cheering for your favourite football team. Pay any attention at all to the practical reality of the matter, and that impression falls apart immediately.

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Mead posted...

despite posting here for years we know nearly nothing about Zeus

I honestly don't even remember him posting here until relatively recently, despite having been here since 2011 or so. Dunno if he was lurking, or using an alt, or just not being a memorable poster until left-leaning centrism become a more popular political stance, but I have no recollection of anything before then.

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Jen0125 posted...

https://giphy.com/gifs/cardi-b-asia-what-was-the-reason-fGOjgWRzQkC2sHHnq7

I dunno. Probably a sex thing.

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Alternatively, Zeus permanently lives in a Disneyworld hotel and Sunny was visiting him. For reasons.

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SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

With the exception of government involvement, that's exactly what Mead asked for.

In response to "They will force it on people".

And, rather than providing evidence that anyone is considering, planning, or otherwise orchestrating such an outcome in such a manner that would support the conclusion that it's a real possibility (in the absence of being able to prove that it's actually happening), you stuck with being upset by baseless speculation and proving only the vaguest, most obvious point that you could possibly make, which is that some people exist who want people to eat less meat.

Generally speaking, if somebody asks you to prove a conclusion that can't be proven, the next best course of action is to provide the reasons you have for believing it, which should at least consist of evidence of any mandatory prerequisites for said conclusion. If your reasoning is as flimsy and baseless as it seems to be here, then you shouldn't expect anyone to take you seriously, and in fact should strongly reconsider why you believed in your conclusion in the first place.

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Yep. Currently plugged into the wall, but not the TV because the HDMI cord is in the Switch, but it can easily be hooked up if needed.

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thedeerzord posted...

I think you need to see a professional if you don't understand that I was kidding

Hyperbole or not, that's really not something that you should be finding upsetting at all.

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xjayguyx posted...

The Liberal "government" here in Canada wants this.. bill c-10 I believe it's called? They want regulation on what people can post / say on the internet. They only want their leftist propaganda on the internet, so ya there.

C-10 mostly amounts to applying the same regulations that are on Canadian TV to the Internet, handled by the CRTC. Fortunately, the CRTC is thoroughly useless in every way, so I wouldn't expect it to actually do much. Really, I'd be more concerned about telecoms trying to manipulate things than "leftist propaganda," given the CRTC's record of now exactly standing up to them.

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You want to kill yourself because of polyamory in a TV show? I think you should maybe be seeking some professional help with that one, not posting it on PotD.

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SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

And according to this logic no one would ever be concerned about maulings unless they witness one in progress.

How on earth are you getting that from "a picture of a bear is not proof that one needs to worry about being mauled"? I am not in any way suggesting that other evidence cannot be used to prove that risk. In fact, I explicitly said that other evidence can be used to prove that risk. Just not a mere picture of a bear. Similarly, a picture of a tumor in a lung is not proof that cigarettes cause lung cancer. The reams of data on that association, however, do prove it.

You're not being asked to prove that governments are currently forcing people to stop eating meat. You're being asked to prove that that is even a risk, which requires considerably more robust evidence than "some people are saying we should eat less meat." If you can't, then it's nothing more than baseless speculation. Heck, worse than baseless speculation, it's demonstrably false: The government currently heavily subsidizes the meat industry such that they're effectively funding people's carnivory. Taking away those subsidies would cut down meat consumption, but "I'm not paying for you to do this any more" cannot be construed as "I'm forcing you to stop this" because "forcing" is an active process, whereas "not paying" is a passive one. The government cannot simultaneously force and facilitate carnivory. Those are mutually exclusive philosophies.

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Metalsonic66 posted...

I c wut u did thar

Unintentionally, but I did notice it and opted to charge boldly ahead.

SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

I've noticed that people seem to have difficulty with analogies. It's rather troubling.

The problem isn't your analogy. It's your fundamental logical process. Showing somebody a picture of a bear does not prove that they are at risk of being mauled if they go camping in a given location. The mere existence of a bear is not the information that can lead somebody to that conclusion. Your analogy commits a blatant non sequitur fallacy, which in turn suggests the same fallacy in your belief that people are going to be forced to stop eating meat.

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SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Does the absence of a mauling taking place right this moment prove that bears are safe?

I think you need to take a step back and reevaluate your logical process, because the one you seem to be applying bears very little resemblance to the one used in the real world.

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I didn't feed them when I was still active. It's not like there was a meaningful penalty for starving them indefinitely.

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Prepare your shoes.

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Zeus posted...

And a lot of cops manage to deal with combative drunk and drugged out suspects without killing them (and far more times a day than nurses have to). In fact, this cop probably used the same technique many times in the past to safely subdue suspects. The fact that nobody died doesn't mean that subduing a violent individual doesn't have risk (or that the technique is even safe), it just means that the worst didn't happen that time. Not to mention that hospitals deal with far fewer unruly individuals than cops and, when a hospital does wind up killing somebody, it doesn't get the same attention that cops do

You alluded to an awful lot of quantitative data in this paragraph for somebody who provided no quantitative data to support it.

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Mead posted...

Am I supposed to be reading this to the tune of Baby Bottle Pop commercials?

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Cacciato posted...

I mean, departments do have dedicated traffic units. So maybe if funding was properly allocated or re-allocated then law enforcement could have dedicated assets for the other things you listed. Its not like you dont call 911 for those things anyway, they could make a determination and dispatch the appropriate response

Pretty much. This is the central thrust of the idea of defunding the police: Rather than responding to social problems by buying the police bigger hammers to solve problems that aren't actually nails, reallocate that funding to hire professionals that are actually trained to deal with the crisis at hand and dispatch them instead. Heck, that already happens with some vehicle violations: many cities contract out parking enforcement and other relatively minor vehicle-related issues so police can focus on what they're trained and equipped to do.

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SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

That's a bit like if I show you a picture of a bear to prove that they live in the woods, and you ask me to demonstrate that they exist by showing you a mauling in progress. Just because a bear isn't currently ripping apart your tent doesn't mean you should ignore the possibility when you go camping.

No, but you also aren't demonstrating the mauling risk simply by showing a picture of a bear. You're just showing a picture of a bear. Demonstrating the mauling risk entails providing information about bears' ability to maul humans, behavioural patterns that can lead to maulings, statistics regarding maulings... Merely showing a picture of the bear is pretty much meaningless.

Clench281 posted...

If consumers paid the true cost of meat, without government subsidies, there would be a lot more vegetarians in the world (perhaps me included).

How ironic that the party of small government that hates handouts so much is so desperate for the government to keep buying their steaks for them. And by ironic, I don't actually mean ironic, because that kind of hypocrisy is not remotely unexpected at this point. How ironic of me.

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DirtBasedSoap posted...

literally putting the liquids from an animals body inside of your own

disgusting

What if I told you

Your body is already full of animal liquids?

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This isn't the first "drunk girl offers cops a blowjob" topic Duckbear's made, and I still really wonder how he (or Dailymail, for that matter) thinks this qualifies as news.

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I mean, if nothing else, the farming is also some of the best in the genre and it's a thoroughly enjoyable game even outside of the writing, so you can always skip dialogue as much as possible while enjoying the gameplay.

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Nichtcrawler X posted...

Masks have always been intended for when the 1.5 meters cannot be guaranteed, as in indoors. Sure, some people wear masks outside, but most just maintain their distance outside.

Regions with particularly high case numbers have also been recommending outdoor masking as an added precaution. That's generally one of the first restrictions to go when case numbers start looking better, but when the danger is higher, every layer of protection helps.

blu posted...

Tattoos! Invent tattoo tech that lasts like 1 to 2 years. Like henna but longer.

That still won't stop people from making counterfeit ones to lie about being vaccinated, which is a major problem with any idea for vaccine verification.

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grimhilde00 posted...

Well I normally value your opinion. As I said, I'm not very far into it. Will keep playing. Might get better and the beginning just is very shoehorned..

It's also possible you just have less tolerance for generic anime tropes. I generally liked how everyone developed as I got to know them better. My dating strategy consisted of maxing out everyone's affection with the intent of seeing every scene everyone had to offer (which were all handled as random events after reaching a certain relationship level), but then I couldn't bring myself not to marry the one whose proposal cutscene (or at least, the cutscene that was a prerequisite for proposing, because I was a dude and that's just a limitation of the game) came up first because it was convincing enough that blowing it off just felt wrong. That said, I won't deny that the story and writing are very anime, and if that bugs you, I can understand being turned off of the game.

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Revelation34 posted...

There's no way we have the actual tech for flying cars yet.

Have? No. Could have, if there had been enough demand for them and a reasonable chance of there being any practical future in the concept? Absolutely. But there wasn't/isn't, so nobody's invested the R&D into making them.

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I'd say give them 2024 and push everyone else forward. 2022 is still up in the air (the pandemic situation will almost certainly be better by then, but whether or not it'll be good enough to start cramming tens of thousands of people from all over the world remains to be seen), and realistically, I don't see there being enough demand to justify having two sets of Olympics in one year anyway.

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The future of cinema is here.

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grimhilde00 posted...

problem with this is a bunch of antivax people are going to go around maskless claiming they're vaccinated

Fortunately, so long as they're outdoors and not in tight crowds, that's generally not going to be tremendously risky (and, for that matter, most anti-maskers already refuse to wear masks outdoors). The only activities they're actually greenlighting vaccinated people to go maskless for are small outdoor gatherings and eating outdoors at restaurants with friends. Everything else (including everything indoors, which is where mask enforcement is relevant), they either continue to recommend masks, or never recommended them in the first place.

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In all seriousness, going by the article, it seems like this one may have been more a matter of poor training and actual mistakes than the murderous malice seen with Floyd. Again, that's a reason to employ people that are trained in dealing with these situations instead of people that are really only trained to solve problems violently, but I don't think this one warrants murder charges (not based on this one article, anyway).

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SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

Mead asked for evidence of something that wasn't one of my assertions.

If not actually an assertion, it's all pretty core to the assertions you're trying to make. So far, the extent of your position seems to be "I know for sure there are people that want the world to eat less meat, and here are all the hypothetical ways they could do it that I wouldn't like and I'm upset about those but I also have no evidence that anyone's actually doing these hypothetical things." That's... not exactly substantial.

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Lokarin posted...

If you shoot someone who is falling from a building with a noose around their neck while on fire and will fall into a pool of robot sharks in lava... that's still murder (unless you only hit them in the foot or something)

Really, I'm fine with convicting people of murder if the person they were attempting to murder ends up dead in the immediate future, regardless of how easy it is to prove a causal link. They got what they were trying to make happen, so they should face the consequences for that success.

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Baardmeester posted...

He didn't murder a guy. The guy had an overdoses of multiple drugs and heart disease.

At this point, we've moved beyond boot-licking and into full on boot-blowjobs.

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Far-Queue posted...

I know a lot of nurses who deal with combative drunk and drugged out patients all the time, yet somehow manage not to kill them.

It's almost like employing trained professionals to handle mental health crises is a better idea than sending in somebody whose only meaningful qualification is a handgun. Who knew?

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Bulbasaur posted...

no one plays rune factory 4 for the dialogue

Sure they do. It's one of the best examples in the genre for the sheer volume and variety of dialogue you get from characters. I literally went more than an in-game year without seeing any daily dialogue repeated, which just made for such an organic, enjoyable experience. Was any of it particularly amazing storytelling? Not particularly (though no less so than anything else in the genre). But talking to everyone every day and developing everyone's relationship levels felt worthwhile for the simple purpose of developing a relationship with them and seeing how they grew as characters, rather than something that's done for the sake of completion. So often, the "talk to everyone every day" thing ends up just being another chore done for the promise of some future reward, like watering crops, but I felt that RF4 subverted that.

Then, on top of that, it's mechanically very solid, with plenty of content and thoroughly enjoyable combat/farming/crafting systems. Really, its only flaw is that the third story arc (and, with it, access to the endgame content) is locked behind a random event that isn't weighted any more heavily than any of the more minor random events, so it can take a while to show up if you're unlucky. Save scumming is an option to remedy that if you get impatient, but it's still just not the most sensible design choice (it would have been pretty easy to adjust its weighting so it still felt as organic as the rest of the random events, while preventing players from ever waiting too long).

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Mead posted...

There are now people that in their minds know for a fact that Biden and democrats want to take away the food they like to eat and make their life just f***ing suck.

See: Icoyar having several rounds of diarrhea because he was so stressed out about the mere possibility that Biden might win the election, let alone when he actually won. And then when these things don't actually come to pass, the GOP will take credit for preventing them and use that to galvanize their fanbase, despite the fact that there was nothing to prevent.

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SKARDAVNELNATE posted...

I'm not sure how relevant that is to proving any of my assertions.

You're not sure how relevant evidence of the things you're asserting is to proving any of your assertions? May I ask which definition you're using for the word "prove"?

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Mead posted...

What evidence do you have that has led you to believe that any Americans are going to be forced to eat insects

Obviously the only way they'll eat less meat is if they're too full from being force-fed all those bugs.

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Zeus posted...

Meanwhile a sizable portion of liberals actively disdain the economy and want to be rid of capitalism completely

Wanting to dismantle capitalism doesn't mean one doesn't care about the economy. Just that they feel that unchecked capitalism does more harm than good and that a less capitalistic economy would be better overall.

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Honestly, leaving the cart at the register isn't that bad, especially if it's a smaller place and that's actually the most convenient place to sanitize it before returning it to the pile. It's the people that leave them in the middle of doorways or lying around the parking lot that are real garbage.

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My first time through, those archers were nightmarish, but I don't think I've had a problem with them since.

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Communion during Advent always struck me as being odd for that reason. "We're preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus oh btw he dies lol."

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