Steph and I went to Zeni after sailing to meet Jeremy there. We saw Abe and Karen when we got there and Karen is very pregnant. We didn’t get the combos like we had normally. Instead we got Yemizer Wat, Fava Beans, and Gomen Kitfo. Jeremy also got a seasoned beef. Steph got the honey wine.
Friday night and Saturday night this weekend we played a game called GeoGuessr. It is a really fun game where you are placed randomly somewhere in street view and you are supposed to figure out where by just moving around and looking at things. It is really difficult sometimes when you are placed in a random field, but when you are in the cities it isn’t too bad.
I never really thought about how terrible some of the things the people of God did before. I’d heard some jokes about it before but listening to these two books (part 1) of the Bible audiobook bring it out. Some of the terrible things are:
Giving away your wife so that you can get into the community, but telling everyone that she is your sister, then waiting for God to get angry and threaten to destroy the other person for their iniquity even when they didn’t know anything about it and taking a lot of their property as a reverse dowry of sorts. After all of this you go to another city and do it all over again. And then your descendant does it as well. The excuse given is that you were afraid they would kill you to steal your wife.
After one of the daughters of your people has pre-marital relations with boy from another group you demand that him and all of his people circumcise themselves and tell them that they can then marry your women. When they are all in huge pain from circumcising themselves you kill them all.
God sets a plague upon someone because they aren’t doing what God wants. God makes them not change their mind so that God can show his power, and sets another plague on the person. God then does this 4 more times before allowing the person to change their mind. God them decides that the person should change back so God can have him destroyed.
God makes a people unable to convert so that they can be destroyed for not believing.
God makes new life, then when it hasn’t fully met it’s potential, he decides to remove it all from the earth (earth sized abortion).
This is also rife with the joke I put in the book of Mormon. It is much worse in fact than the Book of Mormon in justifying anything a believer does to a non-believer because of the belief.
This book was very repetitive of the first two and I can’t tell if the guy likes telling the same stories over and over or if they repeated content between the books. I think it is the former. He references many of the good books and studies I’ve been listening to lately, like the marshmallow experiment from the willpower instinct. I really enjoy the points he has on mindfulness and not being attached to emotion, but I still can’t get behind the end goal. If the end goal is enlightenment and enlightenment is being fully detached from the world, then that is something that I don’t want. I want to be fully attached to the world, but in control of myself. I want to rule over my instinct, emotions, desires, and thoughts so that they don’t rule over me. To do this I think the practices of Buddhism are very spot on, but the end goals that we strive for diverge greatly.
Last night, Steph, Nick, Brian, Jeff, and Chris played Space Commander with me. It was an interesting game full of many minigames. These minigames were supposed to rotate between people, but we wanted to get used to the game and chose to not do that. The game was very difficult, confusing, and complex. I did not like the game at all. I don’t think I would have liked it much better had I been at a different station. I was playing the Helm station and controlling where the ship went, which was decently easy. I was able to get where I wanted most of the time, but not all the time. We landed on the crystals many times, but were never really set up to pick them up because we were focusing on killing the enemies. It would have been much better to zoom in, pick up the crystals, and zoom out. I don’t think I’m willing to play this game again.
Wow was this dry and not at all what I was expecting. This also was the worst narration of any book I’ve listened to. The narrator reads the chapter number and verse, then rereads the verse number for every single verse in the entire book. It was painful. The history of the people in the book was mainly along the lines of ‘the people sinned so God did not answer them or was wrath with them, then they were faithful again and God killed their enemies.’ Something I’ve been finding to be very true in most of the religious text I’ve been reading (besides Buddhist texts) is that they all follow the lines of the joke below
Steph and I started a new game last night, we are going for diplomatic victory on a Pangea map. We can’t find some of the Civs, so there may be another continent that we just can’t see.
Yesterday Bo and Umi were going to get a mariage liscense. They were expecting to get married, but since they need another appointment to get married with a ceremony they will have to go back.
Before going to City Hall, we enjoyed some great seafood at Swan Oyster Depot (Yelp)
We had Oysters, Salmon, and they also got some Urchin. I’ve had urchin before and don’t really care for it. It was amazing that the urchin was still moving while Bo and Umi were eating it.
It was really nice of them to invite me out for their wedding, even if it didn’t actually happen.
Last night Steph and I finished the Civ 5 game. I absolutely destroyed my civ to push it to full production for the science victory. Before that we decided that India was getting too powerful, since they were higher score than either of us. India was also starting to encroach on our borders. We took a 2 front approach and pinched India in the middle. We also had a far superior navy and were able to bombard the cities so that they had no chance. We started taking out India’s ally, America, but competed the spaceship first.
It's an Exciting World 