Didact has three excellent post on the nature of ticket-taking (that is, the nature of the offers that Satan/his agents tempt mankind with). With a combination of ignorance, incredulity, and ‘Christian Materialism’ that I see both online and in real life interactions, it is imperative that anyone, especially Christians, gain at least some understanding of the spiritual battles we face. Taking the ticket will destroy you Link: At some point in your life, someone will give you an opportunity that seems too good to pass up. The cost to you will be small. You will simply have to make a small moral compromise. The reward, on the other hand, will be relatively high. ...

TL;DR A great book on lamentation and vigorous prayer. Just don’t get triggered by passing references to left-leaning socio-political stuff, which is very few and far between. Contents This may be a strange thing to start a review off, but I’ve always found presenting the table of contents for a book useful for any potential reader. I don’t know how many people skip the TOC or actually read it, but I find that showing it here at least gives one a bird’s eye view of what he’s getting out of it. So here’s the road map for this book: ...

The principle of “Separation of Concerns” ought to be balanced with the principle of “Locality of Behavior”. This principle is derived from a Richard Gabriel’s paper, “Patterns of Software” (emphases mine): Compression is the characteristic of a piece of text that the meaning of any part of it is “larger” than that piece has by itself. This is accomplished by the context being rich and each part of the text drawing on that context—each word draws part of its meaning from its surroundings. ...

Fathers of daughters and young men navigating the current dating market will find this helpful, written by a zoomer girl about the so-called “sexual hellscape”: There’s a certain kind of girl who grows up a little too fast: her shirts are a little too low cut, her manner of speaking a little too flirtatious. This kind of girl instinctively understands the power her sexuality can command; she knows little of how it can invite danger. ...

I recently had at a Bible study with a good friend, and we’re going over the book of Revelation together. On the night we tackled Revelation chapter 13, we had some interesting chatter. For those who don’t recall, this is a very famous chapter talking about John’s vision of the sea and earth beasts, and the very popular mark of the Beast. Now, as we were going through this book, we weren’t approaching it as if what John was seeing were in literal, chronological events and concrete things, but rather from a symbolic or spiritual sense that points to historical and current Patterns as well as future and final Prophecy. How we view the book, at least currently in this juncture of our lives, is less like an itinerary and more of a recursive narrative with multiple “camera angles” of this ancient, ongoing, and final war between two kingdoms and their citizens. ...