HughJ

Still waiting for a Fire/Ice mon that I will dutifully proceed to add to my top 5 regardless of other design elements

If you were given the choice to send a 140-character message (tweet length) back in time to yourself 5 years ago, would you? If so, what would you write?

I think the Buddha was very wise in his statement that "Desire is the root of all sorrow." Sorrow, after all, is a feeling of sadness brought on most often by loss or disappointment. I also think that human beings are motivated by desire, as you said. While this is initially counter-intuitive - in a tautological fashion, we might deduce the absurd conclusion that "human beings are motivated by sorrow" - it is actually a circumstance that can coexist with the Buddha's wisdom. Why would someone argue that the Buddha's words make no sense? Well, although when we desire something and fail to receive it, we are unhappy; when we do receive something we desire, we are happy, as a simple function of evolution. Our brain must reward us for actions we take to secure what we want. So, desire is a mixed basket, a 50/50 that leads us to sorrow depending on the situation. This isn't true, however, because even in the circumstance where a person receives what they want, they are only positioning themselves for more sorrow further down the line. I can see two possible scenarios after someone receives something they've been desiring: the first is disillusionment, and the second is anxiety. In the first scenario of disillusionment, the person has become so fixated on the process of obtaining the thing or their own illusory perception of the thing that when they actually receive it, they are disappointed and disinterested. Think of Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, who dedicated about 10 years of his life to forming a relationship with a girl he met just once before, Daisy. And when he finally managed to achieve this, after sacrificing his morality by getting involved with the mafia and seducing Daisy away from her (admittedly dishonest) marriage with Tom, he felt hollow inside. In a sense, he was experiencing sorrow, brought on by the loss of the desirous illusion he had fallen in love with. In the second scenario of anxiety, the person actually does enjoy the item they've desired and obtained. However, they love this item so much that if they ever were to lose it, it would be a devastating blow to their psyche. In this case, think of a person who dreamed lifelong of being a parent and has finally had a child. They might become overprotective and invasive; when that child left the house at 18 to pursue their own life, they would experience a certain amount of sorrow, but more than anything they would suffer if that child were to die. Sorrow is a complex emotion, but it's an ancient one. For this reason, many people might think that even if desire was indeed the root of sorrow, it would be unavoidable, because desire is so deeply woven into the human consciousness. The Buddha, obviously, thinks otherwise, as his promotion of the art of meditation and the rejection of worldly possessions evinces a belief that we can 'shed' such compromising mentalities. If desire is indeed the root of sorrow, then we must simply stop desiring worldly objects, as these are the ones that lead us to disillusionment and anxiety. The purest desire would undoubtedly be the search for enlightenment: you could not be disillusioned at the attainment of the best possible state of soul, or anxious when Nirvana is everlasting and indelible. Finally, what of instinctual desires? Basal necessities such as consumption (of food and drink), sleep, or sexual reproduction? The only argument I can imagine for this is that someone on the path to enlightenment and the transcendence of sorrow would simply have to engage in this activities without desiring them. I am overall unclear on this theory, however, and would like to turn it over to Viri or another philosopher to explain. I'd also like to hear anyone else's thoughts on the prompt Viri has offered.

Probably Kougami from Psycho Pass

Mightyena a simple evil dog who doesn't take shit from an y bod y

I have post togekiss stress disorder so I really hope not

once I was on a plane with jon stewart Do you know how to moonwalk? if so teach me

Yes, of course But to seriously respond to the topic, I'd say that my favorite 'character snapping' moment was probably in the finale of Season 4 of AMC's The Walking Dead, when Rick Grimes (played by Andrew Lincoln) bites out a man's jugular to kill him and reach his son. He then grabs a knife and approaches another one of the gang, who was about to rape his son, and brutally mutilates him. The moment was very powerful because the man who was once a sheriff's deputy and family man had been reduced to an absolute savage. There were obvious parallels given the fact that in The Walking Dead universe, the cause of the collapse of society was a virus that causes corpses to rise as zombies and bite the living. It was gory, yeah, but it was nothing less of what you would expect from a post-zombie-apocalypse 'boiling point' moment

Fire cat because it's the closest thing to Charmander "what a weird looking lizard"

I think this goes in Grand Hall Which is funny because someone made a post there talking about how they were stuck in Grand Hall the other day, meaning they made a post about the game, which should go here Guess the universe had to balance itself out

I have no clue how fairies work so I'm in for a world of pain Also how can they know about fairies if they've been underground for 10 years, this is a fresh hell, only been around like 3

Good luck with her Togekiss After the 14th reset I started flinching in real life too every time I heard its cry

Yeah... If she's into some weird shit in the form of a lunatic there's not much you can do besides monitor the situation. As much as you don't want to hear about the guy just stay aware of the situation and make sure that she has you or someone else as a lifeline if she feels she is in danger or if she has received a threat If you're in the US, under 18 U.S.C. § 875 any credible threat of violence or murder is illegal and would be offered up to a federal court if an investigation into the guy's location proves it to be interstate. It would also help your case in saying that such a threat is credible given that he has been demonstrated to be mentally unstable and that your friend has given up her real identity (and presumably her location) It fits with stalking behavior that if she were ever to reject him of her own volition he would become more desperate and mix in threats with his approaches. So if she ever wants to cut him loose, now or later, things could get dangerous. As the three above me have mentioned, it's better to remain a lifeline for her than to push her away and consequently jeopardize her security even further

Oh wow, what a fascinating prompt (not sarcasm). I'm on my phone currently but later today I'll definitely write more for this. Yeah, Trainer's Journal is a little screwy but what can you expect from the forum equivalent of the Daily's (Anonymous) Opinion section. I think this thread does so well because it actually requires a little bit of reading and there's a sort of mutual understanding that we won't waste too much time with wholly unbased or unrelated statements. I feel that this isn't even a debate thread so much as it is a sort of symposium (I said this on Kuro's debate guidelines thread) because we're not making arguments so much as we are sharing perspectives and collectively learning. I would like to apologize to Strider because I felt I did not prompt him enough to respond as I was sharing my opinions - the interaction ended up being a little one-sided. I suppose the person that answers a prompt first often ends up taking that role though (see the Platonic dialogues). So I would invite him to share anything on the subject of eugenics he had left before I answered this new prompt regarding the Buddha himself.

I wanted to play a well-developed pokemon fan game after playing Emerald randolockes for the 40th time Friend mentioned it and a bunch of us played Made a forum account because of a technical error Came back a month later because I wanted to get back into forums and the community seemed good The rest is (yet unmade) history

Maybe Hardy would have steel tips like Titania if he grew his hair longer

Maybe Americans don't want to stand up for one another anymore because of deeply divisive liberal identity politics This will be my only post, I'm with Kuro

rofl please ignore signature As far as I know "edgy" is a deliberate attempt at being cool, typically as seen from a teenager's eyes, by relying on subjects like death metal, guns, regurgitated statements from villainous speeches, etc I don't think Reborn is truthfully single-minded enough to be "edgy." It has a wide variety of complex characters like Cain and Shelly that help to balance out the sometimes-oppressive dark atmosphere. Especially later in the game, when the player character heads out to the mountains and forest (a point I'm sure the critics never reach), it becomes clear that the game has branched out from its dreariness. I think a truly edgy variant of Reborn would be if all the pokemon types were dark and ghost, the entire game was set in Peridot Ward, and all of the characters were Fern-Corey hybrids

Rocket Boss Gotta make that mafia $$$$

No, I think the Internet is an important tool. I genuinely believe people have gotten smarter with the capacity to search up the answer to any question they have, gotten more skilled by finding tutorials all over YouTube, gotten more in touch with themselves by finding friends and lifestyles they never knew about, and gotten more variety in their outlook (as TV tends to be one-sided). However, it's a tool that comes with a price. By going online, you are putting yourself on the grid, even more so than was previously allowed by information like corporate deals, purchase records on your credit card, and government censuses. You are sacrificing a part of your freedom, and a good amount of it especially if you associate your real name or face with the actions you take online. It's a trade-off - you can't expect to access the whole of human knowledge without sacrificing a parts of your own identity, for better or worse.