The “gospels were dictated by first hand witness” idea is a massive problem because that’s not first hand account at all, that’s actually someone claiming that someone else told him “dude I swear I saw it happen in front of me as clear as I see you” (or worse, the guy who wrote it claims that he found this text written by someone else 50 years ago) and we somehow chose to believe both the guy who wrote it and the supposed guy who told him that. Having something dictated is second hand account, not first hand, because that’s just changing the pronoun of the person speaking. And there were extensive analysis of the text itself to try to figure out what kind of person would have phrased this or that in certain ways, whether it says “I saw that myself” or “my uncle who works at Nintendo told me he saw it himself”, and that analysis, done for the entirety of the Bible, has gone pretty far, including the gospels. As far as I know about it, the biggest point about that analysis is which gospel was written first and which ones copied from which ones or added their own thing, rahter than 4 different people recounting their memories of the same events.

I don’t know about the timeline of the temple; I’ve heard it brought up before, but I haven’t heard that it was considered conclusive evidence for dating the text, so I don’t know more than that and how it holds to the text analysis.

None of those are first hand. The gospels were written by other people more than a generation (60 years) after, not by people who were alive in that period of 30 years.

Notice how it says people agree but doesn’t say there is any evidence.

The best we have is letters from a whole generation after his death, and it’s only people saying “these guys say there was a dude a while back” , second hand comments, no living first hand account.

Completing the trilogy “after 28 days” and “after 28 weeks”

You don’t think it’s just… a star?

Right, the Inanna myth where she learns about sex also talks about eating the herbs and trees on a mountain / highland, I’m not sure when Eden was associated with an apple.

The Galapagos weren’t known to Christians until the mid 16th c. so there’s a bit of a timing problem of over a couple thousand years.

There’s a field that was called Gu-edin (meaning “open fields”) in the mid third millennium BCE that was the subject of a border war that lasted a couple centuries, between the cities of Lagash and Umma (which is right where you said), because the founder of Lagash bought an unassuming piece of land from Umma and a bunch of surrounding terrains, and then did mad irrigation work and it became crazy fertile. According to Lagash’s records, Umma got mad that it was swindled out of such great land and kept attacking Lagash over it, and kept getting its ass kicked and its kings killed. People from Umma were “allowed” to till the field for Lagash for a time, but most of the grain would still go to Lagash, causing more revolts from Umma (and more punishment).

It’s fairly agreed that this place probably gave some degree of inspiration for “Eden”, along with some rare green gardens in the region created with irrigation work. The apple bit, the woman rib bit, and the knowledge bit came from other Sumerian myths.

I’m not sure if it’s the Galapagos, maybe in the Canaries instead?, but some island famous for its apples, weather, and safety did play a part in inspiring the myth of Avalon, the island of apples.

Dark matter means there’s a gravitational effect that we can see, but the source is in a spot where we see nothing, so we guess that there has to be something that we can’t see - that doesn’t emit any radiation, starting with light / heat. The lack of electromagnetic radiation is why it’s dark, and the gravitational effect is why it has to be matter - as in something heavy, particles that have a gravitational effect.

We know spots where “matter that we can’t see” should be. The biggest classic example is the bullet cluster, where most of the gravitational effect is outside of the light we see. What we can make progress on is take a list and strike out what it isn’t. We look at some kind of particle we know about, and we check if that could have the effect we see. If it can’t, we shorten the list of what dark matter might be. There’s been a few times along the decades where people said “this time we might have found the one” but so far, we keep shortening the list. The day we say “this time we actually detected something” is the day it won’t be called “dark” anymore, since “dark” is literally because we can’t detect anything coming out of it. Either we’re not looking hard enough to see the radiations we could expect from known matter (except we should be seeing something already with our current tech), or it emits something we can’t see, new types of emissions that we don’t know about. If we ever find a new type of matter that doesn’t emit anything we can see, then it can still be called dark, until we learn to detect it.

It’s possible that our understanding of gravity is wrong and the source of the gravity we see comes from something else in another spot, and the spot we’re looking at doesn’t have any matter we can’t see; but everytime we find something new about gravity, it keeps reinforcing our understanding of it and decreasing the odds that we’re wrong about it and dark matter doesn’t exist. And the theories about gravity that come up to fit the effect we see always create other problems by failing to explain other observations, whereas the current gravity theory does explain everything else. The window for “our current models of gravity are wrong” just keeps getting tighter and harder to justify with every observation that keeps getting more accurate.

I’ve been playing the series since LttP. Twilight Princess is my top, for presentation and storytelling.

I feel like Skyward Sword tried to repeat that, but the dungeons and style / atmosphere of the world of TP still come out on top (even though I’m not very much into gothic style and furries). I think SS is way too cartoonish and happy-go-lucky for a world where the surface has been abandoned to the demons and yet everyone who lives there is cool (gorons, kiwis, moles, proto-Zora), that’s a massive tonal dissonance between the narration and the actual environment and it just takes me out.

The next ones on my top list are Minish Cap and Link Between Worlds.

Assyria didn’t exist in 2800 BCE, either.

On the progress into agriculture and cities, my book recommendation is Mesopotamia - the invention of the city, by G. Leick

Easier on average, still. Of course the labor was different - more long lasting strain and stress that we can see in the bones and the teeth, but with less everyday danger from going out. One hunter-gatherer may have more free time, but half of the population of a city can straight up do something else for a living. I’m no expert in why hunter-gatherers couldn’t do the same, probably something to do with storing food all year round without rotting, but the massive difference in how many people could be fed with a lesser fraction of people doing the works, mathematically shows that agriculture was more energy efficient per head over the years. The population jump from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands in cities like Eridu then Uruk during that period is insane.

It’s the other way around. Agriculture was easier, not harder, it allowed rapid population growth with much less risk and improved survivability, making enough food for more people more easily, which led to a demographic explosion and the rise of cities. It’s the exact period of about 2~3000 years where population centers grew from hundreds of people, to thousands of people, to tens of thousands, having to build communal centers to store all the food to give out to those who can’t work.

Mythology is not a monolith. We’re talking 3000+ years of cultural evolution across multiple cities that united and separated multiple times, each having their own local cult that rose to prominence or got supplanted by a different one.

When some of them got together and overlapped, they might have taken different facets of “death”: Osiris is not strictly a god of death itself but a judge of your soul, and grants eternal life in death, while Anubis was a god of funerary rites and graves, so the physical aspect of handling dead bodies.

When a city took prevalence over another, either because the pharaoh set up shop there or because a temple in that city became more famous and gained influence, that city’s major cult could overshadow other gods worshiped in other cities and take over their duties.

Then there were bigger gods that got cults that split into different aspects, like how Hathor and Sekhmet come from the same goddess but Sekhmet specialized in bloody war and the sun burning in the desert (an aspect she took from her father, a more general sun god) while Hathor specialized in motherhood.

Other aspects are passed around in the same way, starting with the role of sun, there are countless aspects of the sun that were embodied in different gods. Even the scarab is an aspect of the sun - because it emerges fully matured from the dungball of its parent the same way the sun comes out from the underworld in the morning, so there was a god for that. Death is a major aspect that remained a big constant in Egyptian religion, that’s why those two are seen the most often.

If you look at which city becomes the center of Egypt’s rule as time goes on through the different kingdoms and intermediate periods, and check which major temple is in that city, you see which cult takes over more duties.

I know what you mean, but Nintendo is a pretty bad example to illustrate that sentiment. I mean, they totally do corporate crap to benefit them and not the players obviously, but the Zelda series is literally built around the gimmicks of the console. They start thinking about a gimmick, either on the console and / or how to turn that into a gameplay gimmick, and then they make a Zelda game around that. OoT had the rumble pack and then tried to do Ura Zelda that was supposed to be the system seller for the DD64 - but that blew up and was salvaged between Master Mode and Majora’s Mask. The GameCube had Four Swords with the connection to the GBA and the multiplayer. The Wii had Skyward Sword with the motion thing, the Wii U had the separate tablet. The DS then the 3DS weren’t too relevant for Zelda but they tried, and other games did rely on it.

I’m not saying it’s a fact for the whole series, but Nintendo is particularly famous for developing a gimmick console and then building games around that, so yes, the physical console is actually relevant to the game you want to play it on, you’d be hard pressed to port that elsewhere and emulators are always weird and have a lot of work to adapt into something that makes sense on a single screen with a basic gamepad.

Buried, Ryan Reynolds is the only one on screen (not playing multiple characters, just one), though there are voiced characters from other actors on the phone.

I know it stands for graphic, but the creator said it’s pronounced with a soft g, like gif.

Twilight Princess.

I’m not that much into the gothic designs and the slightly edgy, or any of the wolf stuff, but the storytelling and the presentation felt like an actual epic. Lots of scenes like the first horseback field chase, the chariot defense, the bridge horseback fight, are so infuriating to actually play (especially the first time each), but they’re all so cinematic and fast while taking a big leap forward in the story, you get stakes, satisfaction, and awe, as you realize after the fact what just changed. And then the compilation of each combat types for the final boss for the final cherry on the cake, now that you can actually play it better, you’re right there in the movie for its climax.

And the boss fights like the fire temple and the argorok are very simple but really cool.

It’s basically Ocarina, and Ocarina was great, but everything in TP is enhanced, you take every aspect of it and you improve everything. Except Ocarina goes harder on the fairytale feel, while TP is a straight medieval epic.

In 2D, maybe Minish Cap, but LBW is to LttP what TP is to OoT, like, take a great classic and improve on every aspect of it.

BotW/TotK don’t make the top for me because I’m more into the immediate story, and those two are the type to hit harder the more you think about various aspects of it, rather than while you’re in it, it’s more of a melancholic slow burn for me.