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Near the end of his life, the exiled Emperor Napoleon had a conversation with one of his generals about the deity of Christ.

General Bertrand: “I can not conceive, sire, how a great man like you can believe that the Supreme Being ever exhibited himself to men under a human form, with a body, a face, mouth, and eyes.

Napoleon Bonaparte: “Let Jesus be whatever you please – the highest intelligence, the purest heart, the most profound legislator, and, in all respects, the most singular being who has ever existed – I grant it.

General Bertrand: “Still, he was simply a man, who taught his disciples, and deluded credulous people, as did Orpheus, Confucius, Brama.”

To this Napoleon responded by saying:

“I know men, and I tell you Jesus Christ was not a man.

Superficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founders of empires and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not exist.

There is between Christianity and other religions the distance of infinity.

Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne and myself founded empires. But on what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon sheer force. Jesus Christ alone founded His empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men will die for Him. In every other existence but that of Christ how many imperfections!

From the first day to the last He is the same; majestic and simple; infinitely firm and infinitely gentle. He proposes to our faith a series of mysteries and commands with authority that we should believe them, giving no other reason than those tremendous words, ‘I am God.’”

Source: C., Abbott John S. The History of Napoleon Bonaparte, University Press of the Pacific, Honolulu, HI, 1883.

I have written about Gaussian Splatting graphics before. It has the ability to produce unbelievably photorealistic environments (with some limitations like animations being a very rough spot for it) – but are now entering the realm of realtime.

Developer Iakov Sumygin has created a minimalistic playable video game using Gaussian splats for the environment data, and you can load it up and try it right now in your browser.

It definitely shows of the quality – and the limitations – of the technology. It’s an interesting experiment showing how far we’ve come.

Japan has rhythmic gymnastics competitions every year. It’s a good idea to remind yourself these are high school men – and put in some amazing performances that wouldn’t be out of place in the Olympics.

How do you destroy a company – or a country? Besides war, there is the unintended consequences of good-sounding government policy. The UK is becoming a poster child of how you destroy a workforce by encouraging them to work less as well as creating endless layers of unproductive government oversight.

Reopening a 3.3 mile train line to Portishead from Bristol took 79,187 pages of planning documents. Printed out, that’s 14.6 miles of paperwork – 4.5 times the length of the actual railway. The process has taken 16 years so far. (Construction should start soon.)

Mage’s Musings is a channel that has a selection of interesting reflections on old school Dungeons and Dragons – as it was played in the 80’s.

One of the better playlists is is Old School Essentials playlist in which a party goes through the classic “Keep on the Borderlands” module.

His retelling of their sessions does a great job capturing just how different it was to play by early D&D rules than today. I was intrigued by how deadly combat encounters turned out to be and how often early characters would die. As other DM’s of that era point out, players had to be much more crafty and think about what they were doing. Just jumping into combat would often result in the entire party getting killed. Dice were unforgiving and one bad player decision and some bad rolls would almost certainly get one or more characters killed.

Give a few of these sessions a listen. It’s interesting how many characters some players had to go through as they get killed off.