After Pope Francis died Monday morning, a few hours after blessing a crowd on Easter Sunday, the New York Times started rolling out tributes to the pontiff at nytimes.com, plus a standard 7,000-word obituary by Jason Horowitz and Jim Yardley, the current and former Rome bureau chiefs for the Times., respectively. Horowitz adored Francis as pontiff, and the obit predictably hailed the left-leaning pope as a force for “inclusion” against “doctrinaire” conservatives (as if “doctrinaire” is a dirty word when talking about religious doctrine!). However, the phrase “liberal” was scarce in the early coverage, while “conservative” opponents of Pope Francis were easy to find and framed as the enemy of openness. Pope Francis, who rose from modest means in Argentina to become the first Jesuit and Latin American pontiff, who clashed bitterly with traditionalists in his push for a more inclusive Roman Catholic Church, and who spoke out tirelessly for migrants, the marginalized and the health of the planet, died on Monday at the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta. He was 88. …. His insistence on shaking up the status quo earned him no shortage of enemies. He demoted conservatives in Vatican offices, restricted the use of the old Latin Mass dear to traditionalists, opened influential meetings of bishops to laypeople, including women, allowed priests to bless same-sex couples and made clear that transgender people could be godparents and that their children could be baptized. One didn’t expect the Inquisition so soon in Pope Francis's obituary. Conservative Catholics accused him of diluting church teachings and never stopped rallying against him. Simmering dissent periodically exploded into view in almost medieval fashion, with talk of schisms and heresy. Horowitz and Yardley only briefly noted Francis was a daft hand at stifling dissent, in favor of his own ideological leanings. Francis showed a deft political hand at isolating opponents....only days after leaving the hospital after undergoing colon surgery in 2021, Francis introduced sweeping restrictions on the Latin Mass, arguing that its proponents had exploited it to undermine the reforms of the Second Vatican Council and to create divisions in the church. Apparently the only hostility and divisions came from conservatives, not the Catholic left or Francis himself. The spats mostly remained internal, but the ascendance of Mr. Trump in the United States gave traditionalist forces in the Vatican a rival power to rally around. A constellation of conservative Catholic news sites, blogs and television channels, many financed by sources in the United States and Canada, constantly sought to weaken the pope….In 2018, Francis criticized the hostile tenor that often reverberated throughout the conservative Catholic blogosphere. The reporters did criticize Pope Francis for not fighting sexual abuse in the church hard enough, writing “The pope also seemed less than sensitive to the appeals of victims,” even after major investigations in European countries. The most dishonest portion of the obituary came under the subhead, “A New Openness,” which cast conservative popes as narrow-minded while denying Pope Francis’s own ideological blind spots. Arguably the most dramatic change Francis brought to the church, his supporters say, was perhaps the simplest: a willingness to open questions for debate, planting the seeds for deep, long-lasting change. He talked in 2018 about an “apostolate of the ear: listening before speaking.” He once told Father Spadaro, the Jesuit priest and friend: “Opposition opens up paths. I love opposition.” Some of his predecessors had been less fond of it. Pope Pius X purged Catholic theologians who took a modernist approach to Bible studies. John Paul II treated theological disagreement as profane dissent, and with his doctrinal watchdog, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Benedict XVI, the Vatican silenced theologians with differing visions of the church. When he became pope, Benedict ordered the removal of the editor of a Jesuit journal, America, because it entertained ideas anathema to conservative orthodoxy. Francis did not stifle views he disagreed with and believed in a patient process -- he called it discernment -- in which ideas and proposals could be weighed before going forward. Really? Transgenderism, immigration, global warming, homosexuality, the Latin Mass – Pope Francis used his power to stifle church conservatives on many fronts. The rolling live news feed covered similar ground, under the flattering subhead, “His groundbreaking pontificate worked to make the Catholic Church more inclusive. Cardinals will now decide whether to continue his approach or restore more doctrinaire leadership.” Again, the only quibble was that the pope failed to lead left-wing ideology to triumph within the church, as in Ruth Graham’s piece, “Francis faced defiant, conservative U.S. Catholic leaders.” Francis led an increasingly ideologically fractured church, including a boisterous right wing that often openly defied him. The United States, with a heated cultural and political battle over abortion and other social issues, was a stronghold of that conservative opposition....Yet those appointments did not fundamentally shift the balance of American church leadership in a more liberal direction. The church hierarchy in the United States remains staunchly conservative and plays a significant role in the nation’s searing debates over abortion, sexuality and gender…. The Times doesn't broach the argument of papal hypocrisy, as Ed Condon did in The Spectator (UK): “And while Francis preached a vision of synodality, consultation, and collegiality, he showed himself willing to depose bishops from all corners of the world – seemingly on a whim, without due process and sometimes without any reasons given – if they were considered ideologically out of step with him.” Neither did the paper bear down on the theological confusion Pope Francis leaves in his wake.

There’s an undeniable feeling of the air coming out of the balloon of discourse on x.com. Some of this is natural enough. We can’t be at a fever pitch all the time, and now that the most important election of all time is over, we’ve all earned at least a breather. But there’s a deeper, more sweeping effect at work. The Perfume Nationalist just laid it out as well as anyone in a long and bracing X thread. “It may have taken seven years but I've reached this point,” he begins. “The plot lines are so utterly repellent because it ended, we won. The things you all fight about are completely made up. We won and you can just let Trump do everything.” Trump’s win shifted the center of political gravity away from the ideological intelligentsia toward not just 'tech' but to the agentic, whether human or machine. “I don't need to know which malignant groupchat dirtbag leftist who was based-curious in 2021 has written a substack renouncing their dalliance with the right,” he goes on, subtweeting a raft of right-wing-disenchanted online personalities whose grievances and disappointments were recently aired out by a lefty New York Times columnist. “You should've known they were bad at the time. You didn't trust the plan. We won. The side of good won. There was a happy ending. The big Snow White book closed on the page that said THE END. You're free now you can go read a book. There's nothing here since it ended.” The rant expands from there. “Everyone is supposed to be happy at THE END like Beauty and the Beast where the household appliances are changed back into people. But here you chose to stay household appliances." "Everyone anonymous has an incredible real job as a lawyer or a censor at the libtard factory. You don't even have to shill your wares here.” What is going on is that “the right” or the “anti-woke” rebel alliance became so intellectually top-heavy during the bad old Biden years that many of its leading and most popular figures defined the identity of the movement as an intellectual one, a talking one, one that not only won by talking but could only talk, not do — at best, have ideas and then talk about them. So it became extremely important to have the right ideas, the very best and most correct ideas. But at the same time, paradoxically, it became essential to the movement and its leading online figures that their incredibly superior ideas also be strangely ineffective or unpopular — in a constant state of existential threat and crisis, demanding perpetual belligerent defense and pedantic exposition. Trump’s win shifted the center of political gravity away from the ideological intelligentsia toward not just “tech” but to the agentic, whether human or machine. What is especially interesting is that this shift not only imperils the identity and the lifestyle of the perpetually arrogant and embattled “wrongthinker” who is ackshually right about everything; so too does it undermine the basic value proposition of X as the so-called “global public square” — transparently an onboarding scheme to achieve a new cyborg sort of “collective consciousness.” There is a lot of talk in certain online circles about the antichrist-like vibe of this swarm consciousness and the identity that arises from it, but the naive or practical version of the notion must also be acknowledged, namely that our human consciousness is always already relational — and so far, at least, the printing press and the television have done a lot more than digital technology to encourage and accelerate violent, destructive substitutes for the shared spiritual consciousness of Christian communion. And whereas print and television unleashed an overwhelming world war on words, Trump’s win amid today’s digital conditions augurs the paradoxical corrective that, if we’re headed into a golden age, perhaps it’s because we’re rediscovering how silence is golden. That leaves the question of what will become of X, the internet, or AI itself if the blather and discord subside and the bots become heirs to a desertified digital commons … and who will actually care!

With a game as complex as Diablo 4, it's understandable that Blizzard has a few difficult decisions to make regarding game design. There are a ton of factors to consider, such as not making a class overpowered, or nerfing a class too much that no one would want to play it.

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We thought this was just a human thing!