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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2023

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  • What gave it away? Ruining someone’s entire life, taking all he loves, inflicting him with the worst pains a human can feel, just to prove “See? I told you he’s my greatest bootlick”? Nuking an entire town and killing someone for the entirely human reaction of looking back at the home they left behind like some even more twisted version of Orpheus and Eurydike?

    Or giving his creations curiosity, tempting their curiosity, enabling them to indulge their curiosity, then yelling at them, throwing them out, condemning them to mortality, inflicting suffering on them and all their descendants as punishment for their ancestors’ curiosity who didn’t even have the comprehension to know what they were doing was wrong?

    Yes, I know that story is supposed to be a metaphor, but I have yet to find an explanation that doesn’t make him look like an absolute twat.



  • The quillons are particularly interesting. The way the blade widens as it approaches the base means that the upper set of quillons is basically useless - either you catch whatever weapon you’d be trying to catch at a steep angle so the blade bites and binds, or it slides down, likely skipping right over those quillons.

    Widening blades with a narrower part right above the cross-guard aren’t uncommon. Typicay that will a Ricasso, a section that isn’t sharpened for various reasons. You won’t be cutting that close to the hilt anyway, so why bother? Occasionally it is also used to put your index finger over the cross-guard for greater control (particularly with later swords that got an extended guard, like a typical rapier).

    But crucially, those swords all feature cross-guards either straight or curved forward, not backward, which - continuing the “weapon slides down my blade” scenario from above - will do a great job at not catching said weapon and instead letting it slide past your guard. Hopefully, it’ll swing past you as well, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it. Simultaneously, as the meme describes, the decorations and shape of the guard make it harder to put your hand all the forward for better control, let alone putting your index finger over the guard to at least attempt to justify those second quillons.

    Add the material distribution putting the center of balance way forward and you’ve got a slab of metal that’s very hard to control, if you can wield it at all.

    Honestly, I don’t think getting your sword caught in a thrust will be a problem. You’d have a hard time thrusting in the first place. If you can get it lined up to thrust at all without skewing your aim because your hand is a nautical mile away from the center of balance, you’d still have to contend with getting a fairly broad point into the target. If your aim is off though, or the target moves, chances are the alignment of the blade (particularly the center of balance) won’t match the direction of your force and reduce its effect.

    Before your blade even has a chance to get caught, you’ll probably sprain your wrist.






  • Are you trying to argue that laws and treaties are worthless unless enough people abide by them and are willing to enforce them?

    Because, yes, that is the fundamental principle of society: We need to work together to survive and thrive, so we agree on rules by which we work, and enforce them on those that break them. If you disagree with something but take no steps to oppose it, your disagreement is just as worthless as a law nobody cares to enforce.

    So what point are you trying to make here? “If China enforced their claim and nobody stopped them, their claim would be effectively valid”? How is that relevant to the situation if all they’re doing is protesting, but nobody else cares to back them up and they don’t actually take measures to prevent the passage?

    “If I put pineapple on my Pizza and nobody stops or punishes me, it’s legal”? Yes. Congrats. You understood the very basics. Want a sticker?






  • A specialist in one field isn’t necessarily adept in another, and particularly coming from STEM to humanities seems a particularly treacherous transition because so much about humans is based on premises that cold, logical STEM principles just aren’t aware of. That doesn’t mean we STEMs are stupid, we just don’t know just how much there is that we don’t know and would need to know before we can understand, let alone predict human behaviour.

    I know I’ve found myself grossly misjudging human reactions in some case because humans are complex and there are so mamy premises and factors affecting individual behaviour and so many more for collective behaviour that they’re effectively non-deterministic and even predicting the probabilities requires such familiarity with the people or demographics, respectively.

    All that is to say: Yes, I think so too. She’s well-educated, but not above tripping over the same, common stone that many smart people have stumbled on.