Skua

Hollow Knight?

Wait, people actually avoid Australia because of it? I mean, I do think of Australian wildlife as dangerous, but to me that means “don’t fuck about” rather than “don’t go at all”. And I live in the UK, where we killed everything that was even slightly dangerous to humans long ago

This one always makes me smile, because it’s from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It’s just some guy’s blog in which he comes up with new words to express experiences and emotions that are difficult to describe, and that specific one has thoroughly broken containment

I made AltGr + / type an interrobang so I’d always have access to it

They spent a fifth of their sovereign wealth fund covering their budget deficit last year, I’m not sure that Russia has the capacity to scale things up

Presumably you downloaded Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC), which I still had to do to make a custom keyboard layout in 2022. Funnily enough I was also wanting to use AltGr to add diacritics to vowels, because I don’t want to have to go to the backtick key for àèìòù

For what it’s worth, making a custom layout actually is a huge pain in the arse. That’s a pretty niche use case, but there is definitely no reason for it to be as much of a hassle as it is

Isn’t a khopesh sharp on the other side of the curve from a shotel, though? It seems like sharpening the inside was the big innovation that makes shotels distinctive

while a western sword was like the size of a grown man and very heavy. Because of this western swords just didnt need to be that sharp.

I’m afraid these are both wrong. For a start, there’s no one Western sword. There’s not even, like, one sword used by professional soldiers from 15th century Germany. Some of them were going around with zweihänders (literally “two-hander”), which were straight blades and really could be 2m long and 4kg, while others at the same time were using the messer (literally “knife”), which is curved, half the length, and a quarter of the weight.

They were also absolutely kept sharp. There was little point in maintaining an absolutely razor-sharp edge because that’ll just get damaged, but if it’s not sharp enough to effectively cut stuff then you wasted a whole bunch of your money buying a really ineffective hammer. And you absolutely would have just used a hammer if that was what you wanted.

There were techniques for using swords as bludgeoning weapons, but these evolved as methods to counter increasingly effective armour, not because the swords weren’t effective cutting tools. Holding the blade of the sword and using the crossguard as a hammer is one of the better-known examples of this. But that’s something you do if you do not actually have a hammer with you and nonetheless need to fight a guy wearing plate armour. If you’re carving through the four hundred peasants he brought with him, you want to cut stuff. Even against the guy in armour, rather than bludgeoning it you might prefer to hold your sword with one hand on the hilt and one halfway up the blade so that you can effectively direct the tip into the tiny gaps in the armour, at which point sharpness is very important again.

European cultures absolutely did have refined martial arts for wielding swords. We just didn’t put much effort into to preserving them once guns replaced the swords.

By “bigger” here I should have more explicitly made clear that I meant in population and economic terms. A bunch of largely empty land is not that significant in regards to the international balance of power in North America.

This only leads us back to my initial question. If the point of NATO is to keep the smaller members dependent on the US, why do you think NATO is asking the smaller members to increase domestic production? If you think that any Canadian effort can only possibly be inconsequential, fine, that’s a matter of opinion, but according to you that is not necessarily the case for Europe (or at least, some European countries). So is NATO intentionally undermining its own purpose by doing this?

I ignored the part about Europe because the position of “NATO exists to keep Europe dependent on the US” is just as much at odds with the article’s opening of “NATO says it wants its members to develop national plans to bolster the capacity of their individual defence industry sectors” as it was when it was about Canada.

You said “The whole point is to make the vassals dependent on the US militarily which allows the US to control the politics of these countries.” I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to be asking about how this relates to Canada when you said “these countries” on an article that is primarily about Canada, and you’re now saying “The point isn’t to make Canada more dependent on the US”

If NATO was disbanded tomorrow, Canada would still have to work with the fact that its neighbour is a lot bigger than it. It seems to me that even if it cannot meaningfully escape American influence altogether, at least not for so long as America has as much power as it does, there are still always degrees of independence. So how is NATO wanting an increase in Canadian domestic military production a move to make Canada more dependent on the US? Or, if in your view it makes no difference whatsoever, how is this request relevant to it at all?

If Canada were to increase domestic military production, how would that make it more dependent on the US in your view?

That seems rather at odds with the opening paragraph of the article, which is explicitly saying NATO wants Canada to have better domestic production and planning

Svalbard, according to the photographer. It’s the second image in that gallery, there’s a little “info” button below the bottom right of the image

The reason it exists is so bizarre too. It stems from the rivalry between the republics of Venice and Ragusea (modern day Dubrovnik). Venice was gradually asserting control over more and more of the Adriatic coastline and Ragusea didn’t much fancy sharing a land border with its rival, so it just gave up one tiny stretch of land each to its north and south to the Ottoman Empire. Venice would therefore have to come by sea or risk angering the Ottomans. Eventually Austria manages to annex the Dalmatian territory of both Venice and Ragusea, but the Ottomans still held those two tiny strips of land. The Ottomans were not typically on the best of terms with Austria, and they held on to the two tiny bits of Adriatic coast up until the treaty of Berlin in 1879. By this point, Neum (the Bosnian one) had been part of Ottoman Bosnia for 179 years, so the borders were pretty damn entrenched, and they survived through the shifts to Austrian, Yugoslav, and eventually independent Bosnian-Herzegovinan political structures. So a petty but clever move of hiding behind a bigger empire in the 1600s created the tiny bit of Bosnian coastline today.

I like Blue Turtle’s playlists, especially the Ithya ones. They’re mostly folkish intrumentals and some gentle chillstep

The Travellers’ Encore from Outer Wilds

Wait, you don’t mean the line has to be straight? If that’s what you mean, I’m fairly sure the internal lines in the post are only there as construction. The section of the triangle that’s inside the smaller circle is just there to show dimensions, so it’s drawn (slightly) thinner than the external lines