I'm Chinese, I've never seen a map like this before. We usually just use Mercator but split along the Atlantic ocean instead of the Pacific. This map is just kinda bizzare. Why is Antarctica so prioritized? Why's it in portrait orientation? I think it's just intentionally weird, which is still cool.
Wait your signature is supposed to just be your name in cursive? But then wouldn't that defeat the point? I thought in the olden days it was supposed to be like a proof that you were the right person since you knew how your signature was written.
Anyways, for my signature I just kinda designed it. It was ages ago so I forgot my process, but it was deliberate and I remember making a whole bunch of sketches before finding one I liked. And since then I've incrementally improved it.
That seems very precarious to me, I'd be constantly worried about nudging it and dropping the cups.
I've never watched Blade Runner, only this scene, but this scene is incredible. And this quote gives a really strong impression of a much larger world.
It isn't very famous, but I like the opening line of Mortal Engines:
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
It just throws you right into this weird post-apocalypse where cities run around on wheels eating each other. Honestly I think Mortal Engines has some really cool worldbuilding in general.
BTW the movie is a terrible adaptation.
For 40k, I actually feel like "An open mind is like a fortress with its gates open and unbarred" is a cooler, if less iconic quote. It just conveys the ridiculous dystopia of the Imperium so well and so quickly.
But yeah gotta love the classic BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! YOUR CORPSE-EMPEROR WILL NOT SAVE YOU!
TIL not everyone uses a duvet (also TIL that that thing's called a duvet). That's really surprising to me, so some people just use the blanket directly? What do you do when it gets dirty, they're really hard to wash?
I thought this was going to be some math thing, turned out to be so much more straightforward.
That is some surprisingly good VFX for a meme. I wonder if the background is fully CGI or if they recreated it and cut.
While this is funny, I'm pretty sure it isn't real (or it was intentionally written poorly)- It doesn't make any sense in Chinese either, and most people in Hong Kong know English at least somewhat.
Now you also need a creeper farm (or a generic hostile mob farm) to farm gun powder
Check. A basic mob farm was one of my earliest builds, though I'll have to upgrade at some point.
a nether porthole shortcut to a desert to gather sand
Check. I live right next to a desert so I've got all the sand I need. But what do I need sand for, actually?
and a sugar cane farm.
Check, though that definitely needs upgrading.
Oh .. and later on a phantom farm to gather Phantom membranes to endlessly repair and renew your elytra.
TIL phantom farms are a thing, but also I've already got mending so that isn't much of a concern.
Yep, I actually got 3 in my trip to the End. The first one took me I'd guess about 40 minutes, then the next two took me no more than 10 minutes.
To be fair though most of that first 40 minutes was spent just walking to the first end city, after that I found 2 more end cities right next to the first one. Also all 3 end cities had ships, which I think is pretty lucky?
And boy do I regret not getting it earlier.
I defeated the Ender dragon ages ago, and I had everything I needed to go and explore the outer End, but I decided to do a bunch of other stuff first, since I thought that the elytra wouldn't be that big of an improvement. I was wrong, I've had this thing for like 10 minutes and I already rely on it, it's so useful being able to fly and travel about 3x as fast as on foot.
My new #1 priority is now to build a bigger sugarcane farm to make rockets. I already have one, which I thought would be enough, but I'm burning through rockets way faster than I'd expected.
Nope, smoothbore muskets were/are much more accurate than most people think, here's a video of someone shooting at targets with one, and they were able to hit a man-sized target out to 150m. By modern standards it isn't great but definitely not "flying all kinds of directions".
The Youtuber Brandon F has a 4 part series talking about why they fought like this. Spoiler- it wasn't because they were stupid.
TLDR- if you split up you just get run down by enemy cavalry.
TLDR- a close formation lets you concentrate your firepower at one point.
TLDR- a close formation makes communication and controlling the army much much easier (or even possible at all).
TLDR- the formation makes the troops less likely to run away.
I'm thinking about joining mastodon, but I don't know what server to go with, and the list of servers seems to have very little information about each. Right now I think I'll open an account on mastodon.social.
I'd prefer a server with a high character limit and that has access to most other servers.
I'm thinking about joining mastodon, but I don't know what server to go with, and the list of servers seems to have very little information about each. Right now I think I'll open an account on mastodon.social.
I'd prefer a server with a high character limit and that has access to most other servers.
So, this starts with the local currency of Laroth (Laroth is not a single country, and does not have a unified currency, but that’s for another post- I’ll just treat it as such here) which originally consisted of Chinese-style silver coins with holes in the middle. These holes meant that you could string them up on a piece of cord and carry large amounts of them easily that way. (This also served as a standardised unit, but again that’s for a future post about currency.)
People start wearing these strings on their belts, since pockets aren’t really a thing yet. Rich people, to show off, start wearing large amounts of them, all around their waists. Not only does this show off that they have that much money, it also shows that they can walk around in public with that much money without worrying about thieves and robbers, whether that is because they can afford to hire bodyguards or for some other reason. This still isn’t enough flaunting for some though, so they start using fancier materials, replacing the plain cord with gold/silver chains, or intricately patterned ribbons.
This currency stays around for a fairly long amount of time (how long exactly I haven’t decided yet) and this trend becomes pretty well-established in Larothan culture as a way for the rich to show off. It starts seeping into the fashion of the lower classes as well, as a set of plain ribbons or tassels attached to the belt.
Eventually, Laroth switches to coins without holes in them (again, Laroth has multiple currencies and not all of them did) and people started carrying their money in pockets (the medieval kind not the modern kind), purses, wallets, etc. The ribbons now end up entirely useless for carrying money, but by this point they’ve been a part of Larothan fashion for a long time and so they stick around, except since they can’t carry money it becomes entirely about the ribbons themselves.
Since they no longer have to serve a practical purpose, these evolve into many styles. Some are plain, just dyed with more expensive dyes (reds, blues, greens, purples). These are mostly worn by peasants and such. Then they get fancier with patterns and tassels and so on. Some incorporate bits of gold, silver, lumin, and other precious materials. Some have beads or glass or other decoration. Some have elements evoking the coins they once held, while others completely ignore the history of the garment and are made in ways that could never hold a coin.
They differ massively based on class, and there are many regional variants- especially since some areas did not move away from the old style of coins with holes, so they still serve their original coin-holding purpose there.
So, I've had this idea which doesn't fit in my world (I've only got humans), but I thought it was neat so here it is: Dwarves would invent bullpup firearms and here is why.
With early muzzleloading firearms, you have to reach the muzzle of the gun to be able to load it, which poses a problem for dwarves since if your gun is much taller than you it would be difficult to reach. You can't just shorten the gun, since with black powder you need a long barrel to get it to fully burn and give your ball enough power. Furthermore, a long gun would also be unwieldy inside small dwarven corridors, which would be extra important since with dwarves living underground they'd be more likely to be fighting indoors.
The solution to this is to bullpup their muskets. I'm fairly certain that there aren't any significant technological barriers to making it work, there just wasn't much reason to do so in our world. This would let them load their guns normally, without sacrificing power, and make them much easier to carry around and use indoors.
The main issues with this are that having the flashpan so close to the user's face would burn them, and the hearing loss. The flash is dealt with by that plate that sticks out beside the lock, which would hopefully deflect the explosion away from the user. The hearing loss I think could be compensated by the fact that the dwarves, having to fight indoors underground oftern, would probably have much better hearing protection much earlier than in our world.
Behold, Hoid, immortal wanderer, slayer of god (participant), collector of magic... questionable interior decoration
Saw the post asking for an icon yesterday so I made this thing.
