Yeah it’s really hard to design any polearm more complex than a spear to be safe for sparring with. And even those spears are nowhere near as safe as swords like rapiers or sabres. Or even longswords.

I’ve sparred with large poles with bits of pool noodles stuck to the end to simulate spear tips. It’s very fun and fairly safe (as long as you’re extra careful with any butt strikes). But it doesn’t feel anywhere near as realistic as the rapier sparring we do.

Lemmy’s main developers are avowed communists who run one of the tankie instances themselves. I prefer Occam’s razor here. They are what they say they are.

I’m an advocate for defederating all their instances. But it’s because they make the fediverse a worse experience for users and I believe in curated positive spaces (à la the Nazi bar thought experiment) over unfettered free speech. It’s not because I believe they’re a false flag operation or bots.

Realistically, even the political compass is a vast simplification of how real politics works. We usually visualise most mainstream democratic parties on the y=x line on the compass, but there are almost as many exceptions to that guideline as there are examples of it.

For example, left leaning parties overwhelmingly are more likely to support gun control or anti-hate-speech laws, although those are essentially authoritarian social policies. And conservatives support left-economic policies like restricting companies’ ability to moderate their content as they see fit. Or their support of the army, which is an enormous government-run organisation.

But still, yeah, having a 2d set of axes gives you a much better look at where parties sit in relation to each other than trying to visualise it on a single line.

I’ll just add one more detail that hasn’t already been said. Although they profess to be left-wing communists, tankies will defend countries like 21st century Russia in its invasion of Ukraine, despite Russia not even pretending to be communist, and in fact being the very worst that crony capitalism has to offer.

Tankies in reality, at least on Lemmy, seem to position themselves primarily as anti-America and anti anything America supports, rather than being for any specific policies associated with communism.

Yeah I’m struggling a bit. My best interpretation is:

There are 3 axes, Flesh, Divine, Machine. The corners of the triangle are top: (100, 0, ?), bottom left (0, ?, 100), bottom right (0, 100, ?). Figuring out those question marks is the difficult bit. If the axes work at right angles, they’ll all be 50. That feels the most intuitive to me.

But you could also make a very good case for either 0 or 100, by following the axes working at 60°, depending on whether you follow in a clockwise or anticlockwise direction from the axis. One of these two seems to be implied by the triangular grid lines, but there’s no real way to say which.

As an example, the intersection just under the F in Fungi could be (45, 50, 55) if we work at right angles, (30, 30, 40) if it’s 60° clockwise, or (60, 70, 70) if it’s 60° anticlockwise.

Where are you? Up on the northside where I spent my evening I only got a few spots of rain, and could see a small amount of lightning way off in the distance. Driving back home to the inner west we got no rain, nor any signs that there had been rain.

Oh, so they have. I dunno what that means precisely. I think I saw they stopped selling the old AoE3 version, but last I checked AoM EE and AoE2HD were still for sale, but deliberately greyed out and renamed to make it clearer that they’re the old versions. Not sure if they’re still for sale or not as of now.

Big changes all over here, so here are just my personal highlights:

Fixed a bug causing replay playback speed to be excessively slow in some situations.

Not bad, but it’d be much nicer if they just let you replay at 8x like AoE2 and 4 do…

Iteration on the AI to make it perform better in certain situations.

What an incredibly useful patch note…

Tower buffs. TC defensive nerfs. Good stuff considering people have been saying turtling is too weak and often booming is too strong.

The cost of Mythic Age has also been increased, which might help address IamMagic’s concerns, but might make responding to an opponent who does get to Mythic first even harder and just reinforce the early bonus.

Chariot Archer: Hitpoints reduced from 100 → 95.

What a weirdly small nerf to make.

Behemoth sees some fairly significant rework.

• Damage increased from 9 Hack 18 Crush → 20 Hack 90 Crush.
• No longer has 5x bonus damage against buildings.

dunno what the difference between 18 crush with 5x is vs 90 crush at 1x

There’s still no real update on Immortal Pillars. So I’d guess it’s probably not going to be a Lunar New Year release, or even especially close to LNY.

I have people asking if it’s a site for fans of crumbly cheese.

Actually, update: it seems that the current belief is that this is temporary issues with transferring the forums to the control of the new owners.

Most of the articles I’ve come across since I noticed it was down have shown up in the Wayback Machine. But far too many have not. I saw something on Reddit about people having archives of more of it, but not making that archive available (yet?) for fear of legal reprisal.

YouTube’s copyright approach is fucking terrible. There’s that Tom Scott video where he says YouTube’s copyright isn’t broken, the law is, and the main point he’s trying to make is a good one, but he neglects to address the ways that YouTube specifically is broken.

Everything about Content ID is stuff they have voluntarily done above and beyond what the law requires. And Content ID makes no allowances for fair use and does not penalise false claims in any way. But worse, there are regular abuses of content ID for things that are not even under copyright at all. I’ve had videos of me performing Beethoven’s scores receive content ID claims, despite the composition bring public domain and the recording being entirely my own copyright. And you regularly hear stories of people using NASA footage (which is public domain) or other content that’s public domain by law get claimed by news organisations that had also used the same NASA footage and claimed it as theirs. Again, YouTube just lets them do this. Nothing about copyright law requires them to.

Yeah I’m not a fan. It felt like a bit of a loose connection.

I don’t play a lot of big budget games where this kind of thing tends to happen. Probably the worst experience I’ve had has been thanks to confusion caused by multiple remasters.

Age of Empires 2 released in 1999 with an expansion in 2000. It was rereleased in 2013 as the HD Edition on Steam.

Then it was rereleased again as the Definitive Edition in 2019.

And I have seen people get confused and buy the HD version when they meant to get DE. Not quite the same as the OP because it’s not caused by malicious anti-consumer bullshit. But that’s the closest I’ve been.

It’s not a very good article, is it? Hardly surprising, given the newspaper in question. But just repeating “the telegraph understands” without ever attributing it to any source…not even “government insiders speaking on condition on anonymity” or something like that.

The Korean script is actually extremely simple. You could teach yourself to read it in just a few minutes. It won’t help you understand the meaning of the words, but you can at least know the sounds. Here’s a pretty good guide. Personally, having lived in Korea for a few years, I take issue with some of it. For example it’s generally more useful to think of ㄹ as L in all cases, not only when it’s a syllable coda, and some of the vowel sounds are especially poor (particularly ㅡ, which I think is better approximated for the average English speaker as a stronger version of the hidden vowel between the th and m in rhythm). But for the most part it’s very good.

But the main point is, even if you don’t learn to read the script properly, just spending a few minutes skimming through that guide should stick enough in your head to be able to easily and instantly recognise Korean as Korean.

The tricky one for me is Chinese and Japanese, if the Japanese text is heavy in kanji. Incidentally, Korean has its own equivalent of kanji. It’s called hanja (the regular Korean text is hangul). It used to be used in much the same way kanji is, but has largely died out over the last century or so.

Connections
Puzzle #593
🟪🟪🟪🟪
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟦🟦🟦🟦

Skill 97/99
Uniqueness 1 in 367

The colours were all over the place today. I had no idea what green was, and I’m sure yellow was harder to find than blue.

Yup. It looks like the wiki is back alive again, but the forums are still down.

That’s a Mastodon problem. You’ll be far more productive if you open an Issue with the Mastodon developers to improve how they handle posts in Lemmy communities than you will whinging here to us.

People who just publish a link are annoying

First, just posting a link is completely normal behaviour on Lemmy. OP is a Lemmy user posting on Lemmy according to Lemmy norms. Anybody on other platforms who doesn’t like that…🤷‍♂️

But second, they didn’t “just publish a link”. They published a link along with nearly 400 characters worth of personal opinion. It’s not their fault Mastodon fails to display this properly, and yes, it’s extremely arrogant to expect OP to take any action to remedy it. Nor would I put the blame on a Mastodon user if they shared an image in the comments under a Lemmy post, or shared two or more images in a post they submitted to a Lemmy community, both things that will not display on Lemmy. Instead, I would just go and temporarily view things from their instance using the rainbow pentagon fediverse logo or the “open original page” menu item, and then get on with my day.

People who publish a link that you can’t follow

I have no idea why you keep saying you can’t follow it. I visited your Mastodon instance in an incognito window, clicked the link, and had no trouble getting to the original ABC article. No log-in required at any stage. If you’re having trouble following it, that sounds like a problem specific to you.

If you don’t like this, then block OP. Block all Lemmy users you come across. Or open an Issue on the Mastodon GitHub (or better yet, fix it yourself and create a Pull Request) to improve the handling of this edge case. But coming here whinging about something nobody here can do anything about is completely un-constructive. Coming here saying you’re going to block OP if they don’t stop (despite them doing…precisely nothing wrong) is like when people whinge in the YouTube comments and say “that’s it…I’m unsubscribing”. Nobody cares bro. Just do it, or don’t. Either way, it doesn’t need to be announced.