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Comments
@Storm: holy shhhht, what if you're onto something?
@Alk: consider it an in-joke. Kind of makes no sense when taken in the "default" context.
Please. I'm in early stage infection at the worst.
Another unfulfilling weekend passes by.
its my last week of classes
omfg
im going home in six days
There is a favorite Pokemon test/generator here that I think some people here might like messing around with. Based on how it works, it might actually be even more interesting to see what results people who are not really big Pokemon fans get, since you do not really need any knowledge of Pokemon going into it.
I guess there are some flaws with how it determines anything after #1, but I figure it still might be worth a look for those who have not already seen it.
>Last week of class
CHECK
>six weeks of free time
>CHECK
>girl i love coming back home for those six weeks after telling me over skype that she misses me and loves me back
>FUCKING CHECK
The best college recruitment video I've ever seen.
Edit: If gore kinda squicks you out, best to avoid this.
oh god what
welp
Oh God, that was so great.
Well, there are various things to take into consideration here. For instance, the wartime yeoman of England was phased out from military service around 1515, I think? And England was the last kingdom of Europe to get rid of their archers. So between then and the loss of the Confederacy in 1865 (? Correct me if I'm wrong, of course, but I know it's mid-late 19th century), we've got about 350 years of the people who colonised the USA not using bows. That's a long time. Plenty of time to phase out great techniques, as happened even faster with the degradation of the sword.
And what makes this more believable to me is how proper sword, polearm, dagger and hand weapon technique has been rediscovered after historians similarly claimed that certain things couldn't be done. But now we can tell that there are ways to geometrically defend yourself perfectly while continuing to attack and so on and so forth.
Weapons techniques are seldom mutually exclusive, so it means that if this technique was used in warfare (and it seems as though it's the most likely explanation for some cases), it was used as a close range rapid fire tool rather than as the absolute standard for archery. After all, we already have indirect fire as a known technique for long range volleys, direct fire for targets within the bow's standard range and now, perhaps, this rapid for technique for an unsettlingly close adversary.
One of the things is that if this guy is piercing chain, with arrows not designed to do so, then he's inflicting some pretty heavy impact. Video games have kind of ruined this in a way, but mail armour is definitely a kind of heavy armour, and wasn't improved upon significantly for thousands of years before various cultures began making alterations -- the best of these being European plate harness. But that took quite some time, and mail remained the highest standard of battlefield protection for the interim. So with arrows designed to actually penetrate the stuff, he's probably going to defeat the de facto standard of historical armour with ease and rapid fire.
Not using a fixed anchor point might be necessary when firing on the move, which in turn might be desirable if you've got some loony with a great big sword coming at you. This is, after all, a technique with very limited range, so it's probably the case that power is secondary to rate of fire. Obviously, not using a fixed anchor point is far from ideal, but so is the loony with a great big sword.
I find this convincing for these reasons, essentially:
Alex... did you get sick of walltexting about swords and want to move on to a new weapon group?
Anyways.
That's true and I should have gone into more detail, but really I get the feeling nobody cares. Most bow construction and shooting technique was lost in that time, but in the 20th century there was a big revival with the sport and the advances of things like refining recurve bow designs and inventing the compound bow.
Chances are if you're shooting somebody you are either going to use a standard pointed metal tip arrow for ease of acquisition or a broadhead, a tip optimized to make the target bleed out. The metal tip shouldn't have much problem punching through armor.
I guess where we differ in this regard is how we react to these historical bow techniques. You seem to be fuck yeah about rediscovering past techniques and validating historical folks who bragged about awesome shit. I just look at it as a series of neat tricks that while cool looking, isn't really practical or useful for hunting or target shooting.
You seem to be approaching archery as an art and I approach it as a skill in the application of a tool.
Don't get me started about poleaxes, or the mighty dagger.
I'm approaching from a perspective of "how the fuck do I nail that dude before he gets over here with his axe?", and if this technique still allows suboptimal arrows (for armour-piercing purposes) to pierce the historical standard of armour, I consider it a pretty significant indicator of its application as a means of historical battle.
I agree that for sporting and hunting purposes, this is an impractical technique. No animal will willingly let you within 30 feet of it, and as you say, this technique's maximum range meets the minimum range for sporting events, if that. But in context of the completeness of one's skills from a historical perspective -- such as the need to kill several Uruk-hai within a span of a few seconds -- I consider it a pretty significant discovery.
Switchblade vs butterfly knife go go go!
Daggers might actually be more interesting because well, chances are it's more likely somebody will try to hurt you with a knife of some sort than a big hunking sword.
Dagger/knife combat is essentially unarmed combat with a pointy bit for most intents and purposes. Whereas a sword becomes the focus of your technique, a dagger or knife is more like a supplementary tool to aid your empty-handed combat abilities. It's certainly very important, but knife combat is just as much punches and grapples as it is slashes and stabs. So it's kind of impossible to talk about dagger and knife without talking about unarmed combat at large... and unarmed combat is the most diverse form of combat in the world, providing the basis for all other forms of combat and all warfare.
I mean, you know the hook technique in boxing, yes? Your fist arcs around and strikes from the side at reduced range, but with the benefit of circumnavigating a frontal defense. This can be taken as the basis for all indirect offensive techniques, up to and including mass bowfire, mortars, and the deployment of nuclear weapons from a firing platform on land.
tl;dr fists are nukes
But what are fists, if not for arms?
Possibly rocket propelled, telekintetically moved or on a funky wire system.
Say, Alex, if I were to be heading over to Australia soon for whatever reason, would you accept if I challenged you to a few rounds of hot, sweaty, wood-on-wood action?
Y know, like, a round of sparring with wasters?
Only if I'm allowed to dramatically declare "LET THIS BE OUR FINAL BATTLE" beforehand.
So, speaking of that sort of thing, I'm considering ordering a kit for a chain shirt. Haven't made much maille lately, and grabbing a long-but-simple project while out of school might be fun.
Going to do four-link or eight-link?
Most likely four-link, but if the instructions in the kit are eight-link, I'll do that.
Briefly considered Japanese six-in-one, but...two different ring sizes to fool around with, and they don't make a kit for it or anything, so I'd have to figure it all out on my own.
Looked at 8-link, and...yeah, no. I mean, I'll probably destroy my hands either way, but...ow.
Better your hands destroyed now than your vitals pierced by a Saracen arrow, brethren. You wouldn't like the inconvenience.
Has anyone seen JHM around?
Okay, so the maille stuff I'm ordering:
Cost before shipping: $234. Not bad. Yay for bulk discounts.
Might wait until payday to place the order so I can justify it better >.>
So, because this class is terrible the teacher split us up into two groups and made us list the advantages and disadvantages of some hypothetical future technologies.
One of them was cloning.
The group that was supposed to be for the technologies listed "making clones to fight in war instead of actual people" as a positive and i just
help
Remind me of a sociology class I once took; the teacher split us into two groups based on whether we thought mankind was good-natured or bad-natured. I was in the good-natured, side, essentially (I think mankind is essentially neutral, but I'll lean towards "good" any day).
One point against mankind being "good" was that we apparently wiped out neanderthals. The person who claimed this to be true didn't provide any additional detail. I tried to say that we can't actually tell if it was via primitive warfare or genocide or simply out-competing them as a natural process of evolution, and that the latter is more likely given that warfare requires significant organisation. The only response I got was, "but we wiped out the neanderthals".
Not all of them, evidently.
Hey man, don't diss the Neanderthals. They were likely as smart as us, and most non-African humans have some Neanderthal blood.
Someone doesn't remember Princess Apricot~