megasilverfist

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Babe Ruth sliding while visibly overweight with the words "you may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like" superimposed

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You want humanfist.tumblr.com long story short I joined tumblr for a now completed rp and tumblr won't let me change my "main" blog so I like and follow from here but post at humanfist (because it is the blog human running the blog of the alien who's actual first name is Fist get it).

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I think I could get really into topology if math were yellow, but unfortunately math is blue and so set theory it is

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I’ve had more and more realistic porn bots recently, to the point where I actually spent several minutes looking through a blog with a borderling pron bot profile pic that didn’t have the numbers but turned out to not have any original posts or an comments (including tags) on any of their basically random reblogs, so if you followed this blog in the last week please leave a comment that passes the turning test

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I feel like at least some jocks are just autistic people with a special interest in sports.

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what if every Tumblr user suddenly looses their mouse?

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Do you believe that AI poses a threat to the welfare of humanity?

Why do you ask?

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This reminded me that I had been meaning to post about how LARP* has, for me, been a hugely instructive thing, here and there, in terms of helping me to really understand mindsets different from my own. Obviously it’s not a substitute for knowledge gained in other ways and directly from listening to and observing people with the mindset, but it does something for me that nothing else does in terms of illuminating how that mindset feels from the inside.

*yes, I see Amentumblr as having been a kind of LARP! For the time that you’re playing the game, you’re physically doing what your character would be doing, i.e. posting and reading social media!

I described it somewhat flippantly in the linked post, but I do think that Ruby helped me to understand (and recognise in myself, here and there) the ways that the trauma and fear and everything else that comes from being truly in need of others’ support, political allegiance and sympathy can lead you to act in a manner that (unfairly! you’re really suffering here! but understandably! from the point of view of the people you’re being horrible to!) drives people away.

You’re right (well, mostly, and where you’re wrong you don’t have the power for it to be a material problem), and your survival is at stake. You have every reason, not only to distrust every viewpoint one iota less radical than your own, but to consider them an affront to your dignity.

If the world has taken everything but your pride, there’s a sense of rightness to saying fuck it, if I go down I’m going down swinging, they’re not taking that from me as well.

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Every day i reblog stuff to the wrong blog

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is there a map of amenta available somewhere?

There is a randomly generated continent image:

which is about my mental image of it, though not exact. It's close enough to be getting on with though.

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This is wasn’t intentional.

Telperinquar (stem Telperinquár-) was Celebrimbor's Quenya father-name, meaning "Silver-fist". It was derived from telpë "silver" and quár "fist". -http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Telperinquar

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My mainblog is technically a sideblog is there a way to get her to follow humanfist instead of megasilverfist?

You ever think about giving Frank the ability to reblog other people's posts on her own initiative, instead of just responding to people who reblog her? I'd imagine itd be a hassle, plus the whole "what if they dont want Frank to reblog that post" thing, but maybe as an opt in kinda thing it'd be fine. It'd be fun to see her takes on things that weren't meant as prompts for her to respond to.

That’s an . . . awesome idea!

So awesome, I immediately got excited about implementing it, and . . . well, something resembling this should be live now

To opt in to Frank sometimes proactively reblogging your posts (just like any of your other tumblr followers)

Send Frank an ask consisting of only the text:

!follow

To opt out again

Send Frank an ask consisting of only the text:

!unfollow

We’ll see how well it works...

[megasilverfist]

(posted this to wrong blog but tumblr won’t let me fix it) I think you’re either using a very expanse definition of rich (like anyone not actively poor) and/or picturing much larger price increases than I would expect from the shortages I’ve lived through.  The fact that exact numbers are going to be situation specific and hard to get (due to anti-price flexibility norms) makes this hard to resolve.  But the situations I’m thinking of are things like “John” not being able to get toilet paper because of panic buying or how stores in my old city used to run out of everything in the run up to snowstorms. 

I’ve brought this up with lower middle class person I based “John” on, and he’s said would have been willing and able to temporarily pay 1.5x-3x maybe even 4x if it meant getting what he needed, which (probably, counterfactuals are hard) would have been a big enough increase to keep the panic buying from getting out control because the people buying just in case would have had sticker shock and (though this might be generous to their intelligence) because it would have made them aware that the people around them were also being discouraged from stocking up. 

Going back to my hometown, everyone who lived there, let alone ran a store knew that storm shortages were a thing.  Since warehouse space is not literally free, and grocery stores have something like a 1% margin on essentials (as cited above) it didn’t make sense for them to keep extra stock for storms, but seeing as warehousing is fairly cheap (in my personal experience with non-food retail supply lines) and even a 10% cost increase would be getting them 11 times as much profit under normal circumstances I don’t think they would need to charge an unaffordable large premium to have a storm’s worth of extra supplies waiting in the wings (at least for non-perishables, milk is trickier). 

Another way to think of it is by looking at things from a suppliers point of view. All things being equal you want to charge more because duh, but you still need to keep things low enough that you actually sell.  So the typical hike isn’t going to be enough to price out a significant chunk of your normal customer base.  It will go a bit higher to get money from the people who are just always going to panic buy, but most people who don’t actually need more are going be put off by sticker shock and reassured by the knowledge that other panic buyers are also likely to back off and stick to a more reasonable amount.

I don’t want to go take pictures because that seems ghoulish but there’s an hour long line to get into the grocery store down the street and it’s been an hour long line all day.

I never wanna hear anyone bring up breadlines in defense of capitalism ever again.

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New Amenta Thread

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Space Shanties are a thing.  I’m not going to list all of them, but “The Pirate Song” from Mouretsu Space Pirates feels like something real pirates would sing and is surprisingly cute for a song about beating people up (it helps if you’re already invested in the ship),  The Green Hills of Earth is a classic from the 50s or so thats basically a sung prayer for a safe landing, and somebody made a whole playlist though its a little hit or miss.

okay so we all agree that scifi often draws parallels between space and the ocean, right? like, starships, and captains, and crew. right? well now consider:

tales of space leviathans - great glowing serpents and nebulaeic kraken and celestial whales, dismissed by most as the feverish hallucinations of those stricken by madness developed from months or even years of isolation in the void, but believed by others who conduct expeditions and send out probes fitted with recording equipment in the hopes of capturing a glimpse of conclusive evidence of these elusive beasts

ghost starships, populated by skeletal crews of men lost in one of the many legendary battles fought across space and time. sometimes a ship will report seeing a vessel that has been MIA for aeons, or run off-course into dangerous territory, drawn by a distress signal with no physical source; the echoes of the sins of the past.

space atlantis - legends of ‘lost’ planets and civilizations; some say they were destroyed, others that they were crushed under the weight of their own hubris, others still that they developed technology advanced enough to hide themselves and any signs of life from even the most sensitive ship’s scanners. they are the object of both scorn and fascination in the scientific community.

areas of intrigue and foreboding, where vessels sometimes enter and never return; the equivalent of our ocean’s bermuda triangle - treacherous asteroid belts whose dense gaseous fog rings make navigating them a suicide mission; uncharted planets and sectors whose inhabitants don’t take kindly to strangers they catch trespassing; areas where communication equipment fails and ships’ systems are affected in unpredictable ways, leading vessels to drop off the map and reappear, if they do at all, in unexpected locations via an unknown trajectory.

space pirates (being ‘tossed out of the airlock’ is equivalent to walking the plank)

space lighthouses - ancient stations built on uninhabited moons and asteroids, run by old, eccentric spacers too attached to their spacefaring ways to retire peacefully and consign themselves to solid ground and content themselves with looking up at the stars they once used to roam. some serve as rest points for crews on long voyages, while others are rumored to be haunted, or fallen into disrepair.

spaceship junkyards, floating in uninhabited areas or dumped on scarcely populated planets, stripped clean of any useful parts by scavengers looking to make some coin or repair and improve their own vehicles.

black holes = space whirlpools

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I meant to post this to my main blog to begin with, but can’t be bothered to delete and repost because a)Amenta rp is dead b) its basically in character expect for the part where the Amenta has a different enough calendar for the 18th century to not be the right time period.

Q&A: Arms and Armor

I was wondering if you would have any tips on good armor for my characters. I’m having a little trouble figuring out what would be the best option for combat. I’m also having trouble figuring out what weapons would work out the best too. Any help is much appreciated!!

There’s a similar answer to both of these, it’s contextual. “Good weapons” are ones that can kill your foes without killing you in the process. “Good armor” is gear that can protect you from your foes weapons without getting you killed in the process. Both are going to change significantly depending on the world your characters live in, and what they’re doing.

Here’s a quick example: If your character is a 17th century sailor, heavy armor is far more dangerous to your character than going unarmored. If they fall off the deck, they won’t be able to swim, and they will drown. (There’s a decent chance that they couldn’t swim anyway. Ironically, swimming was not a common skill among sailors in the 17th century.)

Their best options for weapons are short barrel firearms and swords. This is because they’re going to be engaging in very close quarters during boarding actions, where long muskets and polearms will get caught on the environment and can’t be used. When going ashore, they’d probably draw long muskets and breastplates from the ship’s armory (if it had one.)

In modern infantry warfare, those weapons would be suicide. Most modern combat happens at ranges where a smooth bore, black powder pistol simply can’t connect.

If your character is infantry in 11th century Europe, it’s probably going to be a cloth gambeson, and polearms, which won’t work for any of the examples above.

Picking the right weapon for the situation is all about understanding the kind of conflict your characters will be seeing, and the technology of the world they live in.

It’s easy to look back at history and the get the impression that nothing changed over long stretches. This is not true. Military technology has been a constant progression. This can be seen in the advancement of armor and weapons throughout history. The swords the Roman Legions used were fundamentally different from the swords wielded in the 18th century, and a smith from two thousand years earlier could not have replicated them.

This is before you consider specialized weapons like the estoc. Which was specifically designed as an anti-armor weapon against plate. Obviously, if your characters exist in a world where plate armor isn’t a thing, the estoc’s not going to be a real weapon. (Not just, “not a good one,” it probably won’t exist.) A shocking number of weapons originate in these kinds of “problem/solution” dynamics, and armor follows suit. The original term, “bullet proof,” referred to early modern armorers “proofing” their armor’s effectiveness by shooting it with a pistol. To demonstrate that the armor would hold up on the battlefield, where firearms had started coming into prominence.

So, weapons evolve to deal with armor, and the situations they’re used in. Armor evolves to deal with the weapons used against them. Sometimes, weapons have a technological surge, leading to new innovations that seriously change the nature of combat. Such as the development of bronze, iron, steel, and firearms. Each of these stages dramatically changed weapons and armor. Even within those fields, refinement of existing technologies kept things moving forward.

One excellent, and recent, example is World War I. The introduction of fully automatic weapons completely changed the face of warfare, and, in less than a year, brought an end to millennia of human combat doctrine. Fundamentally, the answer to your question changes completely when you move from 1900 to 1920.

The best I can offer is, consider the situations where they’ll need to use the weapons. Research any historical allegory for your world, and try to build it from there. It’s not perfect, but it might give you some ideas. For example, if you’re making your characters in the model of Scandinavian heroes, you might want to read up on Viking warfare. If it’s the Romans, then read up on the Roman Legions. There’s no harm in reading up on history and trying to learn from it. Even if things don’t match up 100%, you’ll learn things about how people looked at conflict, and how they responded to it.

-Starke

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Q&A: Arms and Armor was originally published on How to Fight Write.