#open standards

[andypiper]

MQTT turns 25 - here's how it has endured

Happy birthday, @mqtt@fosstodon.org! 25 years young.

It’s October 2024 and I’m sitting here in my creative maker studio, wearing a bright t-shirt that excitedly bellows “MQTT 25”! To my left is a top-end Bambu Lab X1C 3D printer, that uses MQTT internally for communication. On my wall are a variety of connected gadgets that display data or that light up in response to MQTT notifications. Today is the official 25th anniversary of the publication of…

[teledyn]

Mastodon Is More Than A Twitter Replacement

The video is also on YouTube, but I think folks should see the peertube edition just for completeness

[ardathksheyna]

Learned something new today and as a result, I've officially joined the "Fuck HDMI" bandwagon.

[ewanspence]

All the answers I can think of are very 'old school', blogs, RSS, forums, IRC, etc. But then how many of the current generation are familiar enough to roll back to those? Is there something yet to be described waiting for us all? i have no idea.

[weepingfishturtledragon]

Imagine the Young Justice League finds out about Captain Marvel being able to eat anything and they decide to test it out with a bunch of different things. At first it starts off pretty tame with screws and bolts but then it slowly escalates to more extreme things like lava and bleach. Eventually after he ate a number of dangerous things with no effect on him they started to veer more towards extreme flavors and sensations.

First they buy the most spicy pepper The Carolina Reaper and of course Captain Marvel, happy to hang out with his friends, eats it without hesitation. His face slightly flushes, his eyes water a little, and he has a small cough, but generally he's fine. One day one of the YJL members is scrolling through tiktok and sees a drink called Battery Acid, which is a energy drink mixed with a LOT of sour candy, they immediately grab everyone to buy everything they need and make the drink. The moment Captain Marvel steps through the zeta-tube they shove the drink in his face and tell him to drink it and Billy with zero survival instinct does. The moment the drink touches his tongue his brain shuts down and an error message appears (⊙ _ ⊙). He comes back to himself and downs the entire thing in one go. (He might be addicted now)

[pyreo]

Okay this is looking ridiculous

ArenaNet says by the end of the expansion's year-long cycle, around 800 decorations will be available.

It acts as a showcase for your in-game collection of skins and cosmetics. Any alts that you leave in your Homestead—they'll get bonuses for resting in it, including for WvW and sPvP—will still be chilling there when you log in with another character. There's also a stable for your mounts to hang out—great news for anyone who's got a fancy Jackal skin that they rarely have an excuse to see. Even your skiff is docked in a little pier, with some fishing spots available along the river.

With an armour stand, you can make a statue of their character that inherits your current fit—dyes and all. And the weapon stand will let you display any weapon that you've earned.

Any resource nodes that you've bought will be carried across to your new home, available for the daily gathering. And while it won't be available at the launch of Janthir Wilds, a new auto-collect feature is planned for one of the quarterly updates that will instantly gather every node attached to your Homestead's mine, logging camp or farm.

[zephyrine-gale]

I think tumblr ate the ask after I answered it but someone asked why my charms were priced higher now, so I wanted to answer it again and show a little timelapse!

while looking around at all the cons I went to and comparing to my peers + their online shops, I realized I was undercharging for the amount of work I do for my charms, especially when I'm usually drawing two designs per charm to make the backside different and spending a lot of time rendering each one :'>

[lgbtlunaverse]

What kind of saber is baxia anyway?

I love my bloodthirsty princess of a cursed blade, and in my heart of hearts i am nothing but a sword nerd, so i've been extremely fascinated by Baxia and how we know frustratingly little about what she actually looks like!

I mean, look at bichen, right?

Bichen in the donghua:

Bichen in the drama:

They're clearly not exactly the same. The scabbards are different, and the guards have a different shape. But these are recognizably different iterations on one theme, right? Thin jian with a white grip silver guard, light blue tassel and silver mounting accents on the scabbard.

Now this is baxia in the donghua:

And baxia in the drama:

????????

THAT'S A COMPLTELY DIFFERENT WEAPON

it doesn't stop there either, the audio drama is kind enough to give us ANOTHER COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BAXIA

pretty! But how is that he same sword??

And when we go back to the novel, we get very little information on her appearance other than the fact that her blade is tinted red with all the blood she's absorbed. Which none of these designs incorporate.

This is not a dig on the designs itself, they're all quite gorgeous in their own right and i'm going to spend a while discussing all of them! Because isn't it fascinating how, since we know little about novel baxia beyond "saber" all of these designs ended up so different? What kinds of sabers are these, anyway?

So, a chinese aber, aka a "dao" (刀) just means a sword that has only one cutting side. As opposed to a jian, which has two.

You can see how that leaves a LOT of room for variaton.

I've actually seen some people get confused because Huaisang's saber in the untsmed is thin and quite straight, making it superficially resemble the jian more than drama!baxia, but it is still clearly a saber!

See? only one cutting blade!

This, to me looks a lot like a tang dynasty hengdao

credit to this blog for providing his image and being a great source for all this going forward.

TANGENT: during all this I found out the english wikipedia page for dao is WRONG! Ths is what they about the tang hengdao!

So that sounds like the hengdao was called that during the sui dynasty, but then, after that, started being called a peidao, right?

WRONG

I LOOKED AT THE SOURCE THEY USED AND IT SAYS THIS:

IT WAS CALLED THE PEIDOU UNTIL THE SUI DYNASTY, AT WHICH POINT IT WAS CALLED A HENGDAO. Which would carry over to the Tang dynasty. This was the source wikipedia linked! and it says something else than they say it does!

Anyone know how to edit a wikipedia article?

ANYWAY

BACK TO BAXIA

Since we're already at the drama, let's look at drama baxia: She's also straight! the general term for straight-backed saber is Zhibeidao, but that's a modern collector's term, and doesn't really say anything about which historical kind of saber baxia could be based on. Another meta i found on the drama nie sabers already went on some detail here.

I'm gonna expand on that a little: The kinds of historical straight-backed sabers we see resemble the hengdao a lot more than they do baxia. They don't go to their point as harsly as she does (she's basically a cleaver!) and they're all way skinnier.

No, my personal theory is that instead of being based on any kind of historical sword, drama!baxia is based on a Nandao.

I mean, come on, look at it!

Baxia!

The Nandao... isn't actually a historical sword. It was invented for Wushu forms. There's a really fascinating article about its conception, but that's why the swords in the images look a little thin and flimsy. Wushu swords are very flexible and light, they're dance props, not weapons to fight with. There are actual steel versions of Nandao, but they're recreations of the prop, not the other way around.

So That's one way in which Baxia differes from the Nandao: she's actually a real weapon. The other is that, as you can see above, the nandao has an S-shaped guard. Baxia doesn't. She's also much more elaborately decorated, of course. Because she's a princess.

Now: audio drama baxia!

This is much easier. with that flare at the tip?

Oh baby that's a niuweidao, all the way!

There are more sabers with that kind of curved handle, but the broad tip is really charcteristic of the niuweidao. The Niuweidao is also incredibly poplar in modern media, often portrayed as a historical sword, but it originated i nthe 19th century! And it was actually never used by the military!

That's right, the Niuweidao was pretty much exclusively a civilian weapon! That makes its use here anachronistic, but so is the nandao, and considering that the origin story of the Nie is that they use Dao intead of Jian because their ancestors were butchers, portraying them with a weapon historically reserved for rebels and common people instead of the imperial military is actually very on theme!

Finally, Donghua/Manhua baxia. These two designs are so similar I'm going to treat them as one and the same for now.

Unlike both previous baxias, The long handle makes it clear this baxia is a two-handed weapon, though Nie Mingjue is absolutely strong enough to wield her with one hand anyway. Normal rules don't count for cultivators.

Now, this is where things get tricky, because there are a lot of words for long two-handed sabers. And a lot of them are interchangable! This youtube video about the zhanmadao, one of the possible sabers this baxia could be based on, goes a little into just how confusing this can get. This kind of blade WAS actually in military use for many centuries, making it the most historically accurate of all the baxias. But because of that it also has several names and all of those names can also refer to different kinds of blades depending on what century we're in.

So here's our options: i'm going to dismiss the wodao and miandao, because these were explicitly based on japanese sword design, and as we can see manhua baxia has that very broad tip, so that won't work

(Example of a wodao. According to my sources Miaodao is really just the modern common term for the wodao, and the changdao, and certain kinds of zhanmadao... do you see how quickly this gets confusing?)

Next option: Zhanmadao.

Zhanmadao stands for "horse chopping saber" so... yeah they were anti-cavalry weapons. meant to be able to cut the legs and/or necks of horses. That definitely sounds like a weapon Nie Mingjue would wield. But if you watched that youtube video i linked above, you'll know the standardized Qing dinasty Zhanmadao looked very different from earlier versions. It was inspired by the japanese odachi, and more resembles the miandao than its ealrier heftier counteprarts.

Earlier Ming dynasty Zhanmadao on the other hand were... basically polearms. the great ming military blog spot, another wonderful source, says these are essentially a kind of podao/pudao (朴刀) which looked like this

Now that blade looks a lot like baxia, but the handle is honestly too long. Donghua!baxia straddles the line between sword an polearm a little, but while zhanmadao have been used to refer to both long-handled swords and polerarms, this was undeniably a polearm, not a sword.

If you want to know what researching this was like, I found a picture of this blade on pinterest-- labeled as a "two-handed scimitar"-- and the comment section was filled with people arguing about whether this was a Pudao, Wudao, Zhanmadao, Dadao, Guandao, or a japanese Nagita.

So... that's how it was going. This has kept me up until 2 AM multiple times.

However! Thanks to this article on the great ming military blog I found out there have historically been pudao blades with shorter handles!

Specifically, Ming dynasty military writer Cheng Ziyi created a modified version of the pudao to work with the Dan Fao Fa Xuan technixues-- aka technqiues for a two-handed saber, which would alter heavily influence Miaodao swordmanship-- thereby, as the article points out, essentially merging the cleaver-polearm type Zhanmadao with the later two-handed japanese-inspired design.

This is the illustration for the Wu Bei Yao Lue (武備要略) a Ming dynasty military manual

This blade shape in the illustration doesn't match Baxia exactly, but since it's a lengthened Pudao-like blade and we've seen above that those can match Donghua Baxia's shape, i'm gonna say that calling Baxia a Zhanmadao with a two-handed grip isn't all that innacurate!

However, because all of these terms are so intertwined, there are a dozen other things you could call her that would be about equally correct.

To show that, here's a lightning round of other potential Baxia candidates:

Dadao (大刀)

Which are generally one-handed and too short. However!

Another youtube video i found of someone training with a Zhanmadao that resembles baxia a little also calls it a "shuangshoudai dao" (雙手带 刀) shuangshou means two-handed, and while 雙手带 seems to refer to a longer handled weapon, when looking for a shuangshou dao or shuangshou dadao (双手大刀) we find a lot more baxia-resembling blades like here and here

I also found that, while the cleaver-like Dadao is strictly a product of the 20th centuy, since dadao just means big sword or big knife, it has been used to refer to loads of different weapons! Some people could've called the zhanmadao and pudao "dadao" during the Ming dynasty as well.

Another potential baxia candidate that mandarin mansion classifies as similar to the later dadao (though longer, as seen in the illustration below) is the "Kuanren Piandao"

Which piqued my interest because this diagram classifying different tpye of Dao:

Claims that a Kuanrenbiandao (diferent spelling, same sword) is the same as a modern day Zhanmadao.

(So once again, all of these terms are interchangable)

Another opton Is the Chuanmeidao/Chuanweidao (船尾刀) below you can see a diagram, based on the Qing dynasty green standard army regulation, of blades all officially classified as types of "pudao"

The top middle is the Kuanren Piandao, and bottom left is the Chuanweidao.

Both of these have a lot of baxia-like qualities.

So there you go! live action baxia is based on a Nandao, audio drama baxia is based on a Niuweidao, and Manhua/donghua baxia is some kind of two-handed Zhanmadao/Pudao/Dadao depending on how you want to look at it.

I'm honestly surprised no one has made the creative decision to portray Baxia as a Jiuhuandao, aka 9 ringed broadsword yet.

I mean look at it! Incredibly imposing. Would make for a great Baxia imo. (@ upcoming mdzs manga and mobile game: take notes!)

[blueskittlesart]

*sigh* thoughts on Nintendo's botw/totk timeline shenanigans and tomfoolery?

tbh. my maybe-unpopular opinion is that the timeline is only important when a game's place on the timeline seriously informs the way their narrative progresses. the problem is that before botw we almost NEVER got games where it didn't matter. it matters for skyward sword because it's the beginning, and it matters for tp/ww/alttp (and their respective sequels) because the choices the hero of time makes explicitly inform the narrative of those games in one way or another. it matters which timeline we're in for those games because these cycles we're seeing are close enough to oot's cycle that they're still feeling the effects of his choices. botw, however, takes place at minimum 10 thousand years after oot, so its place on the timeline actually functionally means nothing. botw is completely divorced from the hero of time & his story, so what he does is a nonissue in the context of botw link and zelda's story. thus, which timeline botw happens in is a nonissue. honestly I kind of liked the idea that it happened in all of them. i think there's a cool idea of inevitability that can be played with there. but the point is that the timeline exists to enhance and fill in the lore of games that need it, and botw/totk don't really need it because the devs finally realized they could make a game without the hero of time in it.

[manderleyfire]

'How many times you been caught with your hand where it doesn't belong?'

PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953), written and directed by Samuel Fuller

[astrhae]

"she was my best friend in the whole wide universe. i absolutely love her. oh. mmm. do i say things like that now? she's so ordinary, she's brilliant." currently going absolutely feral over donna noble, temp from chiswick, making the same choice over and over again, and holding the doctor to his mark over and over again. donna noble who, in the fires of pompeii, made that choice to sacrifice pompeii for the world --- who saw her world burn around her just as the doctor saw gallifrey burn around him

donna noble who made the doctor save just someone. who still chose to be kind and brave and human and loving even in her grief and heartbreak -- donna who crashes back into the doctor's life for a third time and shows him through her choices that this is the doctor. not a god, just someone ordinary. someone scared and flawed and fallible, but someone who ultimately tries anyway. someone who despite and in spite and because of the broken world still cares enough to try and save it

and the doctor. the doctor, who doesn't know who he really is anymore, who spent the past hundreds of years without donna -- the doctor, who said virtue is virtue in extremis. without witness and without reward -- he finally tells her, no.

no, this isn't who the doctor is. this is who donna turned the doctor into. this is who he is because of her. and it's finally time to make amends

[delicourse]

jolyne doodles

[theblackfemininesociety]

Girl Talk: Stop Comparing Yourself to Unrealistic Beauty Standards.

We just want all of our besties to see this video and take into account that 90% of the beauty standards and images you see that is pushed by the media isn’t real.

And this is with no shade: Jodie Joe, the face of fashion nova, has had surgery and it’s still photoshopped, altered and edited in realtime to make her look a certain way.

Stop comparing.

Stop consuming.

Stop trying to fit the mold when you were designed to break it.

Choose health and fitness over aesthetics. Prioritize your well-being, focusing on nourishing your body, staying active, and reprogram your mind to have a positive mindset.

Why?

Because true beauty radiates from within, and when you feel strong and healthy, it reflects in your confidence and energy.

Set realistic goals, celebrate your progress, and surround yourself with supportive communities that uplift and motivate you.

💌 A love letter to my BFS Ladies:

Here at BFS, while we adore sharing moodboards and celebrating outer beauty and fashion, we want to remind you that your journey in femininity and healed womanhood is about so much more. The true goal is healing, inner confidence and growth. Becoming the woman you aspire to be should transcend your outward appearance.

This journey is a mindset and a lifestyle that not only embodies the essence of a soft life but also breaks generational curses and defies stereotypes often placed upon Black women. It’s about nurturing yourself and starting a journey of self-discovery.

Your God-given superpower as a woman lies in this transformative work. Don’t just look the part—embrace the full, life-changing experience. Don’t cheat yourself from the profound growth and healing and real purpose that awaits you.

With love and inspiration,

The BFS Team 💋

Follow us on IG • Facebook • Join Our Groupchat !

[brw]

"but hamas is getting funded by extremist islamic hate groups!" do you think the U.S. government and military giving funding for israeli's war efforts against palestinians is a morally neutral and inherently righteous body that had no influence in the politics of southwest asia as a global colonial superpower. do you really think anything you can say about the people resisting oppression can't be said about the oppressors.

[moominsuki]

early 20s bakugou and early 20s you meeting the both of you in a decade’s time… you both aren’t particularly close in the present - you orbit around the same friendship groups and katsuki isn’t exactly opening his arms to a warm hug, receptive to your qualms. he has little time for his friends and even less time for new people in his life.

barely eat, sleep, work, repeat. that’s how it is for him after the war and it’s weird knowing him during this stage. he’s still the some snarly, full of bite and venom bakugou from school but sometimes, you can see the lack of sparkle in his eyes when he speaks: when he’s out on patrol with you and he no longer has the energy to snap back at naysayers and snotty nosed kids. he does his job and then he clocks out. simple as that. relationships? dating? they’re not even in his vocabulary.

so it’s easy to imagine the shock in his - both of your faces when he sees 32-33 year old bakugou on the television and the way he is a decade later is antithetical to how he is now. his old personality still shines through (it’s still HIM) but he smiles genuinely when he meets fans now, and the sparkle in his eyes is there all over again - the cheeky sparkle, the one that made you fall for him.

it’s hard to imagine a life in which you’re married to him (self proclaimed mrs bakugou in an architectural digest interview, showing the cameramen around your house while sporting a third trimester bump and gushing over your state of the art kitchen with a fancy le creuset set and an aga that katsuki and friends built for you with their bare hands as a birthday gift) though, it’s probably because the bakugou you know doesn’t even know the bakugou in this timeline. he doesn’t know the bakugou that would joke all carefree and then openly kiss your forehead in the middle of the street.

he doesn’t tell you he wants to know this bakugou.

you guys eventually get back to your timeline, in the present, the one that in which bakugou sneers and he barely eats and doesn’t even know what day of the week it is. it’s only a few, long months later when it’s your birthday and he buys you a gift card for le creuset. he says it’s because you seem to like shitty things like kitchen sets and pots and pans and it doesn’t make sense to him because “they’re all the same shit at the end of the day.”

you laugh a watery laugh that day, tears unshed at his words, though you’re not offended - far from it. you think you can come to love bakugou and you’re excited for when that time will come, no matter how long it may take.

[carsthatnevermadeitetc]

BMW Isetta Standard 250, 1955. The car that transformed BMW's fortunes in the 1950s had been designed in Italy by two young aeronautical engineers, Ermenegildo Preti, and��Pierluigi Raggi. They were commissioned by Renzo Rivolta who thought his company, Iso Rivolta Spa (which was making scooters and motorcycles) should produce a new type of automobile, as small as possible. The Iso version didn't sell particularly well in Italy but did attract the attention of BMW managers. The German company was in dire straits and was struggling to introduce new models. In particular they needed a small car, low-cost and fuel-efficient, to help mobilise post-war Germany. They secured a license from Iso to manufacture the cars In Germany powered by their own BMW motorcycle engines. It was an immediate success, with over 160,000 units being made from 1955 to 1962. Yes that's Cary Grant standing in one