I just recently started watching Star Trek, and Kirk is very unlike the memes. The most noticeable thing is that, contrary to what TV and the Internet would have you believe, he talks like a normal human being.

As to why he is a good leader, he is competent and perceptive He always prioritises the health and safety of his crew even above his own.He never pursues romantic or sexual relations with crew members no matter how much he would like to, and takes reports of sexual harassment seriously (“Charlie X”). He doesn’t throw his weight around; while decisions are ultimately his to make, he listens to his subordinates and acts on their advice. He takes swift action, but only after diplomacy and negotiation have failed.

Let’s not forget that Trump has been attacking Iran since his first term. In November 2018, he unilaterally reäpplied sanctions, violating the antinuclear treaty, despite Iran appearing to have been fulfilling their end of the bargain. As Britain and France desperately tried to get the treaty back on track, Trump had Qassem Solameini assassinated in early 2020. That would have been the biggest news of the year, and likely would have led to a full-on war with Iran, if we didn’t all have to go into lockdown a few months later.

People say this is a distraction from the Epstein files, but I doubt that is more than a minor factor. Trump has had it in for Iran for years. The far more likely conspiracy is that he wants a war so he can declare martial law and be president for life. Even so, what’s more likely is that Trump is doing fascist action for the sake of action.

Reminds me of an infamous videom from the late 2000so about the quality of fansubs at the time. The guy made the case that the issues Horii describes can be overcome, but require careful word choices.

For example, consider “Just who the hell do you think I am!?” vs “May I enquire as to who you think I might be?” In Japanese, the difference is in which word they use for “I”, which the English translation gets across with word choices.

Switch 2s are cheaper in America than the Eurozone and the EU aren’t putting any new tariffs on Japan or Viernam, so they haven’t increased prices to account for tariffs. They pulled this off by getting a whole lot of Switch 2s into America before tariffs came into force.

Doom Eternal.

I like the original trilogy, adored Doom 2016, and I even thought Doom 3 was a decent game in its own right. So a direct sequel to Doom Eternal where Heaven gets involved and everybody says is bigger and better? Sign me the fuck up!

I bought the game and all the DLC. I played through to the end and beat the final boss, and I did not enjoy one second of it (I only finished because I can be a stubborn fool).

Things got off to a bad start when I had to sign into my Slayers Club account before the game would show me the main menu. Then when I was playing, it paused every few seconds to tell me that it couldn’t connect to the server, which utterly kills the vaunted flow of combat.

And the combat. Ugh. Doom 2016 is excellently balanced, providing 10 fun weapons for different situations which let people find their own playstyles, and prioritising ammo drops when the player is low on ammo and health drops when low on health. Eternal fans claim that there is no reason to use anything other than the super shotgun, and I have no doubt that strategy worked for them, but I used all the weapons, and I don’t think I used the super shotgun very much at all.

Eternal officially gives you nine weapons, but each of them has three different fire modes (except the super shotgun, which just has two fire modes and also a meathook), so there are really 26 guns plus two different grenades. And every single fucking enemy has a hardcoded weakness to two, maybe three attacks, and are barely hurt by anything else. These aren’t weaknesses to individual weapons, but to specific weapons in specific modes, and some of those modes have to be unlocked by meeting specific conditions. Every single demon hits like a dump truck and moves like a motorbike, so by the time you have selected the specific weapon that will do more than a papercut, you have a completely different demon in your face. And the guns in this Doom game hold fuck all ammo even when fully upgraded. And getting upgrades often requires playing suboptimally.

Speaking of ammo, the chainsaw has been downgraded from powerful emergency weapon to tool for obtaining ammo. You can find the odd ammo pickup in levels, but 90% of the time, the only way to get more ammo is to chainsaw a weak demon (demons don’t drop ammo otherwise). Because you can barely carry enough ammo to kill one heavy demon, I spent the 90% of the arena battles running around, desperately dodging attacks as I waited for the chainsaw to refill so I could get some ammo to shoot at the big demons. And the arena battles don’t use waves; as soon as you kill a big demon, another one teleports in to replace it, so there is no respite until you get near the end. This did not make me feel like a berserker-packing man and a half. I felt like a weak, terrified wimp, desperately trying to survive. Fighting hordes of demons isn’t epicly badass, it’s a long, tiring slog, and at the end of every arena, I didn’t feel empowered, I felt exhausted and relieved it was finally over.

To make an analogy, Doom 2016 is like an Italian pasta dish: a small number of high-quality, carefully-chosen ingredients that work well together. Doom Eternal is like making a sandwich of rashers, sausages, fried eggs, strawberry ice cream, venison, raspberries, spaghetti, and chocolate cake. All those things are great on their own, but the sandwich is just too much, and the flavours and textures all clash with each other.

Federating with mbin and Piefed

Mr. Powers, everybody says that nudity and cursing aren’t Internet-safe. How much poem could there possibly be?

The one with naked people on it.

I agree. This doesn’t seem any more egregious than clicking a button on a website that says “I am over 18”.

Playing Breath of the Wild helped me process depression.

Thirded

There’s a whole history there!

In short: swearing on the Bible doesn’t stop you from lying, it makes God angry at you if you do.

Long answer: When you swear or solemnly affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, you are making a legal commitment not to lie; if you lie under those circumstances, you are committing the crime of perjury.

But what if somebody was to deny they swore an oath? That’s why we have witnesses, and there is no better witness than a god. (Actually, the difference between an oath and a pledge is that an oath is formally witnessed by at least one god. A vow, meanwhile, is a promise made to a god).

So when a Roman swore an oath, he announced his name and the god he was swearing by; that got the god’s attention, and since gods see everything, the swearer will be punished if he violates the terms if the oath. You know how in movies a character will tell an obvious lie and declare “and may God strike me down if I lie”, whereupon something immediately hits them on the head? That’s how oaths actually work.

Likewise, swearing an oath while touching something related to the witnessing god makes the oath even more powerful and binding. Thus, you don’t want to break an oath sworn by Jupiter, and you really don’t want to break an oath sworn in a temple to Jupiter with your hand on a statue of Jupiter.

Instead of swearing by Jupiter (or Odin, or Ra, or Enlil, or whoever), Christians swear by God, and touch a Bible to make their oath stricter. Muslims use the Qu’ran to the same effect.

I was a big Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan in the 1990s, so I really started with h2g2. For those who don’t remember, it was an early attempt to make a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, but unlike Wikipedia, a given page could only be edited by its original creator or admins. I learned quite a bit of HTML from there.

Every page on h2g2 had an attached comment section, and because anybody could make a page, most of us used it primarily as a message board. There was a lot of roleplaying.

From there I branched out into forums. The big one I posted on was TotalGames.net, the joint forum for a bunch of video game magazines, because I read Cube in secondary school and they regularly posted stuff from it to get more people to join. One of the regular members, Android18a, set up her own website at SilentDream.co.uk and had an attached forum which had six, maybe seven posters. That was a nice, intimate community, and we broke the rules of the forum software by regularly posting porn.

I signed up to a few other forums but never stayed long. In college, I joined TVTropes and actively contributed for a bit over 20 years; I just stopped this week because the new owners seem intent on turning it into another Wikia. TVTropes’ forum software is quite good, really solid, and the community is probably the most thoughtful, rational group I’ve ever encountered online (except for that one moderator. If you’re a regular on the TVTropes forum, you know the one).

I was almost one of the first people in Ireland to join Facebook. During college, I did a work placement where I shared a house with two American girls (also a Polish boy, a Romanian girl, and an Irish girl who moved out because she didn’t get along with anybody). The Yanks told me about this great website called Facebook, which I had also seen mentioned on College Humor a lot. It seemed great, but I kept saying “Oh, I’ll join tomorrow” until everybody else was on it, at which point I decided not to join it because it was too popular (yeah). That turned out to be the right decision.

I made a Twitter account after college because I was a fan of Channel Awesome and they all seemed to be on it, and so was apparently every other famous person. I could keep up with Twitter somewhat for a few years because I was unemployed and had little else to do, but actually keeping up with that site is a full-time job. I tried getting back into it on and off, and eventually deleted my account just before COVID when I figured out I have clinical depression and just reading Twitter aggravates it.

I started using Reddit at some point and I liked it, but stepped back when I realised it was addictive and toxic. I look in once in a while, and every time I do, it seems to be getting worse.

Then when Elon Musk took over Twitter, I started hearing about this thing called Mastodon. I made myself an account which I use daily, but I learned the lesson from Twitter not to bother trying to keep on top of everything. Mastodon led me to Lemmy, which led me to kbin, which is now mbin, which is where this account lives.

I also have a Discord account, but Discord confuses and overwhelms me.

Oh, and I also used UseNet a little bit, but its heyday was long past by the time I got online.

Because current (amps) has nothing to do with energy. Formally, an ampere is the current of 10¹⁹ electrons moving through a given point in 1.6 seconds; in more reasonable terms, it’s 1 coulomb per second. The amount of energy in those electrons doesn’t matter to the amount of current, but energy is very relevant to making machines do things.

Potential (volts) does include energy; specifically, 1 volt is 1 joule per coulomb. Add more energy and you get more volts, but the current remains the same. So volts are more relevant to how much use you can get out of your electrons.

Power (watts), meanwhile, tells you how effective your machine is at extracting that energy. 1 watt is 1 joule per second. Suppose you are running a 6W heater. Every second, that heater converts 6J of electrical energy into heat energy, while the current remains the same.

Thus, knowing current is important for electrical engineering, but potential and power matter more for operation.

I’m doing my part to genericise Google®'s trademark.

Yeah, Trump is just a blowhard who can’t accept losing. (He’s also a liar, but I’m not sure he doesn’t genuinely believe the election was rigged).

I used to work at a call center dealing with phone bill questions. Once you go past 20, people only see the first digit and the total number of digits, and perceive every digit after the first as 0.

If I had a nickel for every time I had this conversation, I’d have more than two nickels.

Customer: Why has my bill gone up by £10?!

Me: I see that on <date> you called a premium rate line which cost £2.

Customer: That’s only £2! I want to know why my bill is £10 higher!

Me: Your bill is normally £29.50. This month it’s £31.50. That’s a £2 difference.

Customer: Oh, so it is.

Steam is a DRM system.

I am not being flippant or facetious. Steam is literally a DRM system with a shop grafted on top. That is what it has always been. If a game is on Steam, it be definition has DRM.

Same as nunchakus.

[https://acoup.blog/2019/06/07/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-v-just-flailing-about-flails/](The optimum is no chain at all).

A flail is a really bad weapon. The chain makes it difficult to control, puts you at great risk of hitting yourself, while not giving you any reach advantage. Real flails were medieval agricultural tools that were sometimes used as improvised weapons, but if you had access to an axe or spear, you would use that. If you have a big spiky ball of iron, it’s much more effective to put it at the end of a rigid wooden staff and whack people with it that way; in other words, a mace is strictly better.

That said, real chain-based weapons do have their uses. The lkusarigama is made by attaching a sickle to a wooden handle with a long chain. It is used to entangle and disarm your opponent, at which point you can close in and slash them with the sickle end. Since it involves swinging a sickle on the end of a long chain, it would never be used in pitched battle lest you hit your comrades, and in any case spears are more useful when armies clash. However, kusarigamas were quite handy in one-on-one combat; since they were easy to conceal and could be disguised as agricultural tools, they were primarily used by ninjas and city guards

So to give an answer to your question, if you’re going to use a chain-based weapon, the optimum length is long enough to completely wrap around somebody. And in that situation, you want a fairly light, small business end, not a big metal ball.