Skua

“Here’s an attempt to re-write the thing you’re going to read the original of anyway” seems like a waste of time too

Even without considering privacy, why would you want it to re-write incoming texts? It’s not like those are usually unreasonably long to read

Here’s where the three railways mentioned in that article are, for anyone else who was curious https://i.imgur.com/7t4WpQ0.png

Huh. Really liked these games when I was growing up, but had never looked into anything that came before Armageddon. That art style on the original and Director’s Cut makes me deeply uncomfortable

Still, cool way to celebrate the series

Strictly speaking it’s “only” aged 51 years, these were released in 1999

I assume you’ve tripped up on your measurements somewhere, because 4 ml would be a very sad dram. A spirit measure in the UK is 25 ml, so you get 28 of those out of a 700 ml bottle for $7,000 at that bar.

Edit: upon looking it up, apparently a dram actually is 4 ml in America? In Scotland that’s just the word for a glass of whisky, assumed to be an approximate “one drink” rather than an actual specification of volume. If you offered someone a dram and poured them 4 ml here, they’d think you were the stingiest person since Ebenezer Scrooge

However bars mark drinks up like mad, and they will absolutely do so on extremely premium drinks because the only people buying those are people who do not care how much it costs. If you take $3 for a shot of a basic vodka, that’s $84 for the bottle, and there’s absolutely no way you’d pay $84 for that same bottle in a supermarket.

You definitely could spend seven grand on a 40 year old bottle of whisky if you went looking for one. This specific bottle is 51 years, but it’s commanding this price because it’s a very rare special edition from a big and popular distillery

None of the Anglosphere currencies would make this anything other than the price of a car anyway. This is absolutely just a collector’s item for those with more money than sense, never expected to be actually drunk

Chad chose it when Romania was using a different one, Chad is environmentally conscious and reuses to reduce waste

Aarhus university has done exactly that! https://consentomatic.au.dk/

It doesn’t work 100% of the time but it’s pretty good

Wait, people actually avoid Australia because of it? I mean, I do think of Australian wildlife as dangerous, but to me that means “don’t fuck about” rather than “don’t go at all”. And I live in the UK, where we killed everything that was even slightly dangerous to humans long ago

Presumably you downloaded Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC), which I still had to do to make a custom keyboard layout in 2022. Funnily enough I was also wanting to use AltGr to add diacritics to vowels, because I don’t want to have to go to the backtick key for àèìòù

For what it’s worth, making a custom layout actually is a huge pain in the arse. That’s a pretty niche use case, but there is definitely no reason for it to be as much of a hassle as it is

Isn’t a khopesh sharp on the other side of the curve from a shotel, though? It seems like sharpening the inside was the big innovation that makes shotels distinctive

while a western sword was like the size of a grown man and very heavy. Because of this western swords just didnt need to be that sharp.

I’m afraid these are both wrong. For a start, there’s no one Western sword. There’s not even, like, one sword used by professional soldiers from 15th century Germany. Some of them were going around with zweihänders (literally “two-hander”), which were straight blades and really could be 2m long and 4kg, while others at the same time were using the messer (literally “knife”), which is curved, half the length, and a quarter of the weight.

They were also absolutely kept sharp. There was little point in maintaining an absolutely razor-sharp edge because that’ll just get damaged, but if it’s not sharp enough to effectively cut stuff then you wasted a whole bunch of your money buying a really ineffective hammer. And you absolutely would have just used a hammer if that was what you wanted.

There were techniques for using swords as bludgeoning weapons, but these evolved as methods to counter increasingly effective armour, not because the swords weren’t effective cutting tools. Holding the blade of the sword and using the crossguard as a hammer is one of the better-known examples of this. But that’s something you do if you do not actually have a hammer with you and nonetheless need to fight a guy wearing plate armour. If you’re carving through the four hundred peasants he brought with him, you want to cut stuff. Even against the guy in armour, rather than bludgeoning it you might prefer to hold your sword with one hand on the hilt and one halfway up the blade so that you can effectively direct the tip into the tiny gaps in the armour, at which point sharpness is very important again.

European cultures absolutely did have refined martial arts for wielding swords. We just didn’t put much effort into to preserving them once guns replaced the swords.

They look like youtube clickbait thumbnails

I personally subscribe to Asimov’s definition of sci fi:

Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.

While Dune is full of stuff that’s just straight up magic, the story is very much about how humans handle the technology, even when the in-universe basis of the technology is essentially magic. Long before the story ever started, we invented AI, freaked out about it, and then had to figure out how to replace computers in an interstellar society. The main overarching plot of the kwisatz haderach is about the consequences of the “invention” of precognition, even if the means of the invention are very fantastical. Several major factions are basically “what if we did super advanced selective breeding on humans for a thousand years”.

Star Wars, meanwhile, isn’t concerned with that sort of thing. It’s an adventure of good againt evil in the most classic of ways. It’s sword and sorcery. Even when a literal world-destroying superweapon is a major plot point, it doesn’t actually take much of any time to think about what this technology would do to society beyond “be very scary”. The obvious point of comparison is nuclear weapons in real life, and the development of those re-shaped culture enormously. We suddenly had this craze of imagination of all the things nuclear power might do. Humanity conquered the atom and we couldn’t stop dreaming up new ways to wield this power. Most of which were fucking insane. In Star Wars, a power orders of magnitude greater shapes society no more than a particularly big army.

Star Wars is only interested in the characters, whatever technology is present is set dressing to allow for fun visuals. That’s not something I say as a negative either. It’s perfectly valid and reasonable for a story to take more interest in its characters than its setting.

Disclaimer: I’m writing all this thinking only about the nine main series films. Especialy the original three. I’m sure someone has written Asimov-definition sci fi somewhere in the Star Wars canon, “legends” or not. I’ve just never delved into it much at all.

I also think that the Last Jedi is one of the better Star Wars films, so I’m quite used to my Star Wars opinions being the subject of definitely very polite disagreement

Star Wars is absolutely fantasy that happens to be set in space

There might be fan art, but I doubt there’s anything official. Besides how little attention anything Elsweyr generally gets (even the first ESO expansion into Elsweyr mostly had the khajiit as secondary characters), it originated in an unofficial source. Michael Kirkbride (a lead writer for Morrowind and several other important bits of Elder Scrolls stuff) wrote The Pocket Guide to the Empire, 2nd Edition with the input of community members. The Pocket Guide 1st edition came with the manual of Redguard, and the 3rd edition came with Oblivion. The 3rd edition contains a few references to the 2nd edition, which at the time had not actually been written, so Kirkbride decided to fill the gap. The relevant section, with explanatory notes from me that you can ignore if you know that stuff already, is:

So Mane ^1 saw that Khajiit was fighting itself more than usual and donned the hairs of his many littermates and his clan and his guards until he could bear no more and then palanquin-raced throughout the lands to repeat these words: “Woah-ho now, mad cat. You fight and fight but if you will give Mane just one moment, he will show something far better, for the Mane has had many hours and fine sugar to think this over. Come now, Palatiit ^2 ; come now, Ne Quiniit ^3 . Together, just this once, Khajiit will stand tall as Alkosh ^4 , cat upon cat upon cat. And in doing so, it will climb to the moon as it has been told so many times.”

Khajiit saw reason in these words and so it climbed and climbed, cat upon cat, for a hundred days. Much sugar ^5 was brought there to support the climbers and in the end Khajiit climbed high, so very high that it was in fact closer to Jo’Segunda ^6 than to Nirni ^7 below. At that moment, little Alfiq ^8 fell upwards and from there on Khajiit helped Khajiit up, which was down, until all were gathered there. This is where Khajiit intends to stay from now on, for who could know strife when walking sugar and not sand?

1 - The Mane is the religious leader of the khajiit 2 - Pa’alatiin, or Pellitine, is the southern half of Elsweyr. Elsweyr is the region that the khajiit are from, and had only recently been united when the 2nd edition was written in-universe 3 - Ne Quin’al or Anequine is the northern half of Elsweyr 4 - Alkosh is the khajiiti interpretation or version of the god of time and top god of most pantheons, generally known as Akatosh to the empire and therefore in most game material 5 - Moon sugar is a narcotic with great religious significance in khajiiti society. If you’ve come across skooma in the games, it is the heroin to moon sugar’s opium 6 - Jo’Segunda, or Secunda, is one of the two moons 7 - Nirni, or Nirn, is the planet that Tamriel and the games are set on 8 - An alfiq is a type of khajiit that physically resembles a housecat but which is every bit as sapient as any other khajiit. You can actually meet several in ESO, but sadly cannot play as one. The Legends card “Frazzled Alfiq” is probably my all time favourite piece of official Elder Scrolls art

Anyway Kirkbride’s unofficial stuff is not “canon”, for whatever that’s worth, but due to his significance to the setting and the fact that his writing is usually interesting, people often accept it as such. The story does not end there, though! The developers of ESO have a series called Loremaster’s Archive, which is an in-character lore Q&A series. In “Moon Bishop Hunal Answers Your Questions”, someone asked about the “cat upon cat” story.

“Our scribes are currently working on the transcription of the ‘Ri’datta-ssabavezi.’ In this story, your people are climbing ‘cat upon cat’ and finally reach Jone, where they founded something called ‘Lleswer.’ But we failed to understand the meaning of this. Some at the Guild suggest it has to be taken literally, but it seems impossible. Am I right?” – Iszara the Restless, Singer of the Scenarist Guild

Moon Bishop Hunal says, “It is the nature of myth to be true and yet at the same time mere allegory. Are you ‘right’? In this context, the question is without meaning. But do not be offended, hairless one. Many stories are puzzles with more than one solution.”

So, canon? Maybe, maybe not. But it got a nod, and people like it.

it’s heavily suggested that the elder scrolls is a post-apocalyptic fantasy game

I distinctly recall a conversation I had on reddit in which I irritated several Fallout fans by insisting that the Elder Scrolls is simply Europe in the world of Fallout and that the Chinese stealth suits were 100% chameleon enchanted gear from TES IV