Skua

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

Skua,

Greece has more tonnage under its flag than three of those. It also has four of those huge Soviet armoured hovercraft. I think we now know whose job this will have to be.

Skua,

Dr Angela Collier, acollierastro, does really fun casual conversational videos on the topic that explain topics in a good approachable way. They're not going to be an efficient way to learn, but they've got a pleasant vibe

Skua,

The members of the Commission are chosen by the head of each member state, but also have to be approved by the parliament. So it's kinda like a civil servant that gets vetted by elected representatives

Skua,

This seems unlikely given the population disparity between the Russians and Ukrainians (which was similar then as it is today) and the casualty figures. I can't find actual estimates of the ethnic breakdown of the army, but there are breakdowns of casualties by SSR. Obviously SSR is not a perfect analogue of ethnicity, but the numbers are far enough apart that I think it does the job here. Roughly 65% of military casualties were from Russia, 15% from Ukraine. Ukrainians were one of only two groups to be overrepresented as a proportion of casualty figures relative to their population though, the other being Belarusians.

Skua,

Most of the problems with an ornithopter are the difficulties of engineering rather than concept, which I think it's safe to say a society as far in the future as Dune's may well have sufficiently solved. Considering how brutal the conditions of the planet are - sand is horrible to any and all mechanical workings - and how there's only really one safe place to land, the fact that the ornithopters can effectively glide or even just keep flying if either of its two propulsion mechanisms fails actually offers a really good safety margin for that environment specifically.

I mean, obviously they were chosen first and foremost because it's a cool visual. But within the context they make some sense.

Skua,

There is a honeybee statblock in Wilds Beyond the Witchlight. Also a regular spider in the Monster Manual, which could work just as well. Apparently the average spider in the Forgotten Realms is poisonous enough to have a 15% chance of immediately killing an average commoner with a single bite

Skua,

Atheismo is, in fact, a tesla coil

Skua,

I don't know anything about Iran's subs, but Sweden's famously stealthy diesel subs keep a big tank of liquid oxygen on board and mix the exhaust with seawater before releasing it

Skua,

This is awful. Good work.

A case for preemptively defederating with Threads (kbin.social)

With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...

Skua,

Kbin will become an also-ran within the fediverse, because most users will want to use tools that allow them to interact with the most people.

I'm not sure this holds. Surely if it was the primary factor in deciding which social media everyone chose, Kbin would already be dead at the hands of Twitter? Federation doesn't really change that argument if it's only about interacting with the most people.

That said I do agree that we need enough instances to defederate from Threads for this to work. If Threads overwhelms every other instance with volume and kills them, Kbin is alone and not really better off for having defederated. But as a pretty big instance, Kbin doing this is a major part of ensuring that the fediverse does not just become a collection of quirky alternative interfaces for Threads.

as if Threads isn't part of the fediverse in the second breath.

If Threads puts out so much more content as to effectively make other federated entities irrelevant, the character of the Fediverse changes such that it is no longer what it is today. Federation is meaningless if 99.9% of content comes from one place. Kbin would wind up as effectively just a weird third party interface for threads in that situation.

Let's not do "separate but equal" with social media, please. It's silly.

Is it meaningfully different to any other instance of defederation? Many of which I would say are generally beneficial to Kbin.

Skua,

This is pretty close to Petrov's account of his reasoning, plus that the early warning system only showed four or five missiles inbound and he expected a hypothetical American first strike to be way bigger

Skua,

Estonia's generosity towards Ukraine has been remarkable (as has that of its Baltic nieghbours). Here's hoping the rest of us listen to them

Skua,

I imagine this was them knowing that 2d6 is different to 1d12 and just not quite understanding why that doesn't apply to two d10s used to roll a d100

Skua, (edited )

What you described would work, but it's not usually what people mean when they say "2d6". 2d6, or any number of dice in an XdY format, means rolling X number of Y-sided dice and adding the results together. The specific case of 2d6 vs 1d12 comes up a lot in D&D because there are some common weapons that use those two values for their damage rolls

Skua,

Look, the rate of encabulation is one thing, but it's not the entirety of progress in the field. I don't want to see a future where we miss out on real strides in the vector stability of linear torsion resonance. Sure, we can make do with what we have and just accept that we'll never have the capacitance alignment to work accurately for more than two, maybe three linkage cycles. But if the claims about the new magnesium-iridium vortex electrodes are even half true, it'd revolutionise the whole business

Skua,

One of them did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tentacolino

Skua,

Original photo. Or this one is actually an edit to make them smaller, an American psyop to cover up North Korea's clear strategic hat advantage

Skua,

The board has a map of North America with a bunch of missile trajectories drawn on it. The text apparently says "United States mainland strike plan". The characters do seem to be mostly right if I put that sentence in to google translate, but I definitely can't read Korean and so can't say for sure

Skua,

I'm with you on this one. I will admit that there is also a degree of appeal in winding up two specific friends of mine that hate it

Skua,

Force damage in D&D 5E is too poorly-defined to be a good part of the game and exists solely for when the designers don't want any characters or creatures to have access to resistance against the thing in question. Either we need an actual description of what happens to a thing that gets hit by it or it should be cut; the vast majority of the things that deal it could perfectly easily be magical bludgeoning / piercing / slashing. Spiritual weapon and Bigby's hand are particularly egregious

Skua,

See, as an example, water jet cutting

Skua,

We know what the damage type of a crushing force is in 5E, though. It's bludgeoning. That's why the grasping hand effect of Bigby's hand does bludgeoning, as does any constricting attack from the likes of giant snakes.

High-pressure fluid jets can cut through things if sufficiently narrow and fast, but at that point you're still just looking at piercing or slashing. The injury isn't different to being poked with a sharp stick other than that you are also wet now. If it's not enough to cut with... well that's bludgeoning again

Skua,

There's also armour of resistance and potion of resistance in the DMG, which can be force resistant. But that's very few items, and in 5E the magic items you get are entirely dependent on your DM giving them to you. Note how they're all in the DMG, after all. Compare this to, say, fire damage. Three player races have resistance, the 1st-level absorb elements spell gives most casters easy access to fire resistance, and two barbarian subclasses and two sorc subclasses can get it regularly. With force damage, I think the only option presented to the player is one of the aforementioned barb classes and a couple of abilities that give general resistance to all damage.

On the DM's side, of the literally several thousand creatures published for 5E, there are 5 with immunity, 12 with resistance, and 2 with vulnerability. 19 total creatures out of over 3,000 have any unusual interaction with the damage type. Compare this to 90 for radiant, another very low one; 552 for fire; 671 for bludgeoning (including the ones that only interact with mundane bludgeoning). 19 creatures is so vanishingly rare that I don't think my description is an unreasonable one.

Skua, (edited )

Bludgeoning clearly doesn't have to be rapid, since it is used to represent plenty of slower crushing damage. Every constrict attack is bludgeoning and so is the rug of smoethering's smother attack, the rolling sphere trap in the DMG does bludgeoning when it runs someone over (it has to enter the creature's space to do damage, it knocks them prone, and it's going way too slowly for it to be the impact), Bigby's hand does bludgeoning when you use it to crush someone with grasping hand, and Maximilian's earthen grasp also does bludgeoning while restraining. So given the significant precedent, it seems far more reasonable to describe the tennis ball as having a higher AC than the skull, and maybe resistance to bludgeoning damage. You can absolutely still do bludgeoning damage to it.

So based on that, bludgeoning damage is just any physical force applied in a way that won't typically pierce or cut a target; I can cut a block of soft butter by pressing a rolling pin through it, but edge cases (no pun intended) like aren't really useful for general purpose rules, so we say a rolling pin does bludgeoning damage when you hit me with it. We can apply this to the oil jet just the same: is it focussed enough to cut in to most targets? Piercing damage, maybe with some necrotic damage if it's some nasty oil that would be very bad to have getting inside you like that, as is often a complicating factor in high pressure fluid injuries. If it's less focussed than that but still hitting with enough force to hurt you, then we say it's bludgeoning, just like a marid's water jet attack or the tidal wave spell. Either way it's not doing some mysterious force damage that doesn't have obvious parallels in the other mundane damage types.

Skua,

I'd be fine with it if they actually described and treated it as, like, nuclear radiation or something. But they haven't.

Skua,

You'd only treat playing tennis as attack rolls on the ball if you were trying to damage it, which I presume you're not. What it would actually mean is that anyone coud eventually break a tennis ball by trying to crush it. But tennis balls do eventually break with enough use anyway, so if you do want to handle it that way then the problem just lies with the fact that we don't have a way to make attacking something have a chance of success between 0% and 5%. That seems more reasonable to me than a brontosaurus being completely unable to squash a tennis ball by stomping on it, which is what immunity would mean

I don't think it's fair to say I've moved the goalposts. My original point was that force damage is poorly defined and described in game, which I stand by whether it should be distinct from bludgeoning or not; I'm not saying all force damage should just be bludgeoning. Only the examples where it's clearly extremely similar to stuff that already does do bludgeoning. There is no actual description of the effects of force damage available, and many notable things that deal force damamge seem to be described in a way that would imply B/P/S damage. Bringing up AC is just me explaining why I think your example doesn't work. What you're describing already has a mechanic in game that is not related to damage types.

Magical B/P/S damage is pretty reliable. Magical bludgeoning is only resisted by about 50 published creatures, a good number of which are swarms, so it's still almost as reliable as it is with force damage. Not to mention that the best part about magic missile is causing multiple guaranteed concentration saves, and that still happens if the target has resistance. A bludgeoning magic missile would even get to work with the vulnerability to that damage type that most skeletons have! And if that really does make the spell too weak to be useful... okay, buff it? Have it do 1d6+1 instead of 1d4. I don't think you'd need to, but it's clearly no trouble to make it stronger. Of course, you don't need to make everything that does force damage into bludgeoning anyway. Have eldritch blast do different damage types depending on who your patron is, that'd be cool.

If you really think that losing a specific damage type that almost never interacts with resistance, immunity, or vulnerability, you could just give whichever attacks and spells you wanted a trait that says it ignores those things. That way everyone is actually clear about what it does too, rather than just expecting players to gradually learn enough of the Monster Manual and other books to realise that force does that. What we gain by dropping force damage is an easier time for DMs to properly describe injuries and more reason for everyone to actually pay attention to what damage types work against different targets (indirectly buffing sorc's metamagic feature to change damage types too, since the elemental damage types are no longer strictly outclassed by force damage). All I want for this option is a clear definition of what the damage type does that is actually supported by the flavour text and mechanics. At the moment it's weird that I'm not "supposed" to desribe steel wind strike, which literally requires the caster to wield a melee weapon, as actually cutting anything

Skua,

Reporting on Spotify's payments to artists typically puts payments at 0.003 - 0.005 USD per stream. 80,000,000 streams at 0.003 is just shy of a quarter of a million dollars. And it's totally fair to still argue about whether that's enough or whether it's fair to the many small artists than Weird Al, but his video is definitely a joke and not reflective of the actual income unless he's getting unbelievably shafted by his label

Skua,

The one time I visited the Netherlands and there was not a hill in sight

Skua,

Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages is outstanding. Packed full of every bit of info you could hope for, clearly delineates different types of content, thoroughly referenced, and doesn't run like shit like every Wikia wiki does

Skua,

It's a testament to how good pomegranates are that we're willing to put up wth the hassle of eating them

Skua,

Blackberries and strawberries! Although my tastes are likely coloured by the fact that I live in a place where few fresh fruits grow other than those, similar berries (yes, I know strawberries aren't technically berries), and apples. So I like what is tastiest here. But I do really like them

Skua,

I find that they do not store or travel well. Like a lot of fruit they're enormously tastier when they're in season and local

Skua,

Scotland! I've never visited the PNW but the impression I get as an outsider is that the landscape and climate are quite similar to Scotland's. The mountains are a lot bigger, but the general shape of things seems to hold

Skua,

Oh shit that was Battle Engine Aquila. I loved that game

Skua,

Oh wow, thanks for the reminder about this band. I had Age of the Understatement on CD and somehow just forgot about them when I switched over to streaming many years ago

Skua,

We're gonna have to call it a beef washington then

Skua,

I believe this is the Black Ice mod for Hearts of Iron 3

Skua,

It even feels pretty heisty at a few important points, especially in the DLC

Skua,

Unbelievably, the exact thing you've just described exists https://crusaderwars.com/

Skua,

It'd actually be hilarious to have this set in the era when the pilot's handheld weaponry or even just throwing a goddamn brick at the other plane were viable tactics

Skua,

It would make for a pretty cool setting for a story though. Set in the near future, first crewed missions to Venus find petroglyphs recording the last days of their ancestors

Skua,

I assume they're American, because 170F is 77C and that's a pretty reasonable temperature to steep green tea at

Skua,

The Fortwo never got anywhere near that much power, not even the Brabus versions. Toyota did make a one-off version of the similarly-sized Aygo called the Aygo Crazy which really did have 200hp and RWD though, so the idea did actually come into being at least once

Skua,

Joules actually are Newton-metres, in a sense. A joule is (genuinely) defined as the work done when a 1 Newton force displaces a mass by one metre. So as long as you're willing to risk the Bureau international des poids et mesures assassinating you for your physics crimes, you can totally pretend that Newton-metres are for measuring energy and Nm/s is a reasonable way to measure power. While you're at it, you should measure torque in Coulomb-volts for the same reason

Skua,

That thing must be terrifying to drive

Skua,

I think you've tripped up with your numbers somewhere. Four million fishing vessels averaging 25m each gives you 100,000km, enough to circle the entire Earth twice over with plenty to spare

Skua,

Oblivion's levelling system was beyond fucked. The optimal way to play in terms of power is to pick primary skills that you know you won't use and then go out of your way to only level those once you've levelled other things enough to get maximum value out of the level up. Or, alternatively, just never sleep so that you never level up and play the entire game at level one.

Skua,

Nah mate, get St David's cross on there. Alternate it with the St George's one, just like the St Andrew's and St Patrick's ones currently are. Keep the theme going.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • uselessserver093
  • Food
  • aaaaaaacccccccce
  • test
  • CafeMeta
  • testmag
  • MUD
  • RhythmGameZone
  • RSS
  • dabs
  • KamenRider
  • TheResearchGuardian
  • KbinCafe
  • Socialism
  • oklahoma
  • SuperSentai
  • feritale
  • All magazines
    •