Toxn

On the one hand, I loathe how darkest Africa has become this lazy stereotype that we all wallow in whenever anything happens on the continent.
On the other hand, a game which shows just how fucking impossible was for any of the post-colonial countries to develop in a stable and productive fashion during the cold war would be pretty neat. And grimdark.

I don't mean physics as in Havok (although that would be nice) but physics as in 'a sword works something like a real cutting instrument instead of a club which knocks off HP'.
 
Dwarf fortress was great for me in this regard, because even though the physics is a bit loopy (you threw a pile of sand and removed both sets of eylids), it was coherent enough so that all the weapons were distinct in their effects and some real truths emerged as a consequence. DF adventure mode is a game where running into a group of bandits is damn near impossible solo, because Lanchester's law is fully in play. Every one of those arrows could have your name on it (unless you're in plate, in which case it becomes entirely about how shitty your luck it) and three dudes whaling on one epic swordsman will have exponentially better chances than two.
 
Plus, you know, caved-in skulls and severed limbs and wounds being calculated to include shearing of subcutaneous fat. 

I don't mean physics as in Havok (although that would be nice) but physics as in 'a sword works something like a real cutting instrument instead of a club which knocks off HP'.
 
Dwarf fortress was great for me in this regard, because even though the physics is a bit loopy (you threw a pile of sand and removed both sets of eylids), it was coherent enough so that all the weapons were distinct in their effects and some real truths emerged as a consequence. DF adventure mode is a game where running into a group of bandits is damn near impossible solo, because Lanchester's law is fully in play. Every one of those arrows could have your name on it (unless you're in plate, in which case it becomes entirely about how shitty your luck it) and three dudes whaling on one epic swordsman will have exponentially better chances than two.
 
Plus, you know, caved-in skulls and severed limbs and wounds being calculated to include shearing of subcutaneous fat. 

Just making an RPG not do physics a disservice seems to be a challenge for developers, let alone history.
 
Speaking of Justinian, my mind sort of got blown reading about the Corpus Iuris Civilis, not only because it showed the long sweep of legal history (we have a partly Roman-Dutch legal system), but because it's like the wasteland survival guide becoming the foundation text of fallout civilization and being actively taught to students till 4000AD.

Eh, I enjoyed it fine. I just wish things would, you know, move on a tad from endless pseudo-medieval stasis. I mean, they managed to un-invent the crossbow and spear somehow.
What is it about magic that seems to make societies develop steel working but not gunpowder, blast furnaces, mechanical looms or urbanisation?

Firearms, even terrible ones, are better because:
- low skill requirements
- loud and flashy
- impressive terminal effects
The first successful homemade musket I made took a wooden shield that had successfully withstood dozens of arrows and spears and shoved a roofing nail though it so hard that it was irreversibly pinned to the tree behind it. Even more impressive, this was after punching through a 2mm steel plate in front.
If I had been a prospective customer weighing up this new-fangled gun thing, you can bet on that demonstration being persuasive.

Living in a country where high-poundage, long-draw bows never developed, I have come to realise that wood quality is hella important to bow making. We just don't have anything that is well suited to developing long bows and recurves*, so it never happened. Hell, I still don't have access to anything better than balau (and even this in limited quantities) and so my bow making career has been an endless series of failures.
 
I suspect the Pacific Northwest (which, from what I hear, is infested by pines) may have suffered from something similar.
 
While I am dispensing wisdom, I have also come to realise that bows are a ridiculously unintuitive invention. The idea of careful tillering and working, without which your bent stick will last about 10 shots before breaking and hitting you in the nuts, is just not that obvious a step.
 
Bows are hard, basically.
 
* Without having access to a sawmill

But Colli, this is the TERRIBLE music thread. And E6 are anything but terrible...

God I want that bow...

My wife has mentioned that one of the more unpleasant aspects of horse ownership is sheath cleaning. That, along with detailed descriptions of the use of phantom mare and an explanation for why mares in season need to have their tails tied back, makes me think that it's probably a good thing that parents generally don't know much about horses when they send their little diddums to riding school.
 
As for the invention, maybe it's to prevent unwanted mounting when teasing a mare? It's still fucking stupid, but at least that's a use.

And yet we tend to want to argue when our emotions are touched by a topic...
 
I'm going to second the call for proof of some sort to back up assertions (unless you are explicitly providing something as a personal opinion and therefore expecting it to carry no persuasive value), but will also call to extend this approach to the wider discourse.
 
We should not be afraid to have our ideas and assertions tested by others: only bad ideas fail when they get hammered on a bit. We should also try to be patient with each other. It can take a lot of effort to understand a position you do not agree with, because our ape brains seem to be wired to think that understanding an idea is the same as endorsing it.
 
I'm inviting Zin to have another go, here. And not just because I've made some of the same arguments myself

Now wait for it to become a breed standard and for the BLOOD PURITY to begin.

Or just peel it like an orange and man the fuck up.
 
 
 
I'd put pears ahead as well, yes.
 
As for apples, we're one of those places that sends all our best produce overseas. Given that I then have the choice between a terrible, floury red and an edible granny smith I'd take the latter any day.

FTFY

Come over to my end of the world - it's 90% woodsball and 10% using the gun as a bludgeon.

Or just peel it like an orange and man the fuck up.
 
 
 
I'd put pears ahead as well, yes.
 
As for apples, we're one of those places that sends all our best produce overseas. Given that I then have the choice between a terrible, floury red and an edible granny smith I'd take the latter any day.

I am obligated to include this.
 

And this.

As the documentary "Red Dawn" even states, we had 600 million screaming Chinamen on our side.
Americans have been bred for decades to view everything as a bilateral conflict of us versus them, good versus evil, white hat against black hat. NATO vs Warsaw Pact in the Cold War, Allies vs Axis, North vs South, Redcoats vs Continentals. We have a two party system of politics that pits Republicans vs Democrats. Our favorite pop culture movies follow the same theme (Star Wars, Avengers, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings).
Now to be fair to 'MURICA, this isn't a trait found just in ourselves but has permeated Western culture for centuries (Crusades, Napoleonic Wars, Reformation) and is no doubt a result of our collective Judeo Christian worldview.
Nor is it surprising that "sophisticated" terms like Byzantine and the alleged Arabic proverb "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" are ascribed to foreign races from the "Orient".
Conflicts with multiple and competing factions are a clusterfuck. As one of you said, one need only look at the belligerents table on the Syrian Civil War Wikipedia article.
Getting back to Asia, it is difficult to make heads, tails and middles out of the 21st Century edition of The Great Game, with China, Russia, North Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan, the other Stans, Myanmar, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines all thrown in the mix. The latter four entities are what I personally care about. And now that UBL has achieved room temperature, Afghanistan has zero strategic value (contrary to popular opinion) and should have been vacated two years ago.
I'm somewhat more pessimistic on the longer term. China is building itself to be the regional hegemony, reversing five centuries of decline. If I were a neighboring country without a nuclear program I'd be very concerned. Even if I were a country like India, I'd be looking to rapidly mobilize given the number of border incursions committed by the ChiComs.
As for the US we are at (or past) the transition stage where we are so confident that no one will mess with us (and our friends) because our military is so Skookum. Instead we are relying on the logic that surely it wouldn't be in the best interest of China to start a conflict, why we're trading partners and we owe them so much debt.
As we've seen throughout history, countries often act illogically, irrationally and in ways that are counter to their GDP when it comes to foreign policy. If our economy gets hurt twice as much as China's as the side-effect of a trade/shooting war, isn't that a net win for the People's Republic?
To end this meandering length of text, I'm always for being militarily prepared, a show of force being cheaper than actually using force in the long run. Plus it allows us nerds a chance to drool and debate over new airplanes, tanks and ships.

Irony: old school environmentalism is inherently conservative in outlook (this works now, if anything changes it won't work anymore)
As mentioned, I prefer the idea of managed ecosystems. This includes niche filling, even where an 'invasive' organism is doing the filling. Going further, I'd argue that synthetic ecosystems are not only a good thing but also potentially better in terms of providing environmental services.
I'll take working systems over doomed attempts to isolate and fix in place existing ones.

Cue the lumpers v splitters debate...
On a more serious note, I want to thank all the people participating for not making me want to burn the thread down.
Know that, when it comes to threads on phylogeny or dinosaurs, this is about the highest praise I can give.
Beer and a medal for all of you.

My wife, in her capacity as a veterinary nurse, endorses this comment. But also adds a disclaimer that 'alpha training' (where you dominate the animal physically, roll it and so on) is also bullshit.
 
The thing with dogs is that you need to provide them with consistent feedback, consistent behaviour and a secure place in the hierarchy. Getting mad and punishing the animal is wrong, just as rewarding it without reason is.
 
Another part of the problem with long leashes (besides their pathetic design and construction) is that by allowing your dog to roam you remove him from your sphere of control and thus remove your ability to correct his behaviour.
 
Finally, the real sign of the end times isn't the leash, it's the proliferation of Dachshunds, Pugs and other useless 'purebred' animals. Using 19th-century (in)breeding practices to make an animal conform to an arbitrary list of breed standards is evil, yo.

I'm firmly of the opinion that simple conservation is a railed ideology and yet another example of how hippies ruin things.
What we really need is to move away from our absurd natural/manmade mindset and really get into the nuts and bolts of designing and maintaining ecosystems.
For instance, it blows my mind that we have almost no formal studies (not eveb a good theoretical framework) for how to produce a stable, closed ecosystem. Or an ecosystem equivalent of the standardised biological parts initiative.
We're still tinkering when we should be frantically designing, essentially.

I'm firmly of the opinion that simple conservation is a railed ideology and yet another example of how hippies ruin things.
What we really need is to move away from our absurd natural/manmade mindset and really get into the nuts and bolts of designing and maintaining ecosystems.
For instance, it blows my mind that we have almost no formal studies (not eveb a good theoretical framework) for how to produce a stable, closed ecosystem. Or an ecosystem equivalent of the standardised biological parts initiative.
We're still tinkering when we should be frantically designing, essentially.

From numerous discussions on rocketpunk manifesto (which is an awesome site btw, if a bit neglected) my impression is that part of the problem is that there simply isn't a market for more launches and no concievable way to develop one sans... well, more launch capacity.
The old economic chicken-and-egg issue, basically.

Okay, so I'm working off my phone (power failure) with a baby on my lap. In any case, here is a quick rundown:
Hippies suck. They've essentially shut down GMO research in Europe (over 60% of all test fields get destroyed), demonstrating that terrorism works like gangbusters when you're sufficiently white and well-off. On that note, it's also a myth that hippies are some sort of sidelined underclass. The truth is that hippies were always the scions of the upper crust and think and act in ways that the romantic aristocrats would fully understand. Which also explains why so many of them wholeheartedly embrace population control and euthanasia to prevent those overbreedin' third worlders from sucking up mother earth's scarce resources.
As to their other relationships with the poors, hippies are generally much happier with dependance and 'noble' poverty than they are with development and investment. Which is one of the reasons why we still have a ridiculously destructive and predatory food-aid system rather than anything helpful.
Finally, a personal story: a few years ago, I was holidaying in the Cape during the fire season. At this time, there were two major events playing out in the area. The first was a series of massive fires in the Cape flats, which killed many people and left hundreds homeless. The second was a confused humpback whale which beached itself near Hermanus.
The latter resulted in candle-lit vigils and numerous, expensive attempts to return the poor addled creature to the sea. When it inevitably died, there was an outpouring of grief by the well-off hippies who had gone to light candles next to the beast.
The former resulted in shrugs.