Skua

This one always makes me smile, because it’s from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It’s just some guy’s blog in which he comes up with new words to express experiences and emotions that are difficult to describe, and that specific one has thoroughly broken containment

I made AltGr + / type an interrobang so I’d always have access to it

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.

I like Blue Turtle’s playlists, especially the Ithya ones. They’re mostly folkish intrumentals and some gentle chillstep

The Travellers’ Encore from Outer Wilds

To be fair, I don’t have to trust elected politicians to distrust unelected CEOs and other upper management more

This has literally nothing to do with women’s rights

this is exactly the point I’m making

You responded to criticism of the state of women’s rights under Taliban governance with criticism of America, you absolutely said something exactly that simplistic. If the post was saying that America and/or its allies should re-invade or otherwise try to overthrow the Taliban, sure, you might have a point, but it isn’t

You don’t have to think America is doing things right to think the Taliban are doing them wrong

The original being “This film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan.” See, for example, this review from 1988

They’ve added to the post that slack tide is “something else entirely”. If they mean the point when the height of the tide is halfway between low and high tides, which is how I understood it, that should be one of the fastest-moving moments. As opposed to slack tide, which is when it’s not moving at all.

That’s when the tide isn’t going in or out, which is more likely to be closer to the high and low tides

For Civ 6, I’d say winning each victory once. Try to do it with different civs each time too. You can set your goal as winning a game on the highest difficulty if you want, but personally I don’t find that to be as interesting as the shift in gameplay necessary to win the different victories without just militarily crushing everyone else.

Make the avocado into guacamole and you can have an LGBT sandwich

The classic Ethiopian cuisine is stews served on a giant flatbread, it’s spiritually a sandwich even if it isn’t literally one

America definitely has good bread and cheese, it’s just that the worst instances of each are particularly terrible

Their regular supermarket bread is way, way too sweet for me, but there are decent bakeries still

Ploughman’s, easily. Thick slices of sharp cheddar, a tangy onion chutney, thin slices of apple, and some greens. More properly a ploughman’s lunch that is not in sandwich form, but it comes with bread anyway so literally the only difference is how you arrange the components

Also if there’s banh mi on offer I might just about bite your hand off to get at it