Infrapink
@Infrapink@thebrainbin.org
Hi, I'm Infrapink! I used to be @infrapink, but that instance is down. I'm also @infrapink and @infrapink
- Comment on Legal action over 'unfair' Steam game store prices given go ahead 2 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on What is the optimal handle to chain length for a flail? 2 weeks ago:
Same as nunchakus.
- Comment on What is the optimal handle to chain length for a flail? 2 weeks ago:
[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.
- Comment on Players are returning their Dispatch copies due to Switch censorship 2 weeks ago:
GoNintendo got an official response from Nintendo
Nintendo requires all games on its platforms to receive ratings from independent organizations and to meet our established content and platform guidelines. While we inform partners when their titles don’t meet our guidelines, Nintendo does not make changes to partner content. We also do not discuss specific content or the criteria used in making these determinations.
Vague, but it definitely sounds like the issue is with a ratings agency, not Nintendo.
- Comment on Players are returning their Dispatch copies due to Switch censorship 2 weeks ago:
Sega own Bayonetta, Nintendo just license it and pay PlatinumGames to make it.
- Comment on Why do video game skeletons put themselves back together? 2 weeks ago:
You cannot kill what doesss not live
- Comment on It's easy 4 weeks ago:
I became Senior VP at a multi-million dollar company at age 26. My salary was $600k. This was in 2018.
How did I do it?
It wasn’t hustle culture. No 5:30am wakeups, cold showers, or productivity hacks.
What got me there was a relentless focus on impact. Every project I touched, every deck I built, every presentation I gave MOVED THE NEEDLE.
Always, I asked myself: what is the single most valuable contribution I can make to the company right now? And I did that. If people disagreed, I convinced them otherwise.
I kept this up for three years before the CEO (my dad) finally recognized my results and promoted me to SVP.
There are no gimmicks. There are no shortcuts.
- Comment on Hooded Horse ban AI-generated art in their games: "all this thing has done is made our lives more difficult" 5 weeks ago:
Judas Priest, not Black Sabbath.
- Comment on World's Best-selling Video Game Consoles 1 month ago:
The NES was the best selling of those, at ~60 million. The PS1 completely changed the curve.
It's funny. People remember the PS3 as a failure because it's the worst-selling PlayStation, but it still crushed NES numbers
- Comment on World's Video Game Companies 1 month ago:
Because Sony and Microsoft make most of their money from other sources. That isn't to says their game studios aren't big, just that they don't make 90% of revenue.
- Comment on How long until we can start shorting years to 2 numbers again? 1 month ago:
What the fuck kind of calendar has at least 22 months in it?
- Comment on What do other languages use for "magic" words; or names and titles in fantasy and sci-fi novels or cinema? 1 month ago:
Apparently the Hindi translations of tge Harry Potter books translate the Latin into Sanskrit, but that's more of a cultural thing, since Sanskrit has a similar cachet among South Asian Hindus and Buddhists as Latin has among European Christians.
- Comment on Is gold investing a scam? 2 months ago:
Bad news for the Libertarians: silver was historically way more common for money than gold was, to the point that languages like Irish and French use the same word for money as for silver.
This is because there was (and is) way less gold than silver, so gold is way more valuable. As such, gold coins were only used to buy things like houses, horses, and suits of armour. Silver coins were much more practical; the linked article mentions that Ptolemaic Egypt had to export large quantities of grain to bring in enough silver to pay their army despite there being gold in Egypt.
But more than that, if there is a complete societal collapse, the metal you'll want is iron. Societal collapse doesn't mean things continue as they have been except there are no safety or food quality laws. It means everybody goes back to peasant agriculture using tools made of wood and iron (well, steel, which is iron with extra stuff in it). If money is used, it might well be something where no coins actually change hands; everybody just remembers how much they owe their neighbours, and how much their neighbours owe them. That, if course, assumes that in the event of complete societal collapse, we don't decide to give local communism a try.
- Comment on Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)? 2 months ago:
That's actually how it works in Irish. The word for good is deas, while the word for bad is deas prefixed with the negating particle mí, so mídheas.
(There are still separate words for tge cardinal directions).
- Comment on Can I make a Bluetooth button to skip YouTube ads on the computer? 2 months ago:
I use a dedicated video player instead of a browser. Quite a few desktop and mobile video players can directly play YT videos if you just feed them a URL.
- Comment on Gaming Pet Peeves 2 months ago:
Needing to log into an online account to play a single-player game.
When a single-player game keeps pausing to tell me it can't connect to the server.
- Comment on Are physical mail generally not under surveillance? If everyone suddently ditched electronic communications and start writing letters, would governments be able to practically surveil everyone? 2 months ago:
Yeah I'm in Ireland and I can, and do, pay for stamps with cash.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 months ago:
Ye were in the Let Them Eat Cake phase in the 1980s. This is the Storming The Bastille phase
- Comment on If "James Bond" is a codename, would a hypothetical female operative filling the same role receive the same codename? 3 months ago:
It's actually standard practice for secret agents to use their real names, as accidentally failing to respond to a pseudonym is one if the easiest ways to blow their cover.
Furthermore, Bond is a secret agent. The fact that he's a spy who has tons if amazing adventures is not public knowledge, let alone well-known. We the audience know James Bond as a super-popular action hero from a long series of movies, but in his own universe there is nothing particularly special or noteworthy about the name James Bond.
- Comment on What do you call the beleif that gods are just higher beings on other planes of existence? 3 months ago:
In European polytheism, there isn't a clear division between the mundane and the divine, like you see in Christianity.
There are gods all over the place. Your house has a couple of gods in it. They aren't powerful enough to kill you with lightning on a clear day, but they will still annoy you unless you leave out a little food for them.
Specifically in the Greek context, Protogenoi, Titans, Olympians, Gigantes, Nereids, Gorgons, Furies, Fates, Muses, and Nymphs are all gods of varying strength and prominence. Everybody worshipped Zeus, but only your family worships the house gods.
Likewise, in Scandinavia, you have your Aesir, Vanir, Jötunn, Dwarves, Elves, and so on. Gaels have the Sídhe, Fomoire, Tuatha Dé Dannann, Leprecháns, and whatever else. To an Arab pagan, djinn were a form of minor deity. The kami of Shinto continue to encompass everything from local spirits to the supreme creator, to the point that Japanese Christians and Muslims refer to God as Kami-sama.
[Much more info here]https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/)
When Christianity caught on, other gods were out, but that didn't stop people honoring their local house gods. Small gods were reïmagined as fairies; Christian clergy denied their reality, but belief in fairies was mostly seen as a harmless superstition, like not stepping on a crack in the road. Belief in fairies persists in Ireland; ironically, those who genuinely believe in the old gods are the most devout Catholics.
We see a similar phenomenon across history and culture. When Christianity met Vodún, people didn't stop believing in their indigenous gods; instead, those gods became spirits who God put in charge of particular aspects of the cosmos, which is how we get Vodou.
Likewise, Zarathustra was a polytheist, but by the time Islam rose, Zoroastrians were down to two gods, with the others recast as basically angels. This concept in turn influenced Judaism and Samaritanism; Yahweh, the Hebrews' patron deity, merged with El, the Semitic supreme deity, and the other gods became angels.
Because Christianity caught on as the Western Roman Empire was disintegrating, people felt like they were living through an apocalypse. Clergy said that, while the physical world was collapsing, the world to come was brilliant, and thus a sharp division was drawn between the mundane and the divine. Modern Euramericans are raised with this division; whatever our beliefs or lack thereof, we see it as fundamental, and thus retroactively and anachronistically apply it to pre-Christian paganism, whereas the pagans saw the divine as simply part of the world.
- Comment on Why did Thanos, with the power of all the infinity stones, never think to try doubling the amount of resources in the world? 3 months ago:
They don't call him the Sane Titan.
And he's purple because he's an alien who Jim Starlin gave purple skin.
- Comment on Introverts of our era spend their time on their computers, but what did introverts do before? Like when literacy rates were lower (pre-1950s)? Or before the printing press? 3 months ago:
Before the printing press, introverted men worked the farm, while introverted women spun thread, made and repaired clothes, cooked, cleaned, nursed babies, and also worked the farm.
this is the same as what extroverts did, because back then, you contributed to the farm and the household whether you liked it or not.
At a celebration or festival, the introverts might gather in a corner to tell stories, but there was no way to avoid being part of the community back then.
- Comment on I can't say I am going to kill the president. But can the president specify me a civ saying he is going to kill me? And it be legal? 4 months ago:
Civilian
- Comment on GOG: We’re thrilled to announce that the Crysis Remastered Trilogy has joined our catalog, and the original Crysis is now part of the GOG Preservation Program! 4 months ago:
So weird to think that Crysis is retro now.
- Comment on Doug Bowser Retiring From Nintendo, Successor Announced 4 months ago:
Point of order: Wii Sports was not free. The price of the game was added to the price of the Wii, but since you couldn't get a Wii without Wii Sports, people just assumed that was the base price.
- Comment on Favorite Modded Console? 5 months ago:
In my experience, it's actually a little easier; Wii hacks sometimes need multiple attempts, but the Wii U hack works first time.
Alas, there is much less Wii U homebrew, but you can hack the vWii just like a Wii to get all that goodness.
- Comment on Favorite Modded Console? 5 months ago:
Wii U for me. It has all the Wii stuff, plus Wii U games.
- Comment on 5 months ago:
Thank you.
- Comment on What are some franchises with characters that personify countries? 5 months ago:
It even has two Frances!
- Comment on What is the first electronic device kids get these days? (Desktop, Laptop, Tablet, Phone, Game consoles?) 5 months ago:
Mine was a NES. My dad had a 286 running DOS. I remember when my primary school got a PC with Windows 95, and I was gobsmacked that it booted to Windows directly.