Messages

46

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Cultures are Weird

« on: January 19, 2024, 07:12:50 PM »

I have not believed in the Canadian politics series for a few years now.  So in the year of the Black Pharaoh 2024 I have a thread of longform descriptions of cultures which don't slip in to telling you to be angry about them or scared of them.

Literary magazine The Paris Review on the CIA writers' club


Sleuthsayers with an article from 1991 which uses the trial of Lizzie Borden paints a word picture of WASP culture as the author imagines it (just note how much the author asserts purely on the basis of intuition, like 'who stole the family jewels before the murders?'

The History of William Marshall on the Battle of Lincoln (1217)

Edit: Leo Frankowski, of the Polish Engineer novels (modern person goes back to 1240 and saves Poland from the Mongols while acquiring lots of female companionship - yes, some of them were published with Baen Books), was the archetype of a right-wing American sci fi author from the 20th century as his story of how he acquired two Russian wives shows.  I hope his widow got something nice with his money!

47

Questions and Suggestions - The High Court / Re: Forum Discussion

« on: January 19, 2024, 05:34:53 PM »

I still see the logo, it could be a caching issue tho.

48

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: US Politics 2024

« on: January 18, 2024, 06:11:51 PM »

Actually, Biden's tilt towards poorer less credentialed Americans over the professional managerial class might be one reason that the chattering class are lukewarm about him?

I think part of the problem all round may be that Biden's ideal target voter generally is part of a demographic that has aged out and moved into the Republican fold so heavily that he's not winning them back very effectively: even in the rust belt, today's swing voters are often younger and more suburban, whereas Biden would really like to be talking to a sort of white working class voting bloc that is fading and doesn't really trust him anyway. So it's probably true that chattering folks of today dislike his more old-school approach, but some of them do have a point in that managerial, office job, and service industry voters in the suburbs include a lot more swing voters than the remains of US heavy industry.

I can't speak to that (like I can't recall anyone speaking about Biden appealing to manufacturing and resource workers), but my understanding is that the US job market in 2023 was great for men under 30 without higher education or credentials (as witnessed by eg. the military recruitment crisis or the expansion of unions - its easier to crush unions when there is a 'reserve army of the unemployed').  And Biden did not push to raise interest rates and cause a recession to drive down employment and inflation like the wealthiest two fifths of the population would like.  He is supposed to be the friendliest US president to unions in the past 50 or 100 years which is good for workers and bad for large employers in general.  Obviously COVID, the housing crisis, and the global shortage of fossil fuels create other problems.

One reason why Twitter is depressogenic is that its dominated by writers, visual artists, academics, and other people who have been in hard times since 2008.  (And people in a happy relationship with a satisfying job have less time to post).

Strippers in Oregon say things have been slow for a while.

49

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Belief in NHI

« on: January 17, 2024, 04:26:32 PM »

For comparison, Fat Leonard swindled about $35m out of the US navy by just plying officers with ale and whores (my apologies to hard working sex-trade workers for Scott Kurtz' insensitive language in 1999).  When the US federal budget is in the trillions and full of corruption and secrecy nonsense will slip through.

Canada wastes that kind of money just having naval ships built in Canadian shipyards owned by the family that owns Nova Scotia rather than a Korean or German shipyard that actually knows how to build ships.

50

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Belief in NHI

« on: January 17, 2024, 05:21:09 AM »

And it opens with verse!  When a New York City tabloid calls sus you have problems.

The first hour of the NYP story does not make the New York Times look good.

I sympathize with research dives and feeling alienated, but when I look into the limits of human senses and memory, the figures involved, and the kinds of beliefs some of these people seem to be pushing, I have trouble imagining that anything good could come out of this.  And one phone call or email to anyone involved in scientific skepticism would have given the NYT a heads up about many of the names in their story.  A lot of figures in that space have died or turned into cranks, but there are enough who could run a reporter through the basics.

One very American aspect of the story is that Skinwalker Ranch is a random bit of the Southwest which a succession of shady figures keep selling to each other and trying to make money from.  The name Skinwalker Ranch is one of those marketing ploys!  Robert Bigelow sold the ranch in 2016 and the new owners decided it needed a cool name.

51

Tabletop Design - The Senet House / Re: Disabling strikes in game rules

« on: January 16, 2024, 08:40:15 PM »

A Game of Thrones came out in 1996 and I remember novels like Elizabeth Moon's Deed of Paksenarrion from 1988-1989 having sound military science out of Julius Caesar and the USMC and reasonable martial arts from escrima and SCA rapier.  Martin just did not seem interested in demographics, economics, or the practicalities of living and fighting when he wrote the early books in the series.  He was more interested in politics and his grimdark message.

52

Tabletop Design - The Senet House / Re: Disabling strikes in game rules

« on: January 16, 2024, 05:26:11 PM »

'Area control' and 'aggro' mechanics are good examples of the way games can create abstract but entertaining combat.  They don't correspond to anything specific in real combat but they are entertaining (and work around issues like the long turns in D&D, versus the fraction of a second it takes to whack someone running past).

53

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Weird Internet Communities

« on: January 15, 2024, 09:39:28 PM »

An American financier named Eric Falkenstein thinks that the California Effective Altruism movement of young, unattached, ideologically committed people was used to create a network of trusted people at key international locations in the same way that say Armenians in 16th/17th century Old World or Chinese diasporas in Southeast Asia dealt efficiently with each other across long distance because they spoke each other's language, were married into each other's families, worshipped the same way, and so on.  Wikipedia says that Falkenstein converted to Christianity at the age of 51 which might be why he does not use the term 'affinity fraud' (when someone joins a church or a club, makes friends, convinces them to invest in a venture, and runs off with the money)

A casual reader might get the impression that William McAskill the philosopher was part of the California branch, but as far as I know he never lived in CA and just saw fellow travellers at events.

He found a FTX white paper circa 2019 on how to spot fake trading which is amusing.

54

Tabletop Design - The Senet House / Re: Disabling strikes in game rules

« on: January 15, 2024, 12:27:14 AM »

Another issue is that most pre-20th-century shoes are not very 'grippy.'  Aside from some hobnailed boots and clogs or pattens, most shoes and sandals had bare leather or rope soles.  Its relatively easy to slip in shoes like that, but falls are less likely to cause knee or ankle damage.

What rules does Baldur's Gate 3 use?

55

Tabletop Design - The Senet House / Re: Disabling strikes in game rules

« on: January 14, 2024, 09:11:11 PM »

The ASOIAF RPG is pretty interesting from a realism perspective btw, I'll write more about it later if I remember but essentially it does some things very well but then it also throws in a ton of the classic RPG tropes that make it wildly unrealistic at times. It also needs a lot of rebalancing for certain aspects in general, particularly for power levelling (and combat should be an opposed roll reeee)

Interesting, G.R.R. Martin is not the kind of fantasy author who knows anything about material culture or combat.  Maybe the RPG developers were more interested?

GURPS has had the Armed Grapple technique for a while.

The blow-by-blow model of combat in GURPS has its problems (like failing to simulate that sometimes its the right time to try something other than trading blows) but I don't know if I have seen a good one that focusses on outcomes or a quick-contest mechanic.  My days reading RPG rules are long ago though.

One keyword in tabletop wargames is igo-ugo

56

Tabletop Design - The Senet House / Re: Disabling strikes in game rules

« on: January 14, 2024, 07:12:11 PM »

These swords in the Oakeshott Collection are good examples of some swords that suit my 'high medieval' approach.  They are not going to pierce any kind of iron or copper-alloy armour, because the points are wide and the blades are flexible.  But some of them might bruise and shake up someone through a mail coat, and in the meantime they can cut up anyone without that expensive armour. 

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=yIIypm61WE4



My Oakeshott type XV takes the opposite approach to a medieval sword for war.  Its about the same length, weight, and maximum breadth as those swords, but it has a stiff diamond section, last time I measured it its 6.5 mm thick at the cross and never less than 4.5 mm thick (today I get 6.0 and 3.0 - ed.)  This is not the type of sword which can casually remove heads or legs, but its the kind of sword which can go through some kinds of mail on a solid push (and which you can easily grab with the left hand on the blade and use as a lever without worrying too much that you will accidentally cut your fingers).  Its also going to make a smaller hole when it thrusts, 2 cm back from the point its only about 12 mm wide.

You can find swords with a similar profile which would be much better cutters, a lot depends on how the thickness varies from cross to point (distal taper).

57

Tabletop Design - The Senet House / Re: Disabling strikes in game rules

« on: January 13, 2024, 03:35:03 AM »

Grappling is the main way to disable people in real combat, and Doug Cole takes the view that people rarely grapple in RPGs because the mechanics are clunky and annoying.  He created his own rules modules to solve this.  Another solution is the High Medieval solution: give everyone who matters a complete covering of mail and weapons that don't thrust through mail well, and let them batter and bleed each other until one can't fight (the ordinary people who can't afford all that labour-intensive armour get a hand or a leg chopped off and die in the background while the people who matter are bashing it out)

Would the bit about grappling hold true on a battlefield? I'd have assumed that in a combat with multiple opponents, the penalty of exposing yourself to strikes from your opponents' surrounding men would be sufficiently great that most of the time people wouldn't be that keen to initiate grapples and would rather stabbing and shield bashing if they had to be shorter than spear distance, because those things (at least I'd have assumed) keep you in a better upright posture for when the next opponent comes in at you.

I guess I was starting out from "disabling without killing."

When you are fighting with weapons you often want to keep your distance becuse distance is time and time lets you realize something is coming at you and react.  But by sometime in the fourteenth century, someone in western European armour was immune to most weapons powered by muscles.  Very stiff narrow-pointed weapons like some kinds of arrows or daggers might get through mail on a solid hit, and something like a two-handed axe or hammer might break a neck or cause a concussion, but the vast majority of hits will be ineffective. 



At that point you start seeing a lot of grappling because its easier to stab one of the places which are not quite invulnerable if the stabee is restrained (and you can get into grappling distance safely because of your own armour).  It also gives you options like throwing them off their horse so the poor guys on foot can finish them off or disarm them while they are trying to sit up in thick mud while horses step on them (plus you can take their expensive horse!)  Between about 1350 and 1450 we see a lot of pictures like this.



Mr. Golden Garter can easily let go if he needs to defend himself, until then he or a friend can beat on his partner's neck and armpit and back like a pinata

58

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: Belief in NHI

« on: January 11, 2024, 01:25:58 AM »

A lot of early UFO and strange creature stories came down to the limits of human eyes, ears, and memory.  But the current batch are often centred on anomalous sensor readings where there are even more stages where things could get mangled and be very hard to track down.  Some early UFO sightings were almost certainly US military vehicle tests which were not publicly acknowledged at the time, and details about how military aircraft are collecting and processing data must be even harder to sort out.

Photos and audio are becoming the same as more and more smartphones integrate 'AI' to 'improve' photos and recordings.

59

Tabletop Design - The Senet House / Re: Disabling strikes in game rules

« on: January 10, 2024, 01:16:04 AM »

It also touches on the subject of how to make melee characters interesting (especially at higher levels), and in particular, how to functionally distinguish between weapon types (which is something that I feel DnD 5e lacks, and I am not hopeful about the system that One DnD attempted to introduce to supposedly rectify this situation).

Ironically 1e D&D had mechanisms for that in its table of bonuses and penalties to hit depending on the weapon and Armour Class.  But the biggest issue has always been that D&D combat is so abstract and is hard to believe in if you think too much about the details of how the paladin is fighting the dragon or how the rogue in the middle of the room survived the fireball (and shouldn't it set the house and furnishings on fire?  what about smoke penalties? does a Fireball in this edition create pressure which could blow the roof off?)  Its also easy to accidentally make one weapon clearly superior in game-mechanical terms and that can annoy players who have a vision of their character using a specific weapon.

Grappling is the main way to disable people in real combat, and Doug Cole takes the view that people rarely grapple in RPGs because the mechanics are clunky and annoying.  He created his own rules modules to solve this.  Another solution is the High Medieval solution: give everyone who matters a complete covering of mail and weapons that don't thrust through mail well, and let them batter and bleed each other until one can't fight (the ordinary people who can't afford all that labour-intensive armour get a hand or a leg chopped off and die in the background while the people who matter are bashing it out).

RPGs often have a rule for 'nonlethal damage' which is not our world's physics and biology but can be a game world's.  Its pretty common in pulp and supers settings that people can be punched, kicked, and clubbed without lasting effects.

GURPS has been pretty good at weighting its combat to disability rather than death, and giving rules options for weapons which make a small deep hole (high Armour Divisor but low Wounding Modifier), but their rules for combat with edged weapons have some 'legacy code' from Steve Jackson asking SCA members in the 1980s.  And as the quality of backyard experiments improves, we are seeing some unheroic things like 'this blade shape can penetrate that armour in a random man's hands, that blade shape won't penetrate if you give it to an Olympic athlete.'  A lot of people like the tropes of the bare-chested barbarian or the short slender woman fighter and don't want to hear that one of the biggest benefits to being strong is that you can wear more armour and move better in it.

Nobody in a RPG wants to hear 'you survived the fight but with internal bleeding and you die of an infection 1d6 months later' but that happened a lot in the sixteenth century (eg. poor Luis Mendoza on the Magellan Expedition)

60

Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Re: US Politics 2024

« on: January 09, 2024, 02:40:17 AM »

I can see an argument for the Democrats committing to eg. "if we get 60% of the house and senate we will pass a national law guaranteeing the right to abortion" as a way of motivating voters and volunteers, but because US parties are weakly whipped its hard to do that.  Right now a lot of US persons understandably feel that the parties are calling wolf every two years.

Obviously as primate-politics go its not great that Biden is old and frail, but the leading Republican candidate is old and unwell too.  Obama was on the centre right too (and perhaps more oriented towards wealthy credentialed people than Biden is), but he got credit in primate politics for using lefty language in all those beautiful speeches.  Actually, Biden's tilt towards poorer less credentialed Americans over the professional managerial class might be one reason that the chattering class are lukewarm about him?

Fuel and food and housing are very expensive in the USA right now, but on the other hand there is low unemployment and its easier to buy those things when you have a job.  And until October 7 the antiwar movement could have come out and given the administration cover on leaving Afghanistan and ending the drone war.

Things are not great in the USA with COVID and the high cost of living, but they don't seem that bad for the kind of leftish people who talk a lot about national politics.

Edit: can't comment on Biden's fitness for the job beyond "old and frail" (I don't listen to his speeches or interviews) but a lot of animosity seems to be against his imagined personality or policies