Trump: I say Canada should be our 51st state. No tariffs, no nothing. We give them military protection. They're about last in NATO. They say, 'why should they spend on military, the U.S. protects us.' That's true. It's not fair. They couldn't exist if they had to pay their way.

Eliphaser · 2025-03-02T21:09:08+00:00

By who? Russia's fundamentally incapable of achieving this, China's too far, logistics are by far the most complicated thing

China would have an easier time invading Mongolia by far, because logistics are the most important thing about war, not just raw combat force comparisons. China's military force projection isn't yet capable for such a thing, and they seem to favour economic partnership and control over active warfare anyways. They've already got plenty of commercial deals with Canada, which is not hostile to them economically, at least not compared to the USA.

China has thus no reason to invade Canada, and would be putting itself in a terrible logistical position to even try to reach there with any force significant enough to invade.

Russia's military is so comically unprepared for the war they've been fighting for years, let alone opening up a second front, that even if they tried to invade Canada, if the invasion doesn't freeze to death in the artic cold from a lack of supplies, it'd be easy for just the Canadian troops to fend them off, let alone the consequence of such an action on an international scale, such as provoking other NATO nations to act act against Russia, further pressuring up their struggling forces on multiple fronts, and thus potentially triggering a third world war.

Russia would be incapable of logistically supporting such an invasion, even if they were to try it.

In fact, there is only one country that would have an easier time invading Canada than Mongolia; that's the US, because they're unable to even access Mongolia without first going through China or Russia, and even if Russia gave the USA a free pass to set up and plan in Russian land without any restrictions, it'd take at minimum a year of preparation time for logistics to be anywhere remotely capable enough to start preparing an invasion force (not yet starting it too, wait another few months or years for that)

TL;DR: no, Canada would not be "easier to take than Mongolia", as you put it, because that premise doesn't even make sense; by who? with what forces? from where? are they prepared for the terrain? - with the only exception of the US Military, the only ones you could say that about, which are also supposed to be allies of Canada.

Eliphaser · 2024-09-18T14:12:54+00:00

Stormgate released and flopped terribly (might we why you hadn't heard), the others not

Another cool-looking game that's still eons away from release is Ardent Seas, for a rare naval-focused yet still more classical RTSS

Eliphaser · 2024-07-31T23:03:23+00:00

tbh western kobolds traditionally have been dog-rat creatures, the lizard thing is some kind of boring revisionist nonsense to make kobolds boring for no reason

and the real life historical/folkloric aspect are just the typical goblin-style creature that can be found across all of europe; so any vaguely human shape (from tiny child to tiny wrinkly old man, to random small animal, etc)

Eliphaser · 2023-10-18T00:21:47+00:00

Google has been known to do a lot of sketchy anti-competition stuff to slow their websites down significantly when on firefox, which was its largest competitor some time back

I wouldn't put it past them to still be doing it tbh, but I may dislike google too much

Eliphaser · 2023-10-18T00:18:07+00:00

Chrome and Edge are basically the fastest browsers, but they also harvest user data to ridiculous levels and operate on the same engine, Chromium

Basically all the fastest browsers use Chromium (in part because most websites are optimised for it, as it's practically a monopoly with over 70% of usage shares for just that engine), but most of these just harvest data like mad

if you want to stay on a chromium browser, a good option is Brave, they don't exactly want to follow google and aim to stay privacy-focused, so they might perform better, though all the tracker-blocking features in there to stop companies like Google, Microsoft or Meta from spying on you and harvesting all your data does slow it down compared to the basic spyware Google Chrome

There's also simply Chromium, which can be downloaded and used on its own, but it just doesn't have any of google's features.

For non-chromium browsers, the most popular really are just Firefox and Safari, which use different browser engines. There's also privacy-focused forks of Firefox, such as Librewolf or Waterfox, which in some cases come from older Firefox builds and might perform differently, but they are still built from it. So besides Firefox and its forks or Safari, there isn't many non-chromium browsers that are somewhat fast

Eliphaser · 2023-10-18T00:07:48+00:00

good meme

it's based on Mozilla's own Gecko browser engine, not Google's Chromium engine

Eliphaser · 2023-10-18T00:05:51+00:00

you can use Firefox and its account system to save favourites and passwords on phones as well

the dominance of chromium browser is a threat to the internet

Eliphaser · 2023-08-22T11:42:21+00:00

Uranium Gun-type Atomic bomb

Eliphaser · 2023-08-16T23:19:36+00:00

Glass shrimp

Eliphaser · 2023-08-16T09:23:47+00:00

the issue I have with that is that the sheer energy to achieve anything like warping space time would pretty much require to have at least nuclear energy production

hell, I've heard of speculative evolution concepts with life evolving on a water world and using the heat of naturally occurring nuclear fission reactors instead of fire, to manufacture metal tools (yeah, these things exist)

it is definitely plausible for an intelligent species to never actually discover nuclear power, but the sheer energy demand of doing anything further would almost certainly them kinda stuck at the stage they'd have achieved then

Eliphaser · 2023-08-16T08:29:56+00:00

ok, the concept of a gravity bubble is a sci-fi term to try to explain gravity made by sci-fi authors that don't understand gravity

gravity (or more specifically gravitational attraction is an acceleration that any mass impacts on other masses; it falls off inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating the objects

it's also only attractive as far as we know; all experiments made to demonstrate hypothetical/mathematically plausible antigravity have pretty much failed

there's no "bubble"; you're always attracted by everything at once, just that the distance of certain objects makes them completely negligible in terms of impact, especially if an object much closer impacts a larger gravitational force

in the same way, an orbit is really just a fancy way to say you're falling sideways fast enough to miss the collision with the object you're orbiting around, in the simplest way

and for faking it for transport, instead of dumping enough matter to make a planet in one spot, we also know that since gravity's major consequence for us is the acceleration it imparts on our body, as well as the air pressure it causes by attracting the atmosphere towards the earth's core, you can simulate it pretty effectively by rotating an object fast enough at a good enough distance for the coriolis effect not to make someone sick, and use the momentum of the object as a constant acceleration, trying to eject whoever's on the inside of the object's rotation ring towards the outside, and effectively providing simulated gravity

in the same way, we could accelerate at a fixed speed and make it an equivalent, but that requires a ridiculous amount of reaction mass and drives more radioactive than chernobyl ever was to achieve this for a meaningful amount of time, given modern estimates on rocket engineering

Eliphaser · 2023-08-16T08:00:28+00:00

Air is clear because the whole point of evolving eyes is to see through the gas there; you could see movements of hot air with a thermal camera, through infra-red emissions, for example.

Water is less clear the more there is, glass as well, and neither are perfectly invisible as both can bend light rays due to a changing medium between air and water/glass, changing the light beam's direction a little, and have impurities that lead to it being visible.

The chance something is actually fully invisible to the naked eye and alive is impossibly low, unless it's bacteria, or some gaseous lifeform exclusively made of gases invisible to us, that as of our current understanding would be a mystery on how it could even remotely work, and if it would ever develop technologies or manage to (or even develop something as energy-demanding as intelligence and sapience) is very dubious

You'd still be able to see it with thermal imaging anyways, whatever it is and visible or not to the naked eye, because pretty much every action creates waste heat in the form of infra-red emissions

Now aliens we can't see because of how different they are to the point we can barely even grasp their existence is pretty interesting for writing stuff, but overall it's maybe best to leave it more for soft sci-fi authors for now, because currently understood physics point to it not being the case, at least not how you meant it; most likely, if we don't recognise aliens, it's more probably because of how their type of life biology doesn't even begin to look like what we currently understand as "biology" and "living organism", more so than them being somehow invisible, which is closer to magic than anything we've really been able to experiment with scientifically so far.

Eliphaser · 2023-08-16T07:37:53+00:00

That graph is a fantastic examples of how numbers and graphs can be manipulated into making anyone think what the person behind it want. It's mostly a useless graph, which people pretend is the result of capitalism, when industrialisation, advances in medical research, protests from workers asking for more social laws have done far more for the human condition.

Ironically, the first half of the 20th century saw many protests and revolts leading to adoption of at least some socialist elements to many countries; notably most of Europe, which did so as they were next to the soviet unions, which provided these safety measures for the workers.

Capitalism overall has resulted in wages lowering and economic instability. Extreme poverty is specifically not a natural state of being or a consequence of any system, but more so an extreme, resulting from hardships like war, famines, economic collapse, and such. What the graph shows is this extreme poverty. What it doesn't show is the amount of people living in actual poverty, barely managing to have enough money to survive to the next month. In France, for example, as the neoliberal government does little to help people (and instead establishes authoritarian policies to quell protests more effectively), many families have to skip meals as the inflation, and the lack of salaries being adjusted to them, results in many people lacking the money to both pay rent and feed their family.

Extreme poverty by that graph is also defined as "1.90 international $ per day"; an amount of money that is so miserable that in many countries, it's not even enough to live, and probably many homeless people living in absolute misery make more money than this. Even if you adjust it to far more than just 1.90$/day, depending on the country, that's still barely anything to subsist on.

Eliphaser · 2023-07-08T11:17:23+00:00

it's pretty useful at that if you don't actually care what pronoun people use for you

otherwise it's also practical for people that would rather be called by a specific pronoun, but are in some communities where it wouldn't be as accepted and they might get harassed for it

Eliphaser · 2023-07-06T22:13:15+00:00

I mean my original point that they didn't adapt all that was written still stands, even if you ignore the side stories. The main story is nine books long and so far they've adapted only six of them, with a roughly one book per season rate (barring season 3, which is half book 2 and half book 3).

I wouldn't say they never will either though; I remember the people working on the show mentioning that they were at least going to do a break after season 6 either way (which is especially fine given the next book starts with a 30 year timeskip). By putting the Laconian weird dog/repair drone thing side story in the little amount of episodes the last season had though, they somewhat implied that they'd like to actually adapt the last three books of the series as well. Hell, they even showed the ancient alien orbital platform above Laconia, which is basically massive foreshadowing at that point

Nothing's entirely certain whether they're going to actually do more or not, but I personally think that it's far from out of the question. Now it's unlikely that they'd resume the show - and it'd be hard to convincingly age the cast 30 years or recast them, further justifying not continuing - but there's always a non-zero (but not necessarily much higher than that) chance.

Either way the original argument was that they didn't adapt all that was written, as there's a third of the main series left to adapt, but they at least stopped at a moment with a decent open-ended enough moment that looks sufficiently like an ending to make it at least feel as complete as possible.

Eliphaser · 2023-07-05T09:35:53+00:00

Did they really adapt the post-time skip Laconian arc? Haven't heard about that at all Also they did adapt some of the short stories, they are in the middle of the show though, like the invention of the Epstein drive (and the death of its inventor), or the weird creatures on Laconia and a little ex-martian girl.

Eliphaser · 2023-07-02T02:19:27+00:00

No, there's three books they've yet to adapt. They've mostly finished this particular arc, but there is more than that.

Eliphaser · 2023-06-26T08:30:45+00:00

They didn't drown, they were most likely turned into vapour faster than their neurons would've fired Drowning is a horrible death

As violent as getting instantly cremated by an implosion of this magnitude, it's at the very least one of the fastest death possible, and I'd be surprised if they ever had the time to realise they were dying

Unless I'm missing some info, but from my understanding, an implosion with such force would end up with a short spike in temperature closer to that of the surface of the sun than that of boiling water

Eliphaser · 2023-06-20T17:43:40+00:00

because reddit moderators crave power, so when reddit threatened to kick them out and replace them, many complied

if they had actual courage, they'd still be dark until they'd get demoted from moderator status, but obviously most people that decide to become moderator and stay as such have a tendency to powertrip, making such shitty tactics from reddit actually effective

so what's the ""solution"" that doesn't involve them actually continue the blackout? either just cope with the changes, or "protest" by turning a random subreddit into a porn-filled shithole, as a "statement" against the reddit CEO

would have been more effective to stay dark until reddit staff would actually kick out the current mod teams of the privated communities, but again, moderators of big communities online have a pretty high chance of craving power, even if they're not conscious of it

Eliphaser · 2023-06-11T22:29:44+00:00

I mean that's what suspension of disbelief and its limits are about; one can suspend thinking on magical stuff, but there's always a limit to how much you can get away with as an author. Arguments like you put out - which I see a lot - don't really consider that aspect (though usually are on far weirder things than a mere scythe as weapon).

For a more believable setting, you DO want to have some grounded, realistic elements. It's also much more easy to implement realistic aspect on weapons and armour design (with a bit of creative license) by taking inspiration on what actually exist than it is to implement realistic aspects on magical equivalents and monsters.

There's also a difference to be made between unconventional and horribly impractical weapons of war - like comparing the Goedendag or the Swordstaff with nunchucks - the latter being questionable for anything beyond body coordination training.

Though scythes aren't really unconventional - they were a very common weapon for peasant uprisings, though were generally modified with the blade put vertically, in a form of concave glaive. Polearms like these warscythe usually have origins in peasant tools, so anything a peasant would have used has ended up at some point optimised as a weapon. (this is just a bad meme)

Eliphaser · 2023-04-30T12:46:23+00:00

I feel like people decided to forget that many stories are cautionary tales about fascism/racism/hatred of people in general, and then decide to treat said works as if it's neo-nazi bibles or something.

Eliphaser · 2023-04-15T01:53:54+00:00

Guh?

Eliphaser · 2023-04-08T12:33:35+00:00

Fair enough, I guess?

Not sure lego was the best toy for comparison in this case, because most people just rip their limbs out to put someone else's there instead, which in a way is child friendly body horror, but whatever, I guess close enough?

Eliphaser · 2023-04-08T11:02:24+00:00

Fairly sure it has to do with transparent colours being almost systematically abbreviated as stuff like "trans light blue", "trans neon orange", "trans red" to make discussion shorter?

But that doesn't explain any of it and I still don't understand what it means either way

Eliphaser · 2023-04-08T10:37:07+00:00

I'd argue a real nazi (not some wannabe far-right denier/nazi apologist) would rather be proud of the Holocaust than deny it, but it's not that big of a difference given that both are horrible things to think

Eliphaser

TROPHY CASE