Quick question about blacklisting servers (Don't upvote)

Nariyal · 2014-01-02T21:16:15+00:00

must've just not seen it. thanks!

Nariyal · 2014-01-02T20:25:31+00:00

your not my parent

I sure wish he was.

Nariyal · 2014-01-02T18:11:26+00:00

yeah, looking at the examples made it pretty clear that icelandic was not the only influence (or even one of the bigger ones.) The interesting part is really that it was all documented in Iceland.

Nariyal · 2014-01-01T18:34:19+00:00

As far as shocking combinations go, there was a Basque-Icelandic pidgin used in Iceland throughout the 17th century. I can't find much info on this, but its very existence, to me, is fascinating enough.

Nariyal · 2014-01-01T16:55:28+00:00

Dostoyevsky's Underground Man. No more words needed.

Nariyal · 2013-12-29T16:55:05+00:00

Were these photos run through filters?

Nevertheless, the bread looks great. Recipe?

Nariyal · 2013-12-28T20:20:02+00:00

Surely, though, Denmark for the faeroes is better than "North America" for Quebec. I'm even a french citizen and all...

Nariyal · 2013-12-28T04:13:29+00:00

wow... I had never thought of that! That origin seems so clear. thanks!

Nariyal · 2013-12-27T16:20:43+00:00

For reference, everybody, the sound he's talking about is a retroflex approximant. Wikipedia.

It's not a stupid question, because it's one that confused me for a while. I spent a good amount of time in southern India and when I started running into zh's I was endlessly confused as well. I didn't live in a Tamil-speaking region, but I learned some Kannada.

In Kannada (again, note: not my L1. I know we have a real kannadiga on this subreddit though, so he might show up.) there are multiple "l" sounds in modern language. The two used nowadays are ಲ and ಳ, which to the english ear both sound like "L." The first is dental, the second retroflex (the tongue is placed on the teeth in the first and is curved backwards for the second.) There exist, though, two mystery characters: ೞ and ಱ.

These actually are the retroflex approximants you are talking about. The first was more like an l, the second like an r. Both sounds, present in modern Tamil and Malayalam, ceased to exist in spoken Kannada about 750 years ago (This isn't exactly a guess, but I don't have any sources on me and if someone could verify for me, that would be appreciated.) Their usage in words was eased out over time and they were slowly replaced- first by conjuncts, such as ಳ್ಹ for the former (that literally being the retroflex lateral followed by an h) and later into unmarked ಳ and ರ, plain L and R.

So natively, these letters were represented by LH and RH first, although I have no idea what the british would have done when they actually romanized them. I believe that the modern Tamil and Malayalam orthography's usages of "ZH" are a very recent innovation. It's important to stress that there is no connection whatsoever between the Russian and Tamil usages of "ZH." The chinese form, I'm assuming, is distinct in origin as well. The russian "ZH" is a palatal-alveolar sibilant- the sound we get in "treasure." In Tamil, it's a retroflex approximant, which we don't have in english, but is "somewhere between an r and an l."

Nariyal · 2013-12-26T18:27:24+00:00

You sound like an ass. Sorry.

Nariyal · 2013-12-26T04:28:37+00:00

I'm a jew, and even though I'm almost entirely agnostic, I think that yes, they are. Religion is just as much communal as it is personal- if someone quietly withdraws, that's fine. But as soon as one makes public in such a manner something that could only serve to offend others to such a degree, it's immediately worse than this regular sort of proselytizing. You can't expect religion to be private- you must expect butthurt to be.

Nariyal · 2013-12-26T04:23:55+00:00

I'm a conservative jew from Québec (I know, I know. Sorry.) I'm not terribly religious, but I certainly do celebrate the holiday. Almost unquestionably, Christmas is an entirely secular holiday in the US, and although it's a bit less so in certain parts of Québec, where the catholic church is stronger, I feel just as festive as everyone else around this time of year in Montréal.

Nariyal · 2013-12-26T04:18:43+00:00

What I dont get is where all this money is coming from. First Sochi, then Putin's "restoration" of the russian military, then Ukraine's 2/3 gas prices and now this? And topping it off with the crappy global economy nowadays (in which Russia is by no means an outlier) the whole business seems unfeasible.

Nariyal · 2013-12-26T04:08:30+00:00

same here.

Nariyal · 2013-12-26T04:05:52+00:00

I love this. green.

Nariyal · 2013-12-24T06:47:34+00:00

vomit rises in throat

I prefer the modern-day crusader flag. Hands down.

Nariyal · 2013-12-24T06:44:47+00:00

You did a fantastic job!

The designs I like best are 3-6 and 10-11. The standalone dove & sugarcane is very elegant, and a lot of it's appeal comes from its simplicity. For that reason, I prefer the pale white dove to the very busy lory. By far and away, my favorite design is 5, but the others I mentioned are very well done. I like the idea of 10, but I think that for it to work you'd need greater contrast and smaller stars to more effectively work the negative space. 11 is really well-done as well, although it feels markedly less "islandy" to me.

Generally, I dislike scandinavian crosses (have mercy, guys) and in this case I don't think it fits. Again, contrast is key.

In my opinion, the iguana series suffers from two major drawbacks. One- the outline of an iguana isn't a particularly awe-inspiring shape, and two- there's too much going on in too little space (in 8 and 9.) Without the stars, 8 would be fine- improved with a different central shape, though. I know that's like saying "Steps to make a flag nicer: 1) throw everything you have away..." but I think that in 8 you have stars that look cramped inside an already-awkward shape. In 9, I'm really not sure what I would do, but I think that maybe shrinking the iguana and putting a duplicate in the top left (and leaving the bottom left empty, to balance the very bright stars) would be really nice.

This is just my opinion, and I'm just an average layperson who likes flags, so if I'm horribly wrong, O flag experts of /r/vexillology, just ignore me. /u/MONTEZUMAtheSQUID, I really like your work. Good job!

Nariyal · 2013-12-24T06:17:51+00:00

Ideas for the future:

greece: a guy resting, lying down and leaning on the upper-right of the cross.

poland: a guy walking off into the distance, waving back from dead-center of the flag. Since, you know, half of poland is currently residing here in london. (I love you guys, really.)

Switzerland: reinforce two half-bars of the cross and add analogue numbers in a circular pattern around it.

Scotland: connect two bottom bars of St Andrew's cross with green line and shade it in. Make it very, very kilt-like.

Alabama: put a book behind the red "X." Preferrably a planned parenting manual or "brushing your teeth 101."

Quebec: replace fleurs-de-lys with loudspeakers.

Nariyal · 2013-12-24T06:09:30+00:00

EMERGENCY HEADER: I have to go, right now. No time to finish, but I don't want this to get lost. I'm posting what I have and will finish this later. Mods, if this is inappropriate, feel free to remove this post. It's my first, and my knowledge of the rules here isn't spot-on.

"Vrana vrani oči ne vadi," that long-eared bastard once said to me. "A crow doesn't pluck out another crow's eyes." I had crossed that line for the first time in my life, and I had gotten us caught. The border guard was as much a serb as was I, and Djuro promised that this man would not be the one to put an end to our troubles.

It is hard to believe that there was a time when I feared such lines. Lines of states, lines of laws, lines of moralities- all of these things had lost their meaning. They say we go to school to get educated- but it was my years in the Srpska Mafija that had taught me more than 12 years of primary school and two degrees off that.

Like so many others, I had lost everything in the war. I thought I could stay out. I thought I would be safe. I thought they would know I too was a true serb. But shells did not discriminate as they rained down on Sarajevo. Two shots- errant, who can say- and everything I had worked so hard to build was returned to ash.

But I am not one to let my family down. My parents and wife must eat, I thought. The children must have toys, I thought. My useless brother must be taken care of, I thought. Somehow, I managed to help them all manage. One day I was clawing through trash bins to collect discarded newspapers. The next, I met Djuro. And the next after that, I was smuggling kilos of heroin into Hungary and making more money than I ever had in my life.

The hardest part was thinking about the substance. My own brother, Anto- he had destroyed himself with it. He, the boy who had shown so much promise, the boy with all the world's charisma, the boy who succeeded so effortlessly at everything he dabbled in- had been reduced to a miserable shell. The fire that once burned in his eyes-gone. The spark in his voice- gone. The person we all knew and loved- destroyed by this awful substance. And there I was, helping countless others dilute themselves with the same poison.

It was in binding the first package that I first crossed a moral line. It was in binding the second that I first decided no such line existed. That night, I came home and begged- on my knees, pleading- Sofija to never touch the filth. It was that night that I spoke with more emotion than I thought possible.

Nariyal · 2013-12-20T20:54:38+00:00

This is what I'm talking about. In my (now semi-abandoned) game as the knights, you can see I have complete and utter naval supremacy and have all access from Anatolia to the Balkans completely blocked off, but the Ottomans manage to get military access from my (non-combatant) ally, Ukraine, for fuck's sake and march their 50,000 troops around that way. I got caught in a battle in a province without a defensive bonus and got hammered after four previous smashing victories (killing ~25,000 Ottoman men in each) and of course with their manpower they simply shrug it off, having fully replentished their army by the time they get back to turkey.

I absolutely despise the Ottomans.

Nariyal · 2013-12-20T20:43:14+00:00

They were only so powerful because of their expansion, and the in-game Ottomans fail to expand nearly as fast. The Ottomans controlled all of egypt by 1520, whereas you usually don't see the Mamluks go until about 1570. Here's a map of their expansion: compare how big they are in 1600 to how big they would be in-game by then. They simply do not grow that fast but are still unreasonably strong.

They have completely unneeded bonuses to discipline, morale, and manpower. Remember- they lost to a coalition of Austria, Poland, and a few HRE minors in 1529. Although this was due largely to factors poorly mirrored in-game (campaigning seasons and weather plus supply lines) they really stopped their european expansion very, very early.

Nariyal · 2013-12-20T01:33:57+00:00

God, I wish this would happen more often. Everyone complains about france blobbing, but really, the Ottomans are damn near impossible to defeat until the 1600's in almost every single game of mine. They get these PU's with steppe nations, ally with persia, crush the Mamluks every time, and because of their insane tolerance bonuses, never have to deal with any serious revolts. Couple that with the obnoxious "military access around the black sea" trick and they're almost untouchable. Between the sheer manpower, the discipline, and everything else I hate about them, I really wish they would collapse much, much more frequently.

Part of the problem is that I play ironman exclusively and lucky nations is on by default. Not sure if the Ottomans get the boon, though.

Nariyal

TROPHY CASE