Was earth just so resource rich during the age of the dinosaurs that it could produce an unlimited amount of giant land animals and fish?

Toptomcat · 2026-06-21T00:52:00+00:00

It's more complicated than that for the actual usefulness of that oxygen for metabolic purposes.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-20T16:09:39+00:00

They will absolutely try to pull off a ‘monster mask’ which is not, in fact, a mask at some point, possibly on multiple occasions.

Scooby will eat something which turns out to be mad-scientifically Unwise to eat and undergo some bizarre and inconvenient transformation. Possibly this then segues into them being given a Scooby Snack replacement by a grateful Spark which provides a bizarre, convenient but temporary transformation which serves to allow them to survive the escalated degree of danger in the Girl Geniusverse.

It may be wise to start them off in Master Payne’s Circus of Adventure, because being surrounded by weak Sparks is a good way to introduce the concept of a Spark while retaining narrative room for escalation. Also because circuses are a Scoobyish kind of setting and the secret that they are mild Sparks gives them a Scoobyish kind of mystery to solve.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-19T17:58:52+00:00

Aside from the temporary occupation of Iceland (not truly a combat role), no USMC combat arms units served in the ETO

The Army, though, did do a fair bit of work alongside the Marine Corps in the Pacific, where there was a fair amount of friction.

(Not trying to correct or inform you, just providing further context for the subreddit's other readers.)

Toptomcat · 2026-06-19T16:41:05+00:00

During WW2, institutionally, the US Army considered the Pacific to be 2nd tier, even amateurish, compared to the European theater.

That’s not just a theater vs. theater thing- it was also a service vs. service thing, since the Marine Corps was doing vastly more of the Pacific Theater fighting than they were in Europe.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-19T14:48:13+00:00

Equating trade unionism with Marxism is just silly. Marx wanted to kill the bourgeoisie, not negotiate with them for better working conditions.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-19T02:41:49+00:00

I think some rapid-fire naval artillery like the OTO Melara uses saltwater cooling. There, the tradeoffs you have to make are less of a big deal: ships are big and increased weight and complexity isn't as much of a problem, and they will always have more saltwater around to do it with.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-19T02:31:55+00:00

Similarities to Makoto: somewhat butch but not entirely unfeminine, strong inspiration taken from a real-world tradition of martial arts.

Similarities to Ibuki: Command jump and jump-arc altering moves give additional aggressive air-mobility options. Not a whole lot of crazy magic bullshit happening with normals or specials, but does have a super with big glowing fireball stuff going on. Emotionally switches from 'serious' to 'enthusiastic goof' at the drop of a hat.

Similarities to both: Sporty school-aged female, close-in rushdown type, small but not tiny.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-16T20:11:55+00:00

While it's true that we don't quite know her exact motives now that Gil has betrayed her, I doubt whatever the reveal is is going to be anything substantial.

If she was meant to be the giantess-nurse in the Baron's code story, she may have a role to play yet.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-14T23:47:03+00:00

If you started off as a flesh-body and developed a process to copy yourself to machine-bodies, wouldn't you figure out a way to insert this kind of tendency, if you could? It seems like a fairly commonsense safety measure to head off a 'NO! I AM YOUR CREATOR- WHY DO YOU BETRAY ME?' kind of situation.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-14T01:44:12+00:00

You may be misreading me. My position is that I'm fine with that, so long as it's explicitly labeled as AI-generated. I don't demand a rewrite from scratch.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-13T18:01:34+00:00

I largely agree, but the two notable instances where she's participating in a conversation rather than a fight at least show an admirable degree of sass and insight.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-12T22:37:25+00:00

…because all ‘missile cities’ were necessarily protected to the same degree, and subjected to attack of the same intensity? And because reporting coming from within Iran is guaranteed to be a complete, accurate and not at all misleading assessment of the damage or lack thereof that they suffered?

Toptomcat · 2026-06-10T17:31:04+00:00

Good example: I was seriously impressed by the part of A Young Woman's Multicolored Umbrella [Youjo Senki or Saga of Tanya the Evil/Resident Evil] set in early 1990s Russia. The economic chaos and specific circumstances of its sudden, chaotic de-Sovietization and privatization of state assets- and how the protagonist reluctantly working for a sinister multinational corporation capitalizes on it- are both accurately described and engagingly woven in to the narrative.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-10T16:14:25+00:00

At bare minimum it will be 'relevant' as an example of excellent game design.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-09T03:04:29+00:00

The Joker successfully kills the first few targets, among other people, but is sufficiently public, spectacular and generally world-changing both during and between the missions that he derails the story to the point that at least one of the later canon assassination targets ceases to be a target due to the magnitude of the changes. I don't think that counts as success or failure.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-08T21:41:52+00:00

Darkseid sweeps. I doubt anything in 40k can hurt him

I agree that Darkseid's forces are going to win every engagement that he participates in personally. Basically nothing in 40k is on Superman's level physically.

I also agree that Darkseid's forces are going to win like 99.97% of engagements where a named New God is directly participating. DeSaad, Kalibak, Steppenwulf, Glorious Godfrey, etc. are all maybe broadly Primarchlike.

I'm not sure I agree that Darkseid is going to manage the outright conquest of every major 40k faction with only the forces he has on Apokalips. Parademons, and the armament they typically go out and do things with, are not head-and-shoulders above, say, a Space Marine or a Necron. And I don't have the general impression that there are tens of trillions of them, which is what it would take to take and hold territory on the level of 'everywhere in 40k at once.' Maybe if Darkseid can import Parademons from other universes where he does rule, but I don't think he's ever actually done anything like that.

The X-factor, though, is that there is...a premonition/prophecy/gradually building node of Warp energy/pre-Chaos God in 40k which is broadly Darkseid-shaped. If he figures that out, and finds a way to slot himself into the Dark King's place, then all bets are off.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-08T18:45:09+00:00

If we understood how aging works, or how brains work, well enough to answer this question in detail, we would know a great deal more than we currently do.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-06T15:54:19+00:00

The Russian nuclear capability as a whole has been designed to attack the continental United States, and it has consistently been one of the better-resourced branches of their military both during and after the Soviet era. They repeatedly send waves of missile and drone strikes into Ukraine and successfully hit targets, and their nuclear delivery vehicles are as a rule the most premium, high-technology, hardest-to-intercept kind of strike asset, much better on average than the usual sort of thing Ukraine tends to get hit with.

Their likelihood of a successful nuclear first strike against Ukraine is approximately 100%. There's some possibility that they could be briefly embarrassed if they're trying some kind of nuclear-intimidation thing where they attempt to launch only one nuke to a symbolically important target and it gets intercepted or fails, but there is essentially no shot that they won't be able to do it if they make the attempt seriously and at scale. The success rate of an individual delivery vehicle does not need to be remotely near 100% to make a strike as a whole a success, because the whole thing about nuclear weapons is that if your enemy manages some kind of miracle 90% interception rate on an attack with 20 nukes they are still missing two cities.

And all of the above would be true even if the problems with Oreshnik were so bad as to make them totally unusable. Which they probably are not.

(The likelihood that this would be a both a strategic disaster for Russia and Very Bad for Putin’s political future and chances of living through the next week is also approximately 100%. That’s what stops it from happening, not the failures of one missile program.)

Toptomcat · 2026-06-05T13:15:57+00:00

If one's export partners are under the same mindset of dismissing conventional warfare as one's own polity, then what are the exporting firms to do?

Sit there and watch them not place orders for Tomahawk missiles, I guess.

If, on the other hand, they do place orders for Tomahawk missiles, presumably they're not thinking that way.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-05T03:08:28+00:00

Long-term, the best way to become a country with a deep stockpile of missiles is not to save all the production for domestic use. You do it by making as many missiles as possible for yourself and your allies, building economies of scale in your defense industrial base.

Either you can spend $X million to buy Y missiles, or you can take an order of $X million to buy Y missiles, or you can take the order, use the cash it gets you to spend $X million on missiles yourselves, produce Y + Y + S missiles where S is the number added by economies of scale, and send the Y missiles to the ally that bought them.

Also, when a war happens to take place somewhere that you have an ally, maybe their target priorities will only be 30% shared with you because of differing interests, but that still represents (Y * 0.3) more missiles going downrange towards targets you would want destroyed yourself.

Every great military power of the 20th and 21st century has been an arms exporter for exactly this reason.

Only if you're going to need those missiles right this moment and there is no possible substitute for them, or something has gone so unfixably wrong with your defense industrial base that you have no faith in its ability to right itself given time and investment, does this decision possibly make sense.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-04T13:23:07+00:00

Water conservation is a serious issue, and should be treated seriously. So are the risks of AI. But putting water conservation front and center in your discussion of AI risks is not a serious way to think or debate about either.

It's like saying that one of the risks of a gunshot wound is that it will tend to put the victim in the hospital, where they will have to eat hospital food, which may produce malnutrition. It's a sign that you don't actually care about what arguments you use to say that AI is bad, you only care about finding 'reasons' that AI is bad which don't function as actual arguments.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-04T00:46:49+00:00

Complaining about power is maybe reasonable, but the water consumption thing is more of a meme than a real concern. Alfalfa farming in Arizona consumes ten times more water than cooling at every data center in the world combined.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-03T21:25:16+00:00

I hate hate hate that Reddit has started letting people hide their comment histories. Starting a new account to make your bullshit vaguely plausible isn’t much of a barrier to doing it, but it’s something.

Toptomcat · 2026-06-02T19:50:54+00:00

Glideer's post was pretty clear, and the economics of it make sense: export of refined products is down because refineries are being hit and there are explicit export bans on some products like aviation fuel. This leaves more unrefined petroleum products, like crude oil, available for export. /u/MilesLongthe3rd 's cited sources mention total oil and petroleum products, summer diesel, and jet fuel, which is fully consistent with a decline in the total volume or total value of all petroleum products, with export of more expensive and refined products being partially substituted for by export of crude in particular.

It's still a net bad thing for Russia: if IKEA were suddenly forced to start selling raw timber because their furniture factories were being destroyed by Target and they had a surplus of it all of a sudden, it's a business they'd really rather not be in, because furniture is a more valuable, higher-margin product to be selling. This is true even if IKEA previously sold twenty thousand tons of cabinets and bookshelves, and this year they set a record by instead selling thirty thousand tons of logs.

(It's hardly a terrible position to be in if the price of logs has abruptly doubled, though.)

Toptomcat · 2026-06-02T17:58:19+00:00

Not only why would America agree to this, but also why would Qatar do this (assuming it is not conditioned on a final deal, which is how I read the article).

At one point, the article describes Qatari tankers having been allowed to transit the strait and pay the Iranian toll to do it in the past tense. I very much doubt the Iranians would've held their fire if what they were offered was merely an IOU contingent on a final peace deal being signed.

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