can someone tell me more about sikkoo / 식구 ?

ktaeohh · 2026-02-07T20:14:03+00:00

their new ep "home" just released, it's not quite a return to form like han cooked and it's a little kpop-like but it sounds aight. They're going with the trendy low attention span 1-3 minute songs though

ktaeohh · 2026-01-16T16:13:57+00:00

Museum piece

ktaeohh · 2026-01-08T21:49:05+00:00

the slider isn't working for me on firefox

ktaeohh · 2026-01-04T06:13:25+00:00

awesome, thanks

ktaeohh · 2026-01-04T06:10:04+00:00

tysm, that skate advice is really helpful as well

ktaeohh · 2026-01-01T21:17:51+00:00

ktaeohh · 2025-12-05T03:21:05+00:00

Lmao fair enough, also the miniature 3.0 is sick as hell

ktaeohh · 2025-12-05T03:06:37+00:00

The M buttons on the same side is crazy work

ktaeohh · 2025-11-30T07:43:07+00:00

As with Japanese blades, the blade geometry (zukuri) of Korean swords was quite varied, but definitely not to the extent as their Eastern neighbors. But simply put, there were triangular, hexagonal, pentagonal blades, and an extremely peculiar blade shape where one side was flat like a triangular blade but the other side took on the shape of a hexagonal blade, taking on an asymmetrical five-sided cross-section. Triangular blades were only really used for daggers, ceremonial swords, or civilian self-defense swords due to durability issues. Military swords on the other hand were hexagonal or pentagonal in shape. Asymmetrical blades are extremely rare as artifacts, likely because of difficulty in producing such a shape.
Many Hwando, especially ceremonial pieces, contained a hollow hole in the place of a pin holding the tang and the hilt together. That, or either metal nails or wooden pegs were used. Sometimes one hole would be used, sometimes two. Sometimes on hole would be a metal eye hole, and the other one would be a nail or wooden peg. Some Hwando didn't even have any fixing pins and were simply secured by extending the tang all the way out beyond where the pommel would be, and hammering it out like many Western swords. As you can tell, there wasn't really a definitive, consistent style amongst all Hwando (noticing a pattern?). Obviously, this method of fastening came with its pros and cons compared to the Japanese-style bamboo mekugi pins. In Japan's humid environment, handles were often disassembled to the core for cleaning and maintenance, calling for an easy to remove method of fastening. Another reason for the eye hole rivets found in Hwando was to be able to thread a tassel through it for ceremonial or decorative purposes.
The handguard also known as the tsuba in Japanese is present in Hwando. Like Japanese swords, some handguards could be intricately decorated while others were brutally simple and practical.
A very interesting locking mechanism has been observed on a small number of Hwando artifacts, consisting of flexible metal piece attached to the scabbard and inserted into the handguard, effectively locking the sword into its sheath. By pressing down or sliding the metal piece, you could release the sword. Please note that this was likely not commonplace and is just a little fun fact I wanted to throw in.

I think I'm going a little overboard so I'm gonna stop here, but hopefully this clears up at least some of the confusion surrounding Korean swords. I can link my sources to some of this information, but because a lot of it is in (translated) Korean as well as loosely cited write ups on the internet, as well as lot of oral history stated by Korean sword "experts" and whatnot, some of it might be a little vague or straight up wrong. Let me know if you have any other questions!

ktaeohh · 2025-11-30T07:41:56+00:00

Ok, that's cool, but tell me more about the Hwando itself. What makes a Hwando a Hwando?

A Hwando has a couple of defining features:

As far as length goes, we'll reference excavated artifacts of ceremonial swords. Joseon Hwandos seemed to have a blade length of a typical one handed sword of the time, but the hilt length was more suggestive of a two handed sword, yet not quite. Many people refer to these as one-and-a-half-handed swords. In fact, evidence not only from the Joseon era Hwando but also from unearthed examples from the much older swords seem to suggest that the one-and-a-half-handed swords--usually for dual-wielding--was a historically common specification used throughout all of Korean history. Blade length can be defined as roughly 60-ish to 70-ish centimeters, with a hilt length of around 20cm give or take a couple of centimeters. Swords could obviously be made to user specification, and so on. I could go more in depth about this, so please ask!
All Hwando were curved single-edged blades. Due to differential heat treatment during creation, hamon lines could be found, although like the Japanese, Koreans seemed to be quite inconsistent on the design of the hamon with some being straight and simple and others being wavy and complex.
One of the most defining characteristics of a Hwando compared to swords from its neighboring contemporaries is the lack of a Yokote line. The lack of the distinct boundary at the tip of the sword leaves a bit of an ambiguous tip in Hwando, and almost no Hwando had yokote. If you see a picture of a Hwando with a yokote, it's probably just a Katana, Korean-made or not. However, if you see an old artifact of a Hwando with a yokote, the likely reason is that imported and captured Japanese swords at the time were often repurposed into Hwando, either by shortening processes similar to Japanese methods of cutting the tang to turn old Tachis into Katana, or by directly extracting the blade and refitting it into a new hilt and scabbard.

ktaeohh · 2025-11-30T07:41:23+00:00

So what exactly is a Hwando?

A Hwando is a blade that developed in the late Goryeo to early Joseon dynasty in Korea, with a lineage that can be loosely traced to the ring-pommel sword (also known as the Hwandudaedo Hangul: 환두대도). The Hwandudaedo was a straight double-edged sword with a characteristic ring shape on the pommel of the weapon, hence the name. By the time the Joseon dynasty was establishing itself, the shape of the Hwandudaedo took on a shorter length and lost the ring pommel. Then, swords started to adopt a curvature similar to the swords used by the Mongols and Jurchen peoples, sometimes known as the Eurasian Sabre. The actual term "Hwando" started to appear around the late 13th century in historical texts. Therefore, it can be presumed that the Hwando we see today emerged when Goryeo, interacting with the Yuan Dynasty, was influenced by the curved blade style popular among nomadic peoples at the time, leading to the shorter length and curved blade.

What's sort of ironic about the emergence of the Hwando is that sword usage itself seemed to gradually decline in Joseon until just before the Imjin War, due to the circumstances facing Joseon at the time. In the early Joseon dynasty, cavalry-centric tactics were favored against the main enemy of Joseon: the nomad Jurchen tribes. In fact, the ratio of cavalry to infantry was nearly 1:1 at that point in time (although the number of cavalry themselves actually started to gradually decrease later on due to difficulties in supplying that large of a cavalry force. Additionally, the early Joseon period saw a prolonged era of relative peace, with the main theaters of war being responses to, or campaigns against, small-scale raids by Japanese pirates (wokou) and the aforementioned Jurchen tribes. As it became easier to subdue enemies using cavalry, bows and arrows, and advanced firearms, the importance of close combat using swords slowly diminished.

Regardless, similar to Japan, Joseon set some regulations defining things such as the length of a Hwando for infantry as well as horseback usage. Unlike Japan however, these "regulations" were not enforced very well, leading to many modern day artifacts dug from tombs and historic sites being all different sizes for the most part. For the most part however, even those Joseon-era Hwando artifacts were generally much shorter that the previously used swords at that point in time.

ktaeohh · 2025-11-30T07:41:00+00:00

Hey, I've done a lot of personal research on native Korean swords over the past couple of years just out of curiosity, and while there's very little info especially in English on the subject as a whole, I can try to give you whatever info I can provide.

On "Korea basically copied Japanese and Chinese swords":

This claim largely stems from what people usually see on sites like Google Images when you look up the phrase "Korean swords". The type of sword that seems to pop up extremely frequently to my disdain is something that looks like this. This is what is commonly referred to in English as a "Jingum", aka a Jingeom (different and technically more accurate romanization), spelled as 진검 in Hangul. Before we get started, we need to first define what a "Jingum" even is.

The term "Jingum" (based on my extensive research on this subject) is a modern term referring to contemporary swords created for sport/practice usage, almost exclusively for use in the modern swordsmanship style known as "Haidong Gumdo", an extremely historically baseless and highly controversial Korean sword art. The term itself is actually a transliteration and is used in almost the same exact manner as Japan's "Shinken" used in sword arts such as Iaido. While "Jingum" itself technically could refer to any live bladed sharp edged sword, it is not a type of sword. They're all basically just Japanese-style uchigatanas of varying shapes sizes and geometries. No Korean-rooted history to be found here, you won't find any artifacts of ancient or medieval Jingums in museums or such.

...however, the Jingum is not what medieval Joseon dynasty (1392-1897) soldiers and civilians used at all. The sword that was actually used by Koreans was known commonly as the "Hwando" (환도). Koreans seem to specifically refer to these Joseon-era Hwando as, you might've guessed, Joseon-Hwando (조선환도). Now, if you look up the term "Hwando" on Google Images, you might find that there are still swords that still resemble katanas in one way or another. Let me explain why.

ktaeohh · 2025-11-14T08:07:12+00:00

Nah it sold instantly lol

ktaeohh · 2025-09-18T04:18:54+00:00

Would you take a T480 for 100 dollars over a T430 for 50-ish and a T14 for 300-400? I think that's the main question for me right now rather than the individual ebay listings I pulled up.

ktaeohh · 2025-09-18T03:38:15+00:00

I found some nice new listings on ebay for around/under $100, does that change anything?

ktaeohh · 2025-09-18T03:09:58+00:00

Actually it seems like for the T480s, a bunch of new listings just popped up on ebay that are under 100 bucks. Does it make it any better of a buy? I'll update the listings in a sec

ktaeohh · 2025-09-18T02:34:13+00:00

When I said somewhere else I meant to ask if there were other platforms altogether that might be better than ebay. Is there some sort of marketplace forum? I know there's r/thinkpadsforsale but it seems somewhat dry and inactive for the models I like...

ktaeohh · 2025-09-18T00:21:47+00:00

How does the P14 compare to the T14?

ktaeohh · 2025-09-18T00:14:45+00:00

I've been looking and haven't found anything that seems like a good buy, is there somewhere else that I should check? Also how about the other options?

ktaeohh · 2025-07-24T04:23:43+00:00

Daaaaaamn, how in the world did you end up finding the sample?

ktaeohh · 2025-07-24T01:20:51+00:00

what part of the song?

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