Lurker > darkknight109

Muscles posted...

When did America start having a gun problem and what changed? Because we always had a lot of guns but there wasn't always a gun problem

Well... there kind of was, it just wasn't talked about as much. The last time the US murder rate was below 4.0 per 100k (i.e. where every other developed country currently sits) was the turn of last century. It climbed steadily from ~1910 to the 1930s, when it nearly reached 10.0 per 100k, then dropped to roughly half that level during the war years, where it stayed (minus a brief spike in 1945 when the troops came home) until the mid 1960s, when it started climbing again.

That mid-60s mark is probably the genesis of the current gun crime wave, as the homicide rate soared in the 1970s and was persistently high throughout the 80s and 90s, fluctuating between 8.0 and 11.0 per 100k. So, believe it or not, the current era actually represents an improvement (but don't get too excited - homicide rate has been on the rise for the last five years).

Notably, however, the 1970s was also the point where the NRA dropped its role encouraging responsible gun ownership and safe gun handling (believe it or not, it used to be highly regarded for its gun safety stances) and moved to its current aggressive "pro-gun everything" status. The Republicans, similarly, shifted to a very anti-regulatory stance and gun control legislation that had uncontroversially been on the books for years was steadily stripped away, with deadly results.

Rammstein - Deutschland

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeQM1c-XCDc

You do need a bit of an understanding of German history and to be able to understand German (or just look up a translation) to get the full impact, but holy shit, this video is absolutely insanely good and impactful.

Cliff notes version: the song is about the angst of growing up in a country with one of the most violent and bloody pasts of any of the modern powers, including being responsible for what is generally seen as the most horrific act in our species' history. The lyrics talk about wanting to love and be proud of one's homeland, but being unable to in Germany's case because of everything that has been done in her name.

The video, meanwhile, flips through German history from the Roman defeats at Magna Germania in the early first century AD through to the RAF terrorist attacks near the end of the Cold War. It is an incredibly well done video and there is so much to see in pretty much every scene. I have never been this impressed with a music video before - it is truly unique.

Ozmose posted...

They make it sound like everyone needs to live in fear of being gunned down, when the odds are incredibly small.

That's because your odds of dying to anything in any given year are incredibly small (about 1.3% - of all people living in the US at any time, just under 99% of them will still be alive the following year). That doesn't somehow diminish the role of guns in killing people.

Guns are the sixth-most common cause of death for all ages in the US (the only things above it are, in order, heart disease, cancer, COVID-19, chronic lower respiratory disease, and opioid overdose). They are the single-most common cause of death for children. Your lifetime odds of dying to a gun are a staggeringly high 1-in-89. You are more likely to die to a gun than to a motor vehicle crash.

Try and worm your way out of the statistical truth all you like, it won't work.

Ozmose posted...

Drunk drivers kill 4 in every 100,000. Should we ban cars too?

Hmm... good point. Drunk driving does kill a lot of people - not as much as guns, of course, but still quite a few. So what do we do to address that?

Well, we restrict who can drive our cars, of course - no one under the age of 16, save for a training period where they can drive under supervision. And if you're eventually found to have a health condition of some sort that impacts your ability to drive safely, or you show yourself to be irresponsible with your use of a vehicle by breaking the law, you can have restrictions or an outright ban placed on your ability to drive.

Of course, you also need a license to drive, one that requires you to pass a test demonstrating your knowledge of how to operate a vehicle and the responsibility, awareness, and maturity to do so safely. Registration of all vehicles is similarly mandatory. All vehicles on the road have mandatory safety features, which get ever more strict by the year, and the police have the right to inspect your vehicle at any time and ticket you for violations.

You know, since you brought this up, I think I agree - we should be addressing drunk driving and gun crime the same way.

Ozmose posted...

Punish the millions upon millions of responsible law abiding people because of the actions of a small fraction of criminals.

Um... yes? That's how laws work. We legislate to the lowest common denominator because we have to.

Like... do you think traffic laws exist to punish the millions of responsible, law-abiding drivers who drive safely? No, of course not - you could turn most people loose onto roads that have no traffic laws to speak of and they would still drive in a safe, orderly fashion; it's the small minority of people who drive like fucking maniacs that wreck it for everyone else and make it so we need traffic laws.

Guns are no different. Are the overwhelming majority of gun owners responsible and use/store their guns in a safe manner? Yes. Does that mean we shouldn't pass gun laws? Absolutely not, because there are enough lunatics who *aren't* being safe in their handling/storage/usage of guns that America has a massive fucking problem that needs to be dealt with.

Gun laws aren't being passed to "punish" you - if you are as responsible a gun owner as you claim to be, laws enforcing that responsibility should not be a concern to you.

Ozmose posted...

You do overseas.

No, you really don't.

Ozmose posted...

We're not even close to the worst in terms of gun homicide. Based on population, I believe we rank something like 36th globally.

21st, actually, and even that is misleading because it counts Puerto Rico and the American Virgin Islands as not being part of the US (both have higher gun crime rates than the 50 states) and counts them as "countries", for some reason, so the US is actually 19th. And every single other country with a higher gun crime rate is impoverished, has massive problems with corruption and organized crime, or both.

Amongst developed nations, the US is far and away the worst in gun crime and in homicides in general. It has an intentional homicide rate of 6.5 per 100,000 as of 2020, putting it just ahead of such security heavyweights as Haiti and Tanzania, but not quite reaching the lofty heights of Zambia or Burundi. For reference, the next most murdery developed country on the list is Latvia and New Zealand, both of which have less than half the murder rate at 2.6 per 100,000. Continuing down the list, we have Canada at 2.0, Finland at 1.6, Iceland at 1.5, France at 1.3, Sweden at 1.2, the UK at 1.1, Denmark at 1.0, Australia at 0.9, Taiwan at 0.8, Ireland, Austria, and Poland all with 0.7, Norway, the Netherlands, South Korea, and Spain at 0.6, Italy, Slovenia, and Switzerland at 0.5, Japan at 0.3, and Luxembourg at 0.2. And, though I shouldn't need to point this out, I will mention that mentally ill people exist in every single one of those countries.

It's the guns. It's always been the guns. It will continue to be the guns for as long as the US refuses to acknowledge the actual problem here.

Zareth posted...

It's the only real recognizable thing that ISN'T racist, I found it kind of odd that it's there.

He's also got pens, binders, and a rolled up poster. "Cactus" fits into the "office kitsch" category of stuff he's carrying out.

So, I know I'm late, but...

Ferarri619 posted...

I obviously can't tell the interviewer this.

Why not? I mean, obviously you're not going to phrase it as, "My current restaurant is full of cockroaches and I would like a more cockroach-free workspace", but you could have easily dressed it up as something like, "To be perfectly honest, I've seen health and sanitation standards slip at my current job place to the point I no longer feel comfortable working there." That is a 100% valid reason to leave a job (and it shows the interviewer that you actually give a shit about such things, which is a plus).

adjl posted...

It's like the "Objective" section on resumes. It's mostly fallen out of fashion these days, but I really have no idea how it held on for so long. I don't think anyone genuinely believed the pretense that there was more to it than "I like being able to buy things."

I've never even heard of an "objective" section on a resume.

That being said, I think it depends on your field of work. Like, I'm in engineering, and people will legitimately switch jobs or seek one out based not just on pay but also on what type of experience/learning opportunities the job offers. I've seen people switch to lower-paying jobs because they're going to be working on something that's more cutting-edge that they feel they might be able to leverage further down the road. I've seen people leave jobs because they wound up doing engineering work that they didn't like and they weren't getting the learning opportunities they wanted.

Like yeah, the main reason why anyone is looking for a job is, "I enjoy having money and the things that I can exchange it for," but there are sometimes other considerations that factor into it.

For me, it's about archiveability. I hate the idea that a game can simply disappear and become unplayable after X number of years because it got delisted from an online store (or that store simply ceased to exist, as routinely happens to old consoles once they stop being supported by their parent companies). I have an easier time buying and playing NES games from the 80s than some digital-only games that were released less than 10 years ago thanks to this bullshit.

Depends. If I'm doing a transoceanic flight, I usually have a few different methods of entertainment with me - a couple of game consoles, my laptop with some movies, a couple books, etc. I find ways to pass the time.

For anything less than four hours or so, it's usually just listening to music, maybe with a little reading or gaming mixed in.

adjl posted...

Protecting IP's is fair game, but exerting absolute control over who is and isn't allowed to even display footage from a game is pretty dubious. For one thing, that's exactly what the concept of "fair use" is meant to protect, but more than that, there's little to no benefit and often quite a bit of harm to be found by doing so.

Keep in mind that Japanese copyright law is some of the strictest in the world and there is no equivalent in it to the "Fair Use" provisions that show up in most western copyright laws.

That shouldn't matter on most platforms, as they're frequently based out of the US and American law would apply (at best, Nintendo could get the videos blocked in Japan and/or penalties applied to Japanese creators), but the extent of Fair Use is also somewhat subjective. Let's Plays, for instance, generally don't fall under Fair Use because of how extensively they're using copyrighted material; reviews, on the other hand, squarely would.

Yeah, it's tricky.

SoreChasm posted...

I saw a slightly bigger Gundam last week.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/7/1/8/AAPtSiAAEVRm.jpg

I'm headed to Japan in a couple of weeks and I was so annoyed that they were originally going to close this exhibit as of last month. "Yes, let's spend a bunch of money building a life-size working Gundam during the pandemic, when no one can come and visit, then close it as soon as the borders reopen! Brilliant!"

Fortunately, they thought better of it and now it's open until next year.

Anyways, on the subject of Gundam models, I have this lovely fellow downstairs (pic isn't of my copy of it, but it's the same one): https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/0/3/0/AABDhhAAEXTe.jpg

Cacciato posted...

And as a side note, the block option is ridiculously stupid when it completely disrupts the point of a message board. Especially when quoting multiple users ends up hiding the entire post.

You can change that setting so that it only blocks posts from the user in question and not from people who quote them. It's somewhere in the user settings - been a while, so I don't remember where and I'm too lazy to go look for it.

MeatiestMeatus posted...

https://youtu.be/LhqUk28OwHs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JRLCBb7qK8

Only on the SNES; since then, it's been Bowser all the way.

I don't think I've ever been less interested in modern games, particularly on the triple-A front. Basically the only big-name titles I still buy are, like, maybe two games from Nintendo a year.

Indie gaming and retro gaming are still fun, but the medium just feels remarkably stale right now.

To 500!

Username checks out.

Pwnt.

I like where this topic is going.

Ogurisama posted...

Banana Cream

GetMagnaCarter posted...

banoffee

These.

Off the top of my head...

-Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void has a kind-of terrible wrap-up to the trilogy.
-The way that The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles wraps up its final case just comes straight out of left field and is just tremendously unsatisfying (and jarringly out of tone with the rest of the game).
-Ganbare Goemon 3 is hilariously rushed, where you can tell they just tossed in the second half of the game in a mad dash to wrap everything up in time for the ship date.
-And, of course, the "scavenger hunt" portion at the end of Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is absolute ass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OE2NPmqZ9nM

Rotpar posted...

I'm goddamn old. Are the PS2 and XBox 360 "old school" now, for the punk-ass Tiktok Fortnite kids these days?

Put it this way - the PS2 is currently as old as the Atari 2600 was when the PS2 first came out.

Needed an "all of the above" option.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

As an aside, there is an argument that democracy is itself inherently and fatally flawed - which is why we don't live in a pure democracy, as much as a representative democracy that is meant to minimize the injustices of the masses. "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch."

"The Tyranny of the Majority" is a concept that exists for a reason. We tend to implicitly accept the idea that the largest group shouldn't be allowed to simply inflict all of their expectations and principles onto everyone else against their will, but the freedoms of smaller groups should be respected and maintained even if they conflict with the much larger majority. In a pure democracy, where "The People" voted on every issue directly, the minority on every issue would be utterly fucked. Hence, the purpose of representatives (in theory, anyway) is to take into account the wishes of the majority while still respecting the rights of the minority, and attempting to find a balance that does the maximum good for the maximum number while doing minimum harm. But as history shows us, this doesn't always work as intended.

Disagree, sort of. Representatives aren't any more likely to respect minority rights than the general populace. To see this demonstrated in painful clarity, one need only look at the pre-Civil Rights-era United States. The rights of minorities were not only not considered, they were actively suppressed. Even when suffrage was extended to minorities, few would argue their rights were properly respected until the point was forced via protest and mass unrest. Representative democracy did nothing to solve that particular problem (a problem that, at least on some level, remains unsolved even today).

Democracy *does* have a built-in mechanism for respecting the minority, but it's got nothing to do with representatives. In a system where majority consensus has to be secured, the prudent politician will aim to get as close to 50% as possible without going too far over or, especially, under. That gives him the best use of resources available to him and maximizes his chances of election and getting his proposals passed.

To put it in a facile example, let's pretend two candidates were running for office, but the only thing they were permitted to campaign on is how to divide up a payment of $1,000,000 that was slated to go to the 100,000 taxpayers that live in the city. Candidate A states that the fairest way to divide the money is to simply give everyone $10 and be done with it. But Candidate B suggests that, instead, he will give $20 to the 500,000 oldest people in the city, not including himself. The end result is that the 500,000 oldest people will vote for Candidate B, because even though they see benefit in Candidate A, they see *more* benefit from Candidate B - those 500,000, plus Candidate B's personal vote will be just enough to secure him the win.

Now Candidate B could, in theory, hedge his bets a little bit (what if someone he was giving money to died or was sick or otherwise rendered unable to vote?), but he doesn't want to thin out the money too much or else Candidate A could revise his own plan and snipe enough of Candidate B's votes away by concentrating more money in a smaller majority's hands.

Thing is, since it's in a politician's interest to appeal to as narrow a majority as possible, that makes those majorities inherently unstable and ensures you don't want to piss off the minority too much, because it doesn't take much for them to become the majority. For instance, in the above example, what happens at the next election when some of the voters who weren't amongst the 500,000 oldest the first time around have reached that status due to old people dying? They're going to remember what Candidate B did and probably won't be too likely to support him as a result.

Hence, at least in theory, democracy does have some natural defence mechanisms against a tyrannical majority - not great ones, but they exist.

Beyond that, I agree with most of your analysis. Democracy has many structural issues and not ones that are easily solved. One of the biggest problems, at least as I see it, is that politics, by definition, is a zero-sum game - if I'm running for office, I can only win if all my opponents lose. Unfortunately, in the world of party politics, that means that once I'm in office there is almost no incentive for me to help politicians of another party, even if doing so would be to the benefit of the country. Again, this is most vividly illustrated in democracies like the US, where the legislative and executive branches (and even different components of those branches) can be held by opposing parties. When Republicans are in opposition, not only is it not in their interests to help the Democrats in ensuring the country runs smoothly, it is actually in their interests to sabotage the country and make it run badly because it makes the Democrats look like incompetent administrators and improves the electability of Republican candidates next election; and the same is true when the parties switch.

On paper, elections are one of the most reasonable solutions to the age old problem of how you get rid of people in power after they have outlived their usefulness to the collective (given that most other ways involve copious amounts of violence and destruction). In practice, though, politicians have learned that rather than treating elections as being a referendum on their performance in office, it is far more effective to treat re-election as the entire reason to be in office in the first-place, which is completely backwards.

There's also the issue (admittedly not uncommon in methods of power succession) that the skills needed to win election are vastly different from the skills needed to administer a country and elections largely don't account for that. Thus, someone who is popular and charismatic but has terrible ideas generally outperforms someone who is highly competent but awkward.

GGuirao13 posted...

Blame the people in her district and political tribalism. Even if they didn't want to vote for her specifically, they did because she was either the only Republican or the one most likely to win.

She was neither the only Republican nor the one most likely to win.

Her district is an extremely safe Republican seat, meaning that whoever won the primary was a shoe-in for election. She didn't take the seat uncontested, the Republicans took a look at who was on offer in the primary, pointed to MTG and said, "Yep, that one. That's the best we've got!"

Which says a lot, really...

argonautweakend posted...

I can't say I have a favorite Dilbert moment but I always liked reading the strip because it just seemed really accurate how stupid companies are run

This. The comic is much funnier if you've worked in and around cube farms, especially badly run ones.

That said, it kinda peaked in the 90s and hasn't really been worth reading for at least a decade now.

I think it was somewhere around 825-830 last I checked.

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]

I'm starting to think that Scott Adams may unironically be suffering from some undiagnosed form of dementia or brain degradation.

Seriously, I get that he went off the deep end a few years ago, but this shit reads like something you'd present to a judge to get someone involuntarily committed.

Zareth posted...

99% of 40k ripoff models are garbage. Also resin sucks ass to work with.

Have you ever actually tried 3D printing? Resin modelling has come a long way, even in the last ~20 years. The resin used in 3D printing is actually pretty user-friendly, especially if you're using the water-washable stuff.

As for the quality of the models, sure, there's garbage out there, but there's also some pretty damn amazing ones that aren't particularly hard to find. Hell, you can get 3D-scanned copies of the real deal if you know where to look.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Mainly because GW constantly threatens to sue for theft of intellectual property and screams about how rip-off models aren't tournament legal.

Well, given the ubiquity of 40k, BFG, and WFB rip-off models on virtually every 3D model site in existence, those threats of lawsuits don't seem to be deterring too many people. And sure, they ban non-GW models from their official tournaments (and have done for ages)... but so what? 99% of their customers aren't tournament players and never will be. Losing out on official GW events isn't much of a deterrent from where I sit.

Hence why I say I don't know why most people are willing to put up with GW's shit.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

It's entirely possible their current practices (rebooting entire lines and selling everything at vastly overinflated prices) is because they know the gravy train isn't going to last much longer before it runs out. So they're trying to rake in as much revenue as they can now before the bottom falls out.

Possible, sure, but those reboots have significant up-front investments (making new casts for models and producing inventory isn't exactly cheap), so they're really gambling hard on that strategy working.

Honestly, what's annoying about this is that if GW pulled their head out of their ass for two seconds, they could realize that they could be taking advantage of this new market and raking in money hand-over-fist from it.

If I was in GW's shoes, I would set up an official section on my website for 3D modellers. Tell everyone that they can sell their GW-knockoffs there, with GW taking a cut of the profit and highlighting the most popular/highest quality ones. You could even offer an in-store service for people without 3D printers, where they can put together an order of 3D prints and GW staff would print them out on official GW printers (for a substantial mark-up, because this is still GW we're talking about here). GW could basically outsource a huge part of their model design, production, and distribution and basically get handed a bunch of money for next to zero effort on their part, and their customers would get the peace-of-mind that these were officially sanctioned models that could be used in tournaments and had at least some form of quality control.

But no, because GW is perpetually dumb, they just insist on selling chunks of overdesigned plastic sprue for $200 a pop.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

And let's be honest, most people aren't going to have 3D printers anyway. It's still fairly niche technology for the average consumer.

If you have the time, space, and money to pursue Warhammer as a hobby, you absolutely have the time, space, and money to set up a decent 3D printer.

3D printing has improved substantially in terms of accessibility over the last few years. These days, a set-up for an entry level printer - which is good enough for 90% of what you'd be using it for for Warhammer - with the various recommended accessories (curing station, UT cleaner) is maybe $350 - $400. That's, like, two large models at GW's current prices. And the models that come out of a 3D printer need substantially less clean-up and assembly than GW's plastic models.

Honestly, the biggest drawback to 3D printing at the moment is that most of the software tools you use to set-up prints are still not particularly user friendly. But it's really not that niche anymore and it's only going to get more mainstream as time goes on.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Even if GW doesn't really have legal grounds to punish people for doing it, that doesn't necessarily stop them from making the threat (which may intimidate people into not being willing to take the risk). This is similar to how companies will send cease and desist orders to creators who fall firmly into fair use - you don't have to be able to win a case if the mere threat of it causes people to stop doing what you don't want them to.

Thing is, it's a game of whack-a-mole for them and one they can't win - and they're well aware of that.

First of all, as you mentioned, GW largely can't stop 3D works that are "based on" their games, unless they're straight-up 3D scans of the official models (which, incidentally, also aren't particularly hard to find), so they know that all they can do is threaten; if it winds up in court, they're likely to lose.

Secondly, most of the people selling these scans aren't big companies, they're a couple of dudes in Eastern Europe who know how to use 3D modelling software. Thus, even if GW *could* take this to court and win, it would be prohibitively expensive for them to do so and they'd never have a hope of recouping their costs.

Third, unlike in the days of yore, what they're banning now isn't physical goods, but shapefiles, which are just data. As the music industry and the video gaming industry before them have learned, it's awfully hard to ban data, because once a file is out there, it's trivially easy for people to start sharing it around in ways that are almost impossible for you to stop.

Ye olden times when GW could just sic its lawyers on some poor start-up studio don't work in the modern age, because unlike back then it's not just a handful of other small-to-medium-size companies that are trying to elbow in on your niche, it's thousands of tiny operations. Each CaD you send out costs you some of your lawyer's time and those bills will start to pile up very quickly while you barely make a dent in the market.

Zareth posted...

Then gladly pay $300 for an anime waifu figure that they don't even need to build or paint and can't play games with

I mean, at GW's current prices, $300 will get you, like, seven infantry figures and a pot of paint.

Honestly, I have no idea how GW even survives now that 3D printing is a thing. I love Warhammer (both WFB and 40k), but I just couldn't bring myself to pay their exorbitant prices anymore. Every time I went into a store for GW stuff, I came out feeling completely ripped off.

But two years ago I bought a 3D printer and it completely revitalized my love of the hobby. The community has put out models for every single army far nicer than anything GW has ever managed, and you can print off a complete, ready-to-play army for about $100-$150 in shape files and resin, and maybe 2-3 weeks of print time.

I teach martial arts classes 4x a week, and usually do my own practice on one of the other days.

Can communicate with oysters and free gravel for life.

The second one seems like the only good power out of that group, since it's basically free money once I set up a gravel quarry.

I have a soft spot in my heart for King's Quest VI. Played the hell out of that game when I was younger.

User Info: mharbenedict34
Legend
User Since: Oct 2004
Karma: 301
Active Posts: 236

One of the wilder user info pages I've seen.

Yes - when I was a kid, I would spend a week each summer at an overnight camp. Had a blast there and wound up working there for a few years while I was going through university. The pay was shit, but it was easily the most fun job I've ever had.

In free-flowing traffic, you speed up to the speed of the traffic, put on your signal, and look for a spot to safely join the flow. Pretty straightforward.

In very slow traffic, the most efficient way for everyone is to go to the end of the merge lane and zipper-merge there. If you try to do it earlier in the lane, you are not making full use of the space given for merges and anyone who then goes past you in the merge lane and merges further down will further slow traffic in the traffic lane. By merging at the end point of the merge lane, you ensure that there is a single point of entry for traffic in the merge lane, thus optimizing the flow for both lanes.

Seldom do people actually do this properly, however, instead just merging wherever they feel like it.

None. I have a flip phone.

The English language was a mistake.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

Almost no one on PotD today should be posting in this topic, because none of you were here then!

I was. Divided most of my GF time between here and the Star Wars board.

I'm trying to think of who were the big posters back then. I want to say 2006 was after the Ail drama, but I honestly can't remember since I think it was right around then. I remember Foxxbox was pretty active around that time, and Simulord was still around. BTB, Zang, Moonjay, JediMutant, Miroku, and knivesX2004 are the other names I remember from that era.

This may be the single weirdest topic I've ever seen on this board.

My parents made me learn on stick shift, which was a terrible idea because the stick shift at the local driver's ed office was a little gutless shitbox that had zero clutch as a result of being abused to hell and back by every new driver in the city. Seriously, the friction point on that thing was like a millimetre. I would end every lesson discouraged, go back and practice on my Dad's truck (torquey little Toyota Tacoma that would still go if you popped the clutch; I wound up routinely starting it in 2nd countless times while I was learning and barely noticed when it happened), build my confidence up, head to my next lesson, then stall three times getting out of the parking lot.

I had no objection to learning how to drive stick, but not while I was *also* learning the nuances of basic driving. Anyways, I took 10 lessons on it, took my test on an automatic, passed, and I have literally never even had the opportunity to drive stick again in my life.

Grendel_Prime posted...

Reminds me of this story:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160413-the-museum-filled-with-poisonous-spiders-that-just-wont-die

I like how they post the "If you are an arachnophobe, you might not want to read on" warning *after* the screen-wide banner image of a spider.

Our raises happen around Christmas, but no bonuses.

I used to work for a smaller company that gave out bonuses; when we got bought out, the new company just rolled that compensation into our annual pay.

Krazy_Kirby posted...

older ones uses sais right sometimes.
in the 2012 version, raph often puts his "fingers" between the spikes....

He did that in the 80s version as well. Moreover, the 80s version mostly treated the sai as stabbing weapons, when they're supposed to mostly be used like truncheons (you *can* stab with them, but it's not commonly done, to the point where most sai have blunt tips).

Although, to be fair, I'm going off of, like, 35 year old memories now. Haven't actually watched the show in ages.

Yellow posted...

What I gather from these walls of text is that nunchucks are improvised weapons for when you don't even have a large stick.

Dunno how much I would call them "improvised" - you do train with them, so in that sense they are expected to be used as a weapon, but it is also true that they're based off of a farming implement and were not purpose-built to be a weapon, so it depends on how you're defining it.

And yes, I would say that large stick generally trumps nunchaku, because large stick trumps a lot of things. So yeah, if you have access to a large stick, I would generally prefer to use that over a nunchaku, a knife, or really over most things that aren't an actual weapon of war (i.e. sword, spear, etc.) or an even larger stick.

That said, how often do you come across large sticks in your day-to-day goings about? How often do you carry them around with you in case someone tries to mug you?

DragonClaw01 posted...

A set of nunchaku is not equipped to take on a person wielding a knife.

It 100% is.

DragonClaw01 posted...

All the knife user as to do is rush you and stab you a couple times to win the fight.

And all the nunchaku wielder has to do is smash them once in the face or across the hands and that will stop the attack very quickly. And the nunchaku has a significant reach advantage, being more than twice as long at full extension than all but the largest of knives, so advantage nunchaku there.

I don't care what kind of drugs you're on, if you think you will still be standing after someone smashes your crosswise across the teeth with a fast-moving wooden stick, you're mistaken.

DragonClaw01 posted...

The nunchaku is not a powerful enough weapon to stop this tactic.

Again, it 100% is.

You swing that thing full force, it can easily break bones. If all you've seen is Bruce Lee twirling it around to look fancy, you have not seen it used in a way where it actually generates power. A nunchaku at full extension is no different than a stick of the same length, so unless you're arguing that you couldn't beat a guy with a knife if you were armed with a ~2 foot stick, you're wrong here.

That is the nunchaku's main strength - it has the power of a short stick, but the portability and concealability of a much shorter weapon.

DragonClaw01 posted...

the sad thing is that the nunchaku is a specialized tool that is cumbersome to carry around all day, whereas nearly every male in America carries at least a pocket knife

If your hypothesized setting is modern America, you can stop this argument right away because the ultimate weapon there is a handgun, not a knife.

But if you're looking at the environment where the nunchaku was actually used, which was the middle ages Ryukyu Kingdom, different story. Nunchaku are not particularly cumbersome to hang off your belt, tuck in your sleeves, or tuck in your vest if you're wearing traditional Okinawan garb (the latter generally being the preferred place to store inconspicuous self defence weapons like nunchaku or tekko, due to ease of access).

DragonClaw01 posted...

Dealing with a knife wielder in Medieval times is even more scary because due to the low level of medical science it was very easy to sustain a mortal wound. A stab wound to the stomach was almost certain to kill you then. Plus there was a death penalty for robbery in many places, so criminals had very little incentive to spare your life.

OK. And?

You're still going to have to deal with this guy and a set of nunchaku is as suited to that as any other tool you're likely to have on hand.

Sufferedphoneix posted...

I assumed it was good for hand coordination.

Not particularly. Honestly, nunchaku don't really require any more coordination to use than any other weapon I've worked with.

Other: clockfoolish.

Sufferedphoneix posted...

And yeah for the average person nunchuks would be a terrible weapon. I believed it when I heard they where justba training tool.

A training tool for what? What would you possibly be using nunchaku to train for?

Again, we have surviving historical nunchaku and we know *exactly* what they were used for. They were a horse's bridle. There shouldn't be any mystery behind this.