The start of Tunic being basically the exact same as Dark Souls made me laugh once I reaised what it was doing. “Here, take your rubbish weapon and your dodge roll and go ring two important bells in opposite directions from here. It’s important for saving the world.”

I don’t know if that’s even cheese, I think it’s the intended solution. How do you handle three fast-moving enemies at once? Use the choke point that the devs put just behind them

Ahh, the capra demon. Bane of many a Dark Souls run. I’m sure that if you wanted guides you’d look them up, but honestly it’s not a bad fight at all if you can survive the scramble at the start

We should insist that France name one Castillon and have them work together on exercises

They are quoting DeepSeek’s privacy policy. They say this before and after the first quote, and also link the policy at the top of the article.

I mean, they did defend the Maginot. The Germans went around it.

Funnily enough I have also worked with them, but all of mine were short lengths so I have absolutely no sense of scale for what kilometres of it looks like rolled up. Or had, I suppose, until now. I just used them to run light into awkward spots for sensors, though, so I wasn’t exactly maxxing out the potential applications

By a neat coincidence I also play a bit of guitar, and a quarter millimetre is the diameter of the thinnest string on most of mine. For any other guitarists reading, a 10 gauge string is 0.254 mm

I suppose unless you’re at the very end of the length of it, it can probably account for that to some degree by just letting more fibre out. This paper (which I have only skimmed, so sorry if I’ve got this wrong) seems to say that fibres even thinner than that — 0.15 mm — can handle a force equivalent to a couple of kilograms hanging off of them

Messy napkin maths to explain this to myself, because it is wild to me that 41 km of anything fits in that. I will use the top picture and assume that the guy’s hand is about the same size as mine; my hands are reasonably large, so this should err on the safe side, and his hands are at a similar distance from the camera to the spool. That gives me a very approximate scale of 2 pixels per millimetre.

Diameter of the spool case: 365 px = 183 mm = 0.183 m Radius of the main section of the case: 91 mm = 0.091 m Length of the main section of the case: 477 px = 239 mm = 0.239 m

Volume of a cylinder = pi r r l v1 = pi * 0.091 * 0.091 * 0.239 v1 = 0.00622 m^3

I will assume that the shaft of the spool is the same diameter as the narrow part of the case

Diameter of the spool shaft: 55 px = 28 mm Radius of the spool shaft: 14 mm = 0.014 v2 = pi * 0.014 * 0.014 * 0.239 v2 = 0.00015 m^3

Subtract shaft from first volume = 0.00607 m^3

I’ll assume that the cable has the same volume, as if the case had zero-thickness walls and the cable filled the case perfectly. Since the cable has the same volume, dividing that volume by 41,000 m should give us the cross-sectional area.

0.00607/41000 = 1.48e-7 = 0.000000148 m^3

Square root of that to get the length and height of that cross section = 0.000345 m = 0.345 mm

This number can effectively serve as the diameter of the cable, since it’ll have a circular cross section. And… yeah, I can find 0.25 mm diameter optical fibre easily, so the numbers check out.

It has the same face as that burrowing bastard 10th colossus in Shadow of the Colossus https://www.deviantart.com/daniel-aubert/art/Colossus-10-Dirge-485275245

Oh I agree that it is an Alien sequel, I’m just saying I wish it hadn’t been. For me, it kinda cuts down on the dread that the xenomorph can create when there are dozens of them charging into a hail of automated machine gun fire and getting slaughtered.

I don’t think that they actually executed it very well, but I am far more keen on the ideas brought about in Prometheus and Covenant. That’s what I personally want out of Alien sequels. Just ideally with, like… a second look over the script. By anyone.

I’m not sure about that, actually. There’s a similar power dynamic involved — Arnie’s terminator is unstoppable compared to Kyle Reese, but then the T-1000 is unstoppable compared to Arnie. Worse, it can now be anyone in almost any scene

Terminator 3, on the other hand…

While I do not think that Aliens was a bad film at all, I kinda wish it wasn’t a sequel to Alien. It’s a completely different film, far more action-oriented

Then again my view is probably significantly coloured by the fact that I enjoyed the first one a lot more

Ethiopia is not the only country that has it endemic by any means. Vietnam - which is far wealthier - only got certified as clear of it late last year. Hell even Mexico only got certified in 2017. Ethiopia, meanwhile, is one of the poorest countries in world, has an ongoing civil war, and is only recently out of a second civil war that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions

As I understand it, the Wielbark culture is the earliest one that we are certain was associated with the Goths, and it was based around modern day Poland and Lithuania. There’s some theorising that they came from the Swedish island of Gotland before that. The Roman historian Jordanes said so, but he was writing in the 6th century, so a couple hundred years after Gothic migrations.

However upon checking, it looks like I did slightly misremember that chronology; they mostly moved to the area you describe before the Migration Period, rather than roughly simultaneously with it as I had been thinking. I think I was mentally overestimating the physical separation between the Ostrogoths and Visigoths. I will edit a correction into my comment

We’re depressed for reasons entirely unrelated to the end of the empire

Genoa was one of several Italian maritime republics of this period (the best known being Venice). They used their very powerful navies to get rich in the Mediterranean, both because they were able to protect their merchants from piracy and because the larger European powers wanted to be friendly with them to have access to that naval power. Since they relied on sea power, their expansions focussed on grabbing useful ports rather than big swathes of land. They would often make agreements with the larger powers to set up a colony on the coast in their territory, which suited the larger power in question because it meant the republic’s ships would be bringing valuable goods to and from that port.

Theodoro is a bit of a historical oddity — it was the last Gothic state. As in the Germanic people that burned Rome down way back at the fall of the Western Empire, roughly a thousand years before this map. When Before (see Not_mikey’s reply) they migrated into central and western Europe, some of them went to Ukraine and eventually into Crimea.

Crimea remained part of the Eastern Roman Empire up until the Fourth Crusade, in which France and Germany were supposedly going to go capture Jerusalem. The entire Fourth Crusade was a colossal shitshow which resulted in the crusaders partitioning the ERE instead, and the Crimean Goths basically just bounced between whoever happened to be the main power in the region for the next few hundred years. They managed to more or less maintain independence so long as they paid tribute to whoever was in charge that year (first one of the ERE’s successor states, then the Mongols, then a Mongol successor state, then a successor to that) until they were eventually conquered by the Ottomans a few decades after this map.

It’s wild how a comedian has turned out to be such an incredibly effective wartime leader

He clearly placed it in Mimisbrunnr

Yes, and also the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. Russia signed both