I am living for all the responses to this post but my favorite* is all the graphic designers in the tags who not only know what this aesthetic is called (Memphis Group) but are having violent, traumatic flashbacks to art school.
* Actually I think my favorite response is still “Not even Clarissa can explain this” but a close second is the person who tagged it “I would nut on the spot if I saw this.”
Just now biking, passed a car - one of the cubier ones - with a big white-on-black diamonds-in-diamonds business logo and I realized I’ve never seen a car in WWI dazzle camouflage
Probably just make you more likely to get hit, which is funny - can’t invoke a use/mention distinction
Probably disadvantage human rival drivers more than autonomous, maybe you could pair it with those machine learning-glitch patterns to do something interesting by filtering on that distinction
Dazzle camo is actually used all the time in conjunction with nylon coverings for prototype cars undergoing road testing before their full reveal.
The camo itself isn’t as dramatic as what was used on ships but it’s very good at concealing things like bodywork changes that hint at different engines and exterior sensors that imply expanded autonomous driving capabilities.
when Elizabeth dies they should bury Charles with her and make William king of the United Kingdom and Harry king of Australia, as there is no strict requirement that both kings be the same person.
huh, when Scotland was thinking of leaving the UK I talked up the potential of personal union, but I never turned that around and realized it’s possible for the Commonwealth to have a succession crisis
The Perth Agreement is an agreement made by the prime ministers of the 16 Commonwealth realms during the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in October 2011 in Perth, Australia, concerning amendments to the royal succession laws, namely, replacing male-preference primogeniture, under which male descendants take precedence over females in the line of succession, with absolute primogeniture; ending the disqualification of those married to Roman Catholics;
and limiting the number of individuals in line to the throne requiring
permission from the sovereign to marry. However, the ban on Catholics
and other non-Protestants becoming sovereign and the requirement for the
sovereign to be in communion with the Church of England remained.
It’s ape fucking wild to me how many RedLetterMedia gifs/images have prominence on tumblr, and yet it’s so clear by the numbers of blogs and on posts that not many people actually watch the videos.
Like… so many of you people don’t realize that this kid
apparently of the people that own functioning opium antiques its only a “small minority” that have have never used the drug and have no interest in it with most being able and willing to make occasional trips (even lugging literal antique opium sets which can be written off as antiques i guess) to buy the drug from the right people even though at every step of the production someone had to forego the incredibly more profitable and practical decision of just turning the opium poppies into heroin so the entire micro-trade is dependent on people doing favors for friends and this is on top of the fact that the opium sets themselves are incredibly expensive, fragile, difficult to use and literally no one makes the parts anymore and like this has gotta be the weirdest drug community ive ever head of and i like how i found out about it not from Vice but an antique collector’s website
I don’t wanna like Kill The Joke but this brings up a really cool fact about swords in ~14th-16th century Germany! The only people who were allowed to own Real Swords were the royalty and nobility BUT! Everyone else was allowed to own knives. The definition of a knife, however, was based on not length but handle construction, and to some extent how it was sharpened. The handle had to be constructed Like So with 2 pieces of wood sandwiching the metal tang.
Only one edge was allowed to be sharpened, but oftentimes a small part (a couple inches) of the short edge (e.g. the edge that wasn’t sharp) would be sharpened, and weapon design often allowed for this
In this way, something that looked like This, a messer of just over a meter in length…
…would be legally considered a knife, and therefore allowable for non-nobility to possess. (you can also see the bit on the back of the tip that would be sharpened)
So @swordmutual, there’s a not definitive but certainly interesting historical perspective on your question
There is litterally no historical evidence of late medieval/rennaisance Germany having laws against commoners owning swords, plus the definition of a sword under medieval German weapon law was effectively length-based rather than on those features.
The real reason Messers showed up is because of Medieval German craft guilds. In order to make a sword, you would have to be a member of the local swordsmiths’ guild. What then happened was the local knifesmiths’ guild decided they wanted in on the buiseness and started making things that technically counted as knives in terms of production, undercutting the swordsmiths’ prices.
If you think modern “union rules” are restrictive as to who could and couldn’t do what, medieval guild rules were there before them - closed shop, trade embargo, import tariffs, you name it.
I don’t know what people in Gothic-armour-making Nuremberg would think of a local knight who wore Milanese-style plate armour from Italy
(shades of how his mates would look at a Ford car-worker from Detroit or Dagenham who drove a Volkswagen or Toyota)…
… but he wouldn’t make many friends or be invited to the best parties. Or jousts, or whatever.
Re. the OP image - that’s a big knife, but not the first I’ve seen for advertising purposes…
Defining
the difference between a “sword” and a “knife” when they’re both the same
length is one of those herding-cats-at-a-crossroads things.
Is it
because the sword has two edges and the knife has one? Then what about scimitars, sabres, katanas,
backswords…?
Is it
because a knife is a tool and a sword is a weapon? You could say that a sword
is principally a weapon, while a knife is principally a general-purpose cutting
implement that can be used as a weapon, but despite that the combat use of
short blades is known as “knife-fighting” rather than “dagger-fighting”.
Is it
because of the way they’re constructed? A sword has a full grip enclosing the
blade tang, secured by peening (heating and hammering) the end of the tang down onto the pommel like a rivet…
…while
the knife has a grip composed of two separate scales, often/usually leaving the
tang visible between them, secured by adhesive or by rivets through the tang
like a chef’s knife, and which usually has no pommel…
…except when it does. And a full grip, too.
There are, however, Indo-Persian swords which often have no pommels and
whose grips are held in place with strong adhesive rather than a peened tang, and the Turkish yataghan short sword has a grip secured by, yes, rivets through
the tang but also has a very big pommel indeed.
Is it
because the sword is longer than the
knife? That doesn’t work when an Afghan choora (Khyber knife) or a big kukri can
be as long as a Roman gladius (short sword) and of course, further down, there’s
the Renaissance Messer (which means “knife” no matter how big it got – and “big”
could mean the size of a longsword). Here’s an example:
The sword is a qama or quaddara, the dagger is a kindjal - but if they were two images resized so both weapons were the same length, only the hand-space on the grip would show which was originally bigger. And by the way…
…quaddaras could be single-edged.
Confused
yet? I am…but then that’s par for the course; our ancestors had the annoying
habit of not giving things all the specific names we seem so fond of, and often
called a sword just a sword and a knife just a knife. And as for the names and
shapes of complex-headed polearms, let’s not go there right now…
“Messer”, as mentioned before, simply means “knife” - the aircraft designer Willy Messerschmitt may have had knifesmiths as ancestors - but as they got bigger and more swordlike the word had extra descriptors tacked onto it: “Grossmesser” (big knife), “Heibmesser” (hewing knife), and of course “Kriegsmesser” (war knife).
Here are two Landsknechts using longsword vs Kriegsmesser, with no suggestion that one weapon is in any way better than the other.
A couple of characters in Breughel’s “Peasant Dance” painting (the bagpiper and the first dancer) are wearing short Messers that are obviously weapons, not just everyday knives: the bagpiper’s Messer has a long, S-curved crossguard and a side-ring to protect his knuckles.
(For extra interest, the way the knife’s guard is constructed and the way he wears it on his right
hip (perhaps even the way he plays his bagpipes) show he’s left-handed.)
The dancer’s Messer is even more clearly a weapon, since it has a knucklebow and side-plate (compare it to the ordinary knife - that little black thing with the brown top - worn by the man in red hose).
All the on-line images of this character are either dark or small, but here’s a much clearer reproduction of that very Messer.
Here’s another weapon-carrying bagpiper, and two more men (white hose left, orange doublet / tan coat centre back) with ordinary general-purpose or eating knives for comparison.
This selection of repros by Tod’s Stuff shows what the ordinary knives look like more clearly than the paintings (maybe they were so ordinary and familiar that Breughel didn’t take much trouble over painting them).
Messers weren’t just weapons for commoners: Emperor (and armour, jousting and weapons-in-general fan) Maximilian I owned this one.
If Messers were good enough for the Holy Roman Emperor, they were good enough for anybody.
Oh thank god someone made the “CAN THIS MYTH DIE ALREADY” comments before I had to.
You learn something every day: apparently “pharaoh” translates literally to “great house,” and it was originally used in reference to Thutmose III in the way that we’ll say “the White House” in reference to the president and his administration. For example, it’s not “Pharaoh Bob ordered…” it’s “the Pharaoh ordered…,” in the same way we would say “the White House opposed…”
The Fibonacci sequence is a series of numbers where every new number is the sum of the two previous ones in the series.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. The next number would be 13 + 21 = 34.
Here’s the thing: 5 mi = 8 km. 8 mi = 13 km. 13 mi = 21 km, and so on.
Edit: You can also do this with multiples of these numbers (e.g. 5*10 = 8*10, 50 mi = 80 km). If you’ve got an odd number that doesn’t fit in the sequence, you can also just round to the nearest Fibonacci number and compensate for this in the answer. E.g. 70 mi ≈ 80 mi. 80 mi = 130 km. Subtract a small value like 15 km to compensate for the rounding, and the end result is 115 km.
This works because the Fibonacci sequence increases following the golden ratio (1:1.618). The ratio between miles and km is 1:1.609, or very, very close to the golden ratio. Hence, the Fibonacci sequence provides very good approximations when converting between km and miles.
