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      Welcome!   03/05/2016

      Welcome, everyone, to the new 910CMX Community Forums. I'm still working on getting them running, so things may change.  If you're a 910 Comic creator and need your forum recreated, let me know and I'll get on it right away.  I'll do my best to make this new place as fun as the last one!

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1 minute ago, mlooney said:

Nope.  In my defense, it stopped hurting this weekend.

That's good news.

On an unrelated note and more related to previous posts, one fantasy weapon that annoys me incredibly is the idiotic Gyrspike from a supplement to 3rd Edition D&D. They had a mania with two-sided weapons like staff-swords with a blade on either end; I blame Darth Maul for this. The Gyrspike was one of the children of this mania. It consisted of a bastard sword that had a chain with a morning star on it attached to the pommel.

gyrspike.jpg

I do not know what the purpose of this thing is supposed to be. After a discussion with a friend. he and I decided that it was for simultaneous self-disembowelment and self-castration.

Also: scythes look cool, but they are not actual fighting weapons. Peasants did weaponise them during times of war but they did so by straightening the blade along the handle and turning it into a polearm. In its default form, it is NOT superior to anything else. The reason Death uses it so successfully is that He is, well, Death.

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1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

Also: scythes look cool, but they are not actual fighting weapons. Peasants did weaponise them during times of war but they did so by straightening the blade along the handle and turning it into a polearm. In its default form, it is NOT superior to anything else. The reason Death uses it so successfully is that He is, well, Death.

Yes, the problem with scythes is that the side with the sharp edge is facing towards the user, which means that your opponent has to be CLOSER to you than the blade for you to cut them. To be a practical weapon, it needs an edge on the outside as well.

If you want an actual practical weapon that combines two different things, try a halberd--it's a combination battle axe and spear, lighter and faster to swing than a full axe, with the stabby potential of a spear. Halberds were favored by infantry in Europe in the days after plate armor made knights more-or-less swordproof, creating the necessity for heavier weapons.

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6 hours ago, ijuin said:

If you want an actual practical weapon that combines two different things, try a halberd

The offset bayonet seems rather practical.  The PLUG bayonet was obsolete before the muzzle loaders into which the shooter plugged them.

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1 hour ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

The offset bayonet seems rather practical.  The PLUG bayonet was obsolete before the muzzle loaders into which the shooter plugged them.

Remember, the bayonet was originally intended to help fend off cavalry charges. Horses have a curious prejudice against running into sharp and pointy things so they tend to object to running straight into lines of pikemen or musketeers with fixed bayonets. These days we see less horse cavalry on the field of battle, somewhat reducing the need for the bayonet.

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Bayonets were great in the days of muzzle-loading firearms where a soldier had no reasonable chance to stop in the middle of a melee in order to spend ten to fifteen seconds reloading after each shot. Halberds ruled mainly in the era before firearms became standard-issue for armies. Nowadays where we have magazine-based reloading (can reload up to a few dozen shots in about five seconds), a semiautomatic handgun becomes the preferred close-range lethal weapon against any unprotected opponent.

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3 hours ago, ijuin said:

Halberds ruled mainly in the era before firearms became standard-issue for armies.

Not quite true. Even after matchlocks became common, reloading time was so long and range was so poor that it was eminently possible for a unit of halberdiers to defeat a unit of musketmen just by taking their hits and then crushing them in melee. What was more commonly done was to intersperse musketry with halberdiers to protect them while simultaneously giving the halberdiers ranged cover. As the quality of muskets and powder improved and especially as battlefield artillery became more common, units purely of pikemen very quickly vanished. And as Pharaoh mentioned, it was the invention of the offset bayonet that finally killed the pikes and halberds by turning every single musketeer into their own pikeman.

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I have a skinny white boy ass.  I don't have any "office" type chairs now.  This means that after 4 or 5 hours sitting on a kitchen table type chair, even with a pillow in it, my ass hurts.   So, I'm going to take a break from working on Edge and read some more monsters to see what I'm going to steal use via the Open Game License.

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Driving to DTW this morning, I had to refill the tank before returning my car to the rental place.

I checked out gas prices online the night before.  The cheapest place in Michigan would have added almost 150 miles to my trip.  So I didn't go there.

The place I went to, that was actually on my way to the airport, was 40¢ per gallon more that the cheapest place in the state.  The gas station outside the rental place, where I had to top off again. was 50¢ more per gallon than what I paid two hours earlier.  90¢ per gallon more than the cheapest gas station in the state.

It strikes me as odd that there is often only one gas station between the highway off ramp and the rental car return row.  You would think that few more gas stations in this area could still charge more than normal without drastically overpricing the fuel.  Cities and Airport Authorities would do well to encourage that.  You don't want ridiculous gas prices as the last thing visitors to your town notice.

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For reasons I don't know about, Firefox decided all at once to change my layout of tool-bars.  Getting back to almost what I had before was a bigger hassle than it should have been.  This is my confused and less than gruntled face.

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If you have a perl module installed, that started off with an undef version number, even after a numbered version comes out, cpan will still see it as needing to be upgraded, no matter how many times you do the upgrade.

These are my current problem children


Package namespace         installed    latest  in CPAN file
JSON::PP::Boolean             undef   2.27400  MAKAMAKA/JSON-PP-2.27400.tar.gz
JSON::backportPP::Boolean     undef   2.27203  MAKAMAKA/JSON-2.61.tar.gz
Types::Serialiser::Error      undef       1.0  MLEHMANN/Types-Serialiser-1.0.tar.gz
 

#GeekProblems

 

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I have three kinds of migraines. 

  1. My "normal" right hand side migraine, which has all the normal migraine side effects.
  2. The some what rarer left hand side migraine, which has a few of the side effects, and doesn't hurt as much.
  3. The very rare right hand side but forward that has almost no side effects, but feels like a drill has been put into my skull right above the right eye.  About 2 points higher on the pain scale than #1 and not even in the same ballpark as the left hand side #2.

I have a #3 now.  I skipped my normal build up on the drugs and went for the good stuff right off the top.  I'm now in the wait for the drugs to kick in stage, which I freaking hate.  With any luck, they will kick in soon, knock me out and  I'll wake up in ten hours or so and not be in any pain.  See y'all later.

 

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We have a front rolling in.  Already getting the joint aches and what feels like a migraine Prodrome.  Going to take my mid range pain meds and hope for the best.  If I still feel like le crud in 4 hours it's the good stuff and a 6 hour nap for me.

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

We have a front rolling in. 

It's here.  And I think a tree in the Riverparks close by just took a lightning strike. Damn thing was freaking loud.  And of course I had a power flicker.

On the plus side, my pain drugs are working so far.

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3 hours ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

I'm glad yours are working.

I will grant that all I had today was my normal aches and pains that come with weather fronts.  I don't have any real long term chronic pain issues, just frequent migraines and bashing myself due to lack of coordination.  I am not in your class of pain most of the time, for which I am very grateful.

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

I will grant that all I had today was my normal aches and pains that come with weather fronts.  I don't have any real long term chronic pain issues, just frequent migraines and bashing myself due to lack of coordination.  I am not in your class of pain most of the time, for which I am very grateful.

My class does not hold a candle to migraines like yours. I do not wish to experience pain so bad that it shuts down most of your brain.

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My job hit a slow patch back at the end of January so my boss suggested I go on unemployment until things picked up again, I'd still be on call if I was needed and I have been putting in at least 5-10 hours a week, it's just not enough income to pay the bills. When I filled out my EI form, I selected "shortage of work" as the reason for applying for EI benefits, and stated that I would be returning to work at a later time and I've been reporting all the hours I do work so they have it on record that I haven't completely stopped working for my employer. Unfortunately when Service Canada needed to fill in a job search seminar, they just pulled names at random and didn't bother to check if those selected actually needed to find jobs. So tomorrow, I must spend an hour and a half being told how to find a job or else I could lose the ability to file for benefits in the future. Fun times...

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48 minutes ago, Scotty said:

So tomorrow, I must spend an hour and a half being told how to find a job or else I could lose the ability to file for benefits in the future. Fun times...

They probably are hoping you'll go find a job with more stable hours... ignoring the likelihood that this slowdown is temporary and at the end of it you'll be fine.

(Most likely, you getting a new job at half the pay looks better on their statistics than you resuming your existing job.)

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52 minutes ago, Scotty said:

So tomorrow, I must spend an hour and a half being told how to find a job or else I could lose the ability to file for benefits in the future. Fun times...

About 10 years of so I was legit unemployed1 and the state of Oklahoma had me attend a "new to the workforce" training session.  When the first question was "have any of you had a job other than fast food or at a gas station" the "teacher" didn't know how to handle the 3 of us (out of 30 some odd) that raised our hands.  He let us go after an hour or so, but still pain in the butt.

1Vs. taking a break for a couple of weeks or having a mental break down.  EDS downsized my department.

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1 hour ago, ProfessorTomoe said:

My class does not hold a candle to migraines like yours. I do not wish to experience pain so bad that it shuts down most of your brain.

I'd say that any pain that makes you beg for unconsciousness just to escape from it (assuming that you have sufficient coherence even to think that much) is pretty bad.

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