@joysweeper

salt-and-a-dash-of-pepper :

salt-and-a-dash-of-pepper :

Admittedly, I don’t have the widest range of experience when it’s come to archery. I’ve only been shooting for a year now, and the time that I do take to shoot have long months between them. Still, I think it’s important to outline the basics for anyone who wants to write an archer in their book and wants to save themselves the embarrassment of having the archer do something that an archer would never do in a million years.

- Archers usually unstring their bow after battle. Unstringing a bow is exactly what it sounds like: removing the string from the bow’s limbs. Usually, archers then wrap the string around the now-straightened bow so they don’t lose it as easily. Archers unstring bows because everytime the limbs are bent by the string, there is a large amount of tension in the limbs. If the string is on too long and the bow has not been shot for a while, the limbs will start to wear down and lose their power, resulting in an archer needing to buy new limbs or an entirely new bow.

- Archers always retrieve their arrows after battle. Arrows are expensive and take a long time to make, so archers want to conserve as many arrows as possible. Sometimes they have a repair kit with them at the ready, in case they find an arrow with a loose arrowhead or broken fletching that can easily be repaired. 

- Training arrows are not the same as battle arrows. Training arrows have thinner shafts and usually blunted tips so they can easily be removed from targets. Thinner shafts break more easily, and the blunted tips – whilst they can pierce skin – usually won’t get very far in the flesh. They’re also easier to make. Battle arrows are thicker, and their heads are pointed at the tip and have two pointed ends at its sides. This arrowhead is designed to easily pierce through flesh, and is incredibly difficult to pull out because its two pointed ends snag onto flesh. If you want to pull it out, you’d have to tear the flesh away with it, which can lead to an even larger wound.

- Arrows are fatal, and one can incapacitate a soldier for the rest of his life. Arrows are not easily snapped off like you see in movies. The draw weight is too strong, and they can sometimes be as strong as bullets. They will pierce through bone and tendons, which do not easily heal. Furthermore, if you want to remove an arrow, you either have to go through surgery, parting the flesh away from the arrowhead so it doesn’t snag onto anything, or you have you push – not pull – it all the way through the body.

- Bows are not designed for hitting people with in close combat. The limbs are specifically made to flex. Imagine hitting someone with a flexing piece of wood. If you hit with the middle of the bow, it still does very little because there is no weight behind the bow, and so you might as well be hitting them with a pillow. It might be annoying to the opponent, but it won’t save you. Archers need a secondary blade in close combat. They cannot strike people with their bows and expect to win.

- Draw weight affects speed, range, and impact. Draw weight is measured in pounds, at least in America, and it is measured in how much weight must be pulled when you draw back the string. A high draw weight means stiffer, thicker limbs that can shoot further and hit harder. But, this is at the cost of speed. A low draw weight means thinner, more flexible limbs that can shoot smaller distances and have low impact, but can be shot faster. Before you acrobatic fanatics immediately seize the smaller bow for its speed, understand that a bow’s advantage is in its range. No one can hit an archer from 300 meters away with their spear or sword. The archer has complete dominance over the battlefield in this way, and their arrows can kill anyone who gets too close. Not hurt. Not annoy. Kill. And a higher draw weight means a better chance of piercing through specific armor, then flesh, then bone. A lower draw weight means less range and, even worse, a lower chance that the arrow would even pierce through armor if the arrow even hits its target. 

- Bows will always be outmatched in close combat against any other weapon. Bows take too long to draw and shoot, and at such close range, the opponent has an easier chance to dodge oncoming arrows. I already explained that the bows themselves cannot be used to take down a foe. 

- Bowmen on horseback are utterly terrifying. Archers usually can’t move from their spot because range is more important than mobility, and at such a long range, you usually don’t need to move from your spot anyways. Bowmen on horses, however, are closer to the battle, and worse, they are faster than almost anyone on the battlefield. Not only are they difficult to hit, you have no way of predicting where they will shoot next because they can circle around you in confusing ways. If you want an interesting archer character, I’d advise trying these guys out.

- Never underestimate armor and padding. Arrows will never be able to pierce through plate armor because its curved surface will always deflect oncoming arrows. Arrows can pierce through maille because maille is made out of metal rings that can be bent and can fall away. However, padding usually lies underneath, which is surprisingly durable and can stop an oncoming arrow, as well as absorb some of its impact. Because of this, make certain that the archer is focusing on gabs in the armor. To know this, you MUST study armor. Gabs usually lie where the joints are because soldiers need those gabs open so they can move. Typical gaps lie in the neck, the armpit, the inner-elbow, the knees, and the palm of the hand. Impact is also an archer’s friend. A war arrow shot by a hundred pound bow, hurtling at incredible speeds and gaining momentum the further it travels, can evoke serious damage. To be hit by one of these arrows will feel more like being hit by a horse than being hit by someone’s fist. 

More facts:

- Archers should never rest the tip of their bow on the ground. Dirt and dust can wear away the tip, which in turn can eat away at where the string notch is. If the string notch is worn away in any shape or form, the string can fall off or the bow not shoot correctly.

- ARCHERS SHOULD NEVER LEAN ON THEIR BOW. This is the same as keeping the bow strung when you’re not using it. Leaning on the bow causes the limbs to flex, which can be damaging when you’re not shooting anything.

- Never shoot a bow when there is no arrow notched. This is known as “dry firing,” and is incredibly damaging to the bow. Because there is no arrow to transfer the energy of the shot through, the energy instead shivers down the bow. If it is a strong enough energy, the bow can shatter.

- When any archer is shooting at a target, everyone is instructed to stand beside or behind the archer. This is common safety sense, as archers’ fingers might slip and the arrow is shot in a different direction than intended.

- It is incredibly rude, as well as dangerous, to shoot near another person simply to show one’s skill. Unless the person voluntarily agreed with the archer to stand in place and is willing to be shot, it is incredibly rude to shoot near someone to prove one’s skill. It would be the same as a gunman shooting at another person to prove he can hit a can at their elbow. The gunman, as well as the archer, would be thrown behind bars.

- Archers use an “anchor point” to aim. Archers rest either their index or middle finger at their chin or the side of their lip when drawing the bow.  This is known as their “anchor point,” and it is used to steady the hand as well as aim. If an archer does NOT use an anchor point, his shot can go wild. If you see actors holding their fingers behind their chin and hanging in the air, you’ll know that they are not an archer.

- It is both unnecessary and damaging to pull the bow’s string further than your chin. It has a higher chance of breaking or bending irreversibly than shooting further, faster, or higher by drawing the bow string further.

- You use your back muscles the most when drawing a bow. Most people assume that you’re using primarily your arm muscles. Whilst the muscles in your arms are incorporated, the back muscles are used to pull back the weight of the bow moreso than your arms.

- It is easier to swing a sword than shoot a bow. I’m certainly not talking about skill or practice. Swords and bows each have their own difficulties to overcome, but there is a common misconception that bows are lighter than swords. The weight of a sword varies, but most sit between 2 to 5 pounds and are well balanced so you don’t feel the weight of the sword pulling at your tendons. Bows, on the other hand, have a draw weight that varies from 20 to 100 pounds, sometimes more. Whilst different muscles are used to do different things, it’s clear that bows take far more strength than expected to use.

- A proper bow needs proper care. Damages are common after use, no matter what you do. The string may fray, the string’s nock locator might fall off, the arrow rest may wear down, and so on. Archers, therefore, should bring wax, which keeps the string from fraying, an extra nock locator, and perhaps a kit that can either repair the arrow rest or replace the entire thing.

- It really effing hurts when the string strikes your forearm. Because of this, bracers are a thing. Anyone who has shot a bow knows exactly what I’m talking about. Sometimes when you shoot and your forearm is angled a certain way, the string can strike the soft flesh of your forearm when you loose an arrow. Understand that it stings like fire, and does not die down until half an hour, sometimes more. To combat this, most archers wear bracers, which clasp around their forarms and protect them from the string. Experienced archers know how to angle their forearm away from the string so they are never struck.

wealldraw :

do you ever just

tikkety-tok:

deadwooddross :

Hello I blasted through Gideon and Harrow the ninth and desperately needed to TRY and draw some of the characters…..good books, good gay, good body horror

Harrow definitely looks like parchment over toothpicks, please do not punch her,

triviallytrue :

triviallytrue :

anyone remember that one post about makeup where the OP was talking about how it was seen as a requirement and all these people kept adding on “well you actually only need very light makeup” and the OP had to keep saying “you are completely missing the point of this post”?

that’s how i feel on every post talking about how gender essentialism is bad and people keep tacking on stuff like “yeah it makes trans/gay men feel bad” or “it gives shitty men an excuse for their behavior”

“okay but ascribing moral worth to inherent parts of people’s identity that they cannot change is bad”

“yeah, it might make people whose identities are good get lumped in with people whose identities are bad!”

kaijutegu:

powerfulwizard:

aintmyjewelry:

aintmyjewelry:

the photos of prince philip leaving the hospital have my fucking yelling

that’s a corpse just walking around

that man is just straight up the crypt keeper

genderfluid-and-confuzled :

blazingspirit :

johannas-motivational-insults :

positive-lesbian-vibes :

communistgunch :

sweaterfemme :

sweaterfemme :

i feel like we dont talk enough about how two of the most decorated female hockey players ever, one a former captain for team canada and the other for the usa, fell in love and had a baby together 

small gay sports baby

Ok but where is my cheesey lesbian rom-com about them falling in love while playing against each other

Okay but the funniest part is this has happened multiple times. There are three instances of former Canadian and American national team players who have gotten married:

-Caroline Ouellette and Julie Chu (both former captains)

-Gillian Apps (former alternate captain) and Meghan Duggan (former captain)

-Jayna Hefford (former alternate captain) and Kathleen Kauth

Seriously it’s like tradition at this point. I’m sure there’s a betting pool on who’s going to get married next. God I love the rival lesbian jocks trope.

In case y’all didn’t click that link I need to make sure you see the headline.

“How many lesbian ice hockey rival weddings can there be? As many as possible we hope.”

chuckdrawsthings:

different but same

ceescedasticity :

ceescedasticity :

Controversial opinion: A lot of problems people identify as capitalism problems are more accurately small government problems (or misprioritized government problems).

(Which, arguably, makes them ULTIMATELY capitalism problems because devout capitalists have been gutting government to avoid oversight/taxes for quite some time now. But getting rid of capitalism would not fix these problems; an adequately-funded, well-run, properly prioritized government would fix the problems even if capitalism still existed.)

(First, directed mostly at myself: This is my LAST post on this for at least the next month. This entire subject does Bad Brain Things. There will be no more posts mentioning economics until – ha, until tax day at the earliest.)

I don’t LIKE capitalism. It’s illogical and has led to some bizarre and dangerous worldviews and a lot of weird artificial concepts being treated as true, and the inadequately regulated capitalism we have now is a catastrophe, and the whole idea has picked up very unpleasant associations due to its most vocal proponents doing awful things which hurt a lot of people, and just on a personal level I find it disgusting and nonsensical. I think moving on from capitalism would be good.

(This is a precise meaning of “capitalism”. A lot of online people use the word the same way the right uses “communism” – attaching it to literally anything they don’t like – and it’s not any better practice in this direction.)

But crumbling infrastructure? Treatments for rare conditions not being produced because it’s not profitable? Unenforced health and safety regulations? That’s the government not doing its job. Facilitating complicated technical research? UBI? Social services even for unpleasant people? You need a well-run government for that.

It’s dangerous to crowdsource an electrical grid. You can’t guarantee standards of service for mutual aid. Food safety shouldn’t depend on the honor system (which it does now to an unfortunate extent, only mostly with corporations, which is an even worse idea than the honor system for people; who let corporations buy the government). People shouldn’t be expected to do dangerous/unpleasant but necessary jobs without coordination and compensation and something needs to organize that.

Government is like medical treatment in that: it’s a very broad term; if it’s bad enough it can be worse than nothing at all; if it’s good there’s nothing else that can perform its DIRELY NEEDED functions. (Except for things which, when examined carefully, turn out to be government or medical treatment under a different name.)

ohmazgosh :

stillwaitingformagic :

ohmazgosh :

all-the-worlds-a-stag :

tanoraqui :

swingsetindecember :

january-summers :

swingsetindecember :

in movies, when a scientist is held hostage and is forced to make a bomb or virus, like my guy, those villains don’t know shit about science. just make a gumball machine, my dude

eighth grade science fair volcano, but fancy looking

 i just want once where the villain is like, you are too late, i detonated the device and instead of doom and gloom it is just confetti sparklers with abba’s waterloo playing and the scientist is like, bitch you thought 

every time a scientist gets kidnapped to build a terrible weapon, they think about just bullshitting it, but then a tiny voice in the back of their mind says, but don’t you want to see if you can? don’t you want to laugh madly as you show them all? don’t you want to just go feral?

Honestly when’s the next time you’ll get this kind of grant funding?

Not to get all serious on this delightful post, but it just occurred to me that the US government kept scientists working on the Manhattan Project in the dark about what they were working on because if they knew they were building an actual doomsday device, they ABSOLUTELY would have either sabotaged it or quit. Turns out real life villains are more cunning and real life scientists are more upstanding than in fiction.

I thought the Manhattan project was just a marvel thing????

Nope! I’m not sure how the Manhattan Project is portrayed in the Marvel movies (although now I’m curious to see how they might have spun it), but the Manhattan Project was the development of the first atomic bomb in the 1940s. And the vast majority of people working on it had no clue what they were building.

I think part of it really was that if people knew what they were building, they would have quit, but the secrecy also had a lot to do with keeping American military secrets from reaching The Enemy. You know, this kind of stuff: 

According to Wikipedia, "probably no more than a few dozen men in the entire country knew the full meaning of the Manhattan Project, and perhaps only a thousand others even were aware that work on atoms was involved.“ When scientists started to figure out what they were building, they were told they’re making a “gadget”. *insert eyeroll*

When the scientists and workers who built the bombs turned on the radio and heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they instantly knew what they had been working on. Imagine, the sudden realization that you played a hand in the deaths of 200,000 people. You’re a scientist; you’re supposed to make the world a better, more enlightened place, not dole out death and devastation.

But scientists, being humanists, continued to try to mitigate the damage of the bomb after finding out what it really was: 

• Some who had realized how dangerous it could be before the bombs were launched tried to persuade the president or the military that it was unnecessary to have to actually launch the bombs.  
• After the bombings, The Pugwash Conferences were established to try to outlaw the use of atomic weapons globally.
• Oppenheimer, the physicist who was the lab director at Los Alamos and literal “father of the atomic bomb”, went on to lobby for international arms control (and was later accused of being a Communist and stripped of his security clearance).

This article has some really great info about how the scientists working on the bomb reacted when they found out what it was: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/08/07/manhattan-project-scientists-atomic-bomb-hiroshima-nagasaki-column/3305404001/?fbclid=IwAR0VY4iVjtqf7mBYj3KCJ5dKCMqU9AuHEUDRNDIzEPrXR7ftxEwRz1X6D7s

TL;DR Basically, in real life, scientists will not want to work on your villainous death device unless they literally don’t know what they’re working on, and when they figure it out, they will try to convince the villain not to use the death device, and when the villain inevitably uses the death device, they will continue to try to do damage control. And this, kids, is why you never accept a job working for the US Military.

bnwbian:

o-kurwa:

peak cinema

remnantofahero :

dialogue that makes you realize you’ve been playing the villain

                                                   I got infected on like day 3 and was too paranoid to use up a shmowder                                                    and let me tell u… Daniil slowly dying of the disease he’s trying and failing to stop                                                    patently in denial while the fever slowly burns him out and he gets increasingly disconnected from everything he knew and valued                                                    until he’s being forced to make that Final Choice while operating on nothing but spite and delirious existential dread….                                                    it sure adds a certain Something™ to the experience lmao                                                

catkindness :

a pair to heal, a pair to kill, a pair to pray, a pair to clutch when you’re all alone

kumquatstar :

maria

bonus: the OTHER roleswap

emilikarm :

huh

soulcaketuesday :

guess i made a bad call… but i have no idea what i could have done different…?

thepleasuregoblin:

When a customer refuses to wear a mask

catkindness :

that one dead girl she cares about the most

elena-illustration :

I think a lot about how much the tone of the game changes depending on which dialogue choices you make… Everyone is a changeling, in a way.

kikokie :

I wondered how a gate could prevail against anyone.


(alt ver under cut)


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magisteraryon:

original caption: my man skingrad guard got STRAIGHT. BARS.

Pathologic is an "open world rpg" my ass. I accidentally wandered off a path and had to go halfway around town just to get around a knee high brick wall.

oh my GOD I’ve absolutely lost count of the number of times I’ve been tripped up by a wall or fence in both games but by far the worst was the time I had to circumnavigate an entire block of houses because I couldn’t step over a very sparse bit of shrubbery.

cartoon-goon02:

rough week

sirvinter :

cold ears? no prob  👌

prokopetz :

i-sell-nightmares :

prokopetz :

binary-armor-coming-online :

prokopetz :

prokopetz :

Hollywood adaptations notwithstanding, cosmic horror isn’t about people going crazy because they don’t understand. It’s about people making the perfectly rational decision to do horrible things because they do understand, and what they understand is fundamentally incompatible with being a functioning human being.

Basically, cosmic horror isn’t you see a squid and your brain goes pop. Cosmic horror is imagine if there were a simple mathematical proof that John Calvin was right.

(Which isn’t to say that horror media where people go crazy because they don’t understand is bad – you’ve just got the wrong genre label. People being driven to gibbering madness through confronting the incomprehensible is one of the core tropes of gothic horror.)

Does that make Lovecraft Gothic Horror then?

I’m slightly confused by the distinction, but I thought both were cosmic horror. It’s the only genre of horror I can stomach, so I’m genuinely curious

You can’t really take modern genre categories and project them backwards across all of history – that’s not how it works – but it’s worth noting that the bulk of Lovecraft’s writing career took place during a time when cosmic horror had not yet become established as a genre. Though he’s credited as one of the genre’s founders*, much of his writing isn’t horror of any kind, and much of the portion that is horror more closely resembles the older gothic tradition than what cosmic horror would eventually become. Certainly he wrote some cosmic horror as the genre is now defined, but I wouldn’t classify 100% of his stuff that way.

* A reputation that’s honestly kind of overblown. I’d argue that August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, and Lord Dunsany all had greater influence over the shape of cosmic horror than Lovecraft did – hell, even Robert Chambers probably has a stronger claim to being one of the genre’s key progenitors than Lovecraft does, and he was writing during the wrong century entirely. Lovecraft is a big name in cosmic horror less because of his actual contributions to the genre’s formation, and more because a. Derleth was himself a huge Lovecraft fanboy, and his curatorship of Lovecraft’s work after the latter’s death did a great deal to raise Lovecraft’s profile; and b. there was a popular tabletop RPG based on Lovecraft’s work during the early 1980s that made him a household name among a whole generation of nerds at a time when he’d otherwise largely fallen into obscurity.

I mean, Lovecraft’s protagonists also don’t go insane, but instead act rationally wen confronted by what they see (well rationally for someone who’s super racist).like they don’t hallucinate or anything. They just get really scared and start doing weird shit

Yeah, the “see a squid and go insane” stuff is more an artifact of the aforementioned tabletop RPG, which needed a rationale for incorporating some sort of Dungeons & Dragons style hit point mechanic, and found it in the form of “sanity points”. (There’s actually a lot of stuff that folks think of as “Lovecraftian” that the RPG invented whole cloth – though that’s a topic for a whole other post!)

I am convinced that a nonzero percentage of the reason why ‘Lovecraftian” as a label has stuck so well is due to the name honestly just sounding cool. Feels good to say, if you don’t know it’s a name it sounds very mysterious, it’s easy to spell…

shimejisimulation :

day 11

minyoongislaysme:

THIS ENERGY

kaijutegu :

staygolden-studios :

mikaeled :

I’m gonna look too big.
Massive chest and tri bulking workout with Natasha Aughey