A.K.A u/hucifer

  • 3 Posts
  • 151 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • The costumes are good, but the armor in the show is all over the place.

    According to this blog post by a military historian, that “scale” armor you linked is the worst of a bad bunch:

    Perhaps the worst offender (which unfortunately gets a lot of screentime) is the odd Númenórean scale armor. Now scale armor was not necessarily a bad idea here (it could make for an interesting visual motif connecting the seafaring Númenóreans with fish-scales, for instance), but there are two immediate problems with this armor. First, it doesn’t seem structured like scale armor. The strong cording around the edges and rigid spaulders make it look like rigid armor made to look like it is composed of scales. The effect is only increased because the backing is shaped to give it pectoral muscles (and chests for women, which is doubly silly). But that’s not how historical scale armor hangs on the body.

    Scale armor is [supposed to be] a lot more flexible (with the downside that the very flexibility of the scales means that a strike from below can pass beneath them and through the armor) and would thus hang and shape to the body. This armor does not do that. Instead as noted what this looks like are solid plates that are made to look like they are made out of scales. And that’s also not a terrible idea except that the actors are then also wearing scale-armor-print shirts underneath the armor which makes it clear that we’re to understand a flexible scale armor covering the whole of the upper body, which this clearly isn’t.

    What on earth is this armor made out of? The queen’s armor looks like it might be bronze, albeit less well polished than I’d expect for royalty, but everyone else’s scale armor is made of this dull off-white material that looks like plastic or pressed foam, presumably because it is plastic or pressed foam. Surely this stuff should be made of iron?






  • Lol you’re right about this giving native English speakers a headache. I’m not sure the subjunctive is the correct explanation here, though.

    The subjunctive mood in English primarily uses the past tense form of verbs (“were,” “were to,” etc.) to convey wishes or counterfactuality. E.g. ‘I wish you wouldn’t drink so much coffee’, or 'If I were you, I wouldn’t…"

    However, ‘would you like a coffee?’ is a direct question of preference, which means it technically is using the indicative mood rather than the subjunctive. Here, ‘would’ functions as a model verb to soften the request and make it more polite.












  • Yeah, I know that gnostic atheism is a theoretical position to hold, but I’ve never actually met an atheist that holds that view. The vast, vast majority of atheists ascribe to a scientific world view that is based around the concepts of evidence and burden or proof. As such, trying to argue belief in the non-existence of a non-existent being (i.e. “I firmly believe that God definitely doesn’t exist”) is not compatible with that logic, whereas “I don’t believe in God, because there isn’t enough evidence” is.

    When it comes to explaining atheism to religious friends and family members, I’ve found the best approach to be this: Ask them if they believe in any other Gods except their own (Zeus, Ganesh, The Yellow Emperor, etc.) When they say no, you say “Ok, so my list of Gods I Don’t Believe In is one longer than yours.”


  • there’s no wyantonrpove the existence of A god, atheists must believe that that’s the truth.

    What you’re describing here is agnosticism, not atheism. Agnostics claim that the existence of God is either 1) not known, but certainly possible, or 2) unknowable to begin with.

    Atheism, on the other hand,

    is not an affirmative belief that there is no god nor does it answer any other question about what a person believes. It is simply a rejection of the assertion that there are gods. Atheism is too often defined incorrectly as a belief system. To be clear: Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods.

    Source