That’s interesting. Do you manage to land those hits consistently once the element of surprise is gone? I also practice historical fencing (but I mostly do arming sword and langes messer, though I’ve occasionally dabbled with rapier), and my experience has been that taller people usually have the reach advantage.

Ducking and thrusting straight ahead of you makes basic geometry work in your favour for compensating the reach disadvantage (your arm has a 90° angle giving you maximum range), but it also massively exposes your head of your first hit doesn’t land, and prevents you from using footwork for a few seconds. Once your opponent’s has figured out your strategy it would seem like he would just have to stay a bit out of reach and counter-attack/riposte while you recover from your ducking

I would hoard hobbyist supplies and then never use them

Or at least he would have made it less convenient to touch with your hands, like placing it in the middle of your back or something

Same, my first reflex was to quickly search for NATO

I hate that so much. “Oh, this hobby only brings you joy and happiness? Don’t you know you could make money out of it?”

If I saw a name like that for an astrolabe inventor in fiction I’d say the author was lazy

Can’t wait to see how the EU officials will excuse this one

Happened to me in real life and it really changed my perspective for some reason. I was at a bar with a group of people I recently met, and one of them asked me what I do. I sighed internally and started answering the premade answer I give everyone, explaining my job and the company I work for. He cut me off and told me “Yeah yeah that’s great, but what do you DO?”. I was taken aback for a second, and then I started telling him what I do for fun, what my hobbies were, etc. It really turned a boring icebreaker into a genuine conversation

Yeah, that veneer of good intentions and plausible deniability hiding the fact that the US has always been a warmongering country was the basis of its position as a world leader. Now it’s gone, and the bare, ugly truth is right there for anyone to see

Weirdly enough : Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous. It’s an absurdly long game, each run lasting for more than 75 hours, but it ends like half an hour after your unlock the last level for your characters and you basically never get to experience playing as a true late-game party. I never played the DLCs though, so maybe that’s no longer true

Saying the quiet part out loud as always I see

The world’s biggest military superpower is now apparently willing to just kidnap anyone they don’t like, anywhere in the world, ignoring international law. That’s so fucking terrifying that I’m at a loss for words

Never heard it either. Missed opportunity to quote “The English are landing” (“Les anglais débarquent”, referring the Redcoats) though

So much this.

"- I hate the fact that my landlord gets half the money I make without doing anything to earn it!

-If you think it’s so easy why don’t you buy yourself a flat and rent it?"

Well because I don’t fucking want to become a bloodsucking leech myself, is that so hard to understand?

We’re we Here fuck We’re shit Queer up

Almost sounds like poetry

Edit : now that I think about it, “Queer up” could be a great thing to say to someone who’s been closeted for a long time. “Come on man, queer up! You can do it!”

I’m sure there are plenty of activities that you could enjoy but never thought of. Try joining a sports club that isn’t a gym, or a board games club, or a book club, anything really. It doesn’t have to be something that you currently do or that you already enjoy, you can also try expanding your hobbies by thinking of cool stuff you’d like to do but never got around to try

Nah, too risky. What if during those two days someone puts a gun to my head and tells me they’ll shoot unless I post the rowboat emoji? What if I’m stranded in the middle of a lake and need to communicate to an illiterate person that they should get their rowboat and come help me?

My father was an Arab muslim, and was involved in the fight for Palestinian rights for as a long as I can remember, until he died of cancer a few months before the October 7th attacks. I never really thought much about his activism and was never curious enough to ask him questions about what he was actually doing.

When he was on his death bed at the hospital and I was staying with him, we got visited by members of his town’s Jewish community. They told me he was a great guy, and that throughout his years as an activist for Palestinian rights he has always strived to build bridges between Muslim and Jewish communities and always made it clear that the palestine-israel conflict shouldn’t be an excuse to antisemitism or islamophobia. They also told me he took part in a humanitarian trip in Palestine with them, as a translator, and was instrumental in bridging the gap between them and their Palestinian contacts. I never knew he did all that and it really made me proud.

What sometimes still keeps me up at night is to think that, should he have lived to see the current events, he would probably have been called a raging antisemite by the assholes we see all over the media.

You know, I can somewhat understand how some people that have been exposed to Israeli propaganda can think Israel isn’t in the wrong. I don’t excuse it, mind you, because all the evidence is right here to disprove it if they bothered to check, but ultimately it just shows how effective propaganda can be in the information age.

What I can’t wrap my mind around is how a seemingly smart person can say they saw all the evidence, talk about the “carnage” going on and how “powerful people are hurting the weak”, and still come to the conclusion that the real victims are those same powerful people responsible for the carnage. I really can’t understand what must happen in someone’s brain to be like that