Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.

[Kaelik]

I don't know why that's a problem at all. Do you actually watch ads? Why? Just do something else during the ads, like read TGD, or a blog or something.

[Omegonthesane]

Well, you need to watch the ads closely enough to either know when to hit "SKIP AD" or else closely enough to know when you can start watching the show again.

[Ice9]

They used to primarily show ads for other series, which I was ok with because I could switch to another tab and keep the sound on - sometimes the music was even catchy. Recently, it's been boring crap I don't even want to hear, which requires periodic checking back to see when they're done. In either case, the extreme repetition seems counter-productive if their goal is to have anyone actually watch the ads, but perhaps annoying people into subscribing is a higher priority.

[Shrapnel]

Cruncyroll can die in a fire.

I'm already giving these unclefucking twatshitting [EDITED] money, and they're STILL PLAYING ADS.

Fuck these shitweasels. I'm done.

[Kaelik]

Cruncyroll can die in a fire.

I'm already giving these unclefucking twatshitting [EDITED] money, and they're STILL PLAYING ADS.

Fuck these shitweasels. I'm done.

Have you tried logging in?

[Shrapnel]

Yes, I did. I tried logging out and back in again, too. Still ads.

edit: Y'know what, though? It's a moot point, because from now on I'm going to use Kissanime. They have ads, yes, but they're non-intrusive and you can hide them, so you don't have to pay them money to watch anime unmolested. Also, they have a MUCH better selection than Cruncyroll, as they have ALL of the Digimon subs in their entirety, PLUS all but one of the movies/specials. The only sub Cruncyroll has is Xros Wars. Further, they also have all of the Japanese Transformer subs. Cruncyroll has a marked lack of anything Transformers.

So, in closing: Cruncyroll can suck my menstruating dick.

[SlyJohnny]

Urgh.

That moment in a Shadowrun game where it's been 5 minutes since you joined the group and you're a rigger tracking a lady on a motorbike, but due to a poorly phrased command your dalmatian drone gets spotted by the Wasp rotorcraft with minigun that's escorting her. You jump in to the drone and narrowly win initiative and spend an Edge trying to perform a Cut Off maneuver (because that's your only chance of survival), but the pilot ALSO spends an Edge, gets 19 dice to your measly 18, wins the contest and dodges, and then hits you with 14 dice worth of minigun attack. 14 dice AFTER recoil, presumably. The GM isn't even playing it off like "oh shit, this pilot's unexpectedly badass".

I can just see exactly how this game is going to go now and I'm not sure if I want to play. I know we're supposed to be street level, but what's the point in shadowrunners at all if the average mook is so much more competent and well-funded than us? Like why do we even get hired as anything but a disposable distraction?

[Whipstitch]

The most charitable thing I can say here is that drones and vehicle mounts in SR4 are immune to recoil penalties so that dice pool would merely be kind of insulting as opposed to utterly ricockulous. It's part of why I've always wondered why other GMs try so damn hard to kill their players. The way drones and the -9 dice penalty from full-auto wide bursts work makes it pretty easy to at least wing a runner or two with a handful of security drones.

[name_here]

Wait, are mooks supposed to have Edge? I thought only important people were supposed to have Edge.

[Whipstitch]

Mooks have a shared pool tied that's typically but not always tied to their Professionalism rating, so it's more of a guideline than a rule.

[Prak]

I'm so fucking tired of the way fantasy games talk about orcs. They want to say that orcs are tribal murderous assholes, barely two hairs away from animals that live semi-nomadic lives of raiding and pillaging and should be cleansed from the surface by the brilliant light of Sir Hero Protagonist.

And then they want me to take this as a serious image of said orcs


You can't fucking have it both ways. If orcs are savage tribespeople, they've got maybe some iron, but most of their stuff is going to be metals easier to work, stone, and a shit ton of leather. Because it's kind of hard to produce enough iron, let alone steel, to outfit your raiding party when you live in yurts that have to be transported on, I dunno, mastodon back. And, sure, they could have scavenged armor from fallen enemies, but that's going to be very piecemeal, and very patchwork as they have to patch up the damage they just inflicted on it. And it won't all be a matched set, and it won't fit properly. If you want orcs to be imposing warriors with awesome armor and, you know, actually a threat to the armored warriors of civilization, and the typical party, then they need to have a more settled, agrarian culture. And if game writers fucking read up on real world cultures, they could write the society that orcs need to have in order to be the violent murder bastards in scary armor they want them to be.

[Username17]

Iron is mass producible by nomadic tribes people by several methods. That's why the beginning of the iron age saw the collapse of all the big bronze age empires. Suddenly bullshit warlike tribes all over the place could match the armies of empires armored man for armored man.

There's plenty stupid about that picture, but the fact that he's a tribal warrior using a bunch of iron is not on that list.

-Username17

[maglag]

Iron is mass producible by nomadic tribes people by several methods. That's why the beginning of the iron age saw the collapse of all the big bronze age empires. Suddenly bullshit warlike tribes all over the place could match the armies of empires armored man for armored man.

There's also the fact that iron is freaking everywhere on the planet. It even falls from the skies sometimes, there's civilizations that got their iron by taking it from meteorites that fell in their area.

Meanwhile bronze demands an alloy of copper and other stuff, usually tin, either of which are more rare. And most of the tin in Europe back in the day had to come from Great Britain.

The bronze age ends when the tin trade started to dry up and it became impossible to mass produce bronze equipment for your armies.

Now if the tin trade started to dry up because of the iron barbarian attacks, or if the iron barbarians took advantage when the tin trade started to dry up, it's something not very clear.

Now what's bullshit is full armies of leather armor. Leather is expensive even nowadays when we have mass cow production. And there's actually only a few bits of a leather thick enough for armor you can take from each big animal. You need like 7 dead bulls to properly cover a human in hide strong enough to offer meaningfull protection. Thus a full leather armor was something only rich people could get. Heck, among Africa's old armies, the hide shields were often property of the local king.

[Prak]

Huh. Alright then.

I'm still pissed about the whole "great white hunter" voice that's always used to talk about orcs while characterizing them as literally the most offensive stereotypes about tribal cultures. And the general lack of capitalizing on the whole viking image that should be used to talk about orcs.

[DSMatticus]

Most "portable" metalworking technologies of ye olden days (and they did exist) had absolutely abysmal ore-to-usable-iron yields. And it was probably pretty shitty iron too, unless you wanted to haul around even more infrastructure with you everywhere you went. It was definitely used for everyday items, but there's no evidence it was used (or even could have been used) to equip an army.

If you're wondering where the dirty rabble got all their weapons during the late bronze age, the answer is probably all the huge bronze foundries people built specifically to cast bronze weapons. Advances in mass production lead to weaponry so abundant it was impossible to keep it out of the hands of anyone who wanted it. Then when the shit hit the fan (for a variety of reasons we still aren't entirely sure about), the copper and tin trade routes collapsed and no more bronze. The switch to iron as the new metal of war came later, with production being centered in settled areas just as it had been for bronze.

[Prak]

Ok, so an orc warlord kitted out in matching, fitted plate is potentially not problematic with the idea of tribal semi-nomadic orcs, but when they show common rabble orcs with plate, or chain or even scale, I sort of have a point?

[DSMatticus]

Yes, no, maybe so. This shit is complicated. A nomadic group of people is probably not making their own iron weapons or armor on the move, not even for their warlord. There genuinely were portable metalworking technologies, but they took a fuckton of ore to make very little usable iron, and the iron they did make was usually full of impurities that would make it really brittle and therefore unreliable in combat. But "nomadic" people usually aren't perfectly nomadic, and even if they are, they usually have trade relationships with people who definitely aren't. The mongols had permanent settlements in which people permanently lived and engaged in all kinds of necessary trades that would have been difficult to do on the move, and the pastoral nomads (the group we usually think of when we talk about the mongols) would roll up on these settlements and trade with them (or "tax" them - remember that the pastoral nomads were basically the military). There was also a lot of trade with non-mongols - at its height, the mongols' trade network would have covered most of two continents. And when Genghis Khan did his thing, he didn't burn every city he conquered - they just their paid taxes to new management. Taxes that would have included "make me weapons."

The gist is that nomadic people trade with non-nomadic people for the things they can't easily make on the move. Sometimes those non-nomads are nominally the same ethnic group, sometimes they aren't. Sometimes that trade is mutually beneficially, sometimes it's "give me stuff and I won't stab you in the face." Metal weapons and armor fall into this category of thing. Though, I do want to point out that metal armor is fucking heavy, and nomadic warriors are probably going to stick to things like cloth, furs, and leather (which is a lot less primitive than it sounds). Metal weapons are easily worth their weight, though. Anything else is going to break in the middle of a fight.

[maglag]

And when Genghis Khan did his thing, he didn't burn every city he conquered - they just their paid taxes to new management. Taxes that would have included "make me weapons."

Actually, he probably got more cities in tax mode than "burn it down" mode. As long as you didn't do anything to piss them, the mongols were pretty happy with a surrender and offerings. Their plan always was "we want your fancy shit and fine foods and clothing and luxuries", not "blood for the blood god!". But if you did piss them off, then yes burn it all, then sometimes even divert a river over your city's remains to erase all traces.

Not only that, Genghis Khan also had the habit of keeping alive the talented artisans and blacksmiths of the conquered dudes alive and ferry them back to his lands where they would keep working to supply his war machine.

[DSMatticus]

That sentence is intended to read closer to "he didn't burn every city he conquered," not "he didn't burn every city he conquered." I wrote it without any particular emphasis in mind (and would read it without any), but the former is much closer to the intended meaning.

Text-based medium and all that jazz.

[erik]

That sentence is intended to read closer to "he didn't burn every sentence he conquered," not "he didn't burn every city he conquered."

Text-based medium and all that jazz.

Your clarification now makes it sound like Ghengis was a sick rapper poet. I imagine him challenging city leaders to rap battles for their lands and people.

[Longes]

Using Genghis Khan as a time period, the mongols were doing well enough to kit out their heavy cavalry horses in armor



As well as give lamelar to the professional warriors.


Of course, most of the drafted soldiers only used heavy coats as armor, because their job was to shoot arrows and be expendable.
Under Genghis Khan most weapons were owned by the state, stored in the warehouses, and given to soldiers when they were drafted, with an obligation to return the weapon once the war is over.

It's also worth noting that mongols had siege weapons, so they are not really something you think about when you think "nomadic tribe"

[violence in the media]

It's also worth noting that mongols had siege weapons, so they are not really something you think about when you think "nomadic tribe"

I like how the dude with the bow is all, "Wait. Whatthefuck is the plan again here?' while the spear dude is cheerfully laying out how they're going to be launched by trebuchet. Hopefully at something soft.

[Leress]

I like to think he is explaining that they are going to make a sick-ass entrance into the enemy's territory, him using the spear to pierce a guy as he lands and with the mometum pole vault into a flying kick that sends another flying. While the archer will do a no-hands cartwheel while firing arrows at fools and landing by goomba-stomping someone. Both landing simultaneously to strike a cool pose.

[spongeknight]

To be fair, the mongols only really adopted siege weapons after working with China and then attacking China. Before that they really were nomadic and didn't engage in sieges, but of course they later used that method when conquering half the Eurasian continent.

[tussock]

They're in the background. Perspective in art wasn't invented yet, so people in the background are just higher in the picture. The size of the person relates to their importance to the scene rather than their distance from anything.

The thing the trebuchet is throwing is in a cup at the end of those ropes at the left.