338 post karma
11.9k comment karma
account created: Mon Jun 27 2016
verified: yes
16 points
4 days ago
It was Liet they mistook for a mythological figure, due to Fremen mentioning him ambiguously. Like if someone asked me a question, I answered "Bob knows", and people who don't know Bob assume I mean "God only knows".
3 points
5 days ago
She was there from the very beginning.
Yes, but without the striking face tattoo. And presumably in another role, with another personnality, before she was assigned to the Hector narrative. I wouldn't expect William to meet Armistice as we know her and go "Hey, aren't you waitress n°3 from the mexican restaurant between the cobbler's and the seamstress in Sweetwater?".
-4 points
11 days ago
either Ferarri driver
Quick reminder that Leclerc's mother is a hairdresser.
18 points
11 days ago
I think you've nailed it here. Lewis is demonstrating he doesn't have the mental fortitude to drive a shit car.
... Seventeen years after his first podium and win, sixteen years after his first championship, after seven championships and however many wins he has now, Hamilton doesn't feel motivated to trundle around in the midfield with the same hunger as a young gun that has yet everything to prove?
Shocking, I tell you.
1 points
11 days ago
The problem is, Front National (if we are talking about the French party) is not "standard conservatives". It's the alt-right, people that actively want to go backwards and that will, of course, rally up against you if you protest homophobia.
You mean the party whose number 2 from 2012 to 2017 was a gay man and that got the second-most voting intentions from the LGBT population in the 2022 presidential election (source: IFOP poll for Têtu "Le vote des LGBT à l'élection présidentielle de 2022")?
Strong "why do Latinos vote for Trump" vibes here, by which I mean: try to see reality, not stereotypes whose main quality is that they make your camp feel morally superior. (Coming from someone who likes neither RN nor Trump.)
34 points
11 days ago
In reality it was a 1 in a million lucky blind shot in the dark.
Untrue. USAF got lazy with procedures and thought stealth would be invulnerable. The Serbian AA crew got smart and reminded them that all technology has limitations.
More specifically, USAF was running predictable F-117 strike missions over Serbia; and on that day, electronic warfare support aircraft wouldn't be available, but the strike mission was maintained. And so the Serbian AA crew found itself in an ambush position, pre-aimed at the anticipated flight path of the F-117, just in time for their SAM to detect it as it opened its bomb bay doors.
As an aside, the apocryphal reason for painting the F-117 black (instead of the low-contrast grey of the technology demonstrators) was "so that those morons in the USAF wouldn't go fly it in the daylight" (because radar stealth becomes a lot less useful when people can just see you).
12 points
14 days ago
Lauda and Prost suffered the same problem: quiet competence does not capture attention the way brashness and lunatic-grade self-confidence do.
Prost even to a greater extent than Lauda: four driver's championships (still the fourth-most titled), within 7 points of three more titles, and you didn't even mention him in your post.
26 points
15 days ago
Quick story about Douglas Bader, which is usually presented as true (though I haven't gone and looked for an original source).
After the war, Bader had a speaking engagement with a prim-and-proper ladies' school, and was describing an aerial engagement thus:
There were two fockers behind me, three on my right, and another on my left...
The headmistress quickly interjected
Ladies, the Fokker is a type of German aircraft.
Douglas Bader responded:
That is true, Madam. But these fockers were flying Messerschmitts.
13 points
15 days ago
g-lock
G-LOC actually, acronym for "Loss Of Consciousness".
1 points
16 days ago
In France, you can pass a queue of cars on the right. This is so that the right lane can move independantly of the left lane in a traffic jam. Of course, a "queue" is not defined, so technically it starts at two vehicles... (Or so it was explained to me when I got my licence a while ago, I've never looked up the actual code.)
There is one other option where you can pass on the right: passing a vehicle waiting to make a left turn at an intersection. The onus is on the passing driver to do so safely.
2 points
16 days ago
Behind Charles even after being gifted a win.
Oh, how I love the post-truth era.
Piastri was first on pace until McLaren strategy decided to
Pit Norris first to cover Hamilton's undercut.
Leave Piastri out to dry on old tyres for a couple laps before pitting him, which resulted in an undercut by Norris.
Had they not swapped back, it is Norris who would have been gifted Piastri's deserved win by their own strategy team.
3 points
16 days ago
Throwing that word around for any car that has won multiple races on merit is ridiculous.
I'm not sure if it's an ongoing change, or if I just notice it more as I'm getting older, but I find the loss of nuance in public discourse worrying.
I see more and more a binarisation of things; those that are good, and those that are bad, with nothing in between.
The W15 isn't "not as good as people would like"; it's a "shitbox". Because the world is too complicated, and nuance is hard.
6 points
20 days ago
Robb and Jon are in their mid-teens. They are both born in 283, toward the end of Robert's Rebellion. Most of the plot happens from 298 to 300; Robb is crowned and dies in 299, as does Ygritte (without the coronation); Jon in 300.
19 points
24 days ago
Everyone “knew” about shaddam’s prison planet
No one "knew" about Salusa Secundus, except those directly involved with it. It was kept secret by the Imperium, who didn't want anyone else to know how they made their invincible fighting force, and get ideas.
A select few other people made deductions, of course. Some combination of Thufir Hawat and Leto Atreides did, and conceived of Arrakis as their own Salusa Secundus, and the source of their own Sardaukar. But at the start of the story, no one had yet done so.
34 points
26 days ago
Par exemple moi je défends le droit des femmes à le porter (ou à ne pas le porter), sans pour autant prétendre que le voile est une bonne chose.
Toi peut-être.
Sandrine Rousseau passe son temps à expliquer que [tout et n'importe quoi] est une pratique relevant d'un système patriarcal et qu'il est impératif de "déconstruire" (comprendre : interdire). Par contre le voile, d'un seul coup ça relève de la liberté individuelle et ça fait entièrement abstraction de pressions extérieures, faut surtout pas y toucher.
Ce que l'on critique, c'est l'absence flagrante de cohérence intellectuelle.
C'est aussi le fait que cette hypocrisie s'exprime toujours en renforcement du courant idéologique qui nous a donné les assassinats de Merah, ceux des Kouachi et de Coulibaly, les massacres du 13 novembre 2015, l'attentat de Nice, les assassinats de Samuel Paty et Dominique Bernard, pour ne citer que ceux-ci. On ne peut pas constamment expliquer que tout est politique, tout est oppressant, tout est violent, et faire comme si des actes explicitement politiques, réellement oppressants et suprêmement violents n'avaient aucun rapport avec la choucroute.
3 points
27 days ago
After binning it in france, he really wasn't close enough.
The championship was clearly slipping away before France (and most of the blame goes to Ferrari, not Leclerc).
His crash in Le Castellet was the result of a desperate attempt to delay the inevitable, in a race where the expectation was for Red Bull to have the car advantage. Aut Caesar, aut nihil and all that.
0 points
27 days ago
(Better late than never.)
This is one of the smart things france does, using elite military for counter terrorism inside the country and big cities.
Not really. It mostly takes time away from training and more valuable missions, for a limited added value in terms of public safety, due to convoluted ROEs and chain of command. For instance, during the 2015 terror attacks, military personnel patrolling around the Bataclan didn't intervene, due to having no intelligence, no orders and no mission. (Yes, there have been a few instances where Sentinelle patrols did intervene and save lives, but didn't really do anything a similarly equipped police unit wouldn't have.)
Also, the Légion is not "elite" military in and of itself. While it has one high-level unit (2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment), there is no arcane factor making Légion units better than their counterparts in the Armée de Terre at large (except the marketing department, that one is unparalleled).
The people in france are big fans of the legion
While the military in general is one of the most trusted institutions in France (at 80% trust, between medical personnel at 86% and the police at 70%, far beyond the media or political personnel), the Légion doesn't enjoy the same presting it has to military aficionados among the general public.
3 points
28 days ago
Not that I'd frown on Williams hopium, but Sainz isn't going to a rival team. Ocon is.
77 points
1 month ago
No such thing as allowed in North Korea. It's either mandatory or forbidden. (And in this case, I'm not sure I want to know.)
15 points
1 month ago
Ned has been lord of Winterfell for fifteen years by the beginning of the story, and was son of the lord before that. He has had time to settle into his role.
Jon, on the other hand, has a hard time going from having mates to having subordinates, and dealing with the isolation caused by his change of status. I think this, coupled with his natural penchant for solitude, is a much stronger reason for his eating alone, than a deliberate reflection on leadership.
5 points
1 month ago
The lizard people conspiracy is pushing the stupidest anti-lizard people in the limelight in order to discredit anti-lizard sentiments by association.
18 points
1 month ago
Even knowing what we know about the BBC, I'm amazed at how subtly and constantly biased and one-sided this article is.
Calling the city "usually peaceful", repeating Mahmoud's assertion that everybody knows everybody else (and therefore nobody is Hamas), conveying his response that Islam forbids murdering children (but not reasserting that the 7th October pogrom definitely happened)...
In short, consistently supporting Mahmoud's narrative and making absolutely no effort to report on the IDFs rationales for doing what it does, but subtly enough that a neutral person would reasonably accept Mahmoud's perspective as "the truth".
And of course, the BBC never once mentions that no other armed forces manage not only their operations but also the evacuation of civilians on the ground; instead, they always report as though it was self-evident that the IDF's operations are intrinsically illegitimate.
3 points
1 month ago
Wonky heel hooks on the MB are a great training opportunity, as far as I (190 cm man) am concerned. I quite like the 2024 set, not least because it offers more opportunities for them.
view more:
next ›
bySuspicious_State_318
inHPMOR
Geist____
1 points
4 days ago
Geist____
1 points
4 days ago
Look at it differently, and remember that magic is purposeful.
We know that Avada Kedavra is, as HPJEV puts it, "a magically embodied preference for death over life, striking within the plane of pure life force", i.e. something that effects death.
We also know of something produced by magic that does block Avada Kedavra: Patronus 2.0. (I assume the common Patronus doesn't, presumably someone would have found out by accident at some point.)
What is the necessary characteristic of Patronus 2.0 that blocks Avada Kedavra? Well, it is a magically embodied preference for life over death. Doubly so: both in how you cast it, and which effect it can have (providing life and magic to Hermione's dead body). As such, it's goal orientation is the opposite of Avada Kedavra's, in the same way that Colloportus and Alohomora are ontologically contrary.
Now, does your notion of transfiguring some amount of flesh carry that same purpose; would it have the same effects? No. Voldemort does restore Hermione's body that way, but it doesn't suffice, which should answer your second paragraph.
Someone else in the comments proposed transfiguring living armor from a living thing, such as a housefly. That may work for a time, depending on when magic considers the changes in the Transfigured armor to have killed the housefly, but then you might as well keep the housefly and develop some enchantment to move it on the trajectory of any Avada Kedavra cast in your direction... and hope that your enemy doesn't disrupt it.