Eh, I dunno, I’m currently really enjoying Ghosts of Tsushima, although strictly in off-line mode. And I enjoyed the first Jedi: Fallen Order, again, solely off-line.

It is, honestly, not nearly as bad as you’d think. The weight should be pretty well distributed, armor doesn’t have to be all that heavy to stop a sword, and the gambeson is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for piercing weapons. Blunt weapons, well, those are going to be unpleasant pretty much no matter what. You get really hot though; there’s a reason that the Saracens did such a number on the crusaders when they were able to get them outside of cities.

Wearing a plate carrier is, IMO, worse than wearing a gambeson and chain maille.

Unfortunately, this one goes both ways. Some women feel like they need to play hard to get, because otherwise they’re sluts, and also they want to know that a guy really likes her. It’s self defeating of course, on both sides.

What’s crazy is that, for all the poundage that a war bow requires to pull, it’s still less powerful than a small-caliber bullet. A breastplate will easily stop a clothyard arrow with a hardened bodkin point, and a .38 Spl will blow right through. I tried doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations a while back, and IIRC a .22LR has more energy at the muzzle of a 14" rifle barrel than a 160# bow could put into an arrow. (Someone needs to double check my math on that though.)

Blackhawk Down gets things very right.

Sword fight? Fanning at each other, crossing and smacking swords.

Just watch Olympic fencing; you get a very fast exchange that you can’t follow, and then someone has a point. In a real sword fight, without armor, that’s about what would happen. OTOH, when everyone is wearing armor, it gets a lot messier.

And of course, the classic gunfight where nobody hits anything.

That is surprisingly common. Most people are really bad shots when they’re stressed out. It’s physiological; when your body dumps adrenaline into your bloodstream, you lose fine motor control. So unless you’ve trained extensively under stressful conditions, you’re gonna have a hard time doing shit.

Most people in the military do a basic qualification that is pretty easy to pass (23/49 targets, at ranges from 25 to 300m); these aren’t head shots, these are just on the target. Once you’ve done that, and graduated from basic, depending on your specialty, you may rarely touch a rifle. Lots of former military people think that they’re good, just because they managed a single qualification, and that they know a lot about guns, but it’s often just fudd-lore. Spec ops guys and Marines tend to be more proficient overall, because they spend more time practicing. (TBH, a lot of the spec ops are very mediocre as far as competitive shooting goes, but they have a lot of other skills that are relevant to the military, and tend to refuse to give up.) Cops are often even worse; their qualifications are at short distances, with very lenient time standards.

Bear in mind that the kill-to-bullet ratio in Afghanistan was about 1:300,000; most shooting in the modern military is suppressive, rather than directed at a specific target.

Compare that to someone that’s a USPSA B class shooter, or someone that regularly shoots PCSL 2 gun matches; they will tend to outshoot a lot of retired military, because they tend to practice, and practice on a shot timer, a lot.

Without claiming outright magic […]

…We’re still talking about zombies, right? Animated corpses that have an overwhelming need to consume human flesh, and can only be killed with overwhelming brain damage? I’m pretty sure that’s the definition of magic right there. If you’re talking about something like the cordyceps fungi–which, to infect humans, would still need some kind of magical power–you still have a very, very finite limit on how long a ‘human’ will survive (about four weeks without food, give or take), so you should be able to just wait them out, rather than needing to proactively kill them.

That zombie horde will be a lot less dangerous and easy to clean up once it’s crawling on the ground with all the speed of a toddler.

Less dangerous, yes. Not not dangerous, depending on which version of zombies you’re talking about specifically.

You haven’t shot with people that were in the military, have you? :P

I thought that they still used them for destroying some munitions? Like, those burn pits in Iraq that caused so many cases of cancer? IDK.

You can quite legally buy them in the US though. They’re pricey, but, hey, you never know, right?

You’d still need to hit each zombie individually though.

Kinda hard to walk with one leg

Zombies can and do drag themselves, or even worm their way across fields. Until the brain is destroyed, they’re a threat.

25mm chain gun is probably going to mist a few bodies.

Sure, but, again, unless you hit the head, they’re still a threat. And meanwhile, you’ve blown through a thousand rounds of ammo.

Artillery is an area denial weapon.

You can only deny area when people aren’t willing to charge into it. Zombies aren’t doing massed charges though; each and every zombie is Leroy Jenkins, acting entirely independently, and with zero foresight.

IMO, the most effective method weapon would be a steam roller, as long as all the mechanical parts and the operator cockpit were completely covered so that a zombie couldn’t damage anything. Like, say, some of the mine removal vehicles. Moving around is going to attract the zombies, and then running them over would eliminate them.

Conventional infantry tactics don’t really work against zombies. For instance, suppressing fire; you can’t suppress zombies, because they don’t care if they get shot, and it only matters if they get shot in the head. You can’t inflict any amount of damage that’s going to force a retreat. Artillery and bombs are only going to effect them if they’re in the direct blast zone; shrapnel still has to penetrate the brain.

Your best bets are likely going to be napalm and flame throwers. I’m not sure how many napalm bombs the US military has, but I’m pretty sure that they don’t have tons of flamethrowers.

The entire Ultima series for sure. I think those were the first CRPGs I played. I loved Ultima: Underworld I & II, but I was never able to get Ultima VII: Pagan to run properly on my computer. (And, holy fuck, that was 30 years ago.)

But also The Elder Scrolls: Arena, TES: Daggerfall, TES: Battlespire, TES: Redguard, and TES: Morrowind. The first two TES games would be challenging to make, given that many of the areas were randomly generated, rather than being designed.

Having seen the trailer for Gothic, it looks good. I really hope that it’s actually good.

You have three issues - yeah, the pump doesn’t use that much power, but it does use power. If you’re trying to reduce electricity consumption to the bare minimum, a tankless water heater right at the tap will be slightly more efficient. It doesn’t have to always run, but for people that don’t have predictable schedules, that can result in my wasted water. And your water heater is going to have to run more, because even with insulated pipes, you’ll be losing some heat as the water circulates.

It is absolutely better than running the taps wide open until you get hot water, especially if you live in a place with limited water availability. I wouldn’t use my solution for anything other than new construction due to the cost of running so much new wiring.

If you have the money, the most efficient way to solve this is to install an on-demand tankless water heater at every single outlet that has hot water (e.g., not the toilets). The downside is that this is a very expensive way to solve the problem; not only do you need to buy the water heaters, you need to run new electrical to every single one (or new gas lines, which would be even more expensive). The upside is that you get hot water as fast as a recirculating pump, but without the cost of constantly running a pump and your water heater.

Many years ago I lived in an apartment in San Diego that had recirculating hot water (there was no water heater in my apartment); I guess the apartment complex figured that the cost of constantly heating the water was cheaper than the cost of the water that they would otherwise lose down the sewer while people were waiting for the water to heat up in their apartment.

FWIW, feelings on tickling is very split; recipients seem to either love it or hate it, with no in between. Tickling, in a BDSM scene, is absolutely torture, and can be very triggering for some people. Some people can enjoy light tickling in a sensual/erotic manner, and still hate tickling as the primary form of sensation play in a scene.

I am definitely on the sadistic end of that spectrum.

If you try it, set up some kind non-verbal safe signal beforehand, because you may not be able to get words out.

Assuming consent on all fronts, and some kind of safe signal?

Tickle.

IME that ends up being strangely harder on a sub and something that can go on longer–with breaks!–than e.g. caning, flogs, etc. If you go too long with a silicone slapper, you can take skin off; to long/hard with a cane, and you’re causing hematomas. Too long tickling? No physical harm done (as long as they don’t, say, dislocate a shoulder; be careful with how you tie people up, folks!), although a sub might pee the bed, or be laughing so hard that they can’t breathe. That means that you can turn around and do it again the next day. Combine being restrained and blindfolded with sound-isolating earbuds so that a sub can’t tell where you are, and intersperse the tickling with sensual touch, and you can have a sub dreading your touch, flinching at nothing, and drag it out for an hour or more.

I’d remove the gag though; tickling combined with a gag can obstruct breathing.

(Not everyone is ticklish though. IME people that tend towards anxiety have a much stronger reaction to tickling.)

Futurism was a fascinating movement; many of the ideas of the Manifesto of Futurism by Marinetti have ended up being absorbed by culture. The change of popular music–particularly synthpop, industrial, and techno–really capture ideas of futurism, regarding changing aesthetic tastes away from the classic.