It gets worse.

Real life USB-chips from Silicon Labs (a reasonably popular chip maker) use this “Bee” pun for all of their marketing. BusyBee, Sleepy Bee, Universal Bee, so many chips named after Bees…

14th century

16th century and it makes a big difference.

16th century means you are fighting guns on the battlefield, though halberds were still used cause the guns were very slow.

But a bullet will pass through you if you were unarmored. If you had armor, the armor catches the bullet and then stabs you, so now you can’t even remove the armor anymore. So it’s worse… The bullet AND armor is embedded inside you.

but how do you explain the exposed leg, that’s terrible protection.

I dunno. Go ask the Landsknechts

I think we look back at history and realize these mercenaries had increasingly audacious costumes to stick out, possibly to better make a name of themselves. But… its historical. That’s literally how Landsknechts dressed.

Given the mercenary / audacious ways of fighting, it is quite possible Landsknechts used crazy weapons like Zweihanders to increase their odds of being remembered on the battlefield. They were grossly more skilled than everyone else on the battlefield, so it wasn’t about optimizing fighting anymore, but instead optimizing the chance you’re remembered by the local kings so that you’d get hired in the next fight.

But I’m not a specialist of this era. You’d probably have to ask someone who studied specific guilds / mercenaries back then for more precise details.

Not to mention that giant sword being held like that

Dude, that’s literally a historical Landsknecht pose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landsknecht

Zweihanders were heavy, people rested them on the shoulder a lot of the time. How else were you supposed to use these things?

EDIT: Note, this Zweihander here is STILL shorter than a typical Pike. So even with a weapon of this size, you’re fighting with less range than the typical 1500s opponent. Bigger == better was a thing at this time.

Zweihanders were only popular for a few dozen years, but their absurd size made them a historical curiosity. Real soldiers (“Double Soldiers”, because they were paid double a regular soldier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelsöldner) used them. You needed a sword that big to deal with the increasingly large pikes and halberds of the 1500s, though gunpower was beginning to really take off at this time.

If you’ve got any HEMA friends, I do recommend grabbing a Zweihander from them and feeling it. Its surprisingly nimble, not too heavy. But the bulky size makes it difficult to rest. Its a very fast weapon due to its size and surprisingly light swingweight. I’d say that poleaxes (like Glaives) or other “axe” shapes on the end of a stick felt heavier to me., though they probably weigh about the same. A sword just naturally swings faster due to less weight on the end (though a poleaxe will have more power / armor penetration capabilities).

I did a google and it sounds like this artist is “vanishlily”, and made the drawing a few months ago.

https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/89235711

I’m not seeing this comic in that artist’s profile. Its possible that this comic / meme came after this artist’s drawings of “Landsknecht girl”.

Yeah, this is someone who has studied Medieval Armor. I can’t say I’m an expert on this but I’m getting vibes of real armor from these drawings, its pretty cool… albeit in anime-style and some exaggerations for artistic effect, but I can kinda-sorta place some of these armor drawings within a time period.

Like I can instantly recognize this as a Knight Templar.

History is big and it’s hard to generalize.

I’m not saying all kings were like this. I’m saying some kings, and some real armor, was like this. That’s the difference.

And since we have at least an entire century where codpieces were in fashion, it’s possible that that particular era was more about just wearing normal looking armor. Because obviously codpieces are normal in that weird time and likely weren’t seen as a sex symbol. So my statements don’t even generalize to all codpieces.

Bikini Armor’s equivalence is Chip-and-Dale Chippendales armor. (EDIT: Oh snap, I confused the Disney cartoon with the strippers, lulz)

Boob Armor, IMO, is equivalent to Codpieces. People sexualizing armor, because sex is that much more awesome when its made into metal.

Like, look at this Greek Armor.

Its obviously there to demonstrate masculinity and look sexy on the battlefield (or play-battlefield / parades / ceremonies).

I think this depends on the time period, location, and individual King/General.

If you don’t mind, I’ll choose the time period, location, and King to prove my point. Yes, this gets rather specific but… I choose Sigismund II Augustus’s armor as a 15-year-old. King of Poland.

Many kings never took to the battlefield though and only wore their armor in parades and celebrations. I bet you this piece of armor never saw a single battle. No one would seriously put a 15-year-old inexperienced King into a battle.

This king was also rich enough to afford not just one suit of armor, but multiple. There’s a lot of parade armor / ceremonial armor. Now… these don’t have sexualized codpieces on them but the ostentatious / fashion statements they made is obvious. These were clearly designed to make the wearer look good.

Codpieces were either worn by that like ~100 year period where they were lol in fashion, or by “Big Dick” (so to speak) Kings (Henry VIII, and the like). There’s a certain personality type that really just wants to emphasize their penis and they’ll spend good money back then to make a massive codpiece.

Henry VIII saw battle, and likely in that armor. But in his later years, he was a rather sickly man (gout, etc. etc.), so I’m sure his generals made sure he was never really in danger in those later military campaigns.

Given the ceremonial / parade / and even play/costume/theater armors that existed in the Medieval Era, if more females were in power… some fashionista would have looked for ways to accentuate her femininity, much like how Henry VIII or other kings did so with their codpieces to portray manliness. Not necessarily “for battle”, but for a parade, ceremony, or other such event. Not all suits of armor were for battle.

EDIT: As for “battle”, remember that these 1500+ era armor pieces coexisted with Muskets. That meant that if you were hit by a musket while in armor, the armor deformed and pierced you, meaning you’d have to cut the armor off before you can remove the armor piece. There was little military use of armor in this era, a lot of it was just cultural momentum / status symbol purposes from an European perspective. (Armor remained useful vs the Aztecs or other cultures without guns).

So yeah, armor made bullets worse, it was better for the bullet to pass through you than to be stabbed by your own armor while getting shot.

Every fake-historian complaining about unrealistic boob armor in fantasy games needs to look up historical codpieces.

Armor was a status symbol and includes sexualized designs to demonstrate the girth of your penis prowess. If females were in a historical armor setting, I bet you boob armor would have become at least as big a thing as codpieces were.

I mean, the ancient Greeks painted abs and male nipples in their armor, lol. Gotta be sexy while fighting a war, at least if you are in the back just commanding people. It’s not like these Kings or Generals really saw someone swing a sword at them or needed actually functional armor. It’s just shiny metal proving you had more money than the other soldiers in many cases.

That’s not what storage engineers mean when they say “bitrot”.

“Bitrot”, in the scope of ZFS and BTFS means the situation where a hard-drive’s “0” gets randomly flipped to “1” (or vice versa) during storage. It is a well known problem and can happen within “months”. Especially as a 20-TB drive these days is a collection of 160 Trillion bits, there’s a high chance that at least some of those bits malfunction over a period of ~double-digit months.

Each problem has a solution. In this case, Bitrot is “solved” by the above procedure because:

1. Bitrot usually doesn’t happen within single-digit months. So ~6 month regular scrubs nearly guarantees that any bitrot problems you find will be limited in scope, just a few bits at the most.

2. Filesystems like ZFS or BTFS, are designed to handle many many bits of bitrot safely.

3. Scrubbing is a process where you read, and if necessary restore, any files where bitrot has been detected.

Of course, if hard drives are of noticeably worse quality than expected (ex: if you do have a large number of failures in a shorter time frame), or if you’re not using the right filesystem, or if you go too long between your checks (ex: taking 25 months to scrub for bitrot instead of just 6 months), then you might lose data. But we can only plan for the “expected” kinds of bitrot. The kinds that happen within 25 months, or 50 months, or so.

If you’ve gotten screwed by a hard drive (or SSD) that bitrots away in like 5 days or something awful (maybe someone dropped the hard drive and the head scratched a ton of the data away), then there’s nothing you can really do about that.

If you have a NAS, then just put iSCSI disks on the NAS, and network-share those iSCSI fake-disks to your mini-PCs.

iSCSI is “pretend to be a hard-drive over the network”. iSCSI can exist “after” ZFS or BTRFS, meaning your scrubs / scans will fix any issues. So your mini-PC can have a small C: drive, but then be configured so that iSCSI is mostly over the D: iSCSI / Network drive.

iSCSI is very low-level. Windows literally thinks its dealing with a (slow) hard drive over the network. As such, it works even in complex situations like Steam installations, albeit at slower network-speeds (it gotta talk to the NAS before the data comes in) rather than faster direct connection to hard drive (or SSD) speeds.

Bitrot is a solved problem. It is solved by using bitrot-resilient filesystems with regular scans / scrubs. You build everything on top of solved problems, so that you never have to worry about the problem ever again.

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Wait, what’s wrong with issuing “ZFS Scan” every 3 to 6 months or so? If it detects bitrot, it immediately fixes it. As long as the bitrot wasn’t too much, most of your data should be fixed. EDIT: I’m a dumb-dumb. The term was “ZFS scrub”, not scan.

If you’re playing with multiple computers, “choosing” one to be a NAS and being extremely careful with its data that its storing makes sense. Regularly scanning all files and attempting repairs (which is just a few clicks with most NAS software) is incredibly easy, and probably could be automated.

I haven’t heard of any movement in this issue yet. But I also haven’t researched anything aside from leaving this topic over the last few months.

Honestly, Docker is solving the problems in a lot of practice.

Its kinda stupid that so many dependencies need to be kept track of that its easier to spin up a (vm-like) environment to run Linux binaries more properly. But… it does work. With a bit more spit-shine / polish, Docker is probably the way to move forward on this issue.

But Docker is just not there yet. Because Linux is Open Source, there’s no license-penalties to just carrying an entire Linux-distro with your binaries all over the place. And who cares if a binary is like 4GB? Does it work? Yes. Does it work across many versions of Linux? Yes (for… the right versions of Linux with the right compilation versions of Docker, but yes!! It works).

Get those Dockers a bit more long-term stability and compatibility, and I think we’re going somewhere with that. Hard Drives these days are $150 for 12TB and SSDs are $80 for 2TB, we can afford to store those fat binaries, as inefficient as it all feels.

I did have a throw-away line with MUSL problems, but honestly, we’ve already to incredibly fat dockers laying around everywhere. Why are the OSS guys trying to save like 100MB here and there when no one actually cares? Just run glibc, stop adding incompatibilities for honestly, tiny amounts of space savings.

Because it isn’t inferior.

Ubuntu barely can run programs from 5 years ago, backwards compatibility is terrible. Red Hat was doing good but it just shit the bed. To have any degree of consistenty, you need to wrap all apps inside of a Docker and carry with you all the dependencies (but this leads you to obscure musl bugs in practice, because musl has different bugs than glibc).

For better or worse, Windows programs with dependency on kernel32.dll (at the C++ level) have remained consistently deployed since the early 1990s and rarely break. C# programs have had good measures of stability. DirectX9, DirectX10, DirectX11, and DirectX12 all had major changes to how the hardware works and yet all the hardware automatically functions on Windows. You can play Starcraft from 1998 without any problems despite it being a DirectX6 game.

Switch back over to Ubuntu land, and Wayland is… maybe working? Eventually? Good luck reaching back to programs using X.org dependencies or systemd.

Windows is definitely a better experience than Ubuntu. I think Red Hat has the right idea but IBM is seemingly killing all good will built up to Red Hat and CentOS. SUSE linux is probably our best bet moving forward as a platform that cares about binary stability.

Windows networking stack is also far superior for organizations. SAMBA on Linux works best if you have… a Windows Server instance holding the group-policies and ACLs on a centralized server. Yes, $1000 software works better than $0 software. Windows Server is expensive but its what organizations need to handle ~50 to ~1000 computers inside of a typical office building.

Good luck deploying basic security measures in an IT department with Linux. The only hope, in my experience, is to buy Windows Server, and then run SAMBA (and deal with SAMBA bugs as appropriate). I’m not sure if I ever got a Linux-as-Windows-server ever working well. Its not like Linux development community understands what an ACL is in practice.