Fun Fact Thread! (previously fun fact for the day, not limited to 1 per day anymore.)

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

17 minutes ago, Admiral Fluffy said:

It’s good

I was impressed with how far they had come when I tried Science! when it came out... But then some of the game breaking bugs were still present and made me quit again. 

I'm waiting for the first Colonies build to try again. 

2025? 

[Admiral Fluffy]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I was impressed with how far they had come when I tried Science! when it came out... But then some of the game breaking bugs were still present and made me quit again. 

I'm waiting for the first Colonies build to try again. 

2025? 

I meant normal KSP.

Thread Tax:

Ichthyotitan is the largest known marine reptile

[Codraroll]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I was impressed with how far they had come when I tried Science! when it came out... But then some of the game breaking bugs were still present and made me quit again. 

I'm waiting for the first Colonies build to try again. 

2025? 

Uhh ... you haven't read the latest news?

No fun facts to be found there, I'm afraid. Rather the opposite.

EDIT: To put any reader who might only follow this sub-forum up to speed: The studio that developed KSP2 has been disbanded as of April 29, the developers laid off, and the community managers are apparently no longer employed there either. There hasn't been any official announcements yet, but things are not looking good for the future of the game.

Edited May 3, 2024 by Codraroll

[Ryaja]

"fun" fact: most color printers print your computers metadata in faint yellow dots that can be decoded. This is why yellow ink is needed for printing monochrome pages.

Edited May 4, 2024 by Ryaja

[kerbiloid]

Interesting, if print yellow-on-black instead of black-on-white, will it jam the metadata reading?

Or  if use a yellow textured paper.

[Ryaja]

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they had ways of finding where the ink is even if the paper matches it

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

15 hours ago, Codraroll said:

Uhh ... you haven't read the latest news?

No fun facts to be found there, I'm afraid. Rather the opposite.

EDIT: To put any reader who might only follow this sub-forum up to speed: The studio that developed KSP2 has been disbanded as of April 29, the developers laid off, and the community managers are apparently no longer employed there either. There hasn't been any official announcements yet, but things are not looking good for the future of the game.

Wow. 

I've avoided the game subs because they've been nothing but arguments between doomslingers and polyannafanbois for the last year. 

Looks like one side won the argument. 

The frustration I align with is towards the industry pushing games into publication / open to purchasing when they are clearly not ready.  KSP2 should have never released (EA is repurposed bovine waste CorpSpeak) until it was in the state of the game with ForScience! That was a worthy EA state.  The Alpha build released in Feb 23 killed the game. 

Sad. 

FWIW - Cities 2 is in the same state. 

[DDE]

1 hour ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

The Alpha build released in Feb 23 killed the game. 

The 2K-wide cutbacks is what killed the game, really.

[Codraroll]

4 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

FWIW - Cities 2 is in the same state. 

Nah, Cities 2 is currently playable without gameplay-destroying bugs, it actually has most of the features it was advertised with (although a few of them are poorly implemented) and its much-delayed mod support is at least partially up and running. The Traffic Manager mod was released to the public yesterday. It appears able to crawl, slowly but steadily, out of its early-access heck.

KSP2, after more than a year of development, has still only managed feature parity with KSP1, but is troubled by certain bugs its predecessor solved years ago, and the advertised sequel features are absolutely nowhere to be seen. Judging by the type of content they chose to feature in the developer diaries, there was essentially zero progress on adding more star systems, multiplayer, or extraplanetary colonies (except orbital structures, where it appears they have had a 3D model, at least). I'm starting to suspect that Take-Two pulled the plug because the game wasn't anywhere close to what its marketing had promised, and wouldn't be there even with multiple more years of development.

Edited May 4, 2024 by Codraroll

[DDE]

European and American battlefields and cemeteries were dug up en masse to use the human bones in sugar production; XVIII-XIXth century war graves may be gone entirely. Waterloo was a particular hotspot, with production started in the 1830s, and battlefield "harvesting" widely reported.

https://www.science.org/content/article/now-we-know-where-dead-went-did-grave-robbers-plunder-battlefields

[DDE]

A map of the lesser known features of Red Square as of mid-1940s. Object №1 is a courtyard VIP bunker, Object №25 hosted government offices, and Object №16 is an unrelated facility that exploited several existing shafts and ended up an NKVD VHF comm post. All are still under the same agencies and closed off, but paperwork on their construction has been declassified and located.

Not shown is the later eastwards tunnel with a battery-powered train that contitutes the entirety of actual "Metro-2" - Object №100.

[darthgently]

Hopefully not another Carrington level event with our present reliance on the grid.  But on a more cheerful note, it should be quite the sight for many, including myself, that haven't seen the aurora except in vids.  According to the map I am hoping to see a decent portion 

[Admiral Fluffy]

1 hour ago, darthgently said:

Hopefully not another Carrington level event with our present reliance on the grid.  But on a more cheerful note, it should be quite the sight for many, including myself, that haven't seen the aurora except in vids.  According to the map I am hoping to see a decent portion 

When exactly will it happen? Like UTC/GMT

[DDE]

5 minutes ago, Admiral Fluffy said:

When exactly will it happen? Like UTC/GMT

It was supposed to begin two hours ago.

[darthgently]

Tell me you've never played with LEGOs without telling me you've never played with LEGOs

You might need this to control the boostback and landing burn of your LEGO F9.  But more seriously, for your LEGO Mars rover

[AckSed]

Dogs in Roman frescoes and mosaics were symbols of fidelity, and were sometimes painted/inlaid looking straight at the viewer as if to say "This won't end well": https://livyarrow.org/2024/04/12/new-pompeii-images/

[kerbiloid]

There are numerous Sheela na gig statues across the Europe, from Ireland to Czechia, made in "High Middle Ages", and all explanations are equally stupid.

[Vanamonde]

What kind of statues? "Sheela na gig" sounds like a rapper's name. 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

15 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

There are numerous Sheela na gig statues across the Europe, from Ireland to Czechia, made in "High Middle Ages", and all explanations are equally stupid.

Well... I just learned something about medieval history.  Probably can't teach it at my school, even though I do talk about some of the crazy shtuff the Normans got up to back then. 

[kerbiloid]

10 hours ago, Vanamonde said:

What kind of statues? "Sheela na gig" sounds like a rapper's name. 

Wiki describes, but unlikely to post the images.

Definitely not a kind of official Christian discourse.

In the kinda totally Christian medieval Europe.

I could understand the story that gargoyles are kinda visualisation of wordly demons sitting outside of the church.
But this doesn't look like.

[DDE]

Yak-24 began as just two sets of Mi-4 engines and rotorss with a new hull and gearbox.

Although it had a completely casualty-free service life, it was notorious for vibration at high speeds, to the point where air controllers complained that the pilots slurred their words beyound legibility.

Edited May 25, 2024 by DDE

[darthgently]

8 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Wiki describes, but unlikely to post the images.

Definitely not a kind of official Christian discourse.

In the kinda totally Christian medieval Europe.

I could understand the story that gargoyles are kinda visualisation of wordly demons sitting outside of the church.
But this doesn't look like.

This would be an excellent question to pose to Jonathan Pageaux of The Symbolic World podcast. 

As for gargoyles, many think they represent that even many of the "monsters" on the fringe of reality understand who is really in charge, even if the monster falls far short of being an exemplar follower, so they face outward protecting the church and those who enter, serving good rather than attacking it, in the capacity that they can. 

You typically will not see them inside the church or gazing inward toward the church as they do not deem themselves worthy and they know their gaze is predatory and frightening.  St. Christopher is often viewed as a representative of this aspect.  Many soldiers returning from a warzone to normal society completely exemplify this aspect and its related struggles

Edited May 22, 2024 by darthgently

[kerbiloid]

4 hours ago, darthgently said:

As for gargoyles, many think they represent that even many of the "monsters" on the fringe of reality understand who is really in charge, even if the monster falls far short of being an exemplar follower, so they face outward protecting the church and those who enter, serving good rather than attacking it, in the capacity that they can. 

I would doubt that this kind of protectors is typical for the setting, and at the same time they look very similar to some other figures from another camp.

Spoiler

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

Recom Sanctuary (Ossetia)

Stereotypical Viking stuff

 

 

Actually, I believe that the "Gothic architecture" was derived from this kind of architecture.
Just on growing in size, it was ancesting the idea of both lateral support and the gargoyle-like figures, which were, for mysterious reasons, considered significant, as from the figured log tips they evolved into the separately made figures.

Spoiler

Spoiler

, and thus the gargoyles look like something very... from pagan times _{not from the mom's pagans, but from the  unpleasant real ones}, something agressively barbaric, rather than protective.

Also notice the difference between the rude and thus probably old gargoyles above and the fan-service toy gargoyles from XIX century and later, added to match Victor Hugo's descriptions.
 

Spoiler

The latter ones are just ugly-looking garden dwarves, while the former are functional, or at least simulating the functionality of a rain gutter.

Also, they look similar to the sheela na gig, and are looking like both are to pour some liquid onto the humans below.
Basically rain, but if have a cistern on top, then any mysterious goo.
Just some of them are functional, while others are decorative (or ceremonial).

In any case, they look like something from dark fantasy, ancested from pagan reasons and ideas, and for unclear reason not destroyed through the whole epoch of inquisition, crusades, knight orders, and so on.
Both don't look like a strange local tradition, but are unified across the Europe (and the sheelas look quite thematically for some Indian temples).

The real medieval was much more grimdark noir time and place, much closer to Disciples rather than to Heroes of Might and Magic or Age of Empires.

Spoiler

 

***

P.S.

Had read a couple of short stories by Giordano Bruno.
A very specific way of thinking...

Edited May 22, 2024 by kerbiloid

[DDE]

Svetlana is a name made up wholecloth in the early 1810s by several popular Russian authors. Because of this, attempts to give it to newborns would, for the longest time, be opposed by the Orthodox Church.

Then a certain moustached man picked this name for his daughter, and the popularity of the name really got out of hand.

[kerbiloid]

If anybody had heard about this daughter before the scandal with her escape to the West after the father had gone.