DM: The enemy champion approaches. He is eight feet tall, fully armored, and a seasoned warrior.
David: I select my sling.
DM: Okay, so that does 1d4 bludgeoning damage–
David: Hang on, let me tell you about all my buffs and saved up Holy Favor points…
DM: -___-
A real sling shoots those pebbles like a bullet. If they hit (a non armored spot), it’d surely do more damage than an arrow.
In the hands of a skilled slinger, they are no joke at all.
There’s a badass scene in the book This Immortal where a guy kills another guy with a sling.
Slingers were a separate set of ranged troops for the roman armies.
I can’t recall precisely where I read it but what made slingers so deadly was their capacity to aim with precision on very small targets, unlike archers that would generally send arrow volleys in almost a suppression fire mode. A slinger could aim for the head, arms, eyes or joints for cripling or even deadly hits.
Slingers often used lead to create “bullets” by just smelting it over a camp fire, making holes on a patch of sand with the tip of a finger, and pouring the molten metal in. A volley of these small, extremely dense but compact and deadly projectiles would wreck havoc on enemy lines or could be used to target commanders to break the chain of command and demoralize troops.
How in the world was a sling more accurate than a bow? You can hit a bullseye with a barebow from 50 yards away. A sling is whirled around your head and then released. I don’t understand how that can be accurate at all, since I’ve never used a sling, but it seems impossible that it would be more accurate than a bow.
A basic sling should be very consistent and simple. Early bows have a lot of advantages but the mechanical complexity makes them less consistent. 50cm of rope is 50cm of rope, it’s gonna throw the same every time as long as you’re practiced. Bows are made of natural wood and fibre with all kinds of tensions and inconsistencies, as well as requiring more work to repeat the same action precisely
You still get two-handed control over the plane the arrow takes (before drift) and it’s easy to dial in angle and draw length. A sling bullet leaves tangent to a circle spinning at considerable speed and distance. The fact anyone can hit anything with a sling is a testament to the human brain’s that-looks-about-right capability to treat tools as extended limbs.
The same for the bow, when considering we only figured the archer’s paradox already in the XX century and demonstrated it when high speed cameras were develope.
A sling shoots forward in a straight line and it only depends on the thrower to give it centripetal force.
Slings are still used today as weapons and effectively. And hunting with one, particularly birds, is an extremely complex exercise.
That last sentence pretty much gets it perfectly
I think slings are treated similarly to throwing by the brain, which humans do very well
There’s a similar story in the bible!
NO WAY!!
There’s a badass scene in the Bible where David kills a giant with a sling.
Not to be confused with the book, My Immortal
Fury of the Small
He is actually 9 feet 9 inches tall.
I lost it at “ELISHA YES!”
On a related note, I once read a nice DnD-esque summary of why Jesus was a Lich - that would fit right into this collection. (not my own pic or theory, just something I stole from imgur … still sorry for the missing pixels)
Of course. The Holy Grail was a phylactery all along.
The Romans played right into his hands by crucifying him, the fools.
No.
“Drink of my blood” “Eat of my body”
This guy made 12 living phylacteries.
Horcruxes if you will.
Seriously though, why did Jesus curse that fig tree? He could be weirdly petty.
BTW, myrrh had lots of uses besides embalming.
I always understood it to be that things exist to be fruitful and multiply. In a sense, a person who does not love, who doesn’t multiply goodness in the world as Jesus modeled, was like the fig tree. Such things could be thought of as cursed, withered and twisted versions of what they could and should be.
I am not a Bible scholar though lol.
So it could be explained that Jesus is a carpenter but not a gardener, and a gardener just look at Jesus and wondering why the heck an adult would curse a fig tree.
Pretty much, only detail missing is that it was the season for fruit. So, there is an added sense that by all natural laws the tree should have had fruit and it’s lack was a particular aberration to a societythat used the fig so much.
Also, thematically, it rounds out God’s domains. Up to this point, there had been miracles showing dominion over weather, matter, human life, animal life, spirits, disease and now there’s plant life.
Except that the gospel of Mark specifically states that it wasn’t fig season. Why did Jesus even look for the figs when he should have known they were out of season. Why then curse the tree when it was just doing what fig trees are supposed to do? Guess Jesus can be an ass when he’s hangry.
Dammit Jim!
I’m a carpenter not a fig farmer!
I saw a guy waving a sign to spread awareness, “God Hates Figs”
Or something like that
The understanding I’ve generally heard, and which seems supported by the context, is that the fig tree symbolises the unfruitfulness of God’s people. This is particularly apparent in that both Matthew and Mark record it as happening alongside Jesus casting out people trading in the temple (Luke records the cleansing of the temple but not the fig tree thing). It is then followed by Jesus telling a series of parables against the religious leaders. There may also be a relation to the parable of the barren fig tree earlier on in Luke 13.
Possibly an extremely contemporary metaphor, where the first-century audience was expected to recognize it as reference to a specific authority figure.
I too think this story is very confusing. I think it’s a metaphor saying something like the time / the people aren’t ready for him yet or something
Makes him more relatable.
What is this, a meme for ants?!
LOL, after I commented it reloaded with higher resolution.
Startrek.Website has been a bit sluggish the past day or so. Not super surprised the bigger images are taking a hot second to filter through. Sorry!
This pic is too pixelated to read it
Everytime someone posts a really long image it’s heavily pixelated, and I thought it was just a me issue.
Edit: turns out you need to change your ap options to load HQ image. Works now
I recently learned that most of the aps people use for lemmy don’t do formatting correctly. The these words look like they have a strike through on whichever ap you are using, let the developer know that
~word~should be subscript, and that~~word~~is strike through.Well Lift Off don’t even seem to care about superscript at all…
If you go into the post and open the picture it opens in good quality. There’s an issue with previews not loading properly sometimes.
Thanks!
Get Voyager or equivalent for Android.
Clicking on the HD option in the top right fixed it for me
Cute. I’m genuinely unfamiliar with the story of Solomon and the demon. I’d be interested to hear the story behind that.
Soloman is friends with some guy who had half his pay stolen by a demon and it keeps sucking his thumb. So Soloman is given a ring with a pentagram on it by Michael that can command demons. He commands thumb sucking demon to get Beelzebub and Solomon enslaves him. Now Solomon controls all demons and uses them to build a temple.
Got that from the wiki page for Testament of Solomon, there’s more to it if you’re interested.
So he’s a warlock, that found the fine print in the contract that fucks over the demon?
Nice
Just to be clear, that’s not in the Bible.
It’s not canon, if that helps.
Ah, that’s why I didn’t recognize it. Apocrypha?
I do believe that is the term, yes. I think it was written in the Middle Ages.
Also recommend the book series Bartimaeus, which makes reference to this story. (it’s a Harry potter style series about demons and demon summoners).
I’ll check that out, it sounds rad.
Roll athletics to yeet the baby
And so Jochebed yote the child, and it did go between the uprights; and it was good.
DM means Dios Mío
Today I learned that God gave bald people the power to summon bears
I learned that in first grade Bible class. We were team bear guy.
Druids man. They are OP, and they are all either too hairy or too lacking in hair, or both.
So Cocaine is God. Got it.
Ah I was missing r/dankchristianmemes thank you
Argh, I know it’s my app but this is too blurry to read. Looks like fun tho.
I had to disable this setting:
Settings shortcut: Media > Zoomable video
Keep in mind that you also will probably have to back out and reopen the post to get around the cached image
Oddly enough it was blurry if I looked at it from the feed but completely fine when I opened it from the post itself.
Also running Sync but with that setting enabled.
Same here, with sync
My god, what a beautiful reply. How did you manage to share a literal button for Sync settings?
Haha thanks
If you long-press on a settings option it will create a special link
Is there anything Sync isn’t awesome at? Thanks!
Boost for lemmy has an HD button that worked I could read it with that
I guess I completely misunderstood what that setting means. I turn it off and I can zoom and read the image. Turn it on and it’s rubbish.
Hero
Worked for me immediately, thanks
Mine too. Open in browser https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/ce3c437f-0c97-4093-9ad0-68d5addbb17f.jpeg
Much appreciated!
In settings, altering “max zoom” fixed it for me. Bumped it from x30 to x50 and it became readable.
It’s compressed to fuck-all and back. There is a link further down of an uncompressed one.
Try voyager. I can read it.
That’s what I’m using, it’s blurry af. I wonder if it cached a low quality version for some reason.
TIL that Solomon can summon demon
funniest thing i’ve seen in a while
Can’t read half of it :(
Click the 3 dots and open in a browser.
Keep trying. It loads eventually. It’s very funny.
DM: After dinner, a group of thugs approach the house and knock on the door. They want to give you a “proper welcome”
Levite: The fuck…
DM: They really fancied your ass.
Levite, getting up to leave the session: You know what? Fuck you. But fuck the guest’s daughter first, then the concubine, then you can go fuck yourself, too, you sick fuck, I’m out.
Judges 19, for anyone curious. Shit gets real dark.
