so you dated the wrong person and learned a hard lesson. you chose the wrong major and had to start over again. you cherished a friend who backstabbed you. it sucks, but it’s also going to work out. that’s life; you learn, hurt, love, cry, laugh, and keep going. you experience setbacks and you grow and it’s all okay.
So, as it’s roughly explained, the state alchemist program is a kind of “recruit potential human sacrifices” mechanism, with a side-order of “brute strength for the army”. But basically, the state alchemist title is mostly about being a researcher–given people like Shou Tucker exist, and given that the only requirement to stay a state alchemist is to submit a yearly report of your research that says “look I’m still being a useful scientist”.
So far, so far this is sensible, yeah? Father and the delightful children from down the lane are running a recruitment program for potential human sacrifices. So sure–butter them up! Give them lots of money, get them buddy-buddy with the government, and give them endless resources for research. It’s be pretty easy to trick a state alchemist in that position to open the portal if Sugar DaddyBradley is nudging them to do it.
And I’m still willing to go with this logic for the whole “draft the state alchemists into war” move. They make it pretty clear that was something of a last-ditch effort. And the blood transmutation circle around Amestris was an absolute necessity for Father’s plan. So the risk of a few state alchemists dying or resigning from your Potential Sacrifice Pool is worth it for the completion of the circle.
Now. To get to my fucking thought.
Edward fucking Elric. This fucking fight-me 12 year old troglodyte shows up to the exam and performs circle-less transmutation in front of mother fucking Bradley, demonstrating to one of the seven Actual Fucking Homunculi that he’d already opened the portal. Ed was literally prepped as a human sacrifice before he showed up to Central. A fully set human sacrifice showed up at the homunculi’s door, said “hey look what I can do!”, proved he’d opened the mother fucking portal already, and said “hey yeah hire me”. Human sacrifice, free shipping, no assembly required, handcuffs not included!
They could have just tossed Ed into a shoebox and kept him there until the Promised Day. They wouldn’t even need to make up an excuse he attacked the f u c k i n g president. That’s fucking treason babey. He’s 12, he’s an orphan, he’s from a rural town in buttfuck nowhere, he’s literally the easiest person alive to disappear.They could have arrested him for assassination crimes, kept him in gay baby jail, and just popped him out for the Promised Day
What do they do instead?! “Oh lmao this kid’s great. Let’s give him infinite money, no supervision, no governmental responsibilities, access to all our secret resources, and toss him on a train to who-the-fuck-knows-where-land”
They fucking did that
And like? They then had the audacity to be concerned when Edward “Fight Me” Elric almost got himself killed about 293 times. Just an endless game of “I thought u were watching him” from one homunculus to another when Ed fucking absconds half-way across the globe to go entice some other hostile entity into murdering him to death. That’s the whole series. Every arc is Ed baiting death while the homunculi are in the background like “:/ wish he wouldn’t do that”
This only gets worse when you consider they later learned Al opened the portal too because really?? These two stab-happy globe-trotting public menaces are 40% of your final evil plan for godhood. 40%. Almost half. You couldn’t fucking set aside a cardboard box to keep these idiots in?
We all knew Father was terrible at planning when we learned his thousands-of-years-in-the-making-plan involved him procrastinating until the last five minutes to get his last sacrifice, while he was?? playing chess in his fucking basement, I guess. But it’s like every time I think about it like really think about it I find 7 more reasons Father was a fucking shit idiot moron, king of the stupid fucking idiot club, flesh and blood founder of seven other established dumbasses, all living in their idiot hovel under central, just giving random dumbass 12 year olds infinite money, j u s t b e c a u s e.
People in the replies trying to explain Father’s actions fall into one of three categories
Father didn’t baby-gate Ed because humans are like ants to him and he had no concept of how thoroughly Ed and co. could fuck his shit up
Father and the Hot Topic Brigade didn’t lock Ed up because they recognized the unbridled chaotic 12-year-old energy compressed into such a small vessel and they understood no jail cell on earth would reliably hold this thing
Father and his sin-sonas didn’t put Ed in a box because locking Ed away in their lair would mean dealing with Edward Elric day-in and day-out in their own home for the next four years and frankly even godhood isn’t worth certain flavors of hell.
I think the real lesson to take away from most failures of machine learning isn’t “machine learning doesn’t work”, but “humans are bad at explaining things”.
I would love to see a study on if animal training mechanical skills would transfer to teaching machines. Timing and reward placement would be irrelevant, but it would be interesting to see if splitting and shaping could have an affect.
(I mean yes, I am a programmer with an interest in machine learning and a dog trainer so I could do the study myself. But that would take time and I am meh about the ai prof at the local uni)
You know, the idea of an interdisciplinary approach that applies animal training techniques to goal definition for machine learning is both absolutely fascinating and head-slappingly obvious, in retrospect. It’d be kind of hilarious if it turned out that this was yet another one of those cases where the solution was staring us in the face the whole time, but we totally missed it because the STEM majors refused to talk to anyone outside their field!
I am an old sage…listen closely to my wisdom before my soul withers away…
Teach us, o wise one
you are not an anime character. your actions impact others and do not only exist in theory. nobody is required to stick around for your tragic backstory or to learn the reasons behind your actions. if you treat people like garbage, they are allowed to think of you as a jerk and nothing more. nobody is obligated to analyze you or think twice when you hurt them. similarly, you are not required to stick around to listen to other people’s reasons for treating you like trash. you can call them a jerk, cut them out of your life, and call it a day.
Everyone in the world needs to read this and think about it hard. The end.
Everything movies taught me about archery is wrong. This is a complete mind-blower. 8D
If you are even remotely interested in archery or medieval combat, check this out, it’s just great!
OMFG EVERYONE PLEASE DROP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WATCH IT RIGHT NOW O_O
HOLY HELL
Not only is this fascinating, there are a lot of images from art history here. It just goes to show that what you can learn from the past isn’t limited to facts you can know, but things you can do.
Lars Andersen originally started using bow and arrow to fight in pretend battles during Larps (live action role play) events, where he played a soldier in a medieval-inspired army. While Larps can be about anything – the Danish/Polish Harry Potter inspired larp College of Wizardry (cowlarp.com) recently got world-wide media attention and there wasn’t a rubber sword in sight there – many Larps take place in fantasy worlds inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. And it was at one of these Larps, that Lars started to learn to shoot fast while moving.
In 2012, Lars Andersen released his video, “Reinventing the fastest forgotten archery”, where he showed how he had learned to shoot from old archery manuscripts. Using these old, forgotten techniques, Lars demonstrated how he was now the fastest archer on the planet, and after its release, the video got 3 million hits on YouTube in two days.
Since the 2012 video was released, Lars has studied and practiced, and he is now able to fire three arrows in 0.6 seconds – a truly stunning feat making him much faster than the legendary fictional archer Legolas (played by Orlando Bloom in the Lord of the Rings movies).
The time benchmark he was trying to achieve, according to the video, was the expectation of the speed at which “Saracen” archers were expected to shoot. In fact, most of the source material as far as I can see isn’t European.
A lot of the techniques described are also used in Mongolian Archery, which requires being able to shoot from horseback, and is traditionally practiced by men and women. You can see a video here.
Holy shit I want that in my book but who wouldn’t call it unrealistic???
Debunks Monks’ Ensnare Missiles and the whole disadvantage on ranged attacks within five feet of enemies.
Remind me to rework my Sharpshooter archetype with these things in mind.
Why is this popping up on my dash 2018 without any of the articles debunking him (like https://amp.dailydot.com/irl/lars-andersen-archery-video-debunked/) or mentioning the fact that he seems to be a pretty shitty guy who lays claim to have discovered “lost” techniques that wasn’t lost at all? To quote the article mentioned above:
“They weren’t lost; they just weren’t European. We’ll pause while you cringe and deal with your Western privilege.”
jinlinli 