It looks cheap and poorly made, though. With this budget, they could have just made scale armor that actually looks like scale armor. Especially for prominent characters.

The costumes are good, but the armor in the show is all over the place.

According to this blog post by a military historian, that “scale” armor you linked is the worst of a bad bunch:

Perhaps the worst offender (which unfortunately gets a lot of screentime) is the odd Númenórean scale armor. Now scale armor was not necessarily a bad idea here (it could make for an interesting visual motif connecting the seafaring Númenóreans with fish-scales, for instance), but there are two immediate problems with this armor. First, it doesn’t seem structured like scale armor. The strong cording around the edges and rigid spaulders make it look like rigid armor made to look like it is composed of scales. The effect is only increased because the backing is shaped to give it pectoral muscles (and chests for women, which is doubly silly). But that’s not how historical scale armor hangs on the body.

Scale armor is [supposed to be] a lot more flexible (with the downside that the very flexibility of the scales means that a strike from below can pass beneath them and through the armor) and would thus hang and shape to the body. This armor does not do that. Instead as noted what this looks like are solid plates that are made to look like they are made out of scales. And that’s also not a terrible idea except that the actors are then also wearing scale-armor-print shirts underneath the armor which makes it clear that we’re to understand a flexible scale armor covering the whole of the upper body, which this clearly isn’t.

What on earth is this armor made out of? The queen’s armor looks like it might be bronze, albeit less well polished than I’d expect for royalty, but everyone else’s scale armor is made of this dull off-white material that looks like plastic or pressed foam, presumably because it is plastic or pressed foam. Surely this stuff should be made of iron?

Lol you’re right about this giving native English speakers a headache. I’m not sure the subjunctive is the correct explanation here, though.

The subjunctive mood in English primarily uses the past tense form of verbs (“were,” “were to,” etc.) to convey wishes or counterfactuality. E.g. ‘I wish you wouldn’t drink so much coffee’, or 'If I were you, I wouldn’t…"

However, ‘would you like a coffee?’ is a direct question of preference, which means it technically is using the indicative mood rather than the subjunctive. Here, ‘would’ functions as a model verb to soften the request and make it more polite.

I’ve never had to deal with Broadcom drivers or pinned the kernel, so I can’t tell you anything about that. The LTS kernel (currently 6.6.32-1) still updates regularly, albeit not nearly as often as the stock Arch kernel, so that means fewer updates that require a reboot.

Just install linux-lts and linux-lts-headers via pacman, and you’re good to go.

Interesting. Do you know if it works with an existing LUKS-encrypted installation?

I do not like the frequency of reboots necessitated by kernel upgrades. I know that I could mask it, but IME that eventually causes problems with packages than make .ko kernel modules; it’s just more things to fail, and it makes me really wish Linus would have just based Linux on MINIX.

Here’s a tip that you might not be aware of: Arch has an LTS kernel. It may seem counter intuitive to run Arch and not have the latest, bleeding edge kernel, but the upside is that you get a stabler, less breakage-prone system.

Same. Two years and counting.

Dolce et Decorum est - Wilfred Owen. A grim, anti-war masterpiece written by a soldier fighting in the trenches in WW1

Ozymandias - Percy Shelley. A reminder of human transience and hubris

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night - Dylan Thomas. Helps me to endure when things seem bleak or hopeless.

True, but I would argue that American Chinese food is a distinct cuisine in its own right, just as Anglo-Indian is.

If the argument is that the British Empire didn’t incorporate seasonings and spices into its own traditional cuisine, then I’d argue that none of the European powers did. French cuisine is still undeniably French and spice-less, despite their colonialist history in Africa and the Caribbean.

Ha! Don’t make me spit out my tea. Your cheddar is cheese-flavored plastic in comparison.

Bold talk from the nation that eats cheese from a spray can.

Anglo-Indian cuisine is a product of the British colonization of India and the fusion of British and Indian culinary traditions. This unique blending of flavors and techniques creates a cuisine that is both savory and flavorful, while remaining distinct from traditional Indian or British dishes.

https://medium.com/@wethechefs.in/a-food-lovers-guide-to-anglo-indian-cuisine-exploring-the-flavors-and-techniques-39bbb806a82d

Nice list.

Depending on your package manager, there are very handy snapper plugins that do automated pre/post snapshots for package installation/removal.

For Arch-based systems it’s snap-pac, and Fedora has one too (although I can’t remember the name).

OnlyOffice is the main alternative to Libre these days.

I personally prefer it because offers better compatibility with the Microsoft 365 documents I need for work.

Tela icons.

(if you look at the night theme shot, there are other details of the setup in the terminal output)

If anyone is wondering, you can download the .jxl files from here:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-backgrounds/-/tree/main/backgrounds?ref_type=heads

Yeah, the customization might not be as extensive as Plasma, but you can certainly add a ton of extra functionality with extensions.

Yeah, so Gnome has an extension called Night Theme Switcher which automatically changes your background, icons, theme, cursor etc. based on a user-defined day/night schedule. It works great.

Arc Menu is another extension which gives Gnome a standard start menu (since it doesn’t come with one by default) in the top lefthand corner. It also comes with a KRunner-like app launcher that pops up in the middle of the screen instead of using the default Gnome Overview UI.

Both these extensions make Gnome feel a little more natural for desktop use, IMO.

Gnome + Dash to Dock + Arc Menu. Nothing too crazy.

“We have investigated ourselves and found no evidence of wrongdoing.”