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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: March 17th, 2024

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  • Skua@kbin.earthtoMemes@lemmy.mlgetting pricey...
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    24 days ago

    I assume you’ve tripped up on your measurements somewhere, because 4 ml would be a very sad dram. A spirit measure in the UK is 25 ml, so you get 28 of those out of a 700 ml bottle for $7,000 at that bar.

    Edit: upon looking it up, apparently a dram actually is 4 ml in America? In Scotland that’s just the word for a glass of whisky, assumed to be an approximate “one drink” rather than an actual specification of volume. If you offered someone a dram and poured them 4 ml here, they’d think you were the stingiest person since Ebenezer Scrooge

    However bars mark drinks up like mad, and they will absolutely do so on extremely premium drinks because the only people buying those are people who do not care how much it costs. If you take $3 for a shot of a basic vodka, that’s $84 for the bottle, and there’s absolutely no way you’d pay $84 for that same bottle in a supermarket.

    You definitely could spend seven grand on a 40 year old bottle of whisky if you went looking for one. This specific bottle is 51 years, but it’s commanding this price because it’s a very rare special edition from a big and popular distillery






  • Skua@kbin.earthtoMemes@lemmy.mlCancel my flight
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    1 month ago

    Wait, people actually avoid Australia because of it? I mean, I do think of Australian wildlife as dangerous, but to me that means “don’t fuck about” rather than “don’t go at all”. And I live in the UK, where we killed everything that was even slightly dangerous to humans long ago






  • Skua@kbin.earthtoMemes@lemmy.mlcurved it is
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    1 month ago

    while a western sword was like the size of a grown man and very heavy. Because of this western swords just didnt need to be that sharp.

    I’m afraid these are both wrong. For a start, there’s no one Western sword. There’s not even, like, one sword used by professional soldiers from 15th century Germany. Some of them were going around with zweihänders (literally “two-hander”), which were straight blades and really could be 2m long and 4kg, while others at the same time were using the messer (literally “knife”), which is curved, half the length, and a quarter of the weight.

    They were also absolutely kept sharp. There was little point in maintaining an absolutely razor-sharp edge because that’ll just get damaged, but if it’s not sharp enough to effectively cut stuff then you wasted a whole bunch of your money buying a really ineffective hammer. And you absolutely would have just used a hammer if that was what you wanted.

    There were techniques for using swords as bludgeoning weapons, but these evolved as methods to counter increasingly effective armour, not because the swords weren’t effective cutting tools. Holding the blade of the sword and using the crossguard as a hammer is one of the better-known examples of this. But that’s something you do if you do not actually have a hammer with you and nonetheless need to fight a guy wearing plate armour. If you’re carving through the four hundred peasants he brought with him, you want to cut stuff. Even against the guy in armour, rather than bludgeoning it you might prefer to hold your sword with one hand on the hilt and one halfway up the blade so that you can effectively direct the tip into the tiny gaps in the armour, at which point sharpness is very important again.

    European cultures absolutely did have refined martial arts for wielding swords. We just didn’t put much effort into to preserving them once guns replaced the swords.