Back in the 1960s, a Harvard graduate student made a landmark discovery about the nature of human anger.
At age 34, Jean Briggs traveled above the Arctic Circle and lived out on the tundra for 17 months. There were no roads, no heating systems, no grocery stores. Winter temperatures could easily dip below minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
Briggs persuaded an Inuit family to “adopt” her and “try to keep her alive,” as the anthropologist wrote in 1970.
At the time, many Inuit families lived similar to the way their ancestors had for thousands of years. They built igloos in the winter and tents in the summer. “And we ate only what the animals provided, such as fish, seal and caribou,” says Myna Ishulutak, a film producer and language teacher who lived a similar lifestyle as a young girl.
Briggs quickly realized something remarkable was going on in these families: The adults had an extraordinary ability to control their anger.
“They never acted in anger toward me, although they were angry with me an awful lot,” Briggs told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in an interview.
Across the board, all the moms mention one golden rule: Don’t shout or yell at small children.
Traditional
Inuit parenting is incredibly nurturing and tender. If you took all the
parenting styles around the world and ranked them by their gentleness,
the Inuit approach would likely rank near the top. (They even have a special kiss for babies, where you put your nose against the cheek and sniff the skin.)
The
culture views scolding — or even speaking to children in an angry voice
— as inappropriate, says Lisa Ipeelie, a radio producer and mom who
grew up with 12 siblings. “When they’re little, it doesn’t help to raise
your voice,” she says. “It will just make your own heart rate go up.”
Even if the child hits you or bites you, there’s no raising your voice?
“No,”
Ipeelie says with a giggle that seems to emphasize how silly my
question is. “With little kids, you often think they’re pushing your
buttons, but that’s not what’s going on. They’re upset about something,
and you have to figure out what it is.”
Traditionally, the Inuit saw yelling at a small child as demeaning.
It’s as if the adult is having a tantrum; it’s basically stooping to the
level of the child, Briggs documented.
Elders I spoke with say
intense colonization over the past century is damaging these
traditions. And, so, the community is working hard to keep the parenting
approach intact.
Poor Fallout 4 really went completely unremembered outside one funny video that got memed. Nothing intentionally in the game really charmed people like Fallout 3 or New Vegas did and it seems like very few people felt they could get any higher entertainment value out of it than Monster Factory did and it faded from public consciousness.
And I don’t remember anything else about it standing out to me as a game either, but it sucks and makes me very sad because if only Fallout 4 had been more culturally relevant perhaps it would have been able to elevate scorpionflies from obscurity.
Imagine a world where the first video game to feature this insect actually took off enough that they became common knowledge, especially from all the people who might assume the “stingwing” is just a cool made-up monster until they learn it was just lifted 1:1 from an actual animal, THEN they learn that the real animal’s tail is not a stinger at all but the male’s genitalia. It could have gone so viral. But they blew it. They put it in a game that people were just okay about. They RUINED scorpionfly’s big chance :(
More scorpionfly facts:
-Theyre essentially insect vultures, most of their diet consisting of other dead insects, though they’ll also eat small live prey or the carrion of large animals, which is why they have long “beaks”
-They can have elaborate mating rituals in which the males give a food gift to the females
-There are flightless scorpionflies that live on ice and snow
-We only figured out in the 2000s that fleas evolved from a scorpionfly ancestor. There are now many more species of flea than scorpionfly and they are wildly different creatures, but we now have to classify all fleas within this group.
@big-bee-png reminded me though that Dobsonflies were also robbed when Elden Ring mistakenly called them dragonflies ☹️
Still not as wacky as people thinking Minecraft invented silverfish
Under D&D rules, a dagger does 1d4 base damage. The average human has a Strength score of 10, adding no bonuses. Several of them, due to the military background of many, likely had strength or dexterity scores of 11-14. But only two or three, and quite a few would be frail with old age, sinking to 8-9 strength. All in all, we can only add a total of +1 damage per round from Brutus.
An estimate of sixty men were involved in Caesar’s actual murder. Not the wider conspiracy, but the stabbing.
Julius Caesar was a general, which is generally depicted as a 10th level fighter. Considering his above baseline constitution and dex, weakened by his probable history of malaria, epilepsy, and/or strokes (-1 dex modifier), and lack of armor at the time of the event, he would likely have something along the lines of AC 9 and 60 HP. The senators would likely hit him roughly 55% the time.
So the Roman senate had a damage-per-round of 66, more than enough to kill Caesar in one round even without factoring in surprise round advantage.
This is a great post, but unfortunately, its conclusion of 66 damage/round is slightly flawed – because this analysis doesn’t take positioning into account. Sixty men can’t all be within knife’s reach of Caesar at the same time; using a normal square grid, only eight Medium-sized combatants can fit in the 5-foot radius surrounding him (and a character can’t end their movement in another creature’s space). I’m sure you see the potential problem here:
5th Edition rules allow any character to break up movement on their turn, moving both before and after an attack. But even with this provision, moving through another character’s space still counts as
difficult terrain (requiring twice as much speed to traverse); if the whole Senate rushes in at once, it’s almost impossible for the innermost attackers to push their way back out after delivering their attack, and eventually the curia floor simply grows too clogged with people for everyone to take a stab at Caesar in one round.
It might be possible to deal all of that damage in a single round if the senators all gathered around Caesar in a tight semicircle formation first, attacking in waves from bottom to top. Assuming each senator delays his initiative in precisely the right order to execute a series of coordinated strikes, each row can dart in to stab the dictator and immediately dash out to make room for the row above, like so:
But given that this wasn’t a perfectly disciplined battalion of NINJA SENATORS, I expect that the murder instead involved a couple of sneak attacks followed by a confused stabby dogpile, and probably took quite a bit longer than one round.