Currently wishing that internet trolls weren’t capable of winding me up to the extent that they can.
My brain continues to dwell on stuff for hours rather than doing the sensible thing of instantly forgetting about it.
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We can all relate. Truly.
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“Through these veins runs some of the finest Scotch in the land!”
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One true scotsman reporting for duty. There are others …
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I thought there were no true Scotsmen…?
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Brexit loosened the sheep dna limits.
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No true scotsman would say that…
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OK, so that is a proper greatsword, or zwaihander (in German areas) or Montante (in the Iberian Peninsula). I think the trick must have been about how you held it single handed. I have a training replica, which is just short of 1,80 meters, but roughly just under 3 kgs, over that sounds like a bit overweight.
They are not designed at all to be held single handed, but if you needed to hold it that way, I think the trick would have been to hold it just under the crossguard and use the long handle/pommel as leverage under the length of your polearm.
I was doing historical fencing for a good 7 years, and I could do it back then. I never got big arms, but did get bulkier shoulders, from drilling sessions where on rapier/longsword you need to offer point, or from sabre where you use what is known as a hanging guard (sword held tip down and covering your body diagonally across, with your arm fully extended holding the guard slightly above)
The first few sessions doing that are painful on your shoulders, but they do pay off when sparring. A good training idea is to find a partner where you alternate guard and strike to the head (parried by the guard) slowly initially and then build momentum from there. After a couple of months you can do that for long 5-10 minute sessions and apply it to your fencing
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In German they are called Zweihänder 
but I guess you pronounce it zwaihander 
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Yeah, this is a place in London using Philippo Vadi, so while the German schools are probably more practical, I guess PV would have an advantage in tournaments in that hardly anyone knows it
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I just realised I mistyped that a after the w, my apologies. And no idea how to get the actual a with the diphthong or dieresis (or however is called) right on my kiwi keyboard…
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I believe Vadi is not that far from Fiore, and there is plenty of Fiore practitioners out there; but anyhow, have fun, longsword (outside of tournaments) always is.
My advice would be to get a good pair of gloves, though. I used Red Dragons back in the day and they were fine as long as I used fingertip protectors from cricket/hockey gloves, but I believe there are better designs out there now. I could ask around.
Unless you use metal, then you definitely need to invest on good gloves, or even mittens (although they restrict movement)
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So usually Germans write ae if their keyboard doesn’t have an ä button (and respective oe or ue). So people understand that though it looks a bit strange.
I remember spending some time in Spain before tablets, smartphones or even laptops were a thing and all my E-Mails from that time looked a bit weird But I looked it up and it exists in Ascii code
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pedant mode ON
I think you’ll find it’s a little more complicated than that.
OK, your actual “ASCII” is strictly a 7-bit code, characters 0 to 127, of which 32 to 126 are considered printable (though not always reliably).
MS-DOS US default is code page 437, but Europeans often used code page 850, which replaces the box drawing characters in the range 128-255 with accented letters, and is what you’re talking about there (character 132 = ä). EPOC16 on Psion machines used this too.
From the mid 1980s onwards you get ECMA-94 which develops into some of the ISO/IEC 8859 standards. ISO-8859-1 is the western European standard, 2 is for central and eastern European languages, and so on. (Windows CP-1252 is similar but not identical, because Windows.) Again this is in the 128-255 character range.
Even when we get to unicode, choices vary, with some platforms originally preferring a flat 2-byte encoding (JavaScript still suffers from this) but most preferring utf-8.
There is no universal way of saying “this file is in character set X”. You just have to guess. Unless you see a byte order mark, in which case you know it’s from Microsoft so needs extra special parsing to find the other errors that are bound to be there.
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I really like working on software that doesn’t process text!
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By the way, tried with my Montante trainer, which is slightly over 1,70m and a bit over 2.75 kg, and I could easily do the challenge, even handling the sword from the pommel end (I am 1,95m tall, so that helps handling a greatsword that size). The thing I was lifting was a cat collar (I did not have a ring around big enough) which made it awkward at times as it would fold a bit and the tip of the trainer is not pointy but rounded.
I think the main issue there would have been with the weight distribution of the sword blade and pommel. My trainer was designed to imitate a real Montante from the 16th century, and the sword that the guy might have been using could have been some cheap replica with really horrible (if any) taper and weight distribution. That can change things a lot.
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We saw the lions at the zoo today.
The local zoo redid its lion habitat, and since it reopened with new lions two years ago, we’ve been to the zoo at least six times, probably more, including a few quick stops just to look at lions. (The zoo is literally on the way to my parents, so at the right time, that can only take 10 minutes. Especially when you don’t see a lion.) We’d never seen them. So much so, I’d been making jokes about them being fake lions.
Today, we actually saw them. All of them (3 cubs, 2 adult females, one adult male), at the same time. I’d forgotten how big they are.
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So they’d be Lyin’s, yeah?
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You’re supposed to remove the cat first.
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