You be the judge of it:

• punched through a tempered, textured, 3mm thick glass, leading to several cuts on a hand and wrist
• kicked a glass panel on a door and got a nasty cust on my toe
• several instances of cutting myself on different types of thorny bushes
• perforation with glasses rim on my eyebrow
• severe cut on my other eyebrow, another on the bridge of my nose
• broken arm, twice
• fall from a 1st floor balcony, landing on a bush, after breaking a cabinet with my back and legs, until finally reaching the ground
• hundreds, if not thousands, of small scrapes and bruises
• bitten by dogs, leading to deep gouges, on my calves
• severe tear on the back of my left hand, with a broken bone, not exposed, leading to surgery
• many, many, many sprained ankles and wrists
• three pulled teeth plus all the bleeding from losing my baby teeth
• minor burns on hands and fingers, from cooking
• several nasty cuts from kitchen knives and a perforation by a lobster spike, which led to a severe infection, with a piece of lobster shell stuck underneath a finger nail
• a few near choking to death episodes
• two electrocussion incidents (230V), for mere seconds

I’m going to risk there is none.

Many hand to hand combat weapons were bespoke to the user.

Using an example I’m fairly familiar with:

In Portugal, we have a martial art called jogo do pau. It uses a simple wooden staff. Today’s schools insist the staff has a standard lenght, width and shape.

An old school practitioner I had the pleasure to meet taught me the staff was always made to fit the wielder, not the opposite.

As a general guide line, it should have the lenght of the distance from the wielder’s armpit to the ground but there would be people that prefered longer or shorter staffs. Some people would prefer thinner staffs, nearly cylindrical in shape, others would prefers heavier, thicker, almost eliptical in profile. The amount of customisation and variation capable of being put into the weapon itself was so diverse, it made each staff unique.

I’d risk this same logic would apply to more classic weapons, like the flails you ask about.

I’m not against supporting a software in a recurring form but the web browser is essentially the lock and key of accessing the entirery of what exists outside your machine.

That would garner an immense power to whichever entity developing one. Remember Microsoft and the IE case.

Firefox is not perfect and apparently on a downwards spiral but what made it stand out was because it wanted to be free and for all. Chrome is far from being a good thing.

deleted by creator

Still too rich for my blood

That sounds very nice!

I don’t have the money for a FairPhone.

But unplug from the net? Sounds strange. The model I checked is a fully fledged smartphone. Nothing that signaled the phone was about not having advanced functionalities.

A visible weapon generates discomfort. Unless on a police agent, nobody likes to see a gun here. It’s a threat. Hence the default for concealed carry.

This just happened. Could not ask for better.

And now, for the obligatory drivel:

I live in one of the countries where more guns are owned and kept by civilians in Europe and the times I’ve seen one, it was on a police officer belt or on a museum.

Portugal (I was surprised when I learned this) has a lot of guns in civilian hands, mostly small handguns and hunting rifles, mostly shotguns and carabines.

The average hunter - I live in a somewhat rural area - stores guns empty, with trigger locks in place. And having more than one gun requires a gun safe, that is routinely inspected by police. Handguns have to be stored in lock boxes or safes unloaded. Ammunition must be stored separately and outside a minimal range of the guns.

Secret storage compartments are forbidden. Open carry is forbidden. Concealed carry is mostly standard here but manifesting it, with no reason, is a serious crime.

Gun violence is not rampant here, regardless what sensationalist news outlets and social networks desinformation campaigns try to do.

Most people never see a gun their entire life and if confronted with one will instantly call the police for safe removal.

So… I appreciate this kind of topic but it always strikes me as unnecessary for the average reality.

@mvirts@lemmy.world @kumi@feddit.online @wickedrando@lemmy.ml @IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz @angband@lemmy.world @doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml

Update - 2026.01.12

After trying to follow all advices I was given and failling miserably, I caved in and reinstalled the entire system, this time using a Debian Stable Live Image.

The drives were there - sda and sbd - the SSD and the HDD, respectively. sda was partioned from 1 through 5, while sbd had one single partition. As I had set during the installation. No error here.

However, when trying to look into /etc/fstab, the file listed exactly nothing. Somehow, the file was never written. I could list the devices through ls /dev/sd* but when trying to mount any one of it, it returned the location was not listed under /etc/fstab. And I even tried to update the file, mannually, yet the non existence of the drives persisted.

Yes, as I write this from the freshly installed Debian, I am morbidly curious to go read the file now. See how much has changed.

Because at this point I understood I wouldn’t be going anywhere with my attemps, I opted to do a full reinstall. And it was as I was, again, manually partitoning the disk to what I wanted that I found the previous instalation had created a strange thing.

While all partions had a simple sd* indicator, the partition that should have been / was instead named “Debian Forky” and was not configured as it shoud. It had no root flag. It was just a named partition in the disk.

I may be reading too much into this but most probably this simple quirk botched the entire installation. The system could not run what simply wasn’t there and it could not find an sda2 if that sda2 was named as something completely different.

Lessons to be taken

I understood I wasn’t clear enough of how experienced with Debian I was. I ran Debian for several years and, although not a power-user, I gained a lot of knowledge about managing my own system tinkering in Debian, something I lost when I moved towards more up-to-date distros, more user-friendly, but less powerful learning tools. And after this, I recognized I need that “demand” from the system to learn. So, I am glad I am back to Debian.

Thank you for all the help and I can only hope I can returned it some day.

Going to separate houses for the night.

One way or another, we need to live. And it is impossible, for all practical purposes, to produce everything we need to lead a well balanced and reasonable life.

It holds a degree of validity, but like all absolutes, it leaves out everything between complete lack and total abuse.

Search enough and you’ll discover that every company on the planet has some shady stuff in the closet.

Best we can do is support the small, more ethical, companies and exploit to our best the others.

They are free to talk about theirs, if they are willing to hear about my own beliefs or lack thereof.

Being laic, religion is of no concern to me in my daily life. I do accept others don’t have the same view and stance and if that brings them joy and a feeling of sense to their life, great.

As long they respect me in return.

I’ve made my peace with the threats of damnation. I fear humans more than I fear demons. And I only need to casually surf the web to take a look into hell.

So, I’m good.

Because I like having my disk properly partitioned, to keep things properly separated. Unlike windows.

And no, I haven’t queried any AI. Because why question a machine when I can ask real human beings and learn from them instead?

I’m going to sit down today and get into it seriously. I’ve just been replying to comments that I can clarify with no need for me to be messing with the computer.

I developed the habit of formatting my disks before a new install, so I’m going to push that hypothesis aside for now.

Before installing Debian I tried Sparky and I noticed it had set up a /boot_EFI and a /boot partition, which sounded off to me, so I wiped the SSD clean and manually partioned it, leaving only a 1GB /boot, configured for EFI.

NVRAM is not completely off the board but I find it odd to just flare up as an issue now, under Debian, and having no problems under Mint or Sparky.

I’m fairly confident at this point that the worst of my problems is to be found between the chair and the keyboard.

If I could, I would award myself with a medal for being a glorified idiot.

I’m a sucker for Debian. It was my first good and reliable workhorse. First love is hard to forget.