I live in the UK and I still thought it was London

The museum is not pro-neoliberalism, though in that light if it does succeed in finding a new location it seems like a guarantee that this news article will become an exhibit in it

Isn't a khopesh sharp on the other side of the curve from a shotel, though? It seems like sharpening the inside was the big innovation that makes shotels distinctive

Happy Birthday. Just because I want to see what replaces it

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.

They look like youtube clickbait thumbnails

I personally subscribe to Asimov's definition of sci fi:

Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology.

While Dune is full of stuff that's just straight up magic, the story is very much about how humans handle the technology, even when the in-universe basis of the technology is essentially magic. Long before the story ever started, we invented AI, freaked out about it, and then had to figure out how to replace computers in an interstellar society. The main overarching plot of the kwisatz haderach is about the consequences of the "invention" of precognition, even if the means of the invention are very fantastical. Several major factions are basically "what if we did super advanced selective breeding on humans for a thousand years".

Star Wars, meanwhile, isn't concerned with that sort of thing. It's an adventure of good againt evil in the most classic of ways. It's sword and sorcery. Even when a literal world-destroying superweapon is a major plot point, it doesn't actually take much of any time to think about what this technology would do to society beyond "be very scary". The obvious point of comparison is nuclear weapons in real life, and the development of those re-shaped culture enormously. We suddenly had this craze of imagination of all the things nuclear power might do. Humanity conquered the atom and we couldn't stop dreaming up new ways to wield this power. Most of which were fucking insane. In Star Wars, a power orders of magnitude greater shapes society no more than a particularly big army.

Star Wars is only interested in the characters, whatever technology is present is set dressing to allow for fun visuals. That's not something I say as a negative either. It's perfectly valid and reasonable for a story to take more interest in its characters than its setting.

Disclaimer: I'm writing all this thinking only about the nine main series films. Especialy the original three. I'm sure someone has written Asimov-definition sci fi somewhere in the Star Wars canon, "legends" or not. I've just never delved into it much at all.

"content warning: bad" is my favourite part about this

I also think that the Last Jedi is one of the better Star Wars films, so I'm quite used to my Star Wars opinions being the subject of definitely very polite disagreement

Star Wars is absolutely fantasy that happens to be set in space

It looks to me like the first one was taken with the front-facing camera of a phone, and those often have a horizontal flip option

The reason it exists is so bizarre too. It stems from the rivalry between the republics of Venice and Ragusea (modern day Dubrovnik). Venice was gradually asserting control over more and more of the Adriatic coastline and Ragusea didn't much fancy sharing a land border with its rival, so it just gave up one tiny stretch of land each to its north and south to the Ottoman Empire. Venice would therefore have to come by sea or risk angering the Ottomans. Eventually Austria manages to annex the Dalmatian territory of both Venice and Ragusea, but the Ottomans still held those two tiny strips of land. The Ottomans were not typically on the best of terms with Austria, and they held on to the two tiny bits of Adriatic coast up until the treaty of Berlin in 1879. By this point, Neum (the Bosnian one) had been part of Ottoman Bosnia for 179 years, so the borders were pretty damn entrenched, and they survived through the shifts to Austrian, Yugoslav, and eventually independent Bosnian-Herzegovinan political structures. So a petty but clever move of hiding behind a bigger empire in the 1600s created the tiny bit of Bosnian coastline today.