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Can anyone comment on the safety of PayPal for personal transactions online? I'm selling a piece of electronics and someone in another city is pretty keen on buying it, and wants to use PP. I've never used it for personal transactions before and I'm a bit worried about being scammed, for example I see the transaction go through and ship the item and then it's cancelled before I can retrieve my funds. is this a thing? Thanks for your time!
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Mar 17, 2021 19:40
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I feel real dumb; is there no way to create a new thread on the forums using the Awful app for android? I can reply to threads but I don't see a new thread button anywhere.
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Aug 28, 2022 00:46
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What's a good file transfer service for large video files? I've been trying to get a ~22GB video file to a friend but Google Drive keeps failing on the upload.
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Aug 29, 2022 20:26
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Is there any truth to 'dream analysis', or is it hokum? Seems to me to lean heavily on subconscious universal archetypical concepts, which feels a little bit too close to the theories of a certain popular right-wing psychologist for my liking. But IDK much about psychology, maybe it is more commonly accepted that certain themes can exist in our subconscious? All I know is I feel weird googling "what does ____ in a dream mean," it's maybe me at my most superstitious and I should just drop that.
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Sep 3, 2022 00:51
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A recent derail in the Tweets thread (about closed/open-casket funerals) got me thinking about something that I've been curious about for a while. Does some perfume smell like straight-up formaldehyde to you? Four years ago my Dad passed away and it's the only time in recent memory I've been to a funeral. The service was nice, of course the whole thing sucked but the thing that stuck with me most was the scent of the funeral home, of the preparation, which I assume must be formaldehyde. It had a vinegary smell but a lot more pungent than simple vinegar. And it lingered with me; I felt like I was still smelling it days later. Really unsettling stuff. Since then, every once in a while someone will pass me drenched in some sort of perfume, and it brings back those unpleasant pungent memories because it smells exactly the same. Not even masked by anything pleasant like you'd expect a perfume to smell like, just straight-up formaldehyde. I've mentioned this to some friends and they think I'm crazy. So a part of me feels like it might be some weird phenomenon like how certain people find the taste of cilantro revolting. Is this possible? Am I crazy? Or does some perfume legitimately just smell offensively terrible?
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Sep 19, 2022 05:33
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Xenoborg posted:How sure are you that that smell was the formaldehyde? Seems like a funeral home may have been using perfume to cover it and other smells up. It's possible, but if so it was the worst perfume I've ever smelled. Absolutely nauseating, and like I said it seemed to stick in my sinuses for like a week afterwards. Of course maybe that's more about the trauma of burying a family member.
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Sep 19, 2022 06:28
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Let's talk about gasoline. Why is it stored underground and pumped up, instead of in raised tanks or even at ground level? I'm guessing it's because it's less of a fire risk, less subject to temperature fluctuations in general, if it's stored underground. How long does gas last before it turns into varnish? Do gasoline companies put stabilizer into tanks at gas stations like you would in the tank of a motorcycle being stored for the winter? What if (as if) demand disappeared tomorrow, how long would the gas at a station remain stable? What about the opposite, how often during shortages do gas stations run out of fuel? What about octane rating - I know what it does and why it's needed only in high-compression engines, but is each octane stored in a discrete tank? Or is there some sort of chemical mixing/dilution going on when you select 89 over 93? How hard is gasoline to synthesize? I mean, is it possible to create in a lab, instead of extracting it from oil? Someone long ago said that gas "is basically the perfect fuel," in terms of its energy density, its portability, its relative safety and how quickly you can fill up. I think about that a lot.
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Sep 24, 2022 01:55
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I was thinking a bit about video games that feature real-world locations, like how the new Overwatch apparently has 22 maps inspired by real cities including Toronto. I don't play Overwatch but I can think of handfuls of games that either feature or very obviously imitate real-world locales. Do the game designers send their graphics team on business trips to document these places and ensure that their recreations of them are faithful? I'd have to imagine they do. What a sweet gig, getting an expenses-paid trip to somewhere like Prague to work on Deus Ex, or really, any of the locations featured in Far Cry games.
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Oct 14, 2022 01:01
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ultrafilter posted:You also need DNA from enough individuals to ensure a viable breeding population if you want more than one generation. As an aside, what is this threshold? What is the absolute minimum number of people to sustain a breeding population? I'm recalling the end of The Matrix Reloaded where the Architect tells Neo he's to select a few dozen people to start Zion over again, I don't think that's rooted in fact but it's something that always got me curious.
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Oct 14, 2022 23:40
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This guy on twitter is eating a whole rotisserie chicken every day. He's up to 39 days and showing no signs of stopping. I'm curious about this because it honestly doesn't seem like that much food - when I was bodybuilding, I would have loved to do that for at least a few weeks. But I wonder how long you could keep that up, would your body start rejecting it after a period or would you adapt and instead get sick if you changed your diet? Assuming you're also eating other things like vegetables. It got some friends talking about "if you could eat just one thing for a year/the rest of your life/whatever, what would it be?" I think I'd pick salmon sushi. Also not really all that bad for you if you're active, but again I wonder about the cumulative effect - we know that seafood tends to have a bit of mercury in it, could you actually get mercury poisoning from eating a great deal of salmon over an extended period of time, is that even possible? Or conversely, could you get acute mercury poisoning from eating a ton of salmon in one sitting? Is THAT even possible?
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Nov 6, 2022 00:30
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This is all fascinating stuff, thanks. Further to it - and I feel like I asked this somewhere else in the forums recently but can't remember where - aren't there certain communities, I'm thinking mostly of the Inuit, who are actually adapted to the particular offal diets? Like BonHair brought up already, you can't eat the liver of certain animals because of vitamin poisoning - but I thought I read somewhere that this isn't necessarily true for Inuit communities that subsist on that sort of thing. Am I imagining things, or is there any truth to that?
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Nov 6, 2022 09:53
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nhl66 dot i r
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Nov 6, 2022 23:29
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Medical question: Hypothetically, what is 'more immediately lethal'; a severed carotid, or a severed jugular? I would think the carotid is worse because it supplies blood to the brain, but is there a meaningful difference? A friend and I were just talking about the time an NHL goaltender's jugular was accidentally slashed by a player's skate, and IIRC someone said his life was saved by the team medic immediately going out to clamp down on the vein. It got me curious about whether it would have been a different story with the carotid severed.
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Nov 9, 2022 03:31
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Why are some figures in historical portrait photographs posed with one hand sticking into their coat? I'm thinking primarily of the famous portrait of General Sherman but I'm pretty sure there are other examples as well. Sherman in particular looks like he's gripping a concealed pistol which is appropriately badass but is that the actual reason for the pose? Did guys just walk around like that because it looked cool?
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Nov 21, 2022 18:33
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Wow that's fascinating, thanks!!!Thirteen Orphans posted:I don’t have an answer to your question but a wedding photographer made me do that pose in a group portrait with the other groomsman and I think it looks ridiculous. Maybe the 'Al Bundy' is the modern answer to this.
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Nov 21, 2022 18:54
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I'm having some trouble sharing a spreadsheet I've created. It's a playlist from my DJ software that I've cut some extraneous rows out of. The software exports the playlist as an HTML file, and Finder sees it appropriately. I open it up in Excel and it also looks right, so I edit out the unnecessary columns. I save it as an HTM file (not sure what the difference is but this is what Excel wants to do) and it still looks fine in Finder. But when I upload it to Drive, things get weird. Opening it within Drive yields a bunch of raw HTML code, and downloading it yields an apparently blank document. EDIT: I get basically the same results with DropBox. Can anyone help me out with this? Ideally, I'd like to get it out in raw text so that I can share it in the body of a post here in the DJ Thread, or in another thread on Reddit. Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Nov 28, 2022 |
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Nov 28, 2022 21:01
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tuyop posted:Just change the file extension to .txt This doesn't work, just yields the raw HTML code. Flipperwaldt posted:Try copy pasting the cells straight from excel into a flat text editor for possibly a tab separated text (libre office calc does this, I don't have excel to test). Or save as csv and throw it into an online csv to fixed width converter to get something that might work in a post if you use the fixed tags. Hmm, getting closer. What I/O settings should I use? I tried the fixed tags and it just spat out a broken table. EDIT: OK, an online CSV converter spits out a .txt file that opens in Finder looking good! But not in a post. Am I using the 'fixed' tags wrong? Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Nov 28, 2022 |
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Nov 28, 2022 22:21
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Flipperwaldt posted:Yeah I'm sorry, fixed tags don't force a line length, code tags should be better. As far as output options goes, it depends on what the fixed width converter takes as input. Comma separated, strings in double quotes seems fairly standard. Can't really say from here though. Code tags worked! Thank you so much!!! EDIT: Lmao, viewing the .txt file in Drive still breaks it. Whatever, at least it downloads fine. Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Nov 28, 2022 |
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Nov 28, 2022 22:37
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Not sure if there's a 'small medical questions' thread that this question would be more appropriate for (I skimmed The Goon Doctor a bit and didn't see one), so here goes. Is a semi-blocked nostril a more serious problem than it sounds? Many years ago I had my nose broken, and while doctors re-broke it in the hospital to set it properly, the cast fell off and I don't think it really ever healed properly. To this day my right nostril feels a bit blocked, not completely but it is uncomfortable, and if I close the other nostril and try to breathe only through the right one, it's definitely more laboured than the inverse. I've been going through some various medical examinations in the past year for depression, fatigue and some other things. They made me do a sleep study, and while it wasn't really what we were looking for, apparently I have 'mild' sleep apnea. I've been wondering if the nostril thing is a factor.
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Nov 29, 2022 19:02
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I'm trying to picture the type of rube who would fall for that lordship scam and my mind's eye sees a guy in a fedora laminating himself a new nametag and informing his coworkers at GameStop that "you have to call me Lord now  "
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Nov 29, 2022 22:57
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There's a discussion in the Schad Thread about buying old GPUs from defunct Bitcoin miners and it got me curious. I don't know much about computers except for what I needed to know to juice up my Mac as an audio (and occasional video) editing machine. Why do we use GPUs for graphics rendering? Why is it a discrete piece of hardware separate from the rest of the motherboard? I've asked this vaguely before and closest thing to a response I got was "turns out GPUs are better for processing video than CPUs," but I don't really know why. Why don't we see other components made out to be so important? I mean, as someone who works with audio I'm familiar with 'external soundcards' (audio interfaces) being a thing, some of the more heavy-duty professional-tier stuff actually does come in the form of a PCI card, but it's my understanding that the bulk of the work is still being handled by the CPU. Is there a historical reason in the industry that video cards are such a big thing? I feel like there's a good video primer to watch on this stuff but I wouldn't know where to start.
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Nov 30, 2022 20:20
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Fascinating stuff, thanks all! I can sort of see why they've been co-opted by Bitcoin jabronis, given that information.
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Nov 30, 2022 21:08
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I've been reading and watching some pop science videos about mathematics lately, not sure why because it's always been a weak subject for me - barely having passed in highschool and not giving a poo poo at the time - but I do find it fascinating. Specifically, I've been wanting to learn more about the Fourier Transform, maybe one of if not the most elegant and revolutionary equations ever devised. That's the good thing about some of these videos; the way they teach and use visual aids is something I never knew, and the math still loses me sometimes but the way it's presented is still relatable. But I'm stuck on something with wrapping my head around Integrals. One or two of the videos I've watched, and rewound, and watched again, imply to me that measuring the area under a curve is essentially a matter of quantization: You're drawing a bunch of rectangles with heights averaged along the curve (I'm probably butchering the lexicon here, sorry, bear with me), so no matter how many times you subdivide things you're still effectively estimating to some degree - like audiophile nuts say, 'staircases instead of waves', but as ridiculous as that is in an audio context, I thought the purity of absolute mathematics would require some much higher degree of precision. Does this quantization mean we can't actually estimate the exact area of a circle, or under a curve? I guess where I'm lost is that so many of these videos that talk about measuring a frequency spectrum to extract all of the harmonics from a signal, I can't really wrap my head around how many 'slices' of a complex waveform are being taken, is it infinite? How does the integral function work? Again I apologize for my layman's nomenclature here.
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Dec 4, 2022 09:47
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Thanks for all the replies to my math(s) question! As I said I'm a turbo layman who wishes I had paid more attention in high school Functions class. I will definitely read up on Limits as well, I figure there are some good mathematics channels to peruse for this stuff. And I'll take further questions to the Math Thread. Thanks again!
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Dec 5, 2022 00:41
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I want to lend my PS4 to a friend so they can play Stray. This is simply a matter of physically lending it to them, right? They won't turn it on and connect it to their network to find that they've got to input my account password to access my games?
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Dec 10, 2022 02:09
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This video got me thinking: https://i.imgur.com/KGFrbzg.mp4 How does speed scale with vehicle size? I remember seeing posts about slot car racing and people commenting on it that if the cars were scaled up to life-size, their speed would be ludicrous. I can't remember the rationale behind it or what the numbers were.
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Dec 11, 2022 02:01
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Not sure if there's a Canadian Telecom thread this would be more appropriate, but do ISPs and subsidiaries like TekSavvy throttle bandwidth for late/failed bill payments? I've been more than a bit late on a bill, and just paid most of it this morning. Ever since mid-late afternoon, it's been inordinately slow.
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Dec 14, 2022 02:00
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Instagram question: In my desktop browser on Instagram I can see that a friend posted a Story, but when I click on it to view it disappears. Nobody else's stories are doing this, they load fine. If I try to go to the app on my phone and view this friend's page, it doesn't even show that they've posted a new story. Does this indicate that I'm blocked from viewing this particular story, or is it more likely to be a glitch?
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Dec 15, 2022 01:35
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Helios Grime posted:This is only a guess, but how close of a friend are you with them? There is an option to only share stories with a "Close Friends" list. So maybe this doesn't correctly work on the desktop app (which isn't surprising) and shows you that they have a story, but then blocks you from seeing it as you aren't on the list. It might be this; I'm aware of the 'close friends' filter. But I've never seen this glitch before. It's definitely not helping my anxiety, hahaha. Thanks though!
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Dec 15, 2022 19:48
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Is there a utility out there to extract text from .m3u/.m3u8 playlist files? Every time I make a new DJ mix I've been writing out the tracklist into an .rtf by hand and I'd like to save a little bit of time on that. There is a workaround I can think of but it's clunky: Re-importing the playlist into Traktor from Rekordbox. Traktor allows you to spit out playlists as... .html files, I think, and you can extract the plain text from there. But for some reason Traktor takes ages to open on my machine, and I'd rather not end up with a convoluted mess of playlists in a software I only use for rapid track cataloguing anyway. If there's a piece of software that can take the .m3u plists and turn them directly into text that'd be dope.
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Dec 17, 2022 00:37
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Killingyouguy! posted:It's been a really long time since I used a playlist file but aren't they plaintext files that are just a bunch of file paths under the hood? Like can't you open them directly in notepad++? Would that be sufficient? Interesting. I gave this a shot and this is what it looked like in TextEdit:  Looks the same in Excel, with the whole filepath for each song. When I try to open it in Word, it gives me options for different encoders, is this in the right direction?
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Dec 17, 2022 00:59
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Inceltown posted:I assume you're running on a mac there. If you're OK with the command line then this should do the trick. Obviously change the file names to be what is relevant. Forgive me, I'm not very familiar with using Terminal. I can drag and drop the .m3u8 file into this prompt, right? Like, type up to '{print $NF}' then drop the file in so I don't have to type out its full path? And then just create a 'tracklist.txt' at the end of the prompt? I tried this and found the file it created - it removed the filepaths but there's still a lot of "#EXTINF:272" for example before the track names.
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Dec 17, 2022 01:58
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Inceltown posted:Do you even want the 03 4A bits like in Neurons there or would one of the following work better? The first one is perfect! I'm only looking for 'ARTIST - TRACK TITLE' format as that's the way I've been writing them out by hand up to now. The '4A' etc. is Camelot Wheel notation for mixing harmonically, and so it's baked into the 'track title' field; if there's no way to remove this that's fine. I tried going back into Traktor and spitting out the plist as .html, last time I was trying to do this I used some sort of HTML to CSV converter in order to post the plist here on SA and in a Reddit post. It mostly works, although as I said having to go back into Traktor is a mote irritating, and I still haven't found a way to turn these tables (lol) into plain text that retains its format. Thanks for helping me out, means a lot.
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Dec 17, 2022 04:46
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Again forgive me, what part of that do I need to type in Terminal to extract the Artist/Title fields to plain text as shown?
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Dec 17, 2022 15:28
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Yeah, I'm not familiar enough with any of this to do anything meaningful with that expression that would be any more expedient than just manually cutting out all the code. That playlist tool from reddit is close! Unfortunately it thinks the Camelot notation is the Artist field so it just outputs "4A - Supreme." A little frustrating because it would be exactly what I'm looking for otherwise.
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Dec 17, 2022 17:35
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Hmm, still no joy.thepopmonster posted:The below is completely untested but it should, theoretically, work. I tried this in Terminal and it returned some sort of syntax error, maybe I copied it incorrectly? code:quote:If it's not doing that, the alternative is to customize the playlist tool. It looks like it's hitting the filenames to get the info because your software isn't generating anything else but #EXTINF. If you download the zip and extract the files, open main.js with TextEdit, you'll see a section of code that looks like this at line 34 or so: Tried this in both Safari and Chrome and I couldn't click the 'Convert' button. Bizarre.
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Dec 18, 2022 01:29
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thepopmonster posted:The single quotes in the split should be double. Too much Oracle. Bingo! This outputs Artist - Title almost perfectly, there are one or two errors but otherwise tight tight TIGHT!!! Inceltown posted:You're now getting into the point where edge cases are going to give you grief without someone writing something reasonably robust. Yeah, I can see how a special character would break any of these expressions. TooMuchAbstraction posted:At some point you should ask yourself if you'd be done already if you'd just buckled down and done everything by hand. Yeah, I ended up writing the plist out by hand this afternoon. This is still very useful for future mixes though! Thanks everyone 
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Dec 18, 2022 03:14
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fewer octopuses
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Dec 25, 2022 03:50
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While we're on old games, I've been thinking about an old space game I used to play on a buddy's Macintosh Plus. It was two-dimensional, and black&white. Your spaceship would fly around the field avoiding different types of enemies and collecting crystals, and when you collected all of them a 'gate' would open at one end of the map that you'd travel through to proceed to the next level. I might be conflating another game, but I seem to remember the different enemies had names, and one type was called a 'Husket'.
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Dec 28, 2022 03:54
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| # ¿ May 18, 2024 14:26 |
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kedo posted:I feel like I read something online (so therefore it is Fact) that .22s have been used for a lot of assassinations partially because they’re a small enough round that they penetrate the body but don’t have enough energy to exit the body. The bullet stays inside and bounces around and fucks stuff up worse than if it were to just cruise right through. This is almost certainly a myth that was popularized by a Joe Pesci movie (Goodfellas, I think). What are the medical sensors called that are put on your chest/stomach and look like a coiled telephone cable? I did a sleep study recently and I was thinking of all the sensors they put on me; I've seen these depicted in polygraph/lie detector scenes in movies also. There are usually two coiled cables, one high on your chest and one closer to your waist. Are these heart monitors of some sort, and how do they work?
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Jan 2, 2023 12:09
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