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two fish posted:Silly question: remember how with PC games back in the 90s they'd sometimes come with phone numbers for hint lines? Did any of you ever call one? What was the experience like? Not a PC game so this might be a bit outside the scope you’re looking for, but I had opportunity to call Nintendo Power Hotline a few times. twice it was really good and helpful with whatever super popular game I called about, but they knew fuckall about Clash at Demonhead. Edit: alnilam posted:Related question: You would often send SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) to such situations, often with some cash/a check alongside. I believe that was the case with MST 3K, my father was in that one at least and he wouldn’t usually be inclined to even do that much but he really liked MST 3k. Grassy Knowles fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Nov 9, 2023 |
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Nov 9, 2023 20:25
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alnilam posted:In the end credits of MST3K they always had a PO Box you could write to to be in a fan club i guess. They didn't say what to write to it though, just gave the address. I presume you were just supposed to send them your name and address. Just a note with your address saying you wanted to be in the info club. They mailed you back various odds and ends like a membership card, a glossy photo of the cast, and the catalog of show merchandise. I also faintly recall there was an amusingly crappy build-it-yourself paper model of Tom Servo. But mostly, you got subscribed to the Satellite News newsletter (in old-fashioned analog paper). You can ask in the MST3K thread and a bunch of people will have all the detail you want, probably with pictures of everything. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3784246
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Nov 9, 2023 22:17
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Badger of Basra posted:Have the traditional Christmas and Thanksgiving menus in the US always overlapped so much? Like it’s basically the exact same food except maybe you have ham on Christmas instead of turkey. Most people in the USA don't prepare fancy meals at all often, so they have a limited repertoire to pull from. Having said that, I'd say the two holidays have different vibes. Thanksgiving is about comfort food, Christmas is much more about being fancy.
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Nov 9, 2023 22:53
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I bought a case of energy drinks from Amazon and inside were these seed things. Are they seeds? Do I need to be concerned?
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Nov 10, 2023 04:27
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I've been working on decluttering, and have three old USB2 external platter (i.e. spinning rust) drives that I have no use for any more. They're 500GB, 1TB, and 3TB in size. Are there places I can donate them or something? Also, recommendations for tools for securely erasing them? I've formatted them all, which should deter all but the most motivated data hunters, but you never know...
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Nov 10, 2023 05:03
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I've been working on decluttering, and have three old USB2 external platter (i.e. spinning rust) drives that I have no use for any more. They're 500GB, 1TB, and 3TB in size. Are there places I can donate them or something? Also, recommendations for tools for securely erasing them? I've formatted them all, which should deter all but the most motivated data hunters, but you never know... local maker spaces/buy nothing groups/facebook marketplace will also likely have a use  i don’t know of an org that would want to trust their data to an HDD of questionable provenance, where in the usage lifecycle it is can’t be accurately determined. I’d feel quite lucky though to fall into a 3TB external, and you can easily give that feeling onto another with those answers.Darik's Boot And Nuke (DBAN) is the overkill-level wipe you want.
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Nov 10, 2023 05:14
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Grassy Knowles posted:local maker spaces/buy nothing groups/facebook marketplace will also likely have a use Thanks! I guess I should've figured that "put it on Craigslist or similar for free" would probably work well! I'll give that a shot tomorrow. Re: DBAN, though, as I understand it that requires me to plug the drive in, boot into the DBAN bootable system, then identify the drive and nuke it and not any of my actual precious data-containing drives? I have a lot of drives plugged into my machine, and no spare machine with fewer drives on it. I'm scared of mis-identifying them. 
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Nov 10, 2023 05:22
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Thanks! I guess I should've figured that "put it on Craigslist or similar for free" would probably work well! I'll give that a shot tomorrow. Boot into DBAN without attaching the drive, document the drives, shut down, attach, boot into DBAN again
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Nov 10, 2023 05:26
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Grassy Knowles posted:Boot into DBAN without attaching the drive, document the drives, shut down, attach, boot into DBAN again yeaaaaahhh, I guess (thanks, that sounds fiddly but entirely workable)
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Nov 10, 2023 05:45
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:yeaaaaahhh, I guess Or just don't bother because what incredible secrets were you keeping on that drive that anyone is going to be motivated to even attempt to dig up?
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Nov 10, 2023 06:39
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Tiggum posted:Or just don't bother because what incredible secrets were you keeping on that drive that anyone is going to be motivated to even attempt to dig up? Tax forms, pay stubs, bill documents, passwords/logins, contact lists, personal pictures, etc. Stuff people keep on hard drives that gets dug up and used against them or to steal their identity. At least, I assume.
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Nov 10, 2023 07:13
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Unless you're nationally important and there is reason to suspect the drive was yours, no one is gonna do anything to recover data beyond what a formatting will erase. It's possible, sure, but there's so many better ways of stealing identities and in 90% of cases you're getting pirated stuff and porn from second hand drives.
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Nov 10, 2023 08:09
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Endymion FRS MK1 posted:I bought a case of energy drinks from Amazon and inside were these seed things. Are they seeds? Do I need to be concerned? It's rice op More than half the world population eats it on a daily basis It's in your package because whoever you bought stuff from is either too cheap to buy a box of desiccant packages or too lazy to empty used boxes before using them again
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Nov 10, 2023 09:55
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two fish posted:Silly question: remember how with PC games back in the 90s they'd sometimes come with phone numbers for hint lines? Did any of you ever call one? What was the experience like? Yep! I got stuck at the end of space quest 5 and it was driving 15 year old me bonkers. It was basically an interactive voice recording where you'd call, and it'd say "for space quest dial one, for king's quest dial two" etc until you narrowed down into the series and part of the game you were up to, then it would tell you the answer to the puzzle you were stuck on. I think it only cost me a few dollars to get the answer I needed which I considered to be good value at the time.
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Nov 10, 2023 10:42
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EricBauman posted:It's rice op It was Amazon so definitely the latter
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Nov 10, 2023 12:03
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Recently I was listening to an internet radio station and they played this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM5DOSC0jUo ... about 70 seconds in it sounded exactly like a Marilyn Manson song and a Static X song mashed together. But this song is from 1989. That blew my mind. I feel like I just discovered the missing link or something. But obviously I'm just not in the know. Why does this song sound so 90s? Was it the starting point for something? Edit: Also I know the alarm sound at the start is from The Thing. wash bucket fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Nov 11, 2023 |
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Nov 11, 2023 04:15
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Ministry was a big influence on a lot of 90s bands.
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Nov 11, 2023 05:02
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ultrafilter posted:Ministry was a big influence on a lot of 90s bands. Well sure. I'm picking up on that. But it's such a 90s 1.0 sound that I can't believe it's not more well known. Or is it well known and I just didn't know?
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Nov 11, 2023 05:18
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ministry wasn't mainstream or anything but if you knew indie or underground at all you knew ministry. jourgensen's been around since the late 70s/early 80s.
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Nov 11, 2023 05:26
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wash bucket posted:Well sure. I'm picking up on that. But it's such a 90s 1.0 sound that I can't believe it's not more well known. Or is it well known and I just didn't know? Ministry was pretty big, at least among metalheads. It was the one industrial band everyone knew. I remember Just One Fix playing regularly on MTV.
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Nov 11, 2023 05:42
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Ministry was pretty well-known as underground bands go but I suspect a lot of their influence on the 90s scene was through Nine Inch Nails.
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Nov 11, 2023 05:50
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Ministry is playing in my town later this month. I've never heard of them.
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Nov 11, 2023 05:54
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lobsterminator posted:Ministry was pretty big, at least among metalheads. It was the one industrial band everyone knew. I remember Just One Fix playing regularly on MTV. Just One Fix sounds like Du Haste. Is Ministry in some sort of 6 degrees of Keven Bacon situation? wash bucket fucked around with this message at 06:34 on Nov 11, 2023 |
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Nov 11, 2023 06:11
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credburn posted:Ministry is playing in my town later this month. I've never heard of them. i hear their lead is a revolting cock
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Nov 11, 2023 07:17
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So maybe not as small question but I haven't found a better place for it: I am wondering when was the last time that European monarchs had a feudal-style army. Many are still the nominal commanders in chief of the national army. They may be the honorary colonel-in-chief of several regiments. But I mean a military force of whatever size that owed allegiance to them not as the head of the national government but as the duke of X or count of Y or another subsidiary title. (In a ridiculous but hopefully clear example from fiction, Joffrey Baratheon was king of Westeros and could summon the nominal national force composed of Lannister and Tyrel armies & levies. But he was also head of house Baratheon which had its own army and several tiny houses with their own forces in the Crownlands sworn directly to him). I am particularly interested in the British monarch but any others would also be interesting. And if anyone knows both A) the last time they actually had a standing force, even if just one regiment B) when they retained the right to summon a levy in a way that would likely have been obeyed, not just a hypothetical quirk.
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Nov 11, 2023 13:04
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I mean, for Denmark, that's 1848, the year we abolished absolute monarchy. Up to that point, the king could tell the army to invade Sweden whenever he wanted, even though it usually didn't go well. I don't know if that's what you're after, but I imagine it's the same in most post-monarchy countries.
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Nov 11, 2023 13:26
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Bright Bart posted:So maybe not as small question but I haven't found a better place for it: I know that England and France started their standing armies in the mid-late 17th century and the other major powers weren’t far off. Before that the monarchs had started forming personal guards and the feudalistic way still kinda existed, but it was less lordly duties and more the king commissioning a nobleman to go fetch him some troops for a party.
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Nov 11, 2023 14:34
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BonHair posted:I mean, for Denmark, that's 1848, the year we abolished absolute monarchy. Up to that point, the king could tell the army to invade Sweden whenever he wanted, even though it usually didn't go well. I don't know if that's what you're after, but I imagine it's the same in most post-monarchy countries. Not exactly what I'm getting at but still very interesting! I sometimes forget how recent the Napoleonic Wars were. And there's of course Russia if you count her Tsar as a European-style monarch. But 1848 is way later for absolute monarchy than I would have imagined. Still, while that army might have pledged loyalty to the Danish Crown and even the current king of Denmark, they were the Danish national army not the king's personal military force. dupersaurus posted:Before that the monarchs had started forming personal guards and the feudalistic way still kinda existed, but it was less lordly duties and more the king commissioning a nobleman to go fetch him some troops for a party. Yeah I know that this retinue of retinues system both existed and that the ability to actually get that nobleman to comply varied. Technically the monarch was overlord of all the dukes, who certainly had forces of their own. But aside from being the king of England they may have been the count of Hertfordshire (they weren't but just an example) and that meant the Hertfordshire regiment. Or a company of archers as the baron of some barony in Hertfordshire. Or maybe a regiment directly maintained by the king as a nobleman. I'm wondering how long this lasted.
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Nov 11, 2023 16:03
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Bright Bart posted:So maybe not as small question but I haven't found a better place for it: I think one of the latest ones may be the pope’s Corsican Guard, technically disbanded in 1870. However, a lot of this depends a great deal on the definitions involved. State power and the influence of individual monarchs on national affairs are very complicated and like, connected concepts, particularly when you have such a huge range of governments just in “feudal Europe”, let alone around the world. For instance, modern heads of state have pretty close control of some parts of their military. In the US context, you have the nuclear triad under essentially direct control of the president. Does that count as a private levy? In other countries, regiments of special forces may be under direct command of parts of the equivalent of the executive, though secrecy is thick here and modern militaries have command structures that are quite complicated compared to King Arthur trick or treating for knights. Edit: having seen your follow up, many regiments were raised by British nobles at least as late as the First World War in the case of Canadian infantry regiments. Of course this isn’t Gault’s private army exactly, but whether levies ever worked like a private sovereign army is debatable. tuyop fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Nov 11, 2023 |
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Nov 11, 2023 16:13
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Isn't the Vatican Swiss Guard still technically directly serving the Pope? The issue of whether they would actually attack anyone is essentially the same as in 1600, it's down to whether the real commander, and a fair bit down the chain really, actually feel like doing it and how much they care for the Pope/king.
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Nov 11, 2023 16:47
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Why do they measure stuff in a half-life? Does a half-life of 10,000 years mean that it'll actually last 20,000?
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Nov 12, 2023 01:40
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Leave posted:Why do they measure stuff in a half-life? Does a half-life of 10,000 years mean that it'll actually last 20,000? To answer your second question first, no. The thing about radioactive decay is that it doesn't happen linearly, but rather in an asymptotic way, approaching zero but theoretically never reaching it (realistically I believe it does reach zero but it usually takes an extremely long time in ordinary cases (it actually takes a very short time for certain highly unstable isotopes/elements)). So a sample of U-238 or whatever will take X time for half of it to decay, and then another same X time for that to halfway decay, and so on. El Jeffe fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Nov 12, 2023 |
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Nov 12, 2023 01:47
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Leave posted:Why do they measure stuff in a half-life? Does a half-life of 10,000 years mean that it'll actually last 20,000? Radioactive decay is random. The half-life is only valid as a statistical measurement, but fortunately we're talking about random actions at the level of individual atoms. If you say "on average, after 10 years this atom will have a 50% chance of decaying", and then apply that statement to a billion atoms, you'll come very close to exactly correct. And no, it wouldn't be 20k years. After 10k years, half the atoms have decayed. After another 10k years, half of the remaining radioactive atoms have decayed. And so on. The amount of time that has passed before now has no bearing on whether or not a particular radioactive atom will decay in the next span of time. Another way to look at it is "each atom has (e.g.) a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of decaying in any given second" and then just running that coin flip over and over again until it finally comes up heads. TooMuchAbstraction fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Nov 12, 2023 |
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Nov 12, 2023 01:55
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Just to make it more clear. Year 0: 100% of atoms Year 20,000: 50% of atoms Year 40,000: 25% of atoms Year 60,000: 12.5% of atoms Year 80,000: 6.25% of atoms. Year 100,000: 3.125% of atoms etc.
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Nov 12, 2023 02:45
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Is there a way to mass-archive marketplace messages on Facebook? I've got way too many to do it one-by-one, but there are also a few of them that are unread and always give me a "new message" notification that I want to get rid of.
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Nov 12, 2023 17:24
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How can I clean strains from a mattress? I followed this video as best as I could, but I feel like the stains have only been diluted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMs5IMQTiJw I only need to get rid of stains so I didn't bathe the whole thing in baking soda.
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Nov 12, 2023 20:16
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paradoxGentleman posted:How can I clean strains from a mattress? I followed this video as best as I could, but I feel like the stains have only been diluted: same way you get stains outta other materials, with the added consideration of the mattress having more than just the surface that could hold stain-causing agents (you may have stains return over time as they rise back up from your body heat/sweat/etc) and with all these post-Space-age mattress types, YMMV (consider what the stain causing agents are and work on them based on that. are they oil? are they blood? etc)
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Nov 12, 2023 20:27
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Also consider just slapping a fitted sheet over the mattress and forgetting about it.
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Nov 12, 2023 20:47
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Just embrace the beige circles and remember the good times.
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Nov 12, 2023 21:01
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I'm looking for full sets by female comediennes I can watch on YouTube while drifting off to sleep. I see to have gone through the slim pickings of using search terms like "full show female comic" with the >20 min filter. I found Liz Miele along the way and a few others. The rest for the first dozen pages or so are ~20 minute shows, compilations, and old men. Those are the majority of results anyways. Dudes like Matt Rife also work. i.e. young & witty; 99% of the reason I'm looking for women is to avoid listening to some old dude talk about how you can't talk about anything anymore. (And, I'm reticent to be a choosing beggar but I'll say I absolutely cannot stand when comics play the piano or sing during their shows. It's almost never, ever funny to me. I know exactly one exception and that's Tim Minchin's song Prejudice. ) Bright Bart fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Nov 13, 2023 |
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Nov 13, 2023 00:12
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