Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
I think most gamers would have been perfectly happy with a trip to the Borealis just for the closure of the thing, even if the gameplay brought little to nothing new to the table other than some nice new visuals and arctic setpieces.
Instead we got Half Life: Alyx which was a stunning albeit niche experience in the same old City 17, which retconned Episode 2’s cliffhanger with another, different cliffhanger. For fuck’s sake, Gabe.
My account is so old I have (or had, before they normalized the format) a four digit steam ID. I “owned” Half Life 2 for like four months before it released thanks to getting a code free in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro back in the day. For a short and glorious flash of time in the summer of 2004, I was guaranteed a copy of the most hotly anticipated game ever, even though nobody could play it yet, and also owned an example of the fastest video card on the planet. Damned if I didn’t mow a fuckton of lawns and reinstall Windows and Outlook an a horde of septuagenarians’ computers to afford that card.
And no, they do not stop asking about your age.
Neat, but.
Even HL: Alyx left us with just as much of a cliffhanger as the end of HL2 Episode 2…
You fuck with enough industrial automation equipment and you absolutely will find yourself needing those 40 pin IDE cables, not to mention 25 pin (ugh) serial cables, and BNC.
Still.
Technology in some sectors changes very slowly.
Typically they are – for two of the same reasons, first being that most of the “salt alternatives” in use, the original “salt” in this case being sodium chloride, are also chlorides (potassium or calcium chloride, usually) and it’s that chlorine ion that’s corrosive. They also all turn the meltwater into an electrolyte, forming an easy electrical connection between the various metals in your vehicle’s parts and dramatically accelerating galvanic corrosion.
Technically any compound composed of positive and negatively charged ions that balance out to a net neutral is a salt, chemically speaking, and by definition they are compounds, i.e. held together with weak ionic bonds via their electrostatic charges and not molecules held together with strong covalent bonds. This means they like to liberate their constituent ions easily, allowing whatever-it-is they’re composed of to readily react with something else.
TL;DR: Pretty much all salts, not just sodium chloride salt salt, are corrosion promoters.
Correct, any instant (or interrupt, if you have cards from expansions old enough to still have them) will work. Fireball is a sorcery and is slower, so instants/interrupts will resolve first.
You also have the potential to be scooped if you do not win the coin toss and don’t get the first turn. There are tons of single cost interrupts and various fast tweaky creatures that can deal small amounts of damage on the first turn, and all your opponent has to do is shave off one single point of life from you and this won’t work.
If you draw this hand, your opponent has zero ways to respond, and the game is no longer fun.
Of course, that’s the joke. The only winning move is not to play.
There is a meta-joke in that there are a few ways to respond to this, but only if you know it’s coming. @[email protected] responded with one. If your opponent also has a way to get fast mana out, a simple Lightning Bolt will also do it if it’s inserted between your Channel and Fireball. Or anything that counters your fireball, which will leave you standing there with your pants down around your ankles, 1 life, and probably an empty hand.
Then the meta-meta-joke is if you are known to be packing this combo, people around you will deliberately structure their decks around countering your stupid 1 turn win (if they will even allow you to employ it at all, given that Black Lotus is very, thoroughly, extremely banned specifically because of this combo), but this requires making sacrifices to their usual strategy and then you can show up unannounced with a different deck instead…
Others beat me to the punch, but see my other comment here:
This is a first turn win if you draw all four of these cards in your opening hand.
Black Lotus and Mox Ruby can be put down on your opening turn, and since they are not lands you are not limited to playing just one of them. If you are poor you can substitute the ruby with a regular old mountain. Basically, I only employ the ruby here to firmly illustrate that I am indeed an asshole.
If you are poor, cheeky, and lucky you can replace the Black Lotus with 3 Lotus Petals and still theoretically draw all the cards you need to do this with your opening hand.
Normally M:tG games start with both players at 20 life. But it doesn’t matter if you play some weird format where everyone has more; all you do is sacrifice all but 1 of your life and dump it into fireball plus the one left over green mana from the Lotus. As long as both players have the same life count or you don’t have less life then your opponent for any reason, you win.
Realistically, just being able to show people this hand will discourage them from engaging you at all in any type of no-holds-barred play. They’ll hide behind their silly Modern or Commander formats or whatever, where Black Lotus is banned and Channel is either restricted or banned.
Wimps.
My cable box of doom – boxes, I have eight of them – are categorized by overall type of cable and everything is bagged for tangle-free storage.
I know what I have and I know approximately where I have it. And often enough, I do indeed need to produce a specific able on demand, albeit usually just to give away to other people who are in a bind with some damn fool device or another.
Retro video game cables in one crate, “modern” (like, PS3 and up) in another, legacy and modern computer data cables in two more crates, video cables in one crate, audio cables in one crate, AC power cables in one crate, and assorted DC power supplies and wall warts in the last crate.
When it comes to old junk cables, I am not fucking around.
Every time this comic gets reposted it gives me an opportunity to, in turn, post this.
I have had multiple people claim this at me this over the last few days and when challenged thus far nobody has actually be able to articulate how he or for that matter anyone else in his entourage plans to do this, especially in light of Republicans consistently and steadfastly working against any and all minimum wage increases at least since Nixon.
So, the ball’s in your court.
“Trump will raise wages.”
Okay, smart guy, how?
Ask the Filipinos, who are the ones who both invented and named it. “Butterfly knife” is a western neologism for it.
For mysterious undiagnosable seemingly hardware related issues, the power supply is always a good place to start.
Be aware that Dell has a nasty habit of using “proprietary” power supplies that have the pins switched around on the ATX connector, and thus won’t work unless you either buy one of their stupid OEM supplies or get a pinout chart and rearrange the pins on your new supply before you plug it in. I don’t know if that model is one of the ones that does this, so you might want to check first before you potentially smoke your board.
Every once in a while my machine requires cleaning, not just reseating, the RAM and/or video card edge connectors and slots for no readily identifiable reason. I have no idea how any kind of crud or oxidation manages to accumulate in there given that my PC never moves, it’s not in an especially humid environment nor one with temperature fluctuations, and as far as I can tell the air in here is acceptably clean. But it does nevertheless, and when it gets into that mode it will randomly reboot or blue screen with no rhyme or reason until I remember to hose everything down with CRC contact cleaner. I have to do this once about every 2-3 years. (Yes, I have had this build long enough for this to happen more than once…)
No, because that would be an easily overcome hurdle by just adding a little extra silicon in each unit to ensure that it meets or exceeds the advertised capacity if the manufacturer were not in fact actually interested in being deliberately misleading. This thing appears to kind of be an exception, but even then they’re allergic to just outright stating the capacity.
If the manufacturers were interested in being honest with these types of things the “size class” would not so often invariably, unfailingly, result in a generous rounding up of the stated figure rather than rounding down.
TV’s are always smaller than their advertised “size class.” Appliances are always a lesser capacity than their advertised “size class.” Cameras always have fewer pixels than their “megapixel class.” Storage media is always smaller capacity than its advertised “size class.”
(And this is before we even get into the whole megabyte-gigabyte-terabyte/mebibyte-gigibyte-tebibyte debate.)
[BFG Division Intensifies]
That, or even street drugs are so expensive now no one can afford them. Damn inflation…
I would have left a thumbtack on every chair, and a bucket of whitewash balanced over every door.
Speak for yourself. I have a full set of chainmail. Have at you, ruffian.