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The people who caused the craze around old coins in auctions back in the '80s are largely the same people behind the craze of old video games now.

2 hours ago, pong said:

During his 19-year career, Shaq attempted 22 3-pointer, and made one.

Oof.

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The Brood War and Starcraft II player Greg "IdrA" Fields is considered one of the best, if not the best, non-Korean players in the early days of SC2. However, he was also famously bad-mannered (we're talking "I hope you get cancer"-tier BM in ladder games, or "fuck you"s in official tournament games), a notorious balance whiner, and known for a weak mentality, surrendering games earlier than he needed to. For that last point, there are two especially famous examples:

  • In a match against IdrA, Chris "HuK" Loranger, a Protoss player, was at a clear army composition disadvantage, with no sufficient answer to IdrA's powerful flying armada. However, before engaging in a big battle, he used one of his unit's Hallucination ability to create a bunch of fake Void Rays (a flying unit with, you guessed it, a strong anti-air attack) as a desperation play - normally this ability is used to scout or occasionally to absorb some enemy fire, since those fakes don't deal any damage. However, IdrA fell for it and GG'ed (well, probably left without GG) out of a game that he would've easily won otherwise. HuK, being a pal, decided to inform IdrA of his mistake at the start of the next game of their series, leading to the following ingame chat:
    • LiquidHuK: u realize
    • LiquidHuK: most of that army
    • EGIdrA: fuck off
    • LiquidHuK: was halluc
    • LiquidHuK: LOL
    • LiquidHuK: just saying
    • LiquidHuK: u werent loss
  • A bit later, IdrA faced off against the Korean Terran Mun "MMA" Seong-Won, in which MMA made a terrible, terrible mistake: The map they were playing on featured a couple expansions with super-valuable minerals that were blocked from being mined by some breakable rocks. MMA set up a couple of siege tanks, and right-clicked them... on his own Command Center, and because he did not keep his screen to watch a couple rocks blow up, he could not tell them to stop shooting his CC before it blew up. In desperation, MMA took an aggressive posture, but IdrA just swarmed and overran the Terran army, the (US-american) crowd went wild... and IdrA surrenders. Y'see, MMA flew a handful of basic Marines into one of IdrA's base, hoping to kill some drones (the Zerg's workers). In response, IdrA pulled his drones aside, sent some defenses, and then forgot that he pulled his drones aside. Which means that IdrA thought that his entire worker line at that base was killed, he didn't know about the blown-up CC, and so he assumed that MMA had an unsurmountable economic advantage.It's worth a watch, really (this only being the last 100 seconds of the game). The crowd slowly realising what's happening, and Day[9] on the commentary desperately hiding his amusement is quite something.

On the other side of the spectrum, "Fantasy GG timing" is still occasionally being used when a player stays in a hopeless game for way too long. "Fantasy" not as in "delusion", but as in Jung "FanTaSy" Myung-hoon, a retired Korean Terran player known for this kind of behaviour.

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The length, width, and height of a standard Minecraft block (stone, sand, dirt, etc.) is 1 meter on all accounts. A chunk in Minecraft, at least in terms of length and width (height is a whole different ballgame that isn't necessary for the fact here), is 16 by 16 blocks, so it's 16 meters for length and width.

Player visibility is Minecraft is also determined by a setting that raises or lowers the chunks that you can see/load at any given time. So if a player set their render distance to, say, 10 chunks, they would be able to see 160 meters in all directions.

Now, as for how far the human eye can see, I have no earthly idea (I think it has something to do with your height/position relative to the horizon; so if you were higher up, you could see farther out), but if you were to stare out at the ocean from the beach, it's about 3 miles. Being generous, let's say that was 5 kilometers, or 5000 meters. That would be the equivalent of 312.5 Minecraft chunks. 

What I'm insinuating here is that the human render distance on a beach staring out at the ocean is 312.5 Minecraft chunks.

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The short, comedic and tricky puzzle game, Helltaker, was made because the developer was sad that nobody shared his attraction to devils in business suits and he wanted to fix that problem.

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Liechtenstein has had no army since 1868, relying on a police force to maintiain peace within the country; the last soldier in the country died at the age of 95 in 1939.

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The Volkswagen Beetle has, shall we say, drawn significant inspiration from the Czech Tatra 97. In fact, Tatra sued Porsche for copyright violation, and Porsche was willing to pay up, but those lawsuits were shut down when the Nazis annexed Czechia. In addition, all production of the Tatra 97 was immediately shut down.

To add some irony, the Tatra itself was heavily based on ideas of a jewish engineer, Paul Jaray, a huge innovator for aerodynamics. Naturally, the Nazis were very adamant on erasing Jaray's hand in the development of their prestige project from the history books, and even after WW2, Jaray did not get the recognition he deserved for a long time.

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The Bearded Reedling is a small songbird which lives among the reeds of Europe. Formerly classified as a tit, it is not currently considered a close relative of other bird species. They are sexually dimorphic- females are pale orange while males are darker orange and have black stripes on their wings, tail, and face. Bearded Reedlings do not migrate, so to deal with the cold winter weather, they seasonally become puff.

Coming at you with roundest Bearded Reedling : r/aww

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The fourth German chancellor after WW2 was born as Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm. However, early during the Nazi's regime, he emigrated to Norway, to build up a centre of resistance against the Nazis there. During that time, he took the nom de guerre "Willy Brandt", which he then kept even after returning to Germany after 1945.

The Nazis revoked Brandt's citizenship in 1938, which made him officially stateless. In 1940, during the German occupation of Norway, Brandt was captured as a prisoner of war, but not recognized because he was wearing a Norwegian uniform. Thanks to that, he was released quickly and was able to escape to Sweden. There, he was officially granted the Norwegian citizenship by the Norwegian consulate. He regained his German citizenship in 1948.

Notably, conservative politicians and media tried to use Brandt's exile against him, even interpreting it as a form of treason. To amateurishly translate the Bavarian head of state F.J. Strauß: "One question should be allowed to be posed to Mr Brandt: What have you been doing outside for twelve years? We know what we did inside."

Not long before Brandt's death in 1992, Mikhail Gorbachev spontaneously tried to see him. However, when he announced himself via intercom as "Gorbachev", Brandt's wife assumed that this was a joke and refused to let him in.

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Speaking of Gorbatchev, he starred in a Pizza Hut commercial in 1997 and release an album of russian romantic ballads in 2008.

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David Walsh's "Garfield Minus Garfield" is exactly what the name suggests: Garfield strips with the titular cat, and everybody else except for Jon Arbuckle, removed. Without Garfield's snarky punchlines, these edits show Jon as depressed, pathetic, and occasionally more than a little crazy.

Interestingly enough, Garfield's creator Jim Davis actually really liked G-G, enough to not only allow, but also contribute to a paperback selection of G-G strips. Much to the surprise of David Walsh, who upon being contacted immediately assumed an incoming cease and desist.

G-G might also have been a precursor of the much more horrifying "I'm sorry, Jon" (named after the first really populare exasmple) or "Gorefield" meme: Garfield depicted not as a fat jolly orange cat, but as exeedingly horrifying, Cthulu-esk monstrosities, with Jon often being victimized but him/it in some capacity.

Bullets don't work, Jon

heaven is void of light, Jon

Jon where is my lasagna?

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Since I just had a little Tolkien on the brain:

Following Tolkien's own suggestion, in the German translation of LotR (and all the other Middle-earth writings), "Elf/Elves" has been translated to "Elb/Elben", an older form of the word. This is because Tolkien was worried that the anglicsm "Elf/Elfen" (even though it had been part of the German language for centuries at that point) would carry associations to more "cutesy" interpretations of elves, which he wanted to avoid.

The reason Tolkien even made suggestions to translators was that he absolutely loathed the earliest translations into Dutch and (especially) into Swedish, which caused him to write a Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings to avoid further misinterpretations. In fact, he hated the Swedish translation by Ã…ke Ohlmarks so much that when the Silmarillion was published in 1977, Tolkien's son Christopher only allowed a Swedish translation under the condition that Ohlmarks wouldn't be let anywhere near it.

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A very minor character in Star Wars, a drug dealer trying to sell space cocaine DEATH STICKS to Obi-Wan, was given the name Elan Sleazebaggano by George Lucas, although it's never mentioned in the film. Thinking that this might be a little too on the nose, later materials renamed him to Elan Sel'Sabagno.

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The late John Bain took his online nickname "TotalBiscuit" from the Discworld novel Carpe Jugulum, in which the main character Agnes Nitt muses over some men from her home country named Syphilidae Wilson, Yodel Lightley, and Total Bisuit.

The context: The first child of the king and queen of Lancre (a very small mountain kingdom, insignificant if it wasn't for its witches) was to be named Esmeralda Margaret. But because the queen was named "Magrat" thanks to a communicative mishap between her mother and the priest doing her naming ceremony, she added "note spelling" in her little paper for the naming priest.

Naturally, that results in the girl being named Esmeralda Margaret Note Spelling, and because there's not takesie-backsies with names in Lancre culture, she is stuck with that name. Sources: James What The Hell's That Cow Doing In Here "Moocow" Poorchick, and King My God He's Heavy the first. Agnes muses over those three names from the first paragraph with the implication that the king's loyal subjects might not even notice anything weird about the name.

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A follow-up to this previous post: Bach used the tune of Oh Haupt... ('Oh head full of blood and wounds') once in his Christmas Oratory, as well, for the hymn Wie soll ich dich empfangen? ('Ah! Lord, how shall I meet Thee'). My theological knowledge isn't advanced enough to fully interpret his intention with that, although I'd speculate that he saw Jesus's birth and death as two parts of one whole, or something to that effect.

More mundane is that Bach reused parts of earlier compositions (his own, that is) for the Christmas Oratory, something that was common practice at the time. For example, the opening choir is taken from some birthday music for the Princess-electress consort (??? My apolgies, I do not know the best translation for "Kurfürstin") with very little changes outside of the lyrics. The instrumental parts even reflect some of the original text: It opened with "Tönet, ihr Pauken! Erschallet, Trompeten!" ('Sound, you timbals! Sound, trumpets!') and the piece does in fact open with the timpals, while the trumpets have their first appearance a couple scores in.

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An old tradition in the city of Bremen is the "Bremer Eiswette", or 'ice bet': Since 1829, almost every year on the 6th of January, burghers in Bremen would have a bet whether the river Weser "steiht or geiht" ('stands or goes') - the criterium being if a tailor carrying a hot flat iron can walk across the river with dry feet. The last time the Weser 'stood' was in 1947 during a particularly icy winter. It was also frozen in 1987, but apparently not thick enough for a man to walk the entire way across.

The society organising the ice bet has had a troubled political past - before WW1, it was apparently a fairly non-militaristic group of people, but during the 1920, it grew a heavy national-conservative spirit, and during the Nazi regime, the society was quite eager to please them. In fact, after 1945, the group had trouble finding a chairman without a... problematic history.

The first post-WW2 ice bet was held in 1949, and the organising seems to have (re-)grown into some sort of Old Boys Club since. The criteria for new members to be accepted have been obscure at best, with one big exception: No women allowed. This has been a point of growing criticism since the 2000s, escalating in 2019: The current mayor of Bremen, who by custom was invited to a meeting of the society. However, he could not attend due to the memorial ceremony for Paweł Adamowicz and asked for his deputy mayor to be invited instead, who is - gasp! - a woman. The ice bet society refused, which made a fairly big stir in all of Germany, and prompted the Bremener parliament to decide that government officials would not attend any events that exclude women.

The ice bet society did give in and very graciously invited a whole 30 women to the 2020 ice bet - out of around 800 total attendees. They also did not invite any Bremener government officials, explicity as a response to the parliament's earlier decision. This has been the latest chapter in this riveting drama thus far - the ice bet was cancelled in 2021 due to the pandemic and will be held in April next year (which doesn't quite capture the spirit of the whole event, in my personal opinion) for the same reason.

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