Lurker > captpackrat

Finished the House on the Cliff, and now I've started The Absolute At Large, by Karel apek.

apek is probably best known for his story R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), which introduced the word "robot" into the English language.

Turkish delight is pretty good, but covered in chocolate?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_J-sNBnaaY

Amazon randomly asks me to log in if I'm accessing certain potentially sensitive things like purchase history or account info.

OJ's funeral procession

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I used to have one of these:

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Although they called it "the Digital Game", there was absolutely nothing digital about it. The only remotely electronic portion was just a single LED, the rest of the game was purely mechanical. You even had to wind it up.

The player with the ball would push the Serve lever and the ball would move across and the other player had to guess where it was going and press the button to hit the ball back. If you missed then you had to serve, which would advance your opponent's score. It even had a one player mode, which just automatically returned the ball every time.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAsQrOLfYzY

I dropped it recently. The only reason I signed up in the first place was for the 2 day shipping, and now it's "2 days after they get around to shipping it" not 2 days after you ordered it. And half the time they can't even get that right. The last item I ordered using Prime took nearly a week to arrive.

And Amazon REALLY sucks to shop without Prime because you can't swing a dead cat without "Are you suuuuuuure you don't want to sign up again?" all over the damn place.

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In Adventure of Mana/Final Fantasy Adventure, by the time you finally get the ultimate sword, Excalibur, you have literally about 1 or 2 minutes before the final battle and maybe a half-dozen enemies.

And the Blood Sword is actually a lot more useful, since it restores HP every time you do damage with it so you can just ignore the enemy's attacks and spam attack.

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agesboy posted...

first of all, have you seen the announcement that all political discussion is banned on gamefaqs outside of CE now

Where is this announcement?

I think I tend to eat more Korean food than Japanese. Korean ramyeon is way better than Japanese ramen, and I think I like kimbap better than sushi.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QCgT1IWsNI

Though really my favorite Wendy's commercial is this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CaMUfxVJVQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0aKKFybRNM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StY4tcm-ebk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idnwh6iDnXA

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVmBtNaDXQg

They're items, not abilities, but generally any super powerful potion or healing item is useless to me, because I just hang on to them forever and never actually use them. I can be in the middle of the final boss battle and have 50 Elixirs or Unicorn Potions or whatever and I won't use them even then because I might need them later.

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Finished Search the Sky this afternoon. (L-sub-T equals L-sub-zero e to the minus-T-over-two-N)

This makes 18 books since Jan 1. I started a new book, the House on the Cliff (Hardy Boys #2), by Franklin W. Dixon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKXtv2_IaCY

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I just downloaded 9 more books from Standard Ebooks this morning, and got another 3 in the past week from various Kickstarters, and a total of 70 new books since January 1st. I've read 17 books so far this year...

I'm currently 63% of the way through Search the Sky, by Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth, and 81% of the way through Medicinal Plants of the World, by Ben-Erik van Wyk and Michael Wink.

My last few books were:

The Meister of Decimen City, by Brenna Raney
You're Cordially Invited to Crossroads Station, by Mary E Lowd
The Canary Murder Case, by Philo Vance
The Visitors, by Clifford D Simak
Citizen Orlov, by Jonathan Payne
So You Had to Build a Time Machine, by Jason Offutt

What have you been reading?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OINxRMqp4Xc

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Revelation34 posted...

How much does that cost?

The peanut butter powder? It's $13 on Amazon for 30oz/850g, which is like 53 servings. But I bought it at Costco and I'm pretty sure it was less than that. It's more expensive than regular peanut butter, but it's had most of the fat and water removed so it's more concentrated.

In the original Battlefield: 1942, the scout class is mostly useless because the engineer gets the exact same gun, just as powerful and accurate with only slightly less zoom, and the engineer gets more ammo plus det packs and land mines, and the ability to make repairs. The only special ability the scout has is spotting for other players using artillery pieces, which is only useful if your teammates are actually using artillery correctly.

The anti-tank class isn't that useful either. Their main weapon is a bazooka/panzerschreck, which is great for taking out armor but it has limited splash damage against enemy troops and is useless against aircraft. You also only get a handful of shots and it's very slow to reload. Other classes can do nearly as much damage to tanks using grenades, or the engineer's det packs and land mines.

And the assault class is mediocre at best. They have a powerful gun and lots of ammo, but that's it, no other special abilities.

This is the hardest one yet. They're both equally crazy, just in different ways. Daffy is more silly crazy, while Donald is angry crazy.

I made a chocolate banana green tea smoothie for breakfast instead of coffee.

Sweetener (I use a mix of sugar, stevia, monk fruit, aspartame, and sucralose), culinary-grade matcha (green tea powder), unsweetened cocoa powder, freeze-dried banana powder, coconut milk powder, and Benefiber powder. Mix it all together, add near boiling water and stir until it's dissolved, then add just enough ice cubes to cool every down, and fill the glass the rest of the way with milk.

The blend of different sweeteners tastes better than any individual artificial sweetener but has far fewer calories than sugar, the green tea offers all kinds of antioxidants and other health benefits, cocoa has antioxidants and minerals, banana has vitamins, magnesium, manganese, and especially potassium, coconut milk has manganese, phosphorus, iron, magnesium, and potassium, and the Benefiber gives you a big boost of soluble fiber, and of course the milk has protein, vitamins A & D and calcium.

I have a bunch of different powdered fruits I can use instead of banana: blueberry, strawberry, raspberry, orange, and dragon fruit, as well as peanut butter powder (which is very low fat but high protein).

Living in farm country in the Midwest, whenever someone mentions "AI" I'm never sure which one they're talking about.

Recent Midwest Messenger article titles:

From the AI box to the board room

AI education facing unique challenges

When it comes to AI, we are a step ahead

AI work, haying, selling beef make for busy week

Top traits: Embryo transfer calves, A.I. pushes Kansas breeder toward his goals

Lessons in AI

Can you figure out which AI is which?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI

The Saw in Final Fantasy Legend is mostly useless except at the very end of the game. The way it was supposed to work is if the user's strength is higher than the target's defense, it's an instant kill. But they got the check backwards, so it only works against enemies with a higher defense than the user's strength. That means it's totally useless against most normal enemies, though it can be used to one-hit kill the final boss, the Creator, and the normally undefeatable form of Su-Zaku before obtaining ERASE99 (this is pointless, however, as you get nothing for winning, and it will continue to attack you randomly until the actual story encounter).

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