Coconut Monkey Cornerclub

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My wife tried to get me to have my first at fault car accident in 40 years. I pulled up to an intersection, and, because of the angle and my bad back, I asked her to watch and tell me when I could pull out. She turned and watched for awhile.

Wife: "Okay, you can go."

I press the gas pedal.

Wife: "STOP!"

I press the brake, and a car passes.

Wife: "I didn't think you'd go so soon. You can go now."

Me: "Really now or in a few minutes?"

Wife: "Just shut up."

I managed to adjust how I was sitting, and, after a bit of pain, made my own determination.
 
Best thing that happened last weekend was that I asked Guido if he was having any problems with calculus, and he said "no".

I had a rather unsettling vision of me sitting at his kitchen table all weekend doing calculus after my 30 year break from it. I did take my favorite calculus book with me, which was written in the 1940s.

Next semester he takes physics, which, even though it is mostly calculus, is more fun for me. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that he'll need my help there either.

I saved all this stuff in my brain for nothing. XD

My daughter is in History/Pre-Law. No one needs help with that. She's doing something kind of funny, though. She's decided to include, in some way, Dante's Inferno in every paper she writes this semester.

It was kind of funny listening to my wife, who was a double major in finance/marketing, trying to help my daughter select subjects for her papers. My daughter was being very kind and gentle in her rejections. I finally told my wife that her suggestions were too general and common for a liberal arts major. Ideas need to be very specific and creative. Ideally, even the professor has never read a paper on your subject.

I miss university life. When do I get to start over?
 
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Brian Boru

Legenda in Aeternum
Moderator
I saved all this stuff in my brain for nothing
Hey, great—you can jettison it all just in time for Starfield spoilers!

History/Pre-Law … She's decided to include, in some way, Dante's Inferno in every paper she writes
Sounds about right. That's the one with the Seven Circles of Hell, right?
 
Hey, great—you can jettison it all just in time for Starfield spoilers!


Sounds about right. That's the one with the Seven Circles of Hell, right?
Yeah. I'm trying to talk sense into her, but since I have none myself, it's a difficult job.

**********

I would like to take back what I said a few months ago about US being better than Japan at baseball. Seems like it's about even right now.

Be interesting to see if baseball ever really has a revival in the US. Personally, I didn't let Guido play baseball when he was a kid because people around here take youth sports too seriously. There's definitely no having fun allowed.
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
The recent article on dice mods for BG3 got me reminiscing about days of yore, when the D&D editions consisted of "basic set" and "advanced." My dice were soooo cheap! I think they came with the basic set. The D20s just had the digits 0 to 9 on them! You were supposed to put the 1s and the 2 on the die yourself with a permanent marker. I didn't have a permanent marker. Instead, I just used a normal one to put a dot near one of the 0's.

You see, I found that if you look directly above the die with a 0 was rolled, you could see all the other digits exactly once. So, if you rolled a 4, you looked at it from directly above. If you could see the 0 with a dot, it was a 14. If you could see the 0 without a dot, it was 4. Simple, effective, and I just had to maintain one dot!

Sounds about right. That's the one with the Seven Circles of Hell, right?
It's the one that inspired this module. You remember it, right? ;)
 

Brian Boru

Legenda in Aeternum
Moderator
people around here take youth sports too seriously. There's definitely no having fun allowed.
How about for amateur sports? Ie there's no money-making possibilities in adulthood.

Rugby has gone as you describe now in Ireland since our clubs and national team scaled the heights and players can make a decent to spectacular living at it.

Hurling and Gaelic Football on the other hand are still enjoyed and enjoyable by all. They are fully amateur.

In between is football, where there's a 'sort of' professional league—but players still need an outside job to make a comfy living. There's still lots of fun to be had playing football, no one sees it as an avenue to future fame and fortune.

NG+ for real life are still inconclusive
Be damned if I'd want to bring my baggage back into a do-over. Just a full reveal of the map, that'd be nice :)

You remember it, right?
Uh, what?

Simple, effective, and I just had to maintain one dot!
Sounds like genius, even tho I have no idea what you're talking about—my visualization skills don't stretch that far :D
 
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How about for amateur sports? Ie there's no money-making possibilities in adulthood.
Every sport I'm aware of is taken very seriously here, even things like lacrosse.

The recent article on dice mods for BG3 got me reminiscing about days of yore, when the D&D editions consisted of "basic set" and "advanced." My dice were soooo cheap! I think they came with the basic set. The D20s just had the digits 0 to 9 on them! You were supposed to put the 1s and the 2 on the die yourself with a permanent marker. I didn't have a permanent marker. Instead, I just used a normal one to put a dot near one of the 0's.

You see, I found that if you look directly above the die with a 0 was rolled, you could see all the other digits exactly once. So, if you rolled a 4, you looked at it from directly above. If you could see the 0 with a dot, it was a 14. If you could see the 0 without a dot, it was 4. Simple, effective, and I just had to maintain one dot!
That seems like a pain in the arse having to look at your roll from directly above. If the 10 and the 20 were on opposite sides, couldn't you almost always see one or the other without looking straight down on it? Or was it one of those you had to be right on top of it to read anything anyway? Seems like my original dice were like that. There was no coloring in the numbers.

And what kind of idiot design is it to put 0 to 9 twice on a 20 sided die? Your product design philosophy shouldn't be "Don't worry. They'll figure something out."
 
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Zloth

Community Contributor
That seems like a pain in the arse having to look at your roll from directly above. If the 10 and the 20 were on opposite sides, couldn't you almost always see one or the other without looking straight down on it? Or was it one of those you had to be right on top of it to read anything anyway? Seems like my original dice were like that. There was no coloring in the numbers.
Nah, not much of a bother. You're already rolling the dice on a table in front of you, so you just lean forward. Many of the numbers are around the 'equator', so you really need to get above to see the 0 sometimes.

You can see the shape in the article:
However, modern dice seem to have the numbers arranged differently. I see 4 and 14 next to each other in some of those shots, where my dice have 4 and 14 on exactly opposite sides.

And what kind of idiot design is it to put 0 to 9 twice on a 20 sided die? Your product design philosophy shouldn't be "Don't worry. They'll figure something out."
Wisconsinites, I guess? Maybe they were expecting them to be used for % roles? Remember, D&D was very new back then. D6 were manufactured all over the place, but the rest were very uncommon.
 
AI is so unreliable. Obviously its creators have no idea what they are doing.

I found an old photo of myself on a flash drive and thought I would touch it up. I looked angry, so I searched for AI that could change expressions (Photoshop can sort of do that, but I wanted to see what else was available because the Photoshop AI is pretty bad).

So I found a site that wanted to charge me $10.99/mo, but would let me do one picture for free, so I signed up and uploaded my picture and clicked on "expressions" and was presented with a few choices. I just picked "happy" and the AI went to work. It took at least two minutes (I thought it had crashed), and then suddenly it came back with the face of an Asian woman with my hair. She was wearing glasses and smiling. Then it popped up with "Are you happy with the change?" A simple "yes" or "no" didn't seem sufficient, so I just closed the tab.
 
I've made about 250 percent on my Nvidia stock this year, and there's no end in sight. My retirement funds would like to thank everyone responsible for the AI revolution. I'd like to say I'm a stock market visionary, but I bought Nvidia because of their gaming GPUs. My Intel is only up by about 30 percent, but since QQQ (a NASDAQ index), which is my only other stock, is at 40 percent, that means Intel is underperforming this year. The rest of my retirement is in bond funds. But things are looking good for not having to go back to work.

The worst stock move I ever made was in the early 2000's. I sold ten thousand shares of Ipix stock at a significant loss for around 20 cents per share and a week later it went to $28/share (they were a tech security company and some sort of terrorist scare had occurred). The worst part was that my wife and I had just had our second kid (Guido), and I was in the middle of my personal "dark ages", so we really needed the money, which is why I was trying to cut my losses with Ipix. If I had held on to that stock another week it would have changed our lives. My wife didn't pay any attention to our investments, and I never told her about it. Everything is great now, of course, so that's all that matters, but I still haven't completely gotten over losing over a quarter of a million dollars.

Of course, I wouldn't have actually sold it at $28/share. As soon as it went above what I paid for it (something like 30 cents), I would have sold it, so really I didn't lose much.
 
Wife wanted to go to Cotton Eyed Joe last night for their 30th anniversary party. Since I can barely walk, much less dance, am allergic to alcohol and mostly don't enjoy country music, I asked her if she would mind taking her sister instead. I fell asleep early and woke up about 4 a.m. and came downstairs and her sister was lying in the living room floor. Not on the couch. Not in one of the recliners. On the floor.

My wife heard me wandering around and came downstairs and said her sister got carried away with the free pitchers of beer and asked me to pick her up and put her on the couch. I said there was no way I was going to pick her up off the floor, that I would be in screaming pain all weekend. My wife proceeded to beg me to pick up her sister. I have no idea what is so wrong with sleeping on the floor, but it was really bothering the wife.

There was just no way to do it without throwing out my back again. I tried kneeling and lifting with my legs, but her sister weighs around 160 pounds, and I didn't even manage to get her dead weight off the ground, at least partly due to pain. I ended up standing over her and taking her under her arms and sort of dragging her towards the recliner, during which she woke up, stood up on her own and went to the bathroom. I felt like such a moron. What I did manage to do was make sure that I was going to be in excruciating pain for probably a week.
 
So here is a random question. How often are people buying speakers for their computers? I have been using the same Bose speakers for at least 12 years. Is there a better set of speakers out there?

I've had my current speakers for well over 10 years, probably somewhere around 15. I care very little about audio quality, so as long as they keep working I see no reason to buy anything new.
 
Made a slight mistake this weekend. I bought a new M2 SSD, it’s 3500mb/s compared to my current 500mb/s. My idea was to put the new drive in the top slot where the old one is, it’s the only slot that supports Gen 3 PCIE which is the 3500mb/s speeds, then put the old drive in the bottom slot. So I opened my PC, got them switched around, and my old drive isn’t working. Luckily my OS is installed on my SATA SSD. I do some more research and come to find my old M2 SSD is a SATA M2 SSD. Still the M2 form factor kinda but SATA speeds. The problem is, only the faster slot supports SATA M2 drives, the slower slot that only gets up to 500mb/s does not… huh??? Why does only the faster slot support the slower drive?? So I figured I might as well sacrifice having more space to have a much faster drive. Ended up doing a full reinstall of Windows in the new M2 drive and it’s noticeably faster. Games load a tiny bit faster too. I might as well pick up a new SATA SSD for the storage, 1TB ones are going for about $35-40 but so are Gen 3 M2s…
 

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