dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

I sure sleep better at night knowing that they put a little gradient on the playback bar that turns the tip of it slightly magenta, though.

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.

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. @SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 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:

https://lemmy.world/comment/13482691

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.

1. Sacrifice the Black Lotus for 3 green mana.
2. Spend 2 green manna on the Channel, pay 19 life, gain 19 colorless mana.
3. Tap the Mox Ruby for 1 red mana.
4. Use that 1 red mana to cast Fireball. Dump all 19 colorless mana from your Channel, plus the one green left over from the Channel into that fireball which adds up to 20.
5. Fireball does 20 damage to your opponent. You take 19 damage from Channel. You are left at 1 life, but your opponent is dead.

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.

[BFG Division Intensifies]

As for why: I have no idea! Maybe just for user familiarity reasons, since a lot of people grew up with that kind of analog feedback that the antenna wasn’t getting a signal.

This is exactly why. Preventing screen burn-in may be a tiny peripheral reason also, but providing a familiar experience to chronically myopic and cranky users (i.e. boomers) is probably the bigger one.

The trope of video/audio breaking down into static is an easy shorthand that is unlikely to be forgotten, probably even well after all the devices capable of doing so have long since been buried in the landfill.

It’s especially hilarious in media depicting the far-flung future, where apparently all technologically advanced space men and their communications devices – not to mention high powered central supercomputers and so on and so forth – somehow still work over NTSC television signals. Even by the early 1980’s it should have been entirely predictable that in “the future” anything like that would be digital, considering we already had widespread digital audio media (CD’s), and digital video was already making inroads into the computing industry.

Tube TV’s remained in common service well into the 2010’s. The changeover from analog to fully digital TV transmission did not happen until 2009, with many delays in between, and the government ultimately had to give away digital-to-analog tuner boxes because so many people still refused to let go of their old CRT’s.

Millions of analog TV’s are still languishing in basements and attics in perfect working order to this very day, still able to show you the cosmic background, if only anyone would dust them off or plug them in. Or in many retro gaming nerds’ setups. I have one, and it’ll show me static any time I ask. (I used it to make this gif, for instance.)

In fact, with no one transmitting analog television anymore (probably with some very low scale hobbyist exceptions), the cosmic background radiation is all they can show you now if you’re not inputting video from some other device. Or unless you have one of those dopey models that detects a no-signal situation and shows a blue screen instead. Those are lame.

Anthropogenic global warming is not a “debate.” It is a scientific consensus among a significant majority of the world’s scientists across a full spectrum of disciplines, whereas the counter opinion remains a minority pushed almost exclusively by monied interests.

Have you done any “research?” Are you a qualified expert in any relevant field? I predict that you are not.

And the whole chat censoring thing, and Microsoft doubling down on banning players on all servers for chat content in their own private servers.

I found some additional articles on what he said about this, and he did indeed flat out say he expects the “other countries” to pay the tariffs. For instance, this.

A sweeping tariff policy will kill two birds with one stone, Trump says: It could find a new source of revenue for the U.S. government, which could offset losses from lowering or eliminating certain forms of income tax, while extracting money from rival governments.

That’s not how tariffs have worked at any point in history.

They all thought the foreign company paid the tariff.

This is probably what Trump thinks, too. I can easily believe he is that stupid.

I’m also wondering just what the fuck Trump and co. are going to do with all the money obtained from these tariffs. Just, like, spend it all on hookers and blow or what? Remember how you all believed this was the party of “low taxes?” Yeah, guess what a tariff is, fuckers.

Here’s the problem with that, though. It’s not going to be like there will be roving goon squads going from door to door snatching away your wives and daughters or anything. Even the MAGA-heads are just barely clever enough not to form themselves into any kind of entity that you could physically fight.

Instead, they’re going to chip away at everybody with asinine laws and legislation, selective enforcement and remote harassment, by filing mountains of frivolous lawsuits, etc. They’ll seize property. They’ll get you fired from your job. They’ll kick you off of your health insurance and freeze your bank accounts. Those responsible are never going to actually expose themselves in any capacity in which they can get got, because they’re cowards; they’re going to hide behind their desks and layers of security and fences and metal detectors and cops and the secret service. If it turns to outright violence vis-a-vis war in our own cities, it would be monumentally stupid for them to send troops marching down the street, and they won’t. They’ll just remotely bombard an entire city block and blame all the collateral damage on “leftists” or “wokeism” or whatever. And idiots will believe it, and then blame the victims.

“That’s ridiculous,” you say. “The government would never bomb anyone on US soil.”

You want to bet?

I usually attack it with a terrycloth and some Flitz. A little will go a surprisingly long way.

There are various methods of oiling, waxing, or otherwise preserving it afterwards. I prefer boiled linseed oil for that, personally.

In Ye Modern Times, you could also just make your mail out of something that doesn’t rust. I didn’t, though.

What makes you think I’m not already similarly equipped?

(Any good excuse to trot out this heavy bastard, which I don’t have occasion to do often enough anymore. It could really use a polish. There’s a project for the weekend…)

Sure, but it’s up from just a couple of years ago when Linux was sub 2%, and was hovering around only 1.5% in, say, 2020.