xoxxala

BBC is now reporting $6.3B was stolen.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwg7xp8kx4v5o

My aunt had a small kitchen fire. She called 911 and asked "Could you send a firefighter with an extinguisher, please?"

The 911 operator responded "Honey, we only send them one way."

And like a dozen guys showed up.

We paid $17k ($12k after subsidies) to install 5kW in Arizona five years ago.

I worked tech support in the early 90s and we received more than one letter in the mail from customers asking about where the "any" key was on the keyboard.

Not the author, but I thought the Word Postmortem was fascinating.

10/10 story. I look forward to the forthcoming motion picture adaptation from Skydance directed by Michael Bay.

The newest puzzle game from Braid's designer Jonathan Blow releases today:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/499170/Order_of_the_Sinki...

I, too, was confused for the longest time, but the secret is in the names.

En dash is the width of an “n”. Em dash is the width of an “M”, so a little wider.

3d printers making 3d printers making drones is a key plotline of the Bobiverse novels.

I just finished my umpteenth reread of AFUtD. It’s one of those books I can pull off the shelf every few years and enjoy from beginning to end.

The Cradle series by Will Wight, starting with Unsouled. Kind of hard to describe, but it’s an sci-fi/Asian fantasy martial arts cultivation epic. If you liked Dungeon Crawler Carl, it may be of interest.

According to a quick kagi, over 90% of US high schools have security cameras.

We used to play Diplomacy at work but it caused too many hard feelings and was a distraction.

Mid to late 70s? Their last years were nothing but medical issues (from the smoking, plus excessive drinking) and poor health. Certainly kept me from starting to smoke.

My step-father’s parents smoked a carton a day. Each. They started smoking before breakfast and stopped just before sleep. Their trailer home had a 2-3’ cloud of haze below the ceiling and every surface was sticky. I’m not how many years they smoked like that, but probably decades.

As a kid, I could not breathe in there. This would have been late 70s. No way they could have afforded that habit at today’s prices.

> Wikipedia doesn't have a page dedicated to it yet.

Someone has been typing quickly...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilcayo_tiger_cat

EverQuest also used pre-generated numbers. The randomness was derived from the large number of players using the same list.

iOS and iPadOS also have that under Accessibility-Audio Visual settings.

I do something similar with boardgames. I like to import foreign language games or pick them when traveling. They don’t need to be in English for me to enjoy and appreciate them. I have games from Germany, France, Spain, Japan, China, Brazil, and the UK.

My favorite is Kolejka, a Polish game about queuing at nearly empty stores during communism.

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/85325/kolejka

There is a new movie in the early stages of development. Some news was teased at Comic-Con in July and the directors spoke about it a few weeks ago.

"After years of an unclear future, it seemed as though “Star Trek” finally found a path back to the big screen as “Spider-Man: Homecoming” writers and “Game Night” and “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” filmmakers Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley boarded the film."

https://www.darkhorizons.com/next-star-trek-film-tackles-cor...

Here's an in-depth write-up of the hardware, software, manuals, variants, release prices and other info:

https://zzxio.com/about-us/sony-smc-70/

There's a pretty famous story about Weird Al's Amish Paradise and Coolio. Weird Al got permission from the recording company and producer, but not Coolio. Coolio was not amused, initially.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_Paradise#Coolio's_respon...

Technically, you only need to plonk somebody once.

https://en.everybodywiki.com/Plonk_(Usenet)

I used to work for Domino's Pizza in the mid to late 80s. Our piemakers were trained for speed and could usually slap dough, sauce, cheese and throw down toppings in around 30-40 seconds per pie. The ovens were super hot and cooked pizzas in 3-4 minutes. The whole goal was to get the pizza out the door so the driver didn't have to speed. This was still during the "30 minutes or less or it's free" period.

Our franchisee held competitions between stores to see how fast employees could make six large pepperonis. Winning times were less than two minutes. And it wasn't just slop, the pies had to met a minimum quality level (proper saucing and cheesing, the right number of pepperoni slices per pie).

I helped out occasionally at a store in Garden Grove by Disneyland that often did ~1500 pizzas on Friday nights. And as a DUMP (Dayshift Manager), did a few 40-50 pie lunch orders by myself, with a couple drivers helping out on ovens, for schools or companies. Stores kept daily records so knew how many employees to schedule based on past sales - pizza sales were surprisingly consistent over time. And we required advance notice for the really big orders so we could schedule appropriately.

Thanks for posting that. The picture of the garage door opening is a trip!

I've been to the Palace in Prescott, AZ. Neat place. I was told by locals that during the 1900 fire, the patrons picked up the actual bar and carried it out of the saloon to save it.

Linotype machines were revolutionary. The New York Times used them for 127 years until 1978 and this documentary shows them in action for the last time:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTiCTFdTd60

No. We put a lot of references into Fallout, but that wasn’t one of them. (And we didn’t have any toads on the team, just a scorpion the artists used as a reference and no one was licking it.)