PhobosAnomaly

Cheers. It also made me think of a bit of newspaper advert abuse that an old colleague of mine told me.

Another pair of people, another spat over something minor, but one wasn’t to be outdone. In the first week of January, he put an advert into a local popular newspaper, saying something similar to:

Leave your old Christmas trees with me for a charity project! Bring your Christmas trees to 45 Smith Drive, Newport*, if I’m not in then leave them on my lawn!

The net results was days worth of Christmas trees being drive-by yeeted into his garden. Said it was the best 50p per word they’d ever spent.

*edit: I’m sorry if you live at 45 Smith Drive in Newport, and I hope the Christmas tree gods are unkind to you!

Story time!

I forget the origin of the beef, but I remember a guy who grew up with another dude who was just a complete tool to my friend. It wasn’t outright bullying, but general arseholery and making his life difficult when it really didn’t need to be.

Anyway, my friend has a long memory and a longer grudge streak. I was finishing college at a time when print media was still king but social media was exploding in popularity.

My friend has decided “fuck this, I’m going to ruin this dude’s life for a bit”. He put an advert in the local paper or freeads (for non UK spuds: the freeads or classifieds is a newspaper-style private advertisements in one place - like a print version of a snapshot of Facebook Marketplace or Vinted for a local area).

Free TV. Call 07000100100 for details.

Anyone to this day knows that anything advertised for free attracts the most annoying, persistent, and unhinged type of people on earth. The freeads was published the following week. I didn’t socialise with the guy on the business end of my friend’s wrath on account of him being a massive cockwomble, but I understand his phone started to go wild with texts and phone calls asking about a free television - bear in mind that cheap consumer TVs weren’t really a thing and a TV purchase was a “buy it for life” thing at the time, so a free TV was just an amazing deal.

It would appear the demand for a free television was too much for the guy. In true mid 2000’s fashion, a social media message went up from the clearly annoyed guy, to the tune of:

Hi all, I’ve started to get loads of prank calls, so I’ve changed my number. It’s 07000200200 now.

With the internet and social interactions online still in the wild west era, this was fairly common. My friend chuckled to himself. The plan worked. Not satisfied with that though, he put another advert in the following week’s freeads:

Free TV. Call 07000200200 for details.

The publication date rolls around a few days later, and tens of thousands of this newspaper gets delivered to stores across the region. Obviously, mere hours after the thin yellow paper booklets are released to the public, the idiot’s phone starts going banzai. Dozens of calls a day from all corners of society, relentlessly asking about collection and delivery of a television at no charge.

The guy was livid.

Livid, but not smart. He had gotten pissed off with the calls, and was unable to stop the barrage of bargain hunters hitting his digits to get a gogglebox gratis. He went back to his phone network operator and makes the appropriate changes. Not one for releasing his number in a private, carefully controlled manner - the gist of the following was posted to social media a few weeks later:

Not sure why I’m getting so many prank calls, and my mobile network are useless. My new number is 07000300300. Let me know if someone asks you for it because I’m getting annoyed.

Most normal folk wouldn’t have risked being burned a third time and released their number in person or by SMS message. That said, I suspect the Venn diagram of twats like this guy who had spent an elder childhood making people’s lives difficult; and those who don’t appreciate the drawbacks of one-to-many communication, aren’t far off a circle.

My friend sees this status update or whatever it was called back then, cuts out the reply slip of the freeads, enclosed his payment, and sends in the following for publication the following week:

Free TV. Call 07000300300 for details. Shout “camel” when I answer so I know you’re genuine.

Hilarity likely ensued. My friend found immense satisfaction that the guy who tried to socially ostracise him and physically manhandle him for “fun” was now getting Guantanamo Bay levels of psychological torture, and 90% of calls that he answered started with someone hollering the name of a type of Saharan quardraped species.

The guy never posted anything after that. Not his new number, not any angry rants, nothing at all.

I respected my pal for that stunt. So much mental torture for so little effort. I lost touch with the friend but I still think of him now and then, and I hope that he still chuckles to himself with that prank under his belt, because I certainly do.

Looks like you tried to do bullet points?

There’s been a pivot away from “classic” speedruns games over the last few years - I get that Doom or Sonic 2 or Goldeneye or other 90s games aren’t guaranteed a place every year, but it seems like the games that kicked off the speedrun scene are often overlooked these days.

That said, there is Quake, and there is SMB3 where I dont know who the runner is but that couch is a banger.

I was looking forward to seeing Still Wakes The Deep runs, but I find them really… unexciting, I think is the sentiment. Like the 2016 Doom onwards, the runs are technically outstanding, but there’s a lot of walking on invisible geometry with collision detection, or random tricks like railboosting in Doom that seems to break a game. I get that that is an entirely subjective opinion though, maybe I’m more suited to No Major Glitches runs!

It could be a translation thing. In certain parts of France, “ados” is a bit of a catch-all term for anyone in teenager or young adults years. It’s not strictly defined, but would explain the presence of the word in an English translation.

Simple really:

(Smaller battery) + (Greater capacity) + (Inexpensive Cost) = More Sales

Now the secret to achieving all three of those things rather than just two can be revealed to you for a small nine figure sum for the next ten years…

Mad optical drive respect.

Giving people the ability to play 90s games and burn fire mix CDs like it’s 2k all over again.

I enjoyed that game. Not sure how it was ever pushed out as a full release rather than a Net Yaroze style special, but fair play to them.

Kurushi (as it was known in the UK and Europe) is like rocking horse shit now. A nice little treasure if you find one in your collection.

I suppose the TV licence in the UK is a sort of paywall, even if it is made of swiss cheese and enforced by folk with all the legal standing of Larry the Head Mouser or whatever moggy it is now.

I pay it, but I’m loathed to now. Not because I watch any live TV or BBC programming, but because I use the BBC News site a metric fucktonne and I suppose I justify it to myself as funding the BBC News department rather than Graham Norton’s salary.

Maybe I’ll fuck it off though. I do fancy a letter war with Capita or whoever managed the enforcement these days.

Absolute banger of a game.

It’s highly unusual to have a Sony PSP as an in-car navigation aid.

Good ol’ Comical Ali, haven’t seen these memes wheeled out since the last time the west started fucking about with the Middle East.

Which weirdly, wasn’t all that long ago.

classic

I was doing some poxy arse-covering COSHH awareness course in the office which sat on the entertainment scale somewhere between “chewing tinfoil” and “drowning”. The worst part of it was that there was no ticket or certification at the end of it, just an eight hour classroom input that absolved the job if we were to drink bleach or put cordite in the microwave or something.

The trainer was pleasant enough, and signed our certificates, handed them out, and looked confused when I fed it straight into the shredder.

Everything gets a certificate now. It wasn’t the trainer’s fault, but my in-tray and mailbox was already twice as full as it should have been without more pointless certificates to sift through.

Go somewhere public and call a girl a chick, see what happens 😂

Seriously though, it’s not the word that’s the issue, it’s the labelling of someone based on their gender. I can’t speak for the bottom line as I don’t appear to be a woman, but I’d start getting fucked off if a generic term was used to address me when I had a perfectly good name.

In the UK, an equivalent is “bird”. Equally likely to get you booted in the balls.

My eldest asked me “have you seen the memes about this One Pound Fish guy?”

I’m like “dude, I paid my 79p to try and get that song to Number 1”… back when it mattered.

For most of them, it doesn’t matter. When the film is wound on, it would hit a ratchet stop to prevent you winding it beyond the next film cell anyway - which would only be released when the shutter button was operated, so you’d intuitively feel whether the film had been already wound forward or not.

This thread reminds me of inexpensive package holidays as a child. It’s brilliant.

I’m guessing you’ve got a study that backs that assertion up as well?

Depends where you are in the world really. In the UK, that is very much a you problem, not the pedestrian’s. Not that people drive like it in some parts of the country, generally in rural areas.