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[Spastic Hamburger]

Here’s the original. Looks like it was last online in 2025. A shame that the page is no longer available!

142. “Calvin-Ball” is not authorized PT.

Nothing wrong with Calvin Ball! It’s good exercise and the rules change constantly!

Lots of good stuff in all three lists! Makes for a fun browse when there’s not much else to do 🙂

Really miss the days when that kind of thing was more common on the Web.

Haven’t read that one but I’ll check the library. There’s also an alternative theory that viruses caused it all with rogue infections. Fascinating stuff!

[DeVaultSetter]

Fabulous. 🙂 Updated the Wikipedia link.
Oh, the memory has returned – turns out Lucille Ball’s husband was Henry after all. 😛
Great! More info over here:
https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Calvin_Ball

According to Role-playing game designer Ron Edwards, “Calvinballing” is when a player in a tabletop role-playing game utilizes mean-spirited misinterpretations of the rules to one-up the other players and gain control of the game.

And that spitballing goofball will now be blackballed from the game!

Steve Jackson Games’ Knightmare Chess uses a deck of cards, from which each player draws with every move, to turn chess into calvinchess. Typical card effects including blowing up pieces and rotating the board ninety degrees.

FIDE will want to look at adopting that for all future challenges. 😛

There’s also a card game with Calvin Rules:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130425023401/http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/485251

[Spastic Hamburger]

I’ve got my own small list of stuff I’m not allowed to do in TCGs:

1. I’m not allowed to play with the cards upside down
2. I’m not allowed to make designs out of everything that’s in play
3. The playmat does not count as a card
4. I’m not allowed to blow everything up by turn four (even if it’s funny as hell)
5. I’m not allowed to balance dice on my head
6. I’m not allowed to balance the cards on my head

😀

Yep! Calvin ball shows up all over the place! I do think the section on politics is a bit of a stretch, though.

Newgrounds was an interesting place back in its heyday. Fun animation section, too.

Fun fact: Adobe Flash was used to make Friendship is Magic

[DeVaultSetter]

All those things would certainly add multiple dimensions to the game experience. Especially when balancing stuff like this:

Yes, the links to Calvin Ball in that section are tenuous at best.

Never put a candidate in a hat

And then pull out a rabbit instead. Which probably means Penn & Teller want to get involved. 😛
Back in the nineties Macromedia Flash was great. Games using Flash were sometimes too large in size for ADSL connections though.
This electric eel packs an electric punch, using 6000 elctrolytic cells in series. Give that ability to us, what would we want with tasers?

[Spastic Hamburger]

It definitely livens things up!

Ouch. Definitely want to be careful with handling them.

Scientists are still talking about traveling to Titan. Not a bad idea at all but current propulsion technology would make for a long trip.

[Spastic Hamburger]

New coffee research: https://www.gearpatrol.com/food/physics-of-fluids-study-paper-9-bar-espresso-standard-research/

Not up to tracking down the original source but the gist of it is that your espresso machines are likely using more pressure than needed, with the rest being wasted

Need some ideas for a new hobby, too. 😛

[DeVaultSetter]

Titan’s too cold for us at present – is there hope in establishing a colony underneath the surface of the moon? Bio-engineering our brain processes to vicariously sense robots skating and cavorting on the icy plains above is another possibility.
It might also depend on the provenance of the coffee itself. It seems 6-7 bars works for many – in which case the machines should accommodate for it. Still percolating here while waiting for the perfect espresso model to emerge. 🙂
Outdoor or indoor hobby?

[Spastic Hamburger]

They’re working on a Moonbase for our moon but it’s on the surface, as far as I know. There’s been proposals about using the lava tubes on Mars if we ever get there. One thing I never see mentioned outside of books is tunneling into the space rocks themselves. Granted, it’ll depend on the hardness of the material and stability.

Yeah, the article does mention that it varies based on various variables at play. We have tea kettles that can be set to certain temperatures based on the type of brew, perhaps it’s time for coffee machines to do the same?

I’m still using the tea ball. Nothing fancy but it does the job. I just go to the local coffee shop when I want something fancy (as rare as that is) 🙂

Either one would do, just looking for something more to do 🙂

[Spastic Hamburger]

Had an interesting dream the other night about a topic my mind referred to as musical cryptography. The concept was that you could, in theory, hide data streams in music using a specific combination of instruments as the key(s) to decode the data. The example given in the dream used a specific series of instruments to translate the notes into something resembling human speech, thus decoding the message.

[Spastic Hamburger]

Had some interesting bits come in the last few days.

First up, we have what was once a chaotic Minecraft server: https://2b2t.place/1million

Don’t download the world: it’s over 15 TB!

And the program that gave birth to Comic Sans is now open source: https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2026/07/16/microsoft-comic-chat-is-now-open-source/

On that note, I recently checked more IRC channels I used to frequent and those are all dead. Makes me sad 🙁

IRC channels for open source software seem to still be going strong, though.

And here we have a breakdown of the computers featured in Jurassic Park: https://fabiensanglard.net/jurrasic_park_computers/index.html

Amazing attention to detail! 🙂

[DeVaultSetter]

Never experienced anything like a crypto themed dream- the complexity of a musical one is sure to be enhanced by different tuning/scaling. Come to think of it, how about some kind of psychometric device for downloading dreams and converting them to text?
Wow, an absolute monster indeed. Looks like it’s ready t0 go in a Linux system – do you use SquashFS much at all? Reception is cool at best:

Littered with archaeological remnants of its history… a palimpsest of a landscape, written over and re-written over by feuds between players, hacks injecting vast structures into the world, and by different waves of Internet communities arriving and rampaging or attempting to settle within it.

Gaming at its best. 🙂
Comic Chat was a very good idea, cannot recall if it was available in this country initially. Was HexChat one of those favourites?
Jurassic Systems specializing in an eclectic mix of MHZ driven clunkers! What a joy! 🙂

[Spastic Hamburger]

Yeah, I’m not exactly sure how practical musical encryption would be but could be a fun research project. 🙂

They’re actually making some progress on turning thoughts into images and text in the lab. Currently, the image generation is very fuzzy and lacks resolution but should improve as the lookup tables get fleshed out based on brain activity.

I mainly stick with ext4 as the file system as it’s the most stable. Probably should try out Btrfs at some point but I haven’t gotten there yet 😛

Did some basic research on the storage costs for the 200 TB of data. It’s pretty expensive! 10,000 to 15,000 USD annually. Seems a bit much to host a Minecraft world 😛

Yep, used to HexChat over here. Looks like development stopped some time ago, though. srain does look interesting but development is slow as the author had life intervene a few years back. Most of the other graphical IRC clients which are still maintained use Qt for the GUI, which we know I’m not a fan of 😛

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