TIL Thread: Today I learned...

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Thu Nov 19, 2020 7:46 pm

The article says the victim was "crushed" by one of the umbrellas and I have more questions now than before.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Thu Nov 19, 2020 9:48 pm

Also TIL that the sitcom joked about in the short-lived "Clerks" cartoon, "The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer", was a REAL show.

It was controversial when it came out due to the very unfortunate show premise, and was cancelled after only a month.

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Fri Nov 20, 2020 11:15 am

Totally Classic Pfeiffer :iamapony:
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Mon Nov 23, 2020 4:41 pm

TIL there is only one person in the world authorized to use Vantablack in artistic applications, somebody named Anish Kapoor.

In response, a company that makes paints for commercial use developed their own darker-than-black paint called Black 2.0, and have said it's available for anyone to buy except Anish Kapoor.

Personally, I see this as just another missed opportunity to name it "Nunmoor Black".
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Madeline (?) » Mon Nov 23, 2020 9:51 pm

oh geez I feel down a rabbit hole a few years ago reading about the Vantablack dispute. Surrey NanoSystems takes their trademark and patent extremely seriously because they’re hoping to score lots of cash from military contracts, while simultaneously claiming export regulations are what prevent them from selling it outside the UK (despite, you know, letting Swiss watch makers, Kapoor, and BMW all have a crack at using it). They get very, very mad about black 2.0 and it’s hilarious

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Madeline (?) » Mon Nov 23, 2020 9:54 pm

Mr. Big wrote:
Thu Nov 19, 2020 9:48 pm
Also TIL that the sitcom joked about in the short-lived "Clerks" cartoon, "The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer", was a REAL show.

It was controversial when it came out due to the very unfortunate show premise, and was cancelled after only a month.
not only was it real, it sucked on top of its incredibly poor taste premise. it was really funny because people would watch it to “own the libs” and come back saying “well, that wasn’t funny at all. that show is horrible.” Not even people who revel in offending other people would defend it after it started airing, which is probably why it’s been completely forgotten outside of that one reference.

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Tue Nov 24, 2020 1:59 am

Madeline wrote:
Mon Nov 23, 2020 9:54 pm
not only was it real, it sucked on top of its incredibly poor taste premise. it was really funny because people would watch it to “own the libs” and come back saying “well, that wasn’t funny at all. that show is horrible.” Not even people who revel in offending other people would defend it after it started airing, which is probably why it’s been completely forgotten outside of that one reference.
The official tagline for the show was "Critics Hate It!"

Yeah :-I

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Fizzbuzz (?) » Tue Nov 24, 2020 6:13 am

Pocket wrote:
Mon Nov 23, 2020 4:41 pm
In response, a company that makes paints for commercial use developed their own darker-than-black paint called Black 2.0, and have said it's available for anyone to buy except Anish Kapoor.
They're the work of an artist named Stuart Semple, and his company's made an even blacker black called Black 3.0, still available at reasonable prices to everyone who's not Anish Kapoor.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Orange Fluffy Sheep (?) » Tue Nov 24, 2020 8:03 pm

I am flabbergasted at how black black 3.0 is, and terrified of the possibility of black 4.0, even blacker
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Wed Nov 25, 2020 12:24 am

DARK DARKER YET DARKER
THE DARKNESS KEEPS GROWING
THE SHADOWS CUTTING DEEPER
PHOTON READINGS NEGATIVE
THIS NEXT EXPERIMENT SEEMS
VERY
VERY
INTERESTING
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Fri Nov 27, 2020 7:40 pm

TIL that "spam" (for unwanted emails) was named from a Monty Python sketch because the central theme of the gag is they're repetitive and unavoidable.


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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Fri Nov 27, 2020 10:12 pm

Yep. Referencing that sketch by just posting "SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM" was one of the Internet's first memes, back in the Usenet era; either people got sick of people doing that, or people started doing it specifically in response to other users posting other memes they'd already gotten sick of, or both, so posting unwanted and repetitive things became known as spamming. This is also why "spamming" is used for any other repetitive action, like using the same attack (or even just using a fully-automatic high-damage gun) in a video game or impatiently hitting F5 over and over on a website.

That sketch, by the way, is itself a reference to a real phenomenon in the UK at the time where, because the economy never quite recovered after the war (even compared to other European countries), people had to resort to buying cheaper foods, and this included Spam being a real thing you might see on a restaurant menu.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Tue Dec 01, 2020 4:18 am

TIL the word "sploot".

I'll leave it up to you to find out what it means.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Sun Dec 06, 2020 6:08 pm


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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Perpetual Motion (?) » Mon Dec 07, 2020 12:08 am

Carter's election campaign really laid into marketing that caricature of Peanut Carter, being the first of its kind to go for proto-meme marketing

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Fizzbuzz (?) » Mon Dec 07, 2020 5:37 am

The statue reminds me most of the LOL WUT pear.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Mon Dec 07, 2020 1:10 pm

I ship it.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Sage (?) » Mon Dec 07, 2020 2:31 pm

TIL that there was a young trans woman Roman Empress, Elagabalus, but unfortunately she was assassinated at the age of 18. Really sucks that her wiki page still refers to her as a man even though she wanted female genitalia and tried finding a doctor who could help her with that. People over on her wiki still argue about whether she was a gay man or not for trying to marry a man...

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Orange Fluffy Sheep (?) » Mon Dec 07, 2020 3:17 pm

Elagabalus's male lover was a chariot driver, not exactly the high position people expected the emperor to marry. It would've been spouse #5. Including a Vestal Virgin, who by the name wasn't supposed to marry.

Also tried to make the sun god Elagabal from the east not only the head of the pantheon over Jupiter, but the only god as all others are mere aspects of Elagabal. The Romans are superstitious motherfuckers so that didn't go over well.

Basically go through your awkward teen high school years while being High Priest of the sun god and also Emperor of Rome.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Orange Fluffy Sheep (?) » Mon Dec 07, 2020 4:31 pm

With a lot of Roman stuff the history is not exactly clear because a lot of the time it was written by people who didn't like whoever was in charge, sometimes centuries after the fact, and twist events to fit a simple moral parable.

Elagabalus wore dresses and denied Jupiter His rightful place! What a prick! Probably fucked wrong too! Goddammit I hate Elagabalus!

Speculating about the gender identity of someone from 1800 years ago feels weird somehow, because the person's long gone and their very life story is wrapped up in myth.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Wed Dec 09, 2020 1:59 am

TIL Rutherford B. Hayes, one of the more obscure and forgotten US presidents, is considered a national hero in Paraguay and is very well-known there.

This gets hilarious when he was among the presidents named in this Simpsons song.


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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Octavia (?) » Sat Dec 26, 2020 9:53 pm

TIL the other two chefs on the Cinnamon Toast Crunch box were named Bob and Quello.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Sat Dec 26, 2020 10:10 pm

Octavia wrote:
Sat Dec 26, 2020 9:53 pm
TIL the other two chefs on the Cinnamon Toast Crunch box were named Bob and Quello.
It's always wild when cereal mascots have names you never know about.

Did ya' know that Cap'n Crunch' full name is Horatio Magellan Crunch? This is 100% true. :-I

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Dong Strongly (?) » Tue Dec 29, 2020 7:51 pm

Fun fact: Cap'n Crunch is technically out of uniform because he is wearing the insignia of a commander, not captain

Also the use of insignia bars indicates that Cap'n Crunch is a military captain, not a civilian
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by SlateSlabrock (?) » Tue Dec 29, 2020 7:54 pm

The Soggies are free milk on the land, and they have been illegally punished by the Cap'ns admiralty court.

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Thu Dec 31, 2020 2:16 am

TIL that Moe Howard suffered an injury while filming this gag where he falls down after the table he's standing on accidentally gets sawed in half, causing him to break his ribs. Here's the scene in question (time-stamped).



He was able to stand up and slap the other two stooges and continue the scene, but you can tell from the way he moves that he was in immense pain :nngh:

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Sun Jan 03, 2021 11:47 pm

TIL that PHP, the language that powers a huge chunk of the Web (including this site), has a new version out that offers just-in-time compiling as an alternative to the real-time interpreter. This is a huge deal because I've known a lot of people who say the performance costs of PHP's interpreter make it a bad language to use, sometimes going so far as to blame all the performance issues of PHP-based sites on it. It's overblown, certainly; some of the biggest sites on the Web would have taken the initiative to migrate to another language if it were really that bad, but at least now they'll get the benefits of at least a modest performance boost without having to reprogram the whole site.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Dong Strongly (?) » Wed Jan 06, 2021 12:21 pm

:vomitpony:

Cw: grown ass dude with a very teenaged girlfriend

The front for Aerosmith, Steven Tyler (who was 27 at the time), convinced his 14 year old girlfriend's parents to sign guardianship of her over to him so she could live and go on tour with him. After she got pregnant and had an abortion, they broke up and he returned the girl, now 17, to her parents. :nngh: :starity: :gonkity:
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Mon Jan 11, 2021 1:37 am

TIL about Thaddeus Stevens, a US Representative during the Civil War whose radical ideas about what to do with the South after the war clashed with Lincoln's. He supported treating the South as conquered territory rather than readmitting it to the Union, and making readmission contingent on half the white voters signing an oath of loyalty. He was also responsible for the famous "40 acres and a mule" proposal, which would have seized land belonging to former slaveowners and given to their former slaves.

He also had a contemporary, Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, whose economic views were so progressive that they would later get a shout-out in Marx's Das Kapital, and who said Lincoln's views on slavery "could only come of one born of poor white trash and educated in a slave State." Had Andrew Johnson been successfully removed from office after his impeachment, Wade would have become the next president.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Tue Jan 12, 2021 10:27 am

TIL that this "Simpsons" sequence was laid out by Brad Bird




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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Sun Jan 17, 2021 10:10 am

TIL that, after the guy who assassinated William McKinley was executed, they dumped sulfuric acid in his coffin and burned his clothes and possessions because the US Government didn't want him to be immortalized in any shape or form.

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Adiwan (?) » Sat Jan 23, 2021 3:17 pm

Today I learned that there is a restaurant offering poutine in my city. I always wanted to try poutine.
Despite it not being real Canadian poutine I'm still curious enough for a general impression.
However due to the lockdown I cannot eat it. I can but it involves delivery.
From my experiences it's a bad idea to deliver potato fries as they cool down, get soggy, lose their crispiness and turn into a pile of sadness.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Sun Jan 24, 2021 4:59 pm

TIL that Burned Furs, a movement within the furry group that was supposidely against pervision in the fandom (but very quickly morphed to be incredibly homophobic and reactionary, harassing people in the fandom) was co-founded by "Iron" Spike Trotman, who is nowadays a successful indie comic creator and publisher, who most notably publishes erotic comics with LGBT themes.

Spike refuses to talk about her days in the furry fandom, tho, especially Burned Furs. She's not exactly proud of that, let's just say.

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Octavia (?) » Wed Jan 27, 2021 6:08 pm

TIL that Eric Andre and I attended Berklee College of Music at the same time. I wonder if we ever ran into each other.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by W.T. Fits (?) » Thu Jan 28, 2021 8:00 pm

TIL that Yusuke Murata, the artist for Eyeshield 21 and the manga adaptation of One-Punch Man, wanted to do a manga adaptation of Back to the Future, but the project never got off the ground due to licensing issues.

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Fizzbuzz (?) » Thu Jan 28, 2021 8:07 pm

W.T. Fits wrote:
Thu Jan 28, 2021 8:00 pm
TIL that Yusuke Murata, the artist for Eyeshield 21 and the manga adaptation of One-Punch Man, wanted to do a manga adaptation of Back to the Future, but the project never got off the ground due to licensing issues.
Your avatar is relevant, I see.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by W.T. Fits (?) » Thu Jan 28, 2021 8:10 pm

Fizzbuzz wrote:
Thu Jan 28, 2021 8:07 pm
Your avatar is relevant, I see.
Just a bit.


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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Thu Jan 28, 2021 9:11 pm

In anime you can time travel just by yelling loud enough
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Thu Jan 28, 2021 10:56 pm

I should look into the history of licensed manga based on Western properties. There's some really interesting (and out there) examples. There was a "King Kong" manga, for example, as a tie-in to the Rankin-Bass version of the property, written by the co-creator of "Tiger Mask" Ikki Kajiwara. The creators of "Doraemon" did a manga based on "Lassie" at one point.

"Batman", "Superman", "Spider-Man", and I think "Hulk" all had manga adaptations, too. There was even a "Popeye" manga, to tie-in with the Japanese broadcast of the old cartoons.

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by stonecutter (?) » Sun Jan 31, 2021 7:19 am

Mr. Big wrote:
Sun Jan 24, 2021 4:59 pm
TIL that Burned Furs, a movement within the furry group that was supposidely against pervision in the fandom (but very quickly morphed to be incredibly homophobic and reactionary, harassing people in the fandom) was co-founded by "Iron" Spike Trotman, who is nowadays a successful indie comic creator and publisher, who most notably publishes erotic comics with LGBT themes.

Spike refuses to talk about her days in the furry fandom, tho, especially Burned Furs. She's not exactly proud of that, let's just say.
I was online around that time, but I didn't see much of the chaos Burned Furs caused. Mostly I remember a few sites I visited posting a Burned Furs patch/logo on their main page and that patch/logo disappearing really quick.

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