What I want to know is what kind of goddamned animal would fill the ketchup gun with mustard. Mustard goes in the yellow gun.

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.

Work work.

An AC-130U. We can play a game of see how many times you can hit it with the side guns before it lands in the ocean.

Thanks.

I have a set of matching super historically authentic pants in the same pattern and material (with suspenders!) as well. I might even still fit in them, but I haven’t tried in a while.

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.

IIRC the whole thing about the land mines exploding when you step off of them is purely down to the Bouncing Betty or the German S-Mine, which saw widespread use and gained its infamy in WW2. They almost worked in the manner described, actually going off with a time delay rather than waiting until the hapless soldier removed his foot from the plunger. But they used a small lift charge to pop the main explosive up into the air a couple of feet and then went off, with the aim of shrapneling in a circle a whole group of soldiers passing by and not just whoever stepped on it. Obviously this wouldn’t work so well if someone were standing on it at the time.

The popular conception formed that they went off “after you stepped off of them,” which was true in most cases (who was going to just stand there like a nincompoop after you’d just triggered it?) and then Hollywood writers of the era just assumed that most or all landmines worked that way and wouldn’t let that misconception go. So now here we are.

Just slap a blue filter over that lens and you’re good to go.

In the original comic her neck was broken, and it’s not clear if it’s due to Spiderman’s failure at grasping physics or if the Green Goblin had already killed her before chucking her corpse off the bridge, but Peter Parker blames himself for it anyway.

And then there is specifically the night Gwen Stacy died.

The X-Wing is explicitly hyperdrive equipped. That’s also part of why it has an astromech droid seat in it (R2), apparently so the droid can handle the jump calculations. A lot of later technobabble in the expanded universe expounded on this after the fact, but I presume this decision was made on a snap basis specifically so Luke could go to Dagobah in his cool plane spaceship.

You get to make hyperspace jumps yourself in your X-Wing a few times, fittingly, in the X-Wing games.

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…)

Uh.

Does anyone currently know James May’s whereabouts now that Andy Wilman is presumably no longer keeping tabs on him?

Knives are prohibited

Tru fax, I am never working where you do, ever, so long as I live. I’d melt like the Wicked Witch of the West, I’m sure.