Be Excellent To Each Other

The rabbits in Watership Down developed a complex faith system.

It's just a film dude. Not everything has to be analysed.

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Now I'm starting to tear up.

I was hiking very near the real Watership Down recently. Somehow managed to keep my composure when this was pointed out.

Yeah.

I had a girlfriend whose parents lived on it. It's very rolling and nice. I suppose downs are. Unlike dales which are more abrupt.

Burnt in a furnace!

Death by Bongo!

The child wouldn't play with a toy burned to cinders, though.

I am just combing back through the thread to say I appreciated that this was cleverly done as nobody else has.

"Hello. MaliA here, you're the dentist and this is a scale and polish"
"Ok. Lie back and we'll get the anaesthetic"
"Wait. The what now?"
"The anaesthetic"
"Um. Probably a mistake. I've seen Deadpool, is this like Deadpool? I waa fhsfvncjfc Arghhhhh"
<time passes. MaliA is spitting blood into a cup. A lot of blood >
"Ok. We've done the left hand side. Come back soon for the other"
"NOOO"
"£34 please"
<malia sobs and makes another appointment>

True story

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Did you get a tooth removed by mistake or something? Or are you now sat in a bath of ice with your kidneys missing?

They cleaned half of them. With violence.

I recently had a root canal, a filling, a crown and tooth cleaning at the dentist.

Most of them were merely uncomfortable. The cleaning was absolute agony, and left me gasping for breath.

I had to retreat to my Mind Fort

I've only ever had the thing where they squirt it with high pressure water. Is that the same thing?

I haven't been to a dentist in the last many years so I'm a bit out of touch with this sort of thing.

I would advise going to the dentist.

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Sub Title

Nah, it's when they get the drill and ram it up inside your gums.

Well, not a drill, more like an industrial sander.

Do not want.

Definitely a good idea to hunt down a dentist and go frequently. When I finally got round to sorting one out and attending for the first time in years, I was told my bite was so bad I needed immediate orthodontic work else bad things would happen. So, er, go but be braced for bad news if you've been avoiding them for years.

(And this is my ten thousandth post - yay for me)

/groans

My teeth are basically screwed anyway. I'm just waiting for someone to invent some false teeth that can be used to replace the entire set, that are easy to put in and secure, and don't succumb to the same predators that natural teeth have.

I think I'll be waiting a while.

This was a nice find.

Wow... Where's that?

Isle of Wight ?

Yep, Ryde. It's very rare to see anything genuine out in the wild. Had to get high scores on the lot of course.

I expect I played on these very machines 30 years ago.

Operation Thunderbolt

IIRC I fell asleep during root canal treatment a few years ago. Such a comfortable chair. I did tell my dentist to give me a nudge if I started snoring.

I was in Asda yesterday with Mrs. W and our grandaughter looking for children's hay fever treatment, only to find Durex vibraters on the next shelf, in between the condoms. Discrete little purple bullet, it was.

Well, why not?

It was one of those games that was such a big deal at the tine, but isn't all that much fun to play, and no matter how good you are, it will keep killing you off just to get more credits.

...what was the Op. Wolf/Op. Thunderbolt clone with robot/cyborg enemies?

I remember one of the levels was pitch black, with searchlights illuminating the enemies, if that helps.

Was that the Terminator 2 arcade game?

Nah, this was way before then....

Found it, it was Mechanized Attack.

We really need a 'Random gaming stuff' thread or something, zaphod's posts about arcadeblogger were buried in this thread and quickly lost in a blizzard of 'Weapons of Ass Destruction #7'..... 'TITLE!' style hilarity. (Maybe such a thread already exists, I will take a look.)

Anyway, to the point in hand, hard to believe that a line-up of machines like that remains anywhere to be found, I'd certainly have spent some time working my way through the available games there - was that the whole thing or were there more?

We don't have a single arcade left on the Isle of Man now, when I first came here in 1994 there were three big arcades in Douglas alone (one of which was really sizeable), with a very generous number of fruit machines and pinballs as well as fruit machines.

The bowling alley had a decent line-up too, and lots of big 'marquee' machines like that jetski one, big Daytona USA sitdowns, four player Manx TT Superbike and so on. (Manx TT Superbike was very popular here for obvious reasons, loads of pubs had them as well.)

On top of that pubs routinely had videogames and pinballs too, you could almost go out for an 'arcade day' just by touring the pubs of Douglas.

Over the years they've all gradually been lost and the last arcade closed, oohhh, maybe four or five years ago, and in tandem with that the other small arcades and locations with games around the island have been lost too.

There is still a cafe in Ramsey that has what could be called a 'games room' attached I suppose, but it's almost all just shitty old fruit machines (mostly on £5 jackpot) and a couple of videogames in the back. I'm barred from there anyway for 'winning too much' so it's sort of a moot point.

It's great that videogames still exist out on site in reasonable numbers, although I wouldn't make a trip to the Isle of Wight out of it, the ArcadeBlogger site is a wonderful read too, at least there are people out there committed to preserving these things.

Yeah the adaptive skill levels on many games of this era are really annoying, not only is there an actual skill level setting for the operator to choose from (EASY/MEDIUM/HARD etc), but they'll also ramp things up or down depending on how well you're doing.

If you muck about in the operator screens for some games they have a 'range' too, so you can choose how far the game will ramp things up if the player does well, which can easily culminate in 'effectively impossible'.

One of the best ways to play Thundercross II is to never collect the final 'option' for your ship and move into the special weapons, as it prevents the game tipping over into its highest adapted skill ranges. (I don't play it like this as it feels wrong, also, awesome music, I happily play this game just for the music.)

And yet rather than start that thread you posted in here?

That was the bulk of it. They had a dead Out Run and a few other generic jamma cabs hidden away. It was the best I've seen for quite a while though. There's an arcade by me that has three or four machines amongst all the standard fruit tat but they are definitely few and far between now.

The only bright light is that there's a few specialist retro arcades cropping up. Arcade Club in Bury is amazing and there's a couple in London too that I must visit soon.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-37103668

Pretty horrific story about people being killed by kite strings in India.

What the piss?!

They fight with kites there. It's a sport. It's not as fatal as 3 day eventing or crown green bowling but crikey.

I seem to remember this being covered on QI once, but referring to Pakistan, as Kite-fighting is a sport there I think.

(Beaten to it by Malia there.. damn)

The 2 kids killed were poking their heads out of a car sun roof... to look at the pretty kites.

And now there's an official extension from Google to bring the backspace functionality back.

I was installing software and BAM! TRIGGERED

My brother is in Prague, drinking at a bar themed on the internet group Anonymous, drinking cocktails themed around various computer games and characters.

I don't understand any of it, but this is an Agent 47

This is an Ezio Auditorie?