I don’t think though, that for the goal of living a happy life, any harm is theoretically necessary.

Whose happiness are we talking about? Surely if one person’s happiness conflicts with someone or something that already exists, they can’t both have happiness and harmlessness. (Also, what are you considering harm? Just harm to people? What about animals? Plants? The planet as a whole?)

Modern human life is inherently very harmful to a wide range of things.

That definitely has to cause more pollution.

This is what the article is about… They’re basically saying “The fireworks are going to cause hazardous air conditions, stay inside and keep your windows and doors shut, don’t go outside to cook because you’re subjecting yourselves to dangerous levels of pollution.”

Agree with you that fireworks just seem like an unnecessary relic from the past. Plus, in addition to the pollution concerns, they scare the shit out of animals, and can cause fires, especially the ‘backyard’ variety.

Not only that, it’s a meaningless requirement. There’s subs on Reddit that exist solely to farm karma. You make a post, everyone upvotes it, done.

That’s pretty funny. Unfortunately for them, I and probably almost everyone else don’t really care about their brand identity, so I’ll keep calling it all velcro. I’ll also keep call all tissues Kleenex, and all adhesive bandages Band-Aids, and all the others that have become synonymous with their product. That’s what they get for being too successful, I guess.

It’s velcro all the way down!

It sticks with adhesive, and I don’t doubt it would rip wallpaper right off, but using adhesive remover before trying to pull it off lets you work it off slowly and not cause damage to paint or surfaces.

A lot of small things. I have some velcro on the wall in few rooms that I can stick a tablet to, for example. I’ve got velcro holding down a few items on my desk - a USB hub, speakers and the like, that I want to move sometimes, but that were commonly getting knocked off (by the cat). I’ve got a small whiteboard and a few places I can stick it, so I can use it to sketch something up and take it with me to our workbench, for example, and not have to precariously balance it.

All things that could be solved with other solutions, obviously, but the heavy duty velcro just happens to be a one-size-fits-all solution that leaves no permanent marks and is very convenient to set up.

A roll of really heavy duty velcro. The kind that can, for example, stick a sledge hammer to a wall. It’s about $12 for 5 feet or so, and about a 1" piece is sufficient for most tasks, so it lasts a very long time. I use it for all kinds of stuff; it’s amazing how many uses for it you find when you have it.

You could just look up articles on his policies - given his high profile status, they’re all over right now.

but not the fatwa that prohibit nukes

My understanding was that they weren’t constructing nukes per se, just getting the capabilities to do so ready to go so that if that fatwa is lifted, they can just do the final construction and be armed, rather than starting the process from scratch at that point. Is there new evidence that this isn’t the case?

Terraria

No, but a multiplayer game which starts with, for example, 4 players could be reduced to 2 players before it ends, so they have to specify ‘begins with’ to keep that multiplayer game from also being a two-player game at that point.

And this really sums up the level of semantics and minutia that requires a 299 page comprehensive rule PDF for a card game.

Or any interaction that requires understanding layers.

In all fairness, the instructions you actually need to know to play the game could be summarized in a single page (with the caveat that there will be a lot of edge cases that won’t be adequately explained there); tournament judges and, to a lesser extent, tournament players are the only folks who need to know the majority of what’s in that PDF.

That said, the game is super archaic and hard to learn, and any player who thinks otherwise is probably either playing only at a super basic level, or just isn’t considering how long they’ve been playing and how much nuance they’ve accumulated. Sorry you had a shitty experience; your friends absolutely should not have tried to throw you into the deep end like that. You sound like you already know, but to reiterate it, this was absolutely not a failing on your part and was 100% your friends’ fault.

If you actually want to try the game (and I completely understand if you don’t), you can go to a game store that sells MtG products and ask for a (free) intro deck. They’re small decks with simpler cards and a booklet explaining the basic game rules that can be helpful to learn the game.

There’s also Magic Arena, the computer game version, which really does a pretty good job of teaching the game. If you don’t mind that format, I’d absolutely start there.

Wow. If you told me this was satire, I’d 100% believe you.

“Here, just use this easy quick-reference PDF.”

Come in with some bolt cutters. Free the milk.

I remember when I was in middle school, I saw my older brother working on a Unix system and it looked like he was some elite hacker. Now, it’s the same look I get from my kid any time he sees me doing anything in the terminal.

Maybe I needed to add a \s to that. :D

Swordfish was always one of my favorites. Writing a worm using a custom compiler he wrote many years prior (to 2001) and had stored on a tape drive in some dusty basement.

Hacking scenes in old movies are ridiculous to look back on. Always some crazy GUI-heavy pseudo-video game with people clattering away madly on keyboards and tense music playing. So unlike hacking scenes of today, which are obviously much more realistic to appeal to a refined modern audience. We’ve truly come a long way.