The problem there is the government already has most of the guns and are very, very willing to use them.

Data is indeed read from the inner ring outwards, as anyone with a CD burner in the late '90’s and 2000’s is very familiar with.

For audio and video playback, the disk is spun faster at the beginning and progressively more slowly towards the outer edge, a process known as Constant Angular Velocity playback, because more linear distance is covered at the same RPM the larger your circle gets, i.e. the closer you are to the edge. This is no problem for audio playback at “1x” speed because this tops out at a paltry 500 RPM or so.

For data reads, however, most drives use Constant Linear Velocity and spin the disk at the same speed all the time. That means your data throughput is higher at the edges of the disk. The prevalence of 2x, 4x, 16x, 24x, 40x, 52x, etc. PC CD (and DVD, etc.) also means that those drives will spin a disk way faster than a regular CD player will which can definitely cause a problem with irregularly shaped disks like the one in OP’ photo. They would also inevitably only achieve their rated whatever-x speed when reading at the very edge of a full disk. (You mean the marketing department was deliberately misleading??? Say it ain’t so!)

Those little business card disks were nonstandard but would work in most tray loading drives, and held a whopping 30 megs.

The 80mm minis were envisioned as “CD Singles,” and they actually were defined as part of the official CD standard. Therefore most CD players and drives including slot loaders actually were and are designed to work with them without incident. Typical tray loaders have a smaller indent below the main one to accept the smaller disks, and pretty much all horizontally oriented slot loaders will take them as well.

This would play just fine in a snap-in (like a Discman) or tray loading CD player. It might give slot loaders some trouble but it looks like it still describes most of a 120mm circle so it would probably work fine in those as well.

For audio playback. At 1x speed.

The real problem with these novelty shaped disks is when you stick them in a fast PC CD-ROM drive, they’re usually badly unbalanced and when your drive dutifully tries to spin them at 8,000, 15,000, or 20,000 RPM when it indexes the disk or when someone tries to copy it – not outside the realm of possibility for a commodity 40x drive – the disk will warp and vibrate like crazy and in some cases eventually crack and then outright explode inside the drive.

I once had to disassemble somebody’s drive and tweezer out the sparkly bits of a Ranma 1/2 CD that I discovered, when rearranging the pieces back together on the workbench like a jigsaw puzzle, was one of these damn novelty disks that was shaped like Ranma-chan’s head. The largest fragment left over was smaller than a dime, and surprisingly the drive still worked after I unjammed it and got all of the glitter out of it ultimately using compressed air.

These were uncommon, but not unheard of. For instance, Metallica also infamously released this fucking thing:

…Which actually was balanced, but only until your garden variety careless owner snapped the very tip off of one of the points.

And nerds absolutely will find each other and bond over whatever their thing is. The world is full of stories like this one. People who met their spouses in World of Warcraft, and so on and so forth.

But boy, am ever I glad us M:tG nerds had much more subtle ways to signal our dorkitude. At least I think we did.

Hmm…

I prefer toe pistol, myself. No one ever expects it.

I sure sleep better at night knowing that they put a little gradient on the playback bar that turns the tip of it slightly magenta, though.

I’m using a diamond tipped nozzle, 0.4mm. I understand that smaller nozzles like 0.2 don’t play well with filaments filled with solid materials, and the glow stuff suspended in this is indeed a solid material.

Temperature may be an issue, but I wouldn’t know. I print PLA typically at 230° C, including this filament, which I am certain many people will find jowl-flabberingly appalling but that’s what I do. My machine goes pretty fast and I found that gives me the best results.

Speak for yourself. I have a full set of chainmail. Have at you, ruffian.

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

I think most gamers would have been perfectly happy with a trip to the Borealis just for the closure of the thing, even if the gameplay brought little to nothing new to the table other than some nice new visuals and arctic setpieces.

Instead we got Half Life: Alyx which was a stunning albeit niche experience in the same old City 17, which retconned Episode 2’s cliffhanger with another, different cliffhanger. For fuck’s sake, Gabe.

This would rule from an aesthetic perspective, but I predict you will run into problems with hills.

My account is so old I have (or had, before they normalized the format) a four digit steam ID. I “owned” Half Life 2 for like four months before it released thanks to getting a code free in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro back in the day. For a short and glorious flash of time in the summer of 2004, I was guaranteed a copy of the most hotly anticipated game ever, even though nobody could play it yet, and also owned an example of the fastest video card on the planet. Damned if I didn’t mow a fuckton of lawns and reinstall Windows and Outlook an a horde of septuagenarians’ computers to afford that card.

And no, they do not stop asking about your age.

Neat, but.

Even HL: Alyx left us with just as much of a cliffhanger as the end of HL2 Episode 2…

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.

Typically they are – for two of the same reasons, first being that most of the “salt alternatives” in use, the original “salt” in this case being sodium chloride, are also chlorides (potassium or calcium chloride, usually) and it’s that chlorine ion that’s corrosive. They also all turn the meltwater into an electrolyte, forming an easy electrical connection between the various metals in your vehicle’s parts and dramatically accelerating galvanic corrosion.

Technically any compound composed of positive and negatively charged ions that balance out to a net neutral is a salt, chemically speaking, and by definition they are compounds, i.e. held together with weak ionic bonds via their electrostatic charges and not molecules held together with strong covalent bonds. This means they like to liberate their constituent ions easily, allowing whatever-it-is they’re composed of to readily react with something else.

TL;DR: Pretty much all salts, not just sodium chloride salt salt, are corrosion promoters.

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.