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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jan 15, 2009 4:03:53 GMT -5
I didn't say anything about ethics, I don't think. But even if it is your eyes, then that's yet another reason why you should invest in a Dead Tree Edition of one of those fine comics. Girl Genius would probably be more to your liking at first, though Schlock Mercenary's books are all sorts of militaristic, explosive fun.
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Post by Mighty Jack on Jan 15, 2009 5:09:26 GMT -5
My eyes... I read antithetical as ethical. Now you see why I have all those typos in my posts. My eyes don't always see what's on the page very clearly.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jan 15, 2009 15:19:23 GMT -5
For the sake of your eyes buying a Dead Tree edition is of paramount importance, then!
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jan 16, 2009 18:08:17 GMT -5
Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet...
I am about to make a proposal that may change the...you know what, no one'll care. But I figure that I should tell people anyway.
You know the tongueout smiley? The one where you stick your tongue out at someone? It's nice, an okay smiley. Not bad, right? But I've always been a bit bugged by the fact that its tongue is lopsided. It sticks out of the side of the mouth rather than being straightforward.
However, I wish to propose the following for those who are similarly disturbed.
:-þ
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Post by Mighty Jack on Jan 17, 2009 1:31:14 GMT -5
strightforward is better if your going for snarky... but I do my like the lopsided tongue because it makes the smiley look like it got conked on the side of the head with an I beam... so it fits if your feeling goofy... or concussed
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jan 17, 2009 8:26:18 GMT -5
I actually did consider that, briefly, while I was engineering the new smiley. I felt such reservations on my part held no place when working in the name of SCIENCE!
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Post by Captain Hygiene on Jan 19, 2009 13:14:50 GMT -5
What is the name of that symbol? Also, does it have any vowels?
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jan 27, 2009 9:55:22 GMT -5
The name of the symbol is þorn. However, due to the fact that very few people use the letter nowadays, the name of the symbol is sometimes instead changed to thorn.
þorn has a weird, and in some ways tragic, history. It was sort of killed by the printing press: they didn't have a space for it on their typesets, so whenever they needed to print the letter þ, they'd just use a y instead since they looked so similar anyway.
This started a tragic chain of events for the 27th letter of our alphabet. People who didn't own books before the printing press never really got to know it, and when they read books that *should* have had the letter, it instead had a y. This lead to all sorts of misunderstandings.
The only real reference to this letter we have in the modern lexicon would involve signs that are trying to look old fashioned but are, instead, just horribly misusing the word "ye." I mean, you know all those signs that say things like "Ye Olde Antique Shoppe" or "Ye Olde Pizza Parlor"? Those signs should rightfully be using þ instead of y.
I should write a book that brings back þ. It'd be just like all those books that don't use the letter e, except instead of e it'd be þ and it'd be using it instead of not using it. Also the books wouldn't be as well written.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jan 27, 2009 19:17:17 GMT -5
Okay, so...the day of the mini-meet up in Chicago? That was great. It was fun. It was sort of like Heaven, if Heaven was a pub that required about two hours of driving to get to.
The day after was not Heaven. It was the other thing. Hoboken.
I received word from my dear mother that she would appreciate a ride to the train station in Kankakee. That's only about an hour, maybe an hour and a half away, so I figured sure, I could get home by 11 after dropping her off and still have plenty of time to relax on my day off.
As we get nearer and nearer to Kankakee, however, a series of unfortunate signals about the day to come arrived. The first sign, though possibly unrelated, came in the form of a single beep from the car. We weren't certain at the time that it was a beep from the car, but we heard a beep, and I thought it might've come from the car. It was ignored because we were running late for the train.
When we got to Kankakee, the car turned at an intersection. The car sort of died...the engine kept going, but all the car's "power" was gone, like an electrical failure.
That happened two or three other times on the way to the station.
We pulled to a stop, and opened the doors. Now, understand: in this car of my parent's there are no interior door handles for the front seats. The easiest way of opening the doors involves using the power windows, reaching outside, and opening the door with the exterior handle.
So the windows open, and so do the doors. The train mere minutes away, the first thing I do is open the trunk, get the luggage, and put them on the platform. Then I decide to tend to the car's problems. As I approach the car I saw smoke issuing forth from the hood.
Now, a smoking car is something that I'm trained for. I can handle that. A lifetime of second-rate cars has taught me enough that a smoking car isn't something to freak out over. However, what I've not been as prepared for is opening the trunk and seeing an actual fire under the hood.
More than under the hood, it was beneath the...I wanna say it was beneath the filter, I think it was some sort of air filter, located directly behind the battery. And there was a hint of the smell of electrical fire in the air.
The next few moments were a blur. My mother called my father and started shovelling snow onto the flame, though we honestly couldn't get a good look at it to get a clear drop onto it. I wasn't sure if that was the right procedure, but apart from some vague memories about using baking soda on stove fires I couldn't think of a valid reason for the snow to not be dropped onto the fire. I started talking on the phone to get a run-down on how this car's battery could be removed, and while I was listening my mom tried just pulling the battery out.
This is the fun part: her attempt to remove the battery without actually unplugging it from the car resulted in the car starting without a key in the ignition! So the train came then and she left me with the fire in the car's running engine at that point.
A passerby strolled over and recommended that I call the fire department. So call them I did (using my own cell phone.) I called 911, though wasn't sure if this truly qualified as a big enough emergency to warrant it.
Another passerby had the truly brilliant and earthshattering idea to run into the office of the train station and ask for a fire extinguisher. The first passerby helpfully pulled a pair of sharp pliers from the toolbox in my trunk and attempted to sever the black line leading away from the battery. Fortunately he didn't do so, because the slightest touch caused the battery to spark like something in a mad scientist's laboratory, followed by the car finally turning off. The fire could then be safely put out with the extinguisher and the passersby left me alone.
Then the fire department showed up and I explained, a bit embarassed, that no, there wasn't a fire anymore, but I insisted that there had been a fire. They believed me and didn't seem too sorry about being called out for nothing (a "better safe than sorry" sort of attitude, which makes realistic sense in that kind of job, and is also what I recall being told in all sorts of medical educational videos over the years), and just did a quick check to ensure that the fire was, in fact, out. It was, so they collected my insurance info, license info, etc.
By now I'd contacted my dad, the rightful owner of the vehicle, and he suggested that I not use the car's insurance to have the car towed. It made a certain amount of sense when he said that he had "access to a car hauler." So I told this to the firefighters and they wished me a good day and left.
Now, at this point the battery is not connected to the car. And the power windows are down. So I can't just leave the car. It's very cold out (I wanna say that it was in the teens, but I've never been a good judge of temperature so it might've even been colder), so I needed to ensure that no one would come by and see all the wonderful things in my dad's car. I spent about half an hour loading the trunk and preparing to lock it. Once the trunk was loaded with all the assorted bric-a-brac I recalled that there was an open window, meaning that anyone who wanted into the trunk could just lean in and pull the trunk's release lever, no amount of locking was gonna prevent it.
So rather than walking a few blocks to rest in the polite warmness of some fast food restaurant (from which I planned on buying enough to tide me over since I hadn't eaten breakfast yet) I had to stand in the waiting room of the train station, which was sort of, but not really, in view of the car. I couldn't see the car due to other cars in the parking lot, but I could certainly see every conceivable pathway leading to the car.
The lobby is only open for a half hour after a train departs, so after some time it automatically locked and I knew I couldn't go out to check on the car unless I was willing to commit to shivering by it. Eventually, just before the automatic timer locked, two fellows who primarily spoke Spanish arrived. Between their English and my almost nonexistant understanding of Spanish we were able to communicate our stories to each other. I'm not *entirely* sure as to what their ultimate goal was, but I'm pretty certain that they intended to go meet up with some friends in Chicago on a train that wouldn't be arriving for a few hours. They took naps on the benches and I continued to watch through the window.
I took a few breaks from standing to sit on the benches of course, and I'm grateful first for the newspaper that someone had left in the waiting room (I read the comics section, solved the paper's sudoku and came so very close to figuring out the entirety of that crossword puzzle. Oh, I had a pen with me, I should've mentioned that) and secondly for the fact that I had the latest book that I'd been reading on hand (Pyramids, by Terry Pratchett. I nearly finished the novel, but didn't want to finish it as I had no idea how long I'd be waiting.)
Eventually, rescue came at about a quarter after five in the form of my father with a van borrowed from one neighbor and the car hauler borrowed from a family friend's father. It took about half an hour to get the car loaded (it was a tricky to negotiate parking lot), and we set off. We stopped at a fast food place so I could get my 6:30 PM breakfast.
It wasn't the best of days. Now, there are any number of ways that it could've been much, much worse, and I'm sort of glad for the experience. But at the same time: urgh...what a day...
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Post by Captain Hygiene on Jan 27, 2009 22:56:22 GMT -5
What a crazy story. Glad you made it out okay, but it really made me wonder why a car wouldn't have interior door handles (particularly in the front).
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Post by Crowfan on Jan 28, 2009 9:28:29 GMT -5
Glad you're okay Affy.
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Post by Afgncaap5 on Jan 28, 2009 12:53:05 GMT -5
Well, there was never any moment at which I was in any sort of danger. Truth be told, for most of the two-decade-plus life that I've had, a lot of it has involved waiting around with cars that are being problematic for some reason. This was just the first where an actual fire was involved.
As for the lack of door handles, the car did, in fact, have door handles on the inside in the front seats at one time, but they snapped off with time. I guess they'd just been opened too often and couldn't stand opening the door one more time. The back seats have door handles, though.
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Post by Crowfan on Jan 28, 2009 12:56:20 GMT -5
You could Accuse Your Parents
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Post by CBG on Jan 28, 2009 16:49:00 GMT -5
...or get some vice-grips.
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Post by Captain Hygiene on Jan 28, 2009 17:49:46 GMT -5
That would be too easy. We must make do with what we have!
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