TIL Thread: Today I learned...

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Fri May 14, 2021 6:23 am

cool
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;) ❤️ :twasnothin: ❤️ :fancyhat:

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Sat May 15, 2021 5:11 am

TIL the music in the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy was composed by Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo fame. I... really don't know how that escaped my notice this long; I'm well aware of his long history composing for movies and such.

That makes two PlayStation platformer trilogies with quasi-celebrity composers; Spyro's music was done by Stewart Copeland, former drummer for the Police.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Sat May 15, 2021 11:41 am

interesting
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sat May 15, 2021 5:01 pm

TIL there's a town in Texas named DISH (all caps). They made a deal with Dish Network to rename their town in exchange for free cable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dish,_Texas
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Sat May 15, 2021 5:31 pm

worth it
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Sat May 15, 2021 5:50 pm

The sitcom option is, you have a town that keeps making these deals but they're very bad at predicting future trends, and that's why the mayor of Betamax, Tennessee has a drinking problem
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Sat May 15, 2021 5:56 pm

i'm surprised parks and rec never had such a situation

it's a very pawnee thing to do
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:05 am

TIL that most of the Nazi uniforms in the book burning scene in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" are real uniforms from the WWII-era. Apparently a bunch of them were found in Eastern Europe and the film's costume designer managed to obtain them for use in the film.

That's, uh, dedication. :-I

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Adiwan (?) » Wed Jun 09, 2021 4:16 am

Why make fake costumes that takes a lot of time to make when you can get the real thing cheap?
It's economical!
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Octavia (?) » Wed Jun 09, 2021 9:02 am

Mr. Big wrote:
Wed Jun 09, 2021 3:05 am
TIL that most of the Nazi uniforms in the book burning scene in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" are real uniforms from the WWII-era. Apparently a bunch of them were found in Eastern Europe and the film's costume designer managed to obtain them for use in the film.

That's, uh, dedication. :-I
Hugo Boss designed a lot of the Nazi's uniforms :spike101:
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Sat Jun 12, 2021 1:31 am

TIL the French word for pencil is "crayon", of all things. This led to Canadians referring to colored pencils as "pencil-crayons" because they were packaged in bilingual boxes reading "Pencil/Crayon".
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Sat Jun 12, 2021 7:27 pm

left over military equipment being used in films is pretty common i think

kelly's heroes was shot in yugoslavia and yugoslavia provided equipment because they had a bunch of american and german stuff in use in their military, so it was easier than getting props built
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Sat Jun 12, 2021 7:30 pm

there's a few companies in the us that own an entire collection of small arms and rent them out to studios

here's an interesting thing:

die hard, predator, lethal weapon and air force one have all had the guns provided from the same company
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Sun Jun 13, 2021 11:13 am

TIL that Wi-Fi is banned and radio transmission is heavily restricted in Green Bank, West Virginia, because it's a home to a radio telescope so large it needs near complete radio silence in order for it to operate properly. As a result, people who claim to have electromagnetic hypersensitivity move there.

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Mon Jun 28, 2021 9:05 pm

Remember the Nickelodeon sitcom "Clarissa Explains It All"?

I have heard about the unsuccessful spinoff pilot that focused on her adult life, but TIL there was an even later sequel that was published as a novel by the show's the creator, "Things I Can't Explain", which focuses on Clarissa in her mid-20s, struggling with finding a new job after the 2008 recession.

Oh, and her brother, Ferguson, became a successful in the financial industry...until he got sent to prison over a white-collar crime. Clarissa indicated that he became a right-wing free market believer.

Also, Clarissa's mom became a millionaire from selling tofu glue.

I know there were talks of a revival in 2018 (nothing's come out so far), although assuming they eventually go through with it, it's a question of whether the events from the book will be taken into account.

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Tue Jun 29, 2021 10:46 am

did you know dueling with wax bullets used to be a sport? did you know it was at the olympics twice?

now you do
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Thu Jul 01, 2021 11:03 am

I imagine required Olympic dueling apparel was a derby hat and handlebar moustache, but otherwise totally naked because Olympics
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Fri Jul 02, 2021 1:08 pm

TIL that Elvis Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, had a very, very wild life.

For starters, he was an undocumented immigrant from the Netherlands; he never became a naturalized US citizen. His real name was Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk.

He may have been involved in a murder, which may be the reason why Parker never sought to officially become a citizen.

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Sun Jul 04, 2021 1:54 pm

Mechanical Ape wrote:
Thu Jul 01, 2021 11:03 am
I imagine required Olympic dueling apparel was a derby hat and handlebar moustache, but otherwise totally naked because Olympics
they wore a thick overcoat and a mask :-P
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Thu Jul 15, 2021 10:22 pm

You know how most fonts make all 10 digits the same width so they automatically line up in spreadsheets and such? TIL there's a special space character that's specified as always being that exact width, called a figure space, made for padding numbers in tables if the need arises. It's one of several special types of spaces that exist in Unicode for handling weird formatting edge cases, like the famous "non-breaking space" that overrides word wrap and also HTML's tendency to treat multiple spaces in a row as redundant; the "zero-width space", which does the opposite, letting word wrap break up text if it wants to without inserting a visible space between them... and the Ogham space, which isn't a space at all but behaves like one, as Mr. Scott explains:

Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of...

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Fri Jul 16, 2021 4:00 am

TIL there was a computer called the Exidy Sorceror that used 8-track cartridges as the cases for its software cartridges. The spindle hole was what held the circuit boards in. Talk about using off-the-shelf parts...
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of...

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Adiwan (?) » Fri Jul 16, 2021 5:00 am

Machining custom injection forming molds are really expensive. It is also a huge benefit that there are already companies that can supply the final product from those molds as they also already have a supply chain for the material.

It's a similar story with the famous dental x-ray imagining device made from the Atari Jaguar molds
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If my memory serves me right I have used it once at my dentist about 20 years ago.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Fri Jul 16, 2021 4:01 pm

ah yes
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Thu Aug 12, 2021 5:34 pm

I always love it when I find out about a vintage piece of animation I never heard of before.

So TIL about a 1954 stop-motion film "Hansel and Gretel". It had an interesting history behind production.



It was largely made by set designers, sculptors, and puppeteers who never worked in animation before (and largely never did after this was made). They were learning "on the job" while making the film. They shot in sequence, and by the end they were running out of money, so you could see the animation quality decline towards the end.

They were able to secure a distribution deal with RKO Pictures. RKO was Disney's main distributor for many years but by the end their relationship was deteriorating (the final straw being when RKO refused to release Disney's documentary "The Living Desert"). Disney set up his own distribution company, Buena Vista, in 1953, but Disney was still obligated to fulfill what was left of his RKO contract, so he largely released "Donald Duck" CinemaScope cartoons to fulfill what was left before switching distribution completely. RKO, with this in mind, promoted the hell out of this movie, wanting it to be their big thing since their relationship with Disney was over by then. It didn't do all that well in box office, alas.

More info here. At least two people involved had extensively worked for Jim Henson after the film, Don Sahlin and Kermit Love (for those wondering, he joined Henson well after Kermit the Frog was created and named)

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Fri Sep 03, 2021 4:36 am

Y'all remember the Space Shuttle Challenger, the first one that exploded? TIL there had been plans to have Big Bird on board. Not like they were gonna pretend he was on board by filming him getting in and using a fake model for the space scenes, or just send the costume and have one of the astronauts put it on for some silent publicity footage, no, Carol freaking Spinney was gonna literally go into space, in his Big Bird costume. NASA was fully on board with it until they realized they couldn't make him fit.

And while it's freaky to imagine the universe where the star of Sesame Street died in a space accident, I'm thinking more about the one where he got to go and nothing went wrong. A children's television character would have been the first civilian celebrity in space, by 35 years. I feel like it would have radically affected the public's perception of the space program.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Sun Sep 12, 2021 11:53 am

Remember James Frey, the guy who wrote a memoir "A Million Little Pieces" that turned out to be a fraud?

Well, TIL that, since then, he's been churning out books via a book mill he founded. He wrote a YA book called "I Am Number Four", which he co-wrote under a collective pseudonym "Pittacus Lore", that later became a movie.

Frey is very much open that he only writes stories for money (works published thru book mills aren't exactly high art), even saying he should "have never fucking apologized" to Oprah. More info here

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mr. Big (?) » Tue Sep 14, 2021 1:14 pm

TIL about how, in the early 1970s, a gay rights group in Los Angeles announced plans to turn Alpine County, CA a "gay colony"

(which turned out to be a publicity stunt for the group. More info here.)

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Tue Sep 14, 2021 3:23 pm

in the 70s you could probably get away with people believing you, i feel like today everyone would call bullshit
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Tue Sep 14, 2021 3:59 pm

Mr. Big wrote:
Tue Sep 14, 2021 1:14 pm
gay colony
What my Surviving Mars LP should’ve been.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Tue Sep 14, 2021 8:48 pm

DaikatunaRevengeance wrote:
Tue Sep 14, 2021 3:23 pm
in the 70s you could probably get away with people believing you, i feel like today everyone would call bullshit
You should look up Joey Skaggs sometime. Dude was a legend at stuff like this.
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of...

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Adiwan (?) » Thu Sep 23, 2021 11:16 am

TIL that my small hand-held air pumps for my bicycle tyres are garbage. I could pump them up to a sufficient level to make them work.
But with the new and bigger standing kind I can pump the tyres to 4 bar (~60 PSI) instead of the 2.5 bar with the old pumps.
The rolling resistance is so low now that I don't end up sweating like a pig coming home. It was fine before but the difference is greater than expected.

Don't cheap out on tools and do proper maintenance on your gear.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Tue Oct 05, 2021 11:08 pm

TIL there was a Waterworld tie-in video game made for the Virtual Boy, of all things. And that's just so perfect. Two overpriced, overhyped messes that were made for each other.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Tue Oct 12, 2021 6:32 pm

TIL the handle of a scythe is called a snath.

When the Grim Reaper comes for you, tell him “Hey, nice snath.” It’s worth a try.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Madeline (?) » Tue Oct 12, 2021 8:44 pm

one letter away from being a forgotten guy ritchie movie

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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Tue Oct 19, 2021 9:08 pm

TIL about Matthias Buchinger (1674-1740), who was born without hands or feet and was 29 inches tall. He was an accomplished artist and magician and could play multiple instruments. He was married four times.
Wikipedia wrote:He also is rumored to have had children by as many as 70 mistresses. Buchinger's fame was so widespread that in the 1780s the term "Buckinger's boot" existed in England as a euphemism for the vagina (because the only "limb" he had was his penis).
broke: Columbus Day
woke: Matthias Buchinger Day
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Pocket (?) » Tue Nov 09, 2021 5:48 pm

People keep comparing NFTs to star registries so I decided to do some digging on how those actually work, thinking maybe it was something run by NASA as a way to fund astronomy research or whatever... turns out not only is it just some random people, it's multiple groups of random people, so there is a good chance the same star has occasionally been "sold" to multiple people by different agencies.

So yeah, it's a pretty spot-on analogy actually.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Wed Nov 10, 2021 11:50 am

There was a time in the early 00's when it was popular to buy land on the moon

you know, despite treaties signed by multiple countries not allowing you own land on bodies outside of earth
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Wed Nov 10, 2021 11:52 am

similarly there were multiple companies selling land on the moon
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by Mechanical Ape (?) » Wed Nov 10, 2021 1:47 pm

TIL Havana, Cuba was named after a Taino chief who ruled there.

I’d always assumed it was Spanish for “haven”
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...

Post by DaikatunaRevengeance (?) » Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:37 am

interesting
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