Totally useless information/trivia

[Mozzavfc]

Disappointed the gap at the bottom right isn't Liz Truss 

[leemond2008]

Well, that really is some totally useless information/trivia right there, thankyou 

[AvfcRigo82]

[Xela]

[Chindie]

The highest grossing movie of all time in Peru is 2023s otherwise flop entry in the generally dire Transformers franchise, Rise of the Beasts.

The movie flopped, one of a long running series of blockbusters failing in 2023, but for some reason in Peru it did gangbusters. Peru was actually it's 4th largest market, which is bizarre. There's not any Peruvian actors in it, though it does have a few actors in it with connections to Central and Southern America (and Puerto Rico).

By all accounts it's one of the better entries in the series, but still, very odd that it really hit the buttons of the Peruvian market. It does seem part of it was filmed in Peru which partly explains things, but still.

Edited November 5, 2023 by Chindie

[Xela]

Pocahontas died in Gravesend, Kent. 

[chrisp65]

25 minutes ago, Xela said:

Pocahontas died in Gravesend, Kent. 

I’ve been to Gravesend, you can’t really blame her.

[colhint]

We get 12 full moons a year. They all have different names, Wolf, Harvest etc. 

However the annual lunar cycle is 11 days shorter than the earths. Which means every 2.5 years there is an extra moon, meaning we get 13 moons.

This moon is called the blue moon. It's rare hence the phrase

Once in a blue moon.

[mjmooney]

3 hours ago, colhint said:

We get 12 full moons a year. They all have different names, Wolf, Harvest etc. 

However the annual lunar cycle is 11 days shorter than the earths. Which means every 2.5 years there is an extra moon, meaning we get 13 moons.

This moon is called the blue moon. It's rare hence the phrase

Once in a blue moon.

I know this because of Nanci Griffith. 

 

[Rds1983]

Humans are the only animals to have a chin.

[sne]

4 hours ago, Rds1983 said:

Humans are the only animals to have a chin.

Not even the Chinpanzee?

[Rds1983]

12 minutes ago, sne said:

Not even the Chinpanzee?

Their jawline slopes backwards and isn't a chin apparently. Same with gorillas. 

[rjw63]

1 hour ago, sne said:

Not even the Chinpanzee?

[AVFC_Hitz]

2 hours ago, Rds1983 said:

Their jawline slopes backwards and isn't a chin apparently. Same with gorillas. 

I've noticed they all look like that...

Do I need a punchline?

[Xela]

6 hours ago, Rds1983 said:

Humans are the only animals to have a chin.

Elephants?

[il_serpente]

Capuchin monkeys?

[AVFC_Hitz]

Gail Platt?

[TheAuthority]

On 25/12/2023 at 03:23, Rds1983 said:

Humans are the only animals to have a chin.

What about a Chinchilla?

[Chindie]

Tetris has been completed.

Or more specifically it's been beaten. 

Tetris on the NES has long been a title used to set gameplay records, like the long known competitive playing of Pacman and Donkey Kong, but Tetris is a bit different. Pacman, if you are very, very, very good at it, is fairly reliably beatable - you can reach a level at which the games' programming breaks, a 'killscreen', and that's the furthest you can get with it.

Tetris, on the other hand, is much more difficult to do that with. Tetris actively fights the player in such a way to make it effectively impossible to beat. When you reach level 29 in Tetris on the NES, the tetrominoes fall so quickly it's impossible to move the blocks from one side to the other before they land in normal play, effectively meaning at level 29 the game is made to end - it's been programmed to prevent a normal player being able to go further.

However, people worked out that you can beat level 29. You just have to play the game differently. First they discovered a technique of tapping the Dpad extremely quickly (extremely quickly - over 15 times a second), called hypertapping, which would allow you to manipulate the pieces faster than the game expects you to at level 29, which lead to a guy reaching level 30 in 2011 - just the 22 years after the games' original release. That record stood for 8 years, and then other players started to slowly push on the record into the mid-30s. After that another technique was discovered, called rolling, whereby the player taps the bottom of the pad with a series of taps of their fingers in succession (like the classic bored rolling tap on a table) while shifting the Dpad direction. This technique allowed people to hit the buttons at a speed similar or better than hypertapping, but much more easily and with much less strain on the hands. Where hypertapping was very difficult, only doable by a small group of players to a high level and lead to injuries, rolling anyone could do, with practice.

This then lead to breakthroughs with how far players could get. Quickly people broke through beyond level 100. The community knew that there had to be a point where the game would break - all these 8-bit games eventually have a point where the programming breaks, mentioned in a previous discussion of these kind of old game records, where the programming hits an overflow error (which is what causes Pacman to go to a killscreen, is programming runs out of numbers it can use and it crashes). A programme was created to play Tetris at a level a human can't to see how far it would need to be taken to hit a killscreen. The bot found one at Level 237, but it wasn't clear that this was a set in stone killscreen like Pacman (Tetris would definitely break at the same level as Pacman, 256, because of byte based programming) and there was a theory it might depend on the actual flow of play. It was then theorised that, with the right flow of play and events happening, the game would crash at Level 155.

This week, a 13yo did it. He actually did it at level 157, because he missed some of the prerequisites to get the 155 break, but he got a NES Tetris killscreen, the first ever, 35 years after the game was released.

[mjmooney]

9 minutes ago, Chindie said:

This week, a 13yo did it. He actually did it at level 157, because he missed some of the prerequisites to get the 155 break, but he got a NES Tetris killscreen, the first ever, 35 years after the game was released.

He needs to get out more.