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Francis E. Dec Esc. said:
Tsar Peter III was mentally ill and had the mind of a child. He spent most days playing with toys, and once had a rat executed for allegedly eating two of his toy soldiers. His wife Catherine eventually had him deposed and killed and ruled as Catherine the Great.
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I know this is a necro of a post but...


So Chris chan if he actually did have some of the power over people he often had delusions of and has put in nearly every wish fufilment piece of fiction he's made? 🤔
 
Really sorry for the triple post but there doesn't seem to be much activity on this page Tonight anyway:


The Mayor of Jersey City Steve fullop and Governor Murphy are such liberal shills they've vowed to "turn New Jersey into the California of the east coast"


Steve Fullop has refused to put the state flag of Mississippi at the Liberty State Park display of state flages because Mississippi is the last State to use the Confederate flag.
 
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During the making of the second Phantasm movie, the studio made Don Coscarelli replace A. Michael Baldwin with James LeGros, but he dug in his heels and refused when they wanted Reggie Bannister replaced with Jeffrey Tambour. Can you imagine the dad from Arrested Development killing evil dwarves with a four-barreled shotgun?
 
The reason Arkansas and Kansas are pronounced differently is because Arkansas comes from a French plural name for the Native Kansa Tribe, while Kansas is name after the Kansas River (which happens to be the English spelling of Kansa). In French, an "s" at the end of the word is typically silent and an "a" is usually pronounced "aw"
 
From 1962 to 1983, the United States attempted a crude form of weather control by seeding tropical storms and hurricanes with silver iodide. Dubbed Project Stormfury, the project was intended to force tropical storms to expend the greater part of their energy over the ocean, meaning they would be weaker when they reached land and thus unable to wreak as much damage.
The project was shelved when it was determined that behavior in seeded hurricanes was indistinguishable from behavior in unseeded hurricanes; the scientists didn't know the results of human intervention, and so confused the results of their actions with the natural behavior of hurricanes.
 
In the original Wakfu "black duck" bathroom scene, the storyboard was drawn with full frontal nudity and the censorship was added later in post production.
 
At night, if you're not close to a major city, get a radio and tune it to the AM band. AM bounces off the atmosphere, and this effect is more pronounced at night. I was in central Oklahoma one night and picked up a station from Chicago.
 
I’m the files of Pokémon Gold and Silver, there exists data for an unused “manchild” trainer class. It’s not known how this class would’ve behaved, but I feel with the Pokemon fandom being the way it is now, it’s be a perfect addition if they wanna reuse some old scrapped ideas.
 
Queen Victoria became obsessed with death and mortality after the death of her husband. She had London's parks sealed shut and when asked were people would have picnics and walks she replied "The city cemeteries." She wore black mourning clothes for the remainder of her life and kept the windows of Buckingham palace shut and covered by black blinds 24/7 she rarely made public appearances and when she did it was only when the weather was cloudy and dreary out (an easy task given London)
 
Jasonfan89 said:
The twelve days of Christmas originally referred to December 25th to January 5th, not December 14th to 25th. The practice is all but forgotten by most Christians in the west save for Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Thought January 5th is still considered Christmas day in Russia.... speaking off which when the Communist party took over in 1917 one of the first State orders was the removal of all symbols of Christmas and the outlawing of the holiday, including outlawing depictions of St. Nicholas as a symbol of religion. Though people got around the bans by calling Christmas trees "New year's trees." And St Nicholas became Santa Claus and wasn't a saint, he was a folk elf.


Still wanna vote for Bernie and AOC next November kids?
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Someone probably noted this, but for the Russian Orthodox and most or many Greek Orthodox, 5th January is 25th of December in the Julian calendar, while Christmas in the West is that date in the Gregorian Calendar, only adopted in Russia after the October Revolution. The Orthodox tried to use adopt a revised Julian calendar, which would mostly follow the Gregorian Calendar, at least in solar terms, except for Easter which would be calculated in Jerusalem using the Lunar cycle, but it was not accepted. The Russian Orthodox are Julian, the Greek Orthodox, officially Gregorian, although there are dissenters, Old Calendarists, which obviously includes the Old Believers too. A somewhat unconnected point, although connected in the sense of stubborn tradition, the Amish and some other tradition minded Protestants, use the Julian calendar..

A calendar devised through the initiative of Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 was not quickly accepted in the Protestant parts of Europe, excepting Lutheran Prussia did adopt it in 1610. The United Kingdom of England and Scotland, and its Dominions only changed in 1752, but contrary to myth, there were no rioters demanding back eleven days. The proposer of the Act, Lord Chesterfield, after whom the Act was commonly named, made certain not to name the Pope, which might suggest accepting Papal primacy, but described a calendar which was the exact same as the Gregorian Calendar.

The modern codified Gregorian Calendar ISO 8601 differs somewhat in details like having year 0, although not the same as a Bernie/AOC/Khmer Rouge Year 0, just the twelve months to AD or CE 1.
 
Similar to Swordquest in the United States, there was a similar ‘use entertainment medium to find treasure’ quest in the United Kingdom. Using a picture book written and drawn by Kit Williams called ‘Masquerade,’ a person would have a chance to find an 18-carat gold and jeweled pendant that was shaped like a rabbit. Hidden in a park, someone ended up stumbling upon the prize from the dug up earth where the two previous contestants missed and took the prize for himself. Now, what would you do with a priceless artifact like this?

Enter Hareraiser. That same person, Dugald Thompson, decided that he should release a video game challenging people to find the golden hare for themselves. Under the moniker of ‘Haresoft Ltd.,’ the game released in 1984 to every 8 bit computer in the UK at the time. Instead of coming with a game and a comic book, Hareraiser only released with a small packet explaining the directions. Hareraiser was separated into two parts: Prelude and Finale. These cost about £8.95/$11.79 each and contained clues to solve a greater puzzle.

However, nobody ever found any sense or meaning to this technicolor nightmare.

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The company was quickly liquidated after poor sales from both games and the pendant vanished. However, Kit himself managed to reunite with it some time in 2013, as the pendant was in the hands of a Middle Eastern collector. You can watch Ashens go a bit more in-depth in his video down below.

 
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Stoneheart said:
Fun Fact, James bond Favourite Fag Brand is named after that guy.
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And Ronald Reagan was one that appeared in ads for that brand.
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Jasonfan89 said:
It took 117 computers running for 24 hours a day for over a year in a temperature controlled room to fully render Toy Story.
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(I promise this is going somewhere, there's an opening and an ending.)

That's not surprising, computers were ass back then and the hardware+software needed had a combined cost of more than you are ok with selling your ass for.
Pixar's renderer, Renderman, is currently free to download. I think it free was in the past as well but it only ran on Irix(the 3D operating system of Jurassic Park fame) and getting a Silicon Graphics computer to run it on cost 20k and up. PowerAnimator and had a similar price-tag, same with Softimage|3D (guess how that is pronounced, they were also briefly owned by Microsoft before they sold it to AutoDesk - the Unilever of 3d software).

Silicon Graphics(SGI and of N64 fame) had the best 3D accelerators in the world and they weren't for ordinary people, they also created OpenGL. Later on some people left SGI and started their own company, 3dfx, they were the first to release an appealing, affordable and actually good 3D accelerator for the home consumer. The 3dfx Voodoo.

Soon they had many competitors, one of the more capable ones was Nvidia. Nvidia later released the first Geforce card around the same time as the new generation of Alias|Wavefront(creator of PowerAnimator mentioned previously) 3d software was released on platforms including PC/Win2k. That program was Maya, you might not have heard of it, it's pretty obscure.

The Geforce was low cost and absolutely tremendous value for money, I mean, build a low-end SGI competitive 3d modelling computer using consumer priced off the shelf parts? Wow, the cost of entry was 1/20th of the price it used to be. PC used to have LightWave, 3dStudioDos, 3dStudioMax, but nothing classy

Nvidia saw this and capitalized on it by releasing the first Quadro card, aimed at professionals. They did this by disabling some previously functional OpenGL features in the drivers for the gaming card, features that games never use, like putting a hard limit on line rendering for wireframes. The Quadro was of course much more expensive even though it was the exact same card/chip but with fancy drivers.
Changing a thing in the registry fooled the installer to install the Quadro drivers, no big deal, saved a couple of hundred bucks.

The Geforce 2 arrived as did the new Quadros. Nvidia had become smarter, it wasn't just a registry hack to separate the cards this time, it was a hardware feature that determined if it was a pleb card or big money card.
That hardware feature was a resistor, either missing or present. Slightly more complicated than doing the overclock hack of an Athlon with a pencil.

Between the PC release of Maya as well as the Geforce 1 and Geforce 2(an 8 month period) SGI started to crater. They used to design their own CPUs and GPUs but went x86(Pentium 2-3, Windows 2000) to be competitive. To add some special flair to their systems they designed some parts of the hardware for their workstations, I think they made their own northbridge for RAMBUS RAM on a P3 system, but the price-tag was too damn high. They also started using Nvidia Quadro cards, sealing their demise, they were no longer selling their own hardware, they were a retailer.


Fun Fact:
The splash screen of 3d modeling/animation software Maya 1 or 2 had the first CG image of Sam Raimis Spider-man movie, years before it was released.
 
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The first two female F-14 pilots both died during their first cruises in the aircraft.

When I was still flying there was also a rumor that the Pentagon had done a report in 98 and found female pilots were almost 5 times more likely to be in an accident resulting in the loss of an airframe than a male pilot with equal experience
 
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