Crescent wank
I can still remember my first proper wank. I was about 10 years old and I'd found a photography magazine of my dads with a picture of a naked lady in it. Whilst closely studying this picture, my John Thomas started doing ‘that thing’ again, and I discovered that rubbing it felt rather nice. After a few minutes of this, it suddenly started feeling very nice indeed, so nice in fact, that I did a little wee. And so began a life long passion of rubbing my John Thomas whilst looking at naked ladies. You should try it sometime.

Fast forward 30 odd years and I’m on holiday in Cornwall with my girlfriend and her parents. We’ve rented a beach house for 2 weeks, well it’s more of a chalet really. It’s small, comfortable and pleasant enough, just like the girlfriend really. A good time is had by all, until towards the end of the first week when I come down with some hideous stomach bug, which causes me to spend 2 days sat on the toilet clutching a bucket. Not wishing to spoil the holiday for everyone else, I insist that they go out for their day trips and leave me alone in the house feeling sorry for myself.

By the morning of the third day of this, I’m starting to feel a little better. I had managed to sleep though the night without needing to rush off to the bathroom, and Id even managed a little breakfast. However, I still felt as weak as a gay kitten, so I opted to go back to bed while the others went out for the day again.

A few hours later, I woke up again, and this time I was feeling much better. I now had 5 or 6 hours to kill on my own before the family got back. It was a beautiful day, with a good strong breeze, so an afternoon of kite flying on the beach seemed like an ideal way to spend the day. But first, I think I’ll knock one out.

I tried a memory wank, but just couldn’t concentrate. Going to need some visual stimulation. There’s no internet access in the chalet, so I’m going to need to improvise. I could go down to the beach, which is bound to be thronging with bikini clad girlies, and maybe even some topless ones, but public masturbation tends to be frowned upon, so I rule that idea out. I briefly consider buying a magazine from the newsagents, but quickly rule that option out too, as I would need to hide it somewhere in the chalet, where it could be found by my girlfriend, or, worse still, her mother. There’s an internet cafe in town......oh yeah.......the public masturbation thing. Best not.

And then I spot it. On the breakfast table is a copy of The Sun, courtesy of the girlfriend’s father. I open it up to page 3, and Katy from Wolverhampton stands there smiling at me. I haven’t bashed one off to a page 3 girl since my early teens, but it could work. I go to the recycling box and pull out the papers from earlier in the week, and pretty soon a grand total of 6 page 3 stunners are accompanying me into the bedroom.

I kneel on the floor, and the girls arrange themselves into a crescent around me. Each girl takes their turn and after a truly herculean effort of fwappage, I finally manage to crash my yoghurt truck over Zoe from Bristol’s ample assets. She looks pleased.

Satisfied, the girls return from whence they came, and I bugger off to the beach.

So there you have it. In an age where muff diving, cum swapping, dildoing lesbians and anal creampies are but a few clicks away, I can still remember how to rub one off to a tabloid newspaper picture of a girl with her tits out.
(Lionel Tiger, Sat 2 Jul 2011, 14:54, 10 replies)

Old Sayings
It is remarkable at how many old sayings and proverbs I can remember:

- Home is where the house is
- Never look a gift horse in the anus
- A little of what you fancy makes you fat
- A poor workman always blames his Polish understudy
- Actions speak louder than words, for the deaf community
- Don’t count your chickens in one basket
- Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you’re an emo
- See a pin and pick it up, careful you don’t cut your finger

I could go on. So many sayings, and I still remember them from growing up.

Sometimes these old sayings can prove useless; they just use up valuable storage space in my mind. Other times however, things happen in life, and it gives me the chance to use one of the sayings that I still remember. Take last week for example.
I saw a woman in Tesco, struggling to control her kids. She looked really stressed and at breaking point. Then she accidently knocked over a carton of milk and it exploded all over the aisle floor.

She dropped to her knees and burst into tears, surrounded by spilled milk. It reminded me of something my dad used to say to my mum, a saying I still remember, so I walked over to her and said; "Get a fucking grip, you stupid bitch."

Ahhhh, old sayings.
(Monkey the Chicken Twitter: death_stairs, Fri 1 Jul 2011, 9:12, 5 replies)

Field Marshall Series 2 Single cylinder diesel tractor (starting)
So there's this tractor right? and it's from the olden times (1947 ish). It's got a single cylinder horizontal 2 stroke engine about 6000cc or 6.0 litres.

and it's bad ass and it's called a Field Marshall

On the side of the tractor is a massive flywheel about 3 foot across that you stick a huge starting handle into (the starting handle is the size of the one used by the clown at the end of camberwick green to wind the credits on... but you know, like full sized)

So you stick this massive starting handle into the middle of the fly wheel... then you go round to the front of the tractor and unscrew this big wind in plug thing kind of where you'd expect to find a spark plug (but because it's a diesel engine it's not) so you wind this bit out and the you roll up a bit of blotting paper dipped in saltpeter (that you prepared earlier) and stick it in the end of the plug thing.

You set fire to the bit of blotting paper blow on it till it glows red and then you quickly screw the plug assembly with the now smoldering bit of blotting paper back into the cylinder head...

This is the glow plug to preheat the cylinder and aid ignition.

you then jog back round to the flywheel and starting handle. Running around the circumference of the flywheel (which is about 6 inches wide) is this spiral groove.

You lift up this spring loaded jockey wheel thing (it looks a bit like the deraileur (you know like from before fixies when bikes had gears) that is attached to the decompressor and put the wheel of it into the groove furthest away from the edge of the flywheel.

You spit on your hands.

You grasp the starting handle (ensuring your thumbs are on the same side of the handle as your fingers so that if there's a backfire then the starting handle flys out of your hand rather than snapping off both your thumbs)

And you wind.

There is massive inertia to overcome and the air chuffs out of the cylinder through the decompressor with each revolution

Chuff!

Chuff!

CHUFF!

The Jockey wheel at this point (after 3 complete revolutions) has come to the end of the spiral track and drops free of the flywheel disengaging the decompressor...

and you know at this point it's shit or bust...


If you haven't picked up enough speed with your winding you are going to have a back fire and have a piece of high speed starting handle flip backwards and fire into you and break lots of bones or throw you 20 or 30 feet through the air - no really I've seen it.

If you've got enough speed up with the flywheel and all goes well, it will overcome the compression ignite the diesel (warmed gently by the glowing blotting paper in the cylinder head and...


WHUMP!!


WHOMP!!!

BROB! BOBBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOB!

The engine starts with a noise that is quite frankly prehistoric and you pull the starting handle out of the centre of the flywheel with a satisfied smile knowing that you've survived another day.

And that is my very obsolete skill

Alternatively...

The proper high tech way of doing it -if you were rich and fancy- was to unscrew another plug assembly on the side of the engine and insert a blank 12 gauge shotgun cartridge (as specified in the operators handbook)

You then screw this plug back in and then with a large hammer hit the firing pin in the middle of the plug, loud bang and the engine starts as if by magic.

Never did it that way.

When I was 9 I wasn't allowed shotgun cartridges.

Apologies for length

I haven't gone through this process for nearly 30 years but I reckon I'd still get the old girl started first time.

cider anyone?
(cidercomic hasn't finished it yet..., Fri 1 Jul 2011, 19:06, 4 replies)

Winemaking
For years I’ve made my own wine. Not using those kits that you can buy, I go out into the woods and pick leaves and berries. I’ve currently got 8 demijohns on the go; 2 elderberry, 4 parsnip and 2 oak leaf (ok, I bought the parsnips from Tesco). When bottled, each demijohn will produce about 5 bottles. At any one time, I’ll have 50 – 100 bottles lying around the house, some are 15 years old.

I like doing the more obscure wines. Over the years I’ve made gorse flower, rowan, oak leaf, broom flower, haw, coltsfoot, nettle, pea pod (a favourite of Tom & Barbara Good of course!), birch sap and sycamore sap to name a few, as well as the more common country wines such as elderberry, blackberry, cherry, sloe and so on.

It may not be all that obsolete really, but at least it’s not about fucking cheat codes.
(Lionel Tiger, Tue 5 Jul 2011, 21:02, 19 replies)

To my unborn (and unconceived) children
You will never know the joys of:

- taping songs off the radio
- rewinding video rentals back to the start
- finding timid porn in a hedge (I had a single picture of a naked Pam Anderson circa 1993/94ish. That had to do)
- Encarta '95 (the internet on a CD)
- Finding things out randomly and having to take people's word for it
- Daft rumours being spread around music festivals because of the isolation from the outside world (the general concern for Elton John's death was particularly heartfelt)
- Picking up the house phone and not knowing who it is
- Picking up the house phone at all
- Smoking in pubs
- Fixing a games console by blowing into it
- Changing the channel without a remote
- Finding out games cheats from magazines, C4's Games Master and/or friends who had seen games master or bought a magazine
(El_diablo_blanco, Thu 30 Jun 2011, 20:57, 6 replies)

Bio-defrag
If my brain was like a hard drive I could look though all the directories and delete folders like "Lyrics to Meat Loaf's Bat out of Hell Album", "Monty Python films/sketches" and have a good old defrag and free up a bit of space. Maybe then I could remember "what I went upstairs for" and "a shopping list with more than 6 items on it"
(sittingduck Attention seeking, bullshitting fuck-knuckle, Mon 4 Jul 2011, 13:00, 3 replies)

I can ride a penny farthing
I can add up three and six
I can catch a bus in Worthing
I can whittle brittle sticks

I can hold a door politely
For a lady to pass through
I can correspond fortnightly
I have good posture on a pew

I know that I mustn’t grumble
I can signal in morse code
I prefer an apple crumble
I give way upon the road

I know how to spell correctly
And can’t abide a sloppy hand
I’ll look you in the eye directly
And say I do love a brass band

I renovate my vintage motor
Each weekend I work twelve hours flat
I don’t know what I do it all for
I really am a massive twat
( vladimir, Thu 30 Jun 2011, 17:41, Reply)

When unblocking chicken soup machines
Be sure to use a 14B and not a 14F (a 14B doesn't even remotely look like a 14F) using a 14F will cause the next crew member to order chicken soup to get black currant cordial with blancmange and two creams and a sugar
(libman, Tue 5 Jul 2011, 15:00, 3 replies)

Tank Fly Boss Walk Jam Nitty Gritty, You're listening to the boy from the big bad city. This is Jam hot.
That is all.
(impossibly witty twat No, YOUR Mum etc etc, Mon 4 Jul 2011, 10:44, 7 replies)

Asda EPOS keyboards
I used to work at IBM, many many years ago, doing tech support for their EPOS equipment as used by Boots, Asda, and many other companies.

One day a couple of years ago (and several years after I'd left IBM) I was in Asda (the big one in Govan, where I did most of my practical training on the damn things). One of the till managers was struggling with a phone, a keyboard and her glasses on the out-of-service checkout beside the one I was waiting in the queue for.
"Do you need a hand with that?"
"Oh, um, yes, can you read that number on the bottom?"
"92F6330"
"You weren't even looking at it!"
"No, I thought I'd repressed that particular memory, but it's still stuck... I used to work there"
"Oh, um, John on the phone here said to ask if that's Gordon?"

And I still know how to use the serrated edge of a £1 coin to resharpen the receipt printer cutter blade, and the exact sequence of little gears and pingfuckits to remove to change them when they are too far gone.
(gordonjcp, Sun 3 Jul 2011, 9:27, 6 replies)

Slice and Dice - Don't read while eating...
I used to work in a lab that performed 'bio-distributions'.

If you have a tumour, and have to have a scan, they sometimes inject you with some radioactive stuff. We were trying to design the radioactive stuff so that it sticks to the tumours, so that they show up on the scan. That's the basic idea.

In the research stage, one of the things to test is how the compound moves around the body when you inject it into an animal, you do that by performing a bio-distribution; inject the animal, wait a certain amount of time, and then dissect it carefully, before counting the separate pieces on a radioactivity counter. That way you can work out where the radioactivity moves around the system... or 'mouse', if you prefer...

Anyway, the dissection procedure has to be fairly uniform and precise to do these things, otherwise the data ends up poor, and if there's one thing you REALLY don't want to do when working with animals is waste a life by cocking up your procedures.

Anyway, over the year I worked in the lab, I estimate I chopped up hundreds of mice, possibly close to 1000, and I can still follow the procedure in my head and hands.

Once the mouse is under anaesthetic, hold blunt end of scissors to the back of the neck, and push down while pulling tail hard, this discolates the neck vertebrae, breaks the neck and kills the animal. A quick incision down the front and then quickly remove the bladder before it leaks, then 1 incision either side up the ribs, and peel back to open the chest cavity. Take the lungs (rinse), the heart (slice to remove blood then rinse) and take a blood sample with a syringe (weigh and record). Open the neck incision higher to take the thymus (if required) and then the thyroid. Lift the animal, small snips behind and below the diaphragm to remove the liver and intestines. Separate the stomach first (don't nick it, or it smells), then the liver (separate lobes if required) then the spleen. Then pull small intestine slowly away from blood supply, and then large intestine. Snip behind kidneys to remove separately. Lift left hind-leg, slice neatly at the back to remove skin. Two snips, one at the base, one up the back of the bone, to remove muscle sample from thigh (weigh and record), and then trim in deeper to get bone sample (weigh and record). Remove excess fat from skin, and collect skin sample (weigh and record). Remove tail (to check injection site). Turn animal over. Snip to remove skin from head, then insert scissors into back of skull. Slice down thin portion of skull, 1 incision each side, then peel back to remove skull flap. Gently pull out the brain. Separate cerebellum/cerebrum, left-right hemispheres if required. Remove eyes if required. Remaining carcass into separate pots. Seal lids, label, send to radiation counter.

I was busily explaining this procedure to a friend the other day (with my eyes closed to more easily visualise it as I moved my hands through the motions) when I looked up and saw said friend looking at me in utter horror. I suppose normal people don't say things like 'gently pull out the brain' over morning coffee.

Oh, and the obligatory note to those against animal testing. Unless you are a full vegan, who does not use ANY modern medicine (aside from homeopathy, you are welcome to that), your hypocritical views are null and void. Otherwise, you have the right to disagree, but please stop using outdated information, and footage from cosmetics testing (which IS pretty abhorrent, and banned in the UK) to back up your views. Kthxbye.
(Serotonicity was a naughty boy on..., Fri 1 Jul 2011, 19:30, 11 replies)

As I've said before I work with young kids,
one day I came into work to find them all round the Xbox playing none other than street fighter. They were engaging in typical button bashing fervor, no finesse whatsoever.

I asked if they minded if I had a quick go. Button basher numero uno said no bother laughing with the lads already with his victory, in their eyes, a certainty. Imagine my delight when I learned the moves were still the same.

HADOUKEN! SHORYUKEN! HURRICANE KICK!!!!!

I thanked him for the game, told him he fought a good fight and handed the control to his now silent friends.
( dazbrilliantwhites has been meaning to change this..., Thu 30 Jun 2011, 17:30, 2 replies)

Singalong
My Dad used to travel to Japan on business reasonably often - everyone's probably aware that the Japanese are very formal in work, but do like to let their hair down after work with a lot of drinking and singing.

After one particularly good day of business my father was invited out to the bar with all his Japanese colleagues for a traditional 'get smashed and sing' session. This was in the days before karaoke machines so everyone had to sing their party piece.

After numerous beers and whiskies it was my dad's turn. He couldn't sing at all, and usually managed to avoid having to take part, but this time there was no escape. He was helped up onto the table top, beer in hand, and everyone cheered him on.

But his mind was a blank: he couldn't remember a single song, not even a hymn or nursery rhyme. The only thing that came into his head was a song he used to sing 20 years earlier, with his fellow commuters on the train to and from Birmingham, which they had made up based on the notice on the old train carriage:

"To stop the train
In cases of emergency
Pull down the cha-a-in
Pull down the cha-a-in
Penalty for improper use
Twenty five pounds"

He drained his beer, sang the song twice through, saluted, then fell off the table into a crowd of drunken Japanese businessmen.
(Smale is stuffed, Tue 5 Jul 2011, 7:29, 6 replies)

will you all click
If I promise to post something that isn't game cheat codes?

In 87-89, I did gcse tech drawing. I really enjoyed it, but I never carried on with the subject after leaving school.
About 6 months back, I was in the loft and I found my old kit; board, ruler, compasses, pens, set square, t-square. The lot. So I thought I'd dig it out and have a go.
I found my old stapler, measured it up and drew it in third-angle projection, plus orthogonal view and an auxiliary view from some arbitrary angle.
My second-born was amazed. He's just started a machine drawing module in his engineering course and is now coming to me for pointers and tips.
I suppose it's not really an obsolete talent, more of a dormant talent that I didn't think I'd ever need again.

The moral of this story is that when your partner tells you to 'get rid of old shit that we don't need and will never use again', tell them to piss off.
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Fri 1 Jul 2011, 18:39, 2 replies)

I've known this for 17 years now
the top speed of a porcupine is 16km/h
( emvee cruor deo cruoris, Fri 1 Jul 2011, 9:14, 7 replies)

I can safely pilot a Cobra MK III into an orbiting station
without using the docking computer.
( VampireMonkeyOnSpeed a super sexy sexual sex terrorist sex, Thu 30 Jun 2011, 21:43, 6 replies)

I remember
learning some old useless bogus mind programming techniques which they say are meant to click people into doing something subconsciously. I like the idea. But this is nonsense and I even payed for my pal to take a course with me. which is one way to lose all your money . if it was true think how good it would make you feel to do this.now

do it now
( Clay hopes this bit is long enough to promote my websi, Mon 4 Jul 2011, 11:08, 12 replies)

Undo the clip of a bra one handed
Now married. no use for that skill any more. But I still like to do it sometimes when we are out just to piss her off. :)
(waxdart hello., Thu 30 Jun 2011, 23:49, 1 reply)

DOS Gaming
I know:
1: How to make a boot disk
2: How to swear at a bastarding boot disk when it doesn't bastarding work even after you've followed all the bastarding instructions to the bastarding letter.
3: How to plead with a boot disk
4: How to bargain with a boot disk
5: How to cry quietly in the corner at a boot disk
6: How to blackmail my parents into buying me a SNES.
(universalpsykopath loves what you've done with your hair., Thu 30 Jun 2011, 22:13, 1 reply)

It's all about the 8-bits this week, isn't it?
And yes, I still know far too much about the 8-bit(s) I owned - a succession of Amstrad CPCs. In fact my b3ta name (the only place I still use it) was originally my Amstrad demo coding name, which probably explains why it's the sort of crap name that only a 13 year old would dream up.

Anyway. I spent far too much time with CALL &BC02 and CALL &BB18 and putting in the right number of NOPs to get the raster timing right and all of that. Split modes. Horizontal splitting (stop that). Different CRTC types. I could bore for Britain.

But in the manner of annoying (by then) 15 year-old entrepreneurs, I also ran this thing called a "PD library". How this worked: some spotty kid sent you, another spotty kid, a C15 tape and 50p. You copied some BASIC games onto it (strictly legit - PD is "public domain", not far off what we now call open source, but more crap and less self-righteous) and sent it back. With all these 50ps you could afford hard drugs, or better still, an Amstrad DDI-1 disc drive, which meant you never had to bother with tapes again.

Copying tapes is slow and it's a rubbish way to earn pocket money. But C15s were bearable. What pissed me off the most, I remember, was when some greasy spotty kid sent me five - five - C90s. That was going to be a whole lot of copying. And yeah, I'd get a few more 50ps for it. But still, there goes the weekend.

So, the old stuff I still know? The name of that greasy, spotty kid... because after copying BASIC game after BASIC game for five times 90 minutes, it's been ingrained on my memory ever since.

Stand up and take a bow, Rob Manuel.
(ChaRleyTroniC is invincible with his chips and cheese, Thu 30 Jun 2011, 19:47, 3 replies)

Muscle memory
Some years ago I started a new job, and on day 1 realised that I now had to use the UNIX skills (or even skillz) that I'd confidently asserted in the interview. What I hadn't mentioned was that it was somewhere up to a decade since I'd last used UNIX in anger. So I was staring at the cursor, knowing what I wanted to do but not having the slightest recollection of the arcane sequence of letters and twisted abbreviations that would achieve it.

I had nothing. Panic was setting in. So I did what all good Jedi do, and Used The Force: I closed my eyes, and just let my fingers type whatever felt right. And I mean that literally, I really did close my eyes and try not to think about what I was typing.

And blow me down, it worked. It seems my finger muscles remembered the sequence, even though my conscious mind didn't.

The human memory is a remarkable thing.
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Tue 5 Jul 2011, 13:16, 7 replies)

I can spell correctly without using a spellcheck.
And I know how to use a paper dictionary to look up words I can't remember.

I'm a dinosaur, me.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Mon 4 Jul 2011, 19:02, 2 replies)

29 years ago I was 12 and this solemn hymn found it's way into my brain forever, by way of a cassette on Scout Camp
As I was walking down the street one day,
I saw a house on fire.
There was a man,
Shoutin' and wavin' at an upper story window,
To the crowd that was gathered there below,
For he was sore afraid.
Jump!
You fucker, jump!
Jump into this here blankit,
wot we are 'oldin,
and you will be all right!
He jumped...
Hit the deck...
Broke 'is fuckin' neck!
There wa-as no-oo blanket.
Laugh?
We nearly shat!
We 'ad not larfed so much since Grandma died,
Or Aunty Mabel caught her left tit in the mangle.
We are miserable sinners,
Fi-ii-ilthy fuckers.
Aaaaaarrrrseholesssssssss!
(CADmonkey rollllllllled another one, just like the other one, Mon 4 Jul 2011, 18:12, 6 replies)

Maps
I can still read a map, which increasingly these days seems a rare skill. I say this because in my work I regularly come across professionals who are required to do so daily and yet seem completely incapable and with our satnav reliant society people seem to be less and less aware of how to properly use a map.

Ok I'm going to go off on one a bit here but what the hell, it seems this weeks question is more a compilation of cheats for old games anyway, what's one more guy nerding out gonna do?

Maps are bloody fantastic things. With a compilation of different data, overlays etc. you can learn everything you ever need to know about a place. As an undergraduate geologist I spent hours pouring over them every single week working out exactly what features I could follow in the field. As a boy scout I carried one with me as I led troops of kids not much younger than myself on epic hikes (or at least they seemed so at the time). I've traveled all over the place using road maps to work out the best routes and sensible diversion (a definite one up on on satnavs) and as I sit at my desk (not working but boring you lot) I have 2 seperate mapping programns open which tell me all kinds of information about land uses, legal notices, development projects and floodplains. I don't even live in this area and most of these places I haven't been to, but if you told me you lived there I'd probably be able to work out exactly what your street looks like in a number of seconds. With next to no effort at all. It's really not that difficult. You can teach kids to do it at school and make it fun and it's not a bad skill to have.

And yet yesterday while walking my Dogs I saw a man driving along an old (heavily) rutted farm track in a vauxhall zafira with 3 children in the back. He had already pulled off a significant amount of body work from his car and as he passed about 100m up the track from me he threw his expensive* TomTom satnav out the window.
Like I say, probably should have looked at a map.

*might have been free, they do seem to give this shite away.
(Monkeyofspong, Mon 4 Jul 2011, 16:59, 5 replies)

I can spell, punctuate, and use proper syntax.
Apparently that's an obsolete, outmoded skill these days.

I still make mistakes, mind, but they're due to inattention, not ignorance.
( flake has nothing against your right leg, Mon 4 Jul 2011, 10:46, 4 replies)

Old stuff I still know...

Me.

.
(emadex thinks the world will end on, Sat 2 Jul 2011, 17:45, Reply)

Does anyone remember Doom?
It was an early FPS, set on the moon, where you fought demons. A bit like Fear Effect, but with 2D graphics, if you will. There was a cheat code to get all the guns, n' stuff, which I can still remember. It was EVERYONEWHOEVERPLAYEDITREMEMBERSTHEBLOODYCHEATCODESFORDOOMWHYDONTWEALLBANGONABOUTTHEKONAMICODEWHILEWEREATITANDTHATHILARIOUSENGRISHCOCKUPFROMZEROWING.
Something like that, anyway. I'd expect most people on here would never have heard of it.
( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Fri 1 Jul 2011, 15:10, 10 replies)

Cruisers
I studied War at university (yes really). I had a whale of a time and enjoyed it immensely. Most of the degree has faded gracefully to the back of my mind but my dissertation seems oddly unwilling to do the same. The title?

"Regional variation in Washington Treaty heavy cruiser design 1922-35"

This is something that I am still worryingly proficient at. The design, philosophy and employment of a category of warship that was built as a result of a conference that occured 89 years ago and of which none survive. It makes some of the stuff people know about vintage computers look pretty up to the minute. This extends to a weird ability to remember the individual units from various photos that are "commonly" (a relative term here) published of them. This is an ability so sad, you can't even impress other nerds with it.

Length? Roughly 600ft with an all up weight not including crew, ammunition or provisions but including boiler feed water of not more than 10,000 tons.
(Leonard Hatred briefly did some work on, Thu 30 Jun 2011, 22:43, 3 replies)

It seems outdated these days.
I cook, by which I don't mean I open a packet and throw it into the microwave, but that I start with raw ingredients and through the processes of preparation, seasoning and the judicious application of heat, I turn them into finished concoctions fit for consumption. Cakes don't come from a boxed mix in my house; they come from knowing the proper ratios of butter, sugar, flour, eggs, liquid and leavening. Don't get the idea that I'm some sort of food snob, because I'm not, but I am still absolutely boggled by the number of otherwise capable adults I know who are totally mystified by the very idea of anyone being able to master anything more complex than heat-and-eat or the simplest meal of spaghetti and sauce from a jar. There's really nothing attractive about being completely useless in the kitchen.
(louveciennes , Volvospotter, Thu 30 Jun 2011, 17:50, 9 replies)

Not old stuff I know...
...more old stuff I’ve learnt from my father. Now, as a dad myself, I have reused these things, as I’m sure many of you also have:

- The ‘look I’ve stolen your nose with my finger and thumb’ trick. Always leads to tears in my child’s eyes before I quickly ‘screw it back in’.

- “oh look I’ve found a coin behind your ear, aren’t I brilliant?!” Confuses the child.

- Pull my finger. Effortless.

- At dinner time, the old, “look over there” trick, so I can pinch food from the plate of my daughter.

- The ‘I can pull my thumb off’ trick. Better than pulling your cock off.


I promised myself I would never allow myself to do these things, but I can’t help it. It’s so new to a child, I feel like Jesus. When she’s older, she’ll realise how shit I really am.
(Monkey the Chicken Twitter: death_stairs, Thu 30 Jun 2011, 17:38, 1 reply)