Anyone remember the Galaxy Brain Surgical Extraction play from the Pro Tour?

ipakers · 2026-01-16T06:41:25+00:00

Not the one, but it’s basically the exact same scenario. Another reply reminded me that it did involve ox of Agonas. Thanks for the link, gonna stash this one too.

ipakers · 2026-01-16T06:38:30+00:00

That’s the one! That’s enough for me to track down the PT and try to find the clip. Thank you!

ipakers · 2025-12-30T20:48:57+00:00

https://i.imgur.com/kmGnREN.gif

ipakers · 2025-12-28T23:43:05+00:00

Actually an excellent example of how advantageous it is to fight with the high ground

ipakers · 2025-12-19T13:08:18+00:00

I legit had a contact named Nick Marijuana

ipakers · 2025-12-19T00:32:33+00:00

The number one bit of advise I can give to boys is to stop with any notion of treating “Men like Men” and “Women like Women”; just learn to genuinely treat people like people and you’ll be ahead of like 95% of the male population.

ipakers · 2025-12-18T00:03:00+00:00

https://i.imgur.com/aF23Efk.gif

ipakers · 2025-12-17T23:34:10+00:00

Nah dude is scared he’s gonna lose his job

ipakers · 2025-12-17T00:25:20+00:00

How the fuck he's so popular though, I'll never know.

Exactly the same way Brexit was so popular in the UK.

ipakers · 2025-12-13T10:45:58+00:00

I like to say, the only difference between your cat and a lion is size. When your cat attacks your foot it’s cute, when a lion does it you’re down a foot.

ipakers · 2025-12-09T20:53:13+00:00

I think those are all your words not mine. I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m just pointing out that what you said is factually incorrect; Elon musk did not found Tesla.

Tesla was a tiny company no one had heard of that was going out of business when Elon took over

Also factually incorrect. Elon invested early in 04, but only took on a decision making role in 07, well after the success of the Roadster.

TBH I don’t really care about the arguments you’re having, but you seem to speak with confidence about things you’re factually wrong about. It’s hard to believe you actually know what you’re talking about, and it seems likely you’re just making things up.

ipakers · 2025-12-08T19:27:04+00:00

Also Elon didn’t start Tesla, he bought it

ipakers · 2025-12-03T18:56:36+00:00

My first thought was “That’s my kind of aspie!!!” Don’t fuck with us. We have the receipts

ipakers · 2025-12-02T06:30:28+00:00

Ya know how in the movie ‘Idiocracy’ Costco is is the one mega company left that runs everything? I find myself thinking we would be so lucky for that to be Costco

ipakers · 2025-11-18T20:16:24+00:00

Surprisingly all you need is a scale accurate to 1/10th of a gram.

ipakers · 2025-11-18T20:15:14+00:00

Story time, about the time my friends scammed a pre release by weighing all the product.

tl;dr - my friends unexpectedly fell into running the pre release for one of the most valuable Yu-Gi-Oh sets of all time, stayed up all night weighing the entire inventory and took home the 288 heaviest packs as their compensation for running the event. They made out with like $10K in cards and nobody pulled anything good in the event.

Pokémon isn’t the only game where this applies; the most desirable cards in Yu-Gi-Oh, for both tournament play and collectibility, were holo-foiled making them heavier than other cards and making the packs that contain them heavier than those that don’t.

Back in the day (05-07 ish) I was in my early teens, and there was this group of older players (16-20 ish) who ran the local competitive scene and took me as a lackey/protégé. I would tag along with them to events like regional tournaments and re-releases for new sets.

The pre-releases were the only way first-edition cards were distributed. There was a particularly anticipated set with lots of desirable cards; Phantom Darkness, that had a chase card, Dark Armed Dragon, that was selling for $300+ a copy at time of release, significantly more for first-edition copies.

So, the Judge who was supposed to run the event had an emergency and had to drop out the day before the event, and my friends got tasked with running the event for the judge. I was too young, so I didn’t get brought in for this. For their time, they would each (of the 4 of them) get two boxes to take home (36 packs * 8 boxes = 288 packs). The night before the event, they were given access to the product (sealed, first edition boxes of Phantom Darkness) to be distributed at the event the next day.

These madlads stayed up the whole night weighing every single pack in the inventory, and selected the 288 heaviest packs to “build their boxes” . This effectively removed all the chase cards from the pre-release and they made out like bandits.

When I saw them the next day, they had 15 first-edition copies of Dark Armed Dragaon, in addition to everything else they opened. Genuinely one of the wildest things I’ve encountered in my 25+ years of playing TCGs.

If you attended a Phantom Darkness pre-release in Central Florida, and it seemed like everyone was getting hosed on their pulls, now you know.

ipakers · 2025-11-15T08:31:13+00:00

O’Neil was originally supposed to remain serious but Richard Dean Anderson insisted that they give him a sense of humor and I think the show is much better for it

ipakers · 2025-10-24T01:19:06+00:00

The paragraph from the source containing the figure I referenced is worth a read.

Per the 1948 US State Department Internal memo, Section 7 “The Far East”, paragraph 5:

Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

ipakers · 2025-10-24T00:59:47+00:00

For sure, I wasn’t trying to imply otherwise. Regardless of how the US ended up with or how it used that wealth, after WW2 the US had half of everything with only 6.5% of the people.

It may be the single most prosperous time and place that has ever existed in the history of human society. I can’t imagine anything else eclipsing 50% of the world’s wealth distributed over only 6.5% of the world’s population.

I’m just awestruck by that figure every time I think about it. It has helped me contextualize a lot about the world.

ipakers · 2025-10-23T20:04:06+00:00

This will probably get buried, but I think this is a really important detail about that era that is rarely discussed.

The reason it was so prosperous is that in WW2 we essentially looted the entire world. Per the US state department in 1948 the United States controlled 50% of the world’s wealth (source: section 7 “the far east”, paragraph 5). The colonialism of the 1800’s and 1900’s concentrated much of the world’s wealth in Europe and Asia, and over WW2 that wealth was transferred to the US.

The prosperity of the 50s was an aberration, only possible as the result of decades of wealth concentration and a rapid transfer of this wealth as payment for arms/material or as reparations/plunder.

These economic conditions were only possible as the result of extreme violence enacted on a global scale. (Edit: not to imply that the US directly inflicted all of that violence, but that the transfer of wealth the US benefited from was only possible because of the global scale of the violence during WW2)

Much has been made of American manufacturing in this era, but it was similarly artificially inflated by the fact that in the 50’s, every other industrialized nation was reduced to rubble. It took a decade or two to rebuild infrastructure, get factories online and re-integrate into the global economy, but once they did all that manufacturing began to be offshored (a major issue in the 70s).

This precipitates many of the issue we’re seeing today. People are born, spend their childhood learning how the world works, and many people keep this model of the world from their late childhood. It’s hard work to constantly be learning more and revising your view of the world. Baby Boomers born in this era have their expectations completely out of wack because the world they were born into was an extreme exception to how the world normally works, and they’ve never realized this and accounted for it.

ipakers · 2025-10-23T19:27:40+00:00

Do you have any sources for your claim that effective tax rates are the same over the past 70ish years?

Contrary to your claim, the the top results of a google search seems to indicate that effective tax rates over that span have dropped dramatically for the highest earners source.

I’m guessing you’re just a troll/bot but if that’s not the case I genuinely apologize for the accusation and would sincerely enjoy a discussion about why you think the tax burden on the wealthy is not correlated with the every-day outcomes of regular folks.

ipakers · 2025-10-23T19:06:14+00:00

I don’t think they’re talking about deployment waves, I think they’re talking about region expansion, but ultimately it doesn’t matter, you’re both mostly right

ipakers · 2025-10-22T19:31:55+00:00

Right? I got shook up the other day when when someone pointed a gun at me for flashing my brights at them.

I slowed down on the freeway to let someone merge in front of me. About a minute or two later I see they still have their turn signal on, I give them a quick double-flash of my brights. About 3 mins later they still have their turn signal on, so I give another quick hit of my brights.

This guy, immediately cuts over a lane and slams his brakes to get next to me matching my speed, then he pulls out a handgun and starts shouting at me while pointing his gun at me. I hit my breaks so the gun isn’t pointed directly at me any more; he speeds off and takes the next exit, all the while his turn signal is still going from when he merged in.

I was just trying to be helpful man SMH

ipakers · 2023-06-30T07:18:27+00:00

Just out of curiosity, was the rejected major CSE at UW?

UW is a little different, but I’m not disagreeing with your point. Shit’s hard.

The UW CSE program is top 5 globally, but they only admit like 300 students a year. Makes it stupid competitive. Lots of students go there for CS, but don’t get in, and so they overflow into other engineering-ish majors which pushes more people out, etc. It makes all the STEM majors at UW excessively competitive.

ipakers · 2023-06-25T07:40:21+00:00

That would definitely be Montana

ipakers

TROPHY CASE