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World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

theguardian.com

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Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#581

Post by pyrale »

russellbeattie wrote: post #548
pyrale wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your mistake is trying to find logic in something Douglas Adams wrote. It makes no sense for alien spaceships to carry conkers. That's the joke, a small dig at people believing the local stuff they're used to is universal.

Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't think you understand Adams. He was incredibly logical. That was his genius: He would extrapolate on every topic to their logical conclusions - from computers to science to religion. When he was being absurdist, he was very clear about it. Like you said, he was writing about conkers as if it's just the same in the rest of the galaxy, which is definitely absurd. But in order t…

> He was incredibly logical.

Oh, sure. But his writings weren't.

> But in order to ground that absurdity, the rest has to be normal.

Maybe we haven't read the same books ? I would not say that conkers are the only absurd element in the book (or even in the paragraph).

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#582

Post by walthamstow »

sourcepluck wrote: post #450
walthamstow wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you have 'stamps' in Ireland too? When a player's conker comes off the string but remains whole, the opponent can call "stamps!!" and attempt to stamp it to pieces.

We had an explicit "no stamping" rule, which could be overturned by agreement before a game. Actually, we used to have a rhythmic string of rules which were very sayable, which I can't remember, along the lines of "no stamping no biting no _____ no _____ no ...", with a list of things, and a rhyme or two in there. I'm going to ask any old friends I run into and see if I can get the full thing back again. I'm pretty s…

Nope, nothing like that. Apart from not varnishing the conker I don't think we had any rules at all. It was a free-for-all. South London, late 90s.

EDIT - and right on time, south London rules show up in today's Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/16/nut-pimping-...

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#583

Post by shermantanktop »

smolder wrote: post #572
shermantanktop wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solitaire is a game, and many people see games in terms of gaining or losing either social status or self-image. But for single-player games: - maybe "winning" is a special case of "completing" - "playing a game" in a competitive sense is totally different than "playing" in an undirected sense; e.g. playing with Legos or playing with a cat. Or playing with matches for that matter. - for me, i'd much rather write "win…

> But for single-player games We were talking about people cheating at multiplayer co-op in this thread. I don't think people use rule-breaking cheats in multiplayer games (competitive or otherwise) purely for the story in the game, or they could go watch a TV show/movie or read a book instead and get a better story. (Or watch someone else play it!) > for me, i'd much rather write "winner" on a t-shirt and wear it th…

I was responding to

> Like, you can cheat at Solitaire, but why?

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#585

Post by oblio »

dang wrote: post #538
oblio wrote: post #236

The British are living proof of the fact that amazing things[1] can be achieved when the place you live in is extremely boring. [1] For varied definitions of "amazing", such as "conquer countries 10x your size", "invent 20 sports the entire world plays", etc.

I'm sure you meant it in good humor but please don't post nationalistic flamebait to HN. Its expected value is flamewar hell (even if we dodged it here). https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (there's probably room for a conquer conker joke though)

You're nut fun at all!

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#586

Post by calfuris »

_heimdall wrote: post #370
joncrocks wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not quite that simple. The line isn't quite as hard between seed and 'nut'. Namely people may commonly refer to things as a nut when it is a seed. e.g. a Peanut is a seed, as are almonds, cashews, walnuts.

This rabbit hole goes deep. Berries are particularly poorly named - stawberries, blackberries, and blueberries aren't actually berries but tomatoes and bananas are.

I disagree with this on multiple levels. For one, the word "berry" has multiple definitions, and I don't see why the botanical definition should be the only one that counts. If anything, the culinary one should have primacy, as that is the one that is far more relevant to far more people. Botanical jargon is useful to botanists but not very useful in general. And to descend to pedantry, blueberries should not have been on your list of examples. They are berries in both the culinary and the botanical senses of the word.

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#587

Post by BlueTemplar »

dullcrisp wrote: post #578
nanna wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminding all of us how old we are

It’s not even true, no one had Tamagotchis two generations ago unless your generations are 15 years or so… Or am I counting generations completely wrong? Are kids these days two generations removed from millennials?

Well, sorry to be a bummer again, but indeed kids these days are from the Alpha generation, which is two generations from Millenials (GenZ being in-between) :

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Ge...

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#588

Post by smolder »

shermantanktop wrote: post #583
smolder wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But for single-player games We were talking about people cheating at multiplayer co-op in this thread. I don't think people use rule-breaking cheats in multiplayer games (competitive or otherwise) purely for the story in the game, or they could go watch a TV show/movie or read a book instead and get a better story. (Or watch someone else play it!) > for me, i'd much rather write "winner" on a t-shirt and wear it th…

I was responding to > Like, you can cheat at Solitaire, but why?

Yeah, that's fair and what you said is reasonable. I was changing the context back to multiplayer to make my point about that.

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#589

Post by dullcrisp »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #587
dullcrisp wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not even true, no one had Tamagotchis two generations ago unless your generations are 15 years or so… Or am I counting generations completely wrong? Are kids these days two generations removed from millennials?

Well, sorry to be a bummer again, but indeed kids these days are from the Alpha generation, which is two generations from Millenials (GenZ being in-between) : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3e/Ge...

:(

Re: World conker champion found with steel chestnut, cleared of cheating

#590

Post by robertlagrant »

SteveSmith16384 wrote: post #405
robertlagrant wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're writing that as though you're quoting someone. Where are you quoting that from?

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/dangerous-daffodils-and-1...

But not anyone in this conversation, though? I'm not sure "someone said this on the internet" is a reason to respond to it.
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