GeekNights Tuesday - PAX Pamir (Second Edition)

Tonight on GeekNights, we review Cole Wehrle's PAX Pamir (Second Edition). In the news, Facebook is destroying the Oculus brand, subsuming it into their social media hellscape. Also there's a new hockey stick in town.

Things of the Day

Episode Links

Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/40865704

Live Stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnlrUtCmgt4

Lizstar is a good follow if you are into streaming. She does a bunch of Point and Click Adventure speed runs as well as GenesisQuest (playing every game that came out on the Sega Genesis).

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I just happened to read about the hockey stick with holes yesterday. I’ll copy paste it here.

  • If you’ve been paying (extremely close) attention to the NHL playoffs, you may have noticed a weird-looking stick with a hole in the blade. The hole apparently allows for two different properties: stiffness above it and flexibility below. According to Bauer, this produces a slingshot effect – almost like a smaller version of the stick’s shaft (which, as explained in this video, bends almost unbelievably to whip the puck forward). These days, ‘twigs’ are made of carbon fiber, though as the hockey lingo suggests, wood used to be the material of choice. The evolution of the hockey stick from wood to carbon fiber gives us insight into a material property called resilience.Resilience is basically the opposite of damping. High resilience materials bounce back with most of the energy that you put into them. As Stevel Vogel illustrates in Cats’ Paws and Catapults , spider silk is a great example of low resilience material. “A web of high resilience would, like a trampoline, tend to fling the prey back out.” Vogel goes on to note that “resilience management highlights the dichotomy between nature and human technologies.” Natural materials, like wood, tend to have lower resilience whereas man-made materials, like carbon fiber, tend to have higher resilience.You can see why carbon fiber, with its higher resilience, has overtaken wood as material du jour; more of the energy you put into the stick comes out on the puck for a faster shot. But a stick can be too resilient/springy – when receiving a pass, you don’t want the puck to bounce off the stick away from you. Players call it “feel”. Some damping is beneficial, as shown in this slo-mo video of a stick that combats springiness with a urethane insert. These hole-y sticks try to solve the problem a different way, adding a softer spring into the mix with the aim of providing “feel” without taking away energy from the shot. So, is it worth buying the latest in hockey tech - a stick with a hole in it for $450? If you’re a beer leaguer like me, clapping your usual head-hunting bombs twenty feet wide of the net, probably not.

The “guess where this is” game is just a mode in Geoguesser

There are timed modes, no moving modes, no turning the camera modes, themed modes…

And all allow for just one click.

Also I just looked through my Instagram to find the photo of the grenade we found in my parents-in-law’s garden. Can’t find it.

However, we all live in the site of an previous munitions factory. Over the fence (which is mostly to keep out wild boar) we’re technically not allow to walk due to the possibility of unexploded bombs and shells.

Considering we actually found an old explosive, it’s a genuine issue.

Yes, I knew that existed, but I don’t remember it being so fancy, or having different modes, or working based on photos. I remember it just naming a place and making you click on an unlabeled map. I also forgot the name of it.

Here’s the review cut out of the rest of the episode!