I found a locked safe hidden at the back of a closet in my new house

Is Rob Ford safe? Or should I be worried about him?

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Iā€™m glad youā€™ve found new employment. I was getting worried.

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The Mythbusters is where I learned that we all have rocket-bombs in our basements.

Itā€™s really kind of weird and creepy the damage one of these can do:

Explosion, fast-moving mass, and also spraying near-boiling water everywhere.

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We have a tankless hot water heater, you never run out of hot water. Itā€™s very dangerous for shower times but much safer for not rocket bombing.

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This one?

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Isnā€™t that one run by committee?

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I thought they were supposed to be running the program to open @beschizzaā€™s safe? Have they voted on the resolution to even open the safe yet?

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What is it, for those of use who havenā€™t seen the episode?

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Itā€™s a very long running audio production made by Focus on the Family. Itā€™s a drama show, a bit like an old radio serial Meant for both children and their parents, with the purpose of instilling a very conservative evangelical worldview. It appealed a lot to me as a kid because the neurodiverse technical assistant (who I strongly identified with) to the grandfatherly professor theologian main protagonist was treated as valuable and respected. Although the main cast (and myself as a child) thought he was silly in his atheism. I was very christian, the aspie guyā€™s love of science was more important to me than him being a heathen at the time.

Eventually they wore him down during the series and he converted. But thatā€™s just a small detail when compared to the scale of the vast canon the show covers.

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Funnily enough the website still exists:

http://www.whitsend.org/

It was produced from the early 1990s until the mid 2000s or so IIRC.

The wiki is a good explainer.

Suffice it to say, anything produced by Focus on the Family, my parents fed into my brother and my media consumption. Whatever church they were in, they always followed Focus on the Family. Which I think eventually reformed into the Family Research Council. Which is fucking gross.

The audio show did a lot of schlocky bits stolen from a lot of places, often to the point of being a complete ripoff. But I didnā€™t know any better as a kid, because I wasnā€™t allowed to consume secular media until I was about 16 years old. Once youā€™re introduced to that, itā€™s easy to break free from the mental bondage and realize these people have been lying to you for many years about important things.

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If this isnā€™t a ā€œsafe placeā€ for any discussion what is? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: I mean it isnā€™t like we arenā€™t all just sitting around shooting the shit until something happens and from the looks of it that could be awhile.

Iā€™m just going to throw this out thereā€¦i know this is a bit out of left field, but why donā€™t we crowd fund it? :slight_smile:

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Heh I remember Focus on the Family from my time in 1995-1999 Denver. More of a Colorado Springs thing, perhaps, but creepy. Which is why this always made me laugh

Also, this is great

Focus on the Family has a long-running childrenā€™s adventure series Adventures in Odyssey which is broadcast by radio, published on audio cassettes and CDs (often given away for free in kidsā€™ meals at Chick-Fil-A since 1990), and more recently available online (an animated TV series is also available on DVD). It mostly takes place in the fantasy of every fundamentalist, a small American town full of almost exclusively deeply religious people who never got the notice that the 1950s ended. Wacky hijinks inevitably lead the one new kid in town who isnā€™t a Real True Christian to a saving knowledge of his Lord and Saviour. In the words of a pastorā€™s testimonial on their website, ā€œThe stories provided a much-needed balance to the ā€˜criticalā€™ method of approaching faith that I was being taught in the classroom.ā€ Who needs critical thinking when the cartoon that came with your 8-piece chicken nugget meal (with a small CokeĀ© and fries) answers all the fundamental questions of the universe?
Adventures in Odyssey has a Very Special Collection called ā€œFor God and Countryā€ which teaches aā€¦ unique perspective on American history.

They also put out a series of teen novels which re-imagined Old Testament events as steampunk, giving Godā€™s favorite murderers access to 1800s technology and (white, very white) European sophistication. They were actually quite good, as it turns out that whitewashing the tale of King David to make him not seem like a homicidal maniac, while ALSO giving him a gun, vastly improves the original story.

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That is amazing, and I will make it into a bumpersticker.

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I remember FOTF for:

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Wait, so if we have threads that list other threads, then that means a thread might list itself.

Consider all the threads of threads. Some list themselves and others do not. Letā€™s make two more list threads: one that lists all the threads that list themselves, and one that lists all the threads that donā€™t list themselves.

Which thread contains the thread of all threads that donā€™t list themselves?

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@OtherMichael? Can you shed some light on this? also, @Woodchuck45, how many lists would a list list list if you listed listed lists?

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This is making me listless

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* Honda Odyssey 2016

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I heard he diedā€¦ should we make a thread?

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I spent way too much time trying to make an Odyssey joke. Gave up :stuck_out_tongue:

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