Adam007

Sorry to hear you're leaving here. You're a great TIF member, and we haven't had anyone like you on these boards before. Lots of people are going to miss your relationship advice and general sense of other people's feelings. It's just too bad your leaving post reeks of advertisement though. :|

i dont buy that one bit. I do. Fanatics like him who spend hours on the forum making fake offers and new threads exclaiming how they got inside information that whips are now rarer are grounds for at least forum bans. Like Ares said, it's not hard to do that for a few hours, but why waste your time? Back on topic: R2, do you plan to come back to merchant, or just play the game/chat with friends?

There's nothing wrong with looking up to the achievements someone made. You're taking the word idol too seriously.

I disagree with that. Ordinarily there's a penalty for bluffing, but in rs you can easily bluff without penalty; that's the problem. On the official forums people make all kinds of fake offers and trades without consequence. That was core to the whole manipulation wave (yes, I still call it that) that really ended my days of being involved with the market. You can say it only was different - not unethical. I just always saw it as being very deceptive. (That's just my opinion and I know you've changed a lot since those days, and I don't think negatively of you anymore, so don't take it as an insult or anything) First of all, I never would make fake posts. Fake posts are dishonest, but they're also quite ineffective. The reason I say that there were penalties for me being caught bluffing are this: If I don't buy the item, my credibility dies, and that item will also get sold publicly. This means that any price I posted, I was willing to actually pay. That's why the prices went so high, and that's also why I don't consider what I did to be manipulation. To put that in the same category as a kid who says "Buying all Santas 40M each" on the forums is quite foolish. I never claimed you specifically made fake posts. I said in general anyone can bluff, which really screws up the market, since nobody really knows what people are paying. That's not something you did, but I consider that being deceptive in the same way as making the state of an item seem different than it really was. But again, the thing about ethics are that everyone has different opinions. We could completely disagree and neither of us could be wrong, because ethics are based on within and can't be objective, so there's really no point going over for the millionth time what happened in the past.

I disagree with that. Ordinarily there's a penalty for bluffing, but in rs you can easily bluff without penalty; that's the problem. On the official forums people make all kinds of fake offers and trades without consequence. That was core to the whole manipulation wave (yes, I still call it that) that really ended my days of being involved with the market. You can say it only was different - not unethical. I just always saw it as being very deceptive. (That's just my opinion and I know you've changed a lot since those days, and I don't think negatively of you anymore, so don't take it as an insult or anything)

Thanks for that read. Not too much I didn't already know about you, but interesting nonetheless specifically how you merchanted. The market's completely different nowadays, and it's harder to trade like that anymore. And, like you said, all of the merchants are gone. You have your Unleash1, Ego Scorpion, and Apoc - all throughout rs there have been great merchants though, and Falador/Varrock can't ever be the same. We also have had our differences throughout your playing (I stopped merchanting completely right when you started), and got in a few arguments back when people were arguing with you whether or not you manipulated or not, but I do like how time manages to make levelness of all 'fueds.' And one last thing though - no matter how badly you got messed up, why don't you just remove the name? We do have the "no naming names" rule here anyways. Edit: As I said before, you probably shouldn't mention anything more about the banning than you need to. Every reply is going to be something along the lines of: "Well you're a bad person because you broke the law and I don't really like you but thanks for telling us," ranging on intensity of both ethical sides. Unless you want this inevitable 5+ page thread to go in that direction.

So, If I swear like that, then it's not cool? The only time I can swear is if it's "cool?" Who decides this? Don't I get to decide what I say? Don't I get to decide if what I say is cool or not? Or are there people that do it for me? Why would I, or anyone else, listen to them? What are you getting at? :? You can do whatever the heck you want. That doesn't stop people from perceiving you as a total idiot if you're acting like one - regardless of what you think of how you act.

My god, if you've never played that game stop everything you're doing right now and download it. I lovveed that game as a kid. It's such an extensive game, and it's just so fun. It's definitely my favorite game for the SNES that I've ever played. I'd download it if I didn't still have a working SNES with that game.

They also delete every technical announcement as soon as it no longer applies :-s They do delete a ton of stuff that would make them look bad to people re-reading news. The dupe, being one example, which I believe has been erased.

Here's all of the videos easily viewable on youtube: http://youtube.com/superbowl I liked the coca cola video game one a lot. I didn't find any commercials to be exceptionally funny this year though.

I live in Central Michigan and I have a snow day. Same here. :) No snow, but because of the temperature. I was so surprised, because we never get days off because of the weather. We'll have tons of snow out with no snowday, but once it hits subzero temps, they cancel it.

Like they said after it happened to me, its doubtful(Though possible) that it will happen twice in one lifetime. I've heard it's actually pretty likely. I've read statistically there's a 50% chance of it reoccurring, and my doctor said about 40%. I wasn't too happy that a lady who was X-raying me (for like a 15th time over the week) asked me if I'd had one before, I said no, and she confidently said I'd be back. :s @LP - Yeah, that does sound absolutely terrifying. Now I'm somewhat nervous about flying. They did tell me there's a risk with flying (which I do yearly), as well as that I could never for the rest of my life scuba dive. :(

Me too. On both fronts. :P We should meet up eventually when school starts.

I'm loving the fact that someone who works for a computer game programming company didn't know what Linux was...

Like someone else said, I wouldn't try any pills. They get you to sleep faster but your sleep quality is diminished and you don't feel as energized when you wake up. As to getting to sleep quicker, I'd try a few things. Make sure you don't have any caffeine or food in general right before you go to sleep. If you do want to have something, drink milk. An hour before you go to sleep don't watch any TV or go on the computer. Also keep your activity low during that hour. Try having a warm shower before if that helps. When you lie in your bed, don't think about anything. If you find your mind drifts into thoughts that you can't stop, just think thoughts that correlate to your breathing to override word thoughts. As you breathe in and out, mentally think "wiiihhhhh.....waahhhh..." as you breathe "in....out..." or anything along those lines. Hopefully that helps.

:shock: same here but at the end of 2 they said a 3 was going to come out... who knew it would take this long... too bad i dont have an X box... better come out on ps3 or something Doubt it, Microsoft owns Rare I believe. Yeah, but the Rare they own now is completely different than the one associated with Nintendo that I miss so much. A large portion of the Rare that made the original Banjo Kazooe's have moved elsewhere now. If I did own an Xbox, I'd definitely get that game though. I've always loved Banjo Kazooie.

Are you sure he said both lungs collapsed 100% at once? How could he breathe if both lungs were completely collapsed?

I think this post is proof that situation will never occur. I've been at this forum five and a half years. The small fish never run out. They spawn at a far faster rate than the large fish ever will. :anxious: Well yes, generally because the small fish do stupid things and eat something poisonous and leave but the big fish are smart and avoid them so they can grow. Meaning -------> \O/ | /\ ^^ You WHOOOOOSH He's saying the opposite of what you're thinking. The little fish are spawning (breeding) faster than the big fish and frankly some big fish now prefer to live on land :) Pfft, as if we could evolve that far as to actually leave to "land." The big fish are stuck in this sea forever. ;) And big fish tend to have long lifespans. Little fish are born and die quickly, but the big fish are the top of the sea's foodchain. :P (Ugh - so done talking metaphorically)

Why do you think people buy lottery tickets? People, in general, aren't very logical. But people are very hopeful. Taking hope over logic, you get the "against all odds" people who don't care about their odds and hope to get lucky.

I read somewhere it only happens to 9 out of 100,000 people per year. Everyone has chest pains every so often. That's why I was reluctant to go at first. Don't think anything of it unless it lasts for over an hour or you're in so much pain its hard to walk normally. Yeah, I didn't have any problem breathing either. I was surprised when I was told the pain was because of my lung. The whole time I was there my oxygen absorption was at 99-100%, which is pretty crazy considering one lung had collapsed.

At my hospital it really wasn't that bad. There weren't that many choices, but of the food I did have it was all pretty good. I had a lot of fruit, spaghetti one night, a hamburger one night, and for breakfast I had eggs, cereal, and other breakfasty food I can't really remember off the top of my head. None of it really was bad. The eggs were kind of mushy like you'd get at a breakfast buffet, but other than that I thought it was pretty good. That or I just don't have high standards for food. Thanks. The doctors didn't really catch it early - actually I kind of came in relatively late. It's not really a disease you can prevent or detect though. It just happens, like a heart attack. And heart attacks aren't diseases. The doctor did say it would have gotten progressively worse and I would have been gasping for air before anything seriously bad happened with my heart. It's not really preventable either, which is the one thing I'm really hating. There is a surgery where they put an irritant on the lung so it adheres to the wall somewhere inside you, but they only do that procedure after a second collapse. The tingling only happened for a few minutes, and at that point I wasn't feeling much pain - but yeah, in hindsight we should have gone sooner. I'm pretty much recovered by now. I just hadn't had time to really type this out, but I've been fine for a week or so. I did get a small infection on the surface where the incision was made so every day I have to put some antibiotic cream on it, but I'm feeling fine. I do get weird feelings that make me think I might be having another one, but they go away pretty quickly and I just reassure myself I'm being paranoid. Are you talking about during or after (now)? Right now I'm pretty much fine, but then I did have some pain standing fully erect and walking. The arm tingling lasted only a few minutes. Usually pneumothoraxes aren't tension related, so if you'd have one it probably wouldn't be related to your heart. Pneumothoraxes themselves are pretty rare. I think a high percentage are spontaneous though. That's pretty crazy. 35% of my lung collapsed within a few hours and it took yours a whole month to collapse to 60? How was your whole experience, and how did you finally decide to go to the hospital? Just because the pain wouldn't go away? Heh, there's nothing to worry about. Those are just the type of people who most often get them. That doesn't mean you're at risk for it or anything. I won't live in Ann Arbor until next year when I'm at U-M. :P I live in Oakland County and went to the West Bloomfield Henry Ford first, then was moved to the Detroit Henry Ford, both which were great hospitals. Ann Arbor's obviously great medically too - if I get one in college I'll be close enough to a hospital. :) It is pretty freaky right now not knowing when/if it'll happen again, and I tend to blow up sensations I feel to bigger things just because I notice everything that goes on. They didn't really suggest I try gaining weight, but I've always been trying my whole life. My parents have been putting in a lot of effort lately to get me high fat foods though, but preventively I doubt it'd make a difference. Oddly enough since I've been out of the hospital, my heart rate's been constantly above 100 though. I'm assuming it's because I'm getting out of shape since I can't do physical activity. It just freaks me out because I'll be at rest and my heart will race, which is really weird. They did a CT scan and couldn't find any blebs, which was kind of good and kind of bad. Bad because they don't know what caused it and if they had found a cause could eliminate it from happening again, but good because I didn't have to go through a big surgery. Yeah, one good thing that came out of the whole experience was that I gained a ton of medical knowledge. I want to go into some field of medicine so in a weird way I enjoyed seeing what the doctors/nurses did. Don't be paranoid though. As I said before, it's extremely rare. Just because it happens mostly to skinny tall people doesn't mean it happens often. Thanks to everyone else's well wishes that I didn't reply to. I didn't expect to get so much support/feedback. :)

Yahoo is my start page for basic news (although I probably should change it to digg or something. I'm just used to having it be my start page for the last several years of using the internet). I do use google to search though. I'm more used to it.

First of all, has anyone else had a pneumothorax? I had no idea what they were until I had one two weeks ago. My story's pretty long (probably me just wording it lengthily, so you'll probably get bored unless you're into medical stories) I was playing ping pong with a friend at my house at around 5. Whether or not the actual pneumothorax was caused by playing ping pong, I have no idea. About a half hour later though, I started feeling pain around my heart. I thought it was a torn muscle or something, so I just called my mom and asked about it. She got freaked out by how I described my pain, so she called my neighbor without me knowing, and she walked over and told me that she was going to take my blood pressure/heart rate at her house. Not asked, told. So awkwardly my friend left, since it was dinner time already. Walking to my neighbor's house the pain got worse. I had to walk somewhat hunchbacked 3/4's of the way there because I was in moderate pain. She used the blood pressure tester thing, and I was fine. Just a moderately fast heartbeat. I waited there until my mom got home ten minutes later, and we walked home together. Back at home, I started feeling tingling in my left arm. That freaked me out, and my arm was a little hard to move like it was asleep, but it went away in five minutes. A good two hours went by and the weird things that were going on stopped happening. I had dinner and was lying on the couch, still in moderate pain. Out of nowhere though, I heard a bubbling going on in my chest. It sounded kind of like rice krispy treats when you pour it into milk. Crackling, popping. It really freaked me out. I called my parents over and they could hear it with their ears a good 2 feet away from my chest. We decided to go to the ER at this point after calling a doctor asking about it. By now it was about 9 or 10. I was feeling alright, still pain, but the bubbling noises quickly went away. They admitted me a nurse asked the usual questions. She said I could possibly (although a very rare chance) have a pnemothorax, the second mention of the word after hearing it from the doctor on the phone. Thinking nothing of that, I was moved to a bed to later have an X-ray. A half hour later I had my X-ray taken. It turned out I did indeed have a pneumothorax, which the doctor explained to me. A pneumothorax is basically when air escapes your lungs, forcing your lungs to collapse. It had happened in my left lung, and was referred to as a "spontaneous tension pneumothorax." My left lung had collapsed 35-40%. By "spontaneous," it means that it has no known cause for it occurring. We have no idea why it was caused. The doctor did say that teenage males who are tall and skinny tend to get it the most - which applies completely to me. It was tension, which is a rarity, and life threatening. That's why I felt it around my heart. If tension pneumothoraxes are left untreated, they can cause a heart attack or death. All of this news was really freaking me out, since I had no idea what any of this meant for me. Shockingly, it turned out I'd need surgery and was further surprised to find out that I'd be in the hospital for a few days. The procedure went like this. I was hooked up to an IV and given dilaudid, which I was told is seven times stronger than morphine. I felt really heavy after being injected with that, and the doctor efficiently did the procedure. He made an incision on my left side by my chest, and inserted a chest tube. I didn't feel any pain, but I felt his finger being inside of me, which really disgusted me (hopefully not you guys reading :P ). This tube was hooked up to a pressure box which would slowly over the next few days remove the air in my pleural space above my lung, so my lung could reinflate. It was after midnight at this point, and I was taken by ambulance to a larger hospital. I had my own room since I'm a minor, which was nice. I guess I'm glad it happened then instead of this month, because I'll be 18 soon, and was really glad I didn't have to share a room. Anyways, over the next four days I had great nurses who basically took care of me. The food wasn't that bad. Some friends and family visited, and the time didn't really go by that slowly. I was in a lot of pain though, since the tube was inside of my and the doctor said that area is extremely sensitive. Anyway, I won't go too much into my hospital experience since I was there for four days and you guys pretty much can fill in the blanks. By Monday (I went in Friday night), they were ready to take the chest tube out. This was the painful part. They did put me on morphine (they had found out I was allergic to the dilaudid), and took the bandages off, which really, really, hurt. These weren't normal bandages. I was on morphine and I can safely say this part was one of the most painful things I've ever gone through. Once they took the bandages off, the most painful part happened when they yanked the tube out really fast. Pain. Anyway, I'll try to wrap it up now. I was cleared to go, and got back home at around 10 that night. I had bandages on still, and would need to get the stitches out in a week. They gave me a ridiculous amount of oxycodon, which is stronger than vicodon. I had one pill out of the sixty perscribed - my parents didn't want me on it since, apparently, I was "really loopy" on it. So this had happened over the Martin Luther King break, and the four days I was out covered my break. I hadn't missed any school, but unfortunately missed basically my whole time off it. The second day I did go back to school. My parents had me take Tylenol instead. The major thing was that I couldn't lift anything or do anything physical at all, and I had to leave classes early so I wouldn't get bumped in the halls or anything. This was the first day of the new semester, and I have a personal weights class, which we had to arrange that I would basically clean every day until the month was over, in which the doctors said I could do physical activity again. I'm still at about a 50% risk for it to happen again, and I'm still justifiably paranoid about it happening again whenever I get pains or weird sensations around the area that I could be having another one, but I'm slowly getting over this. I'd like to thank whoever started reading this and made it to the end. Really, I would. You've got a great attention span. I mostly wrote this to chronicle for myself the event. But if you were remotely informed or enjoyed the read, that's great. So to turn this into a stronger discussion, had anyone else had to go through this? Is your story at all similar?

99% of the time I agree with that. In general, subforums make things into a mess. But given the amount of questions that come up, whether or not they eventually fall doesn't matter. They're always there and always popping up. A subforum would clean these out of OT.

I'm normally against subforums for splitting off one type of information from a whole, but this kind of idea is different, since it's basically splitting off questions - not debate or informational topics. I think "advice" as a whole covers a large enough area to warrant a subforum. It would cover all of those "what should I do?" threads, and relationship advice threads, and questions about whether one thing is better than another to buy, etc. Question threads are clutter in my eyes, and in general I think it would make the off topic forum a lot cleaner if there were made a subforum for people wanting advice in general for whatever issues, dilemmas, or whatever problems they're having. It doesn't have to be only to people, it can apply to anything anyone wants help/advice/a question answered for.