Ask Lemmy

TL;DR- Drunk and with no experience I lead a small group in pretty big parade.

I once led a small marching band in a parade while incredibly drunk, with a flagpole effectively attached to my cock (yeah, just rest the end against your belt, it's fine), and with only 45 minutes of training the weekend before. At the largest fife and drum muster in the US. I had no prior experience at anything remotely related. I had only been to one of the corp's meetings previously. Later that night I kissed my future wife for the first time.

I'm sure there's some wonderful psychoanalysis take away that I thought of the flag as an extension of my cock.

To this day I have no idea why they didn't get the actual marching band member boyfriend of one of the members to lead, because apparently I was pretty awful at it. It got some minor news coverage, so there's a chance a picture exists somewhere.

I worked with Linus Torvalds, met Carl Sagan, and caught a cold from Danny Elfman.

I appear as an extra in 2 different brazilian movies, does that count?

I once interviewed the former chancellor of West Germany, Helmut Schmidt, on a stage in Hamburg Schauspielhaus in front of thousands. It was also on TV.

Obama followed me on Twitter

(He follows 500,000 people but hey…)

I wrote a homebrew Floridaman race for D&D that went viral

None of my actual works are ever actually appreciated, but I still see that damn thing from time to time

Sometimes I get a nice but small euphoric high whenever I comment something or whatever is addressed or liked by some channel I'm subscribed to.

On a more IRL-like experience. I was at a tech conference was and there was a booth hosted by VPR which was Vermont Public Radio and I really liked listening to them at the time. They had a contest, a free one-entry raffle to win some cool gear. And my history with entering raffles was always on the losing end of the thing, whatever. I just filled out my name, address and put it down in the bowl.

Didn't think anything of it and went back home when the conference was over. Some 2 or 3 weeks later, I get a package in the mail and turns out I actually won the draw. I got a nice canteen, a keyring clipper, some stickers, some decals, a nice keyring and I think a hat too. It was a nice feel-good moment.

My first follower on Twitter was Stephen Fry.

I almost smashed into Robin Williams at the only computer store in Northern California in 1982.

I was walking around the game case while staring at the contents with 100% of my concentration only to realize at last second that I was about to suffer an imminent collision with someone. I look up and it's the guy who I watched on Mork and Mindy growing up.

The look on his face was something along the lines of 'who the hell is this weirdo'. I was so mortified.

Bonus, he died on the same day that I was part of a much suckier collision (5 car pile up that left me with permanent injuries).

Met and had a drink with lady Gaga. I did not believe it was her at first. She had dipped out of the venu after her show and came to a bar in Houston. Someone posted it on socials and the place became a zoo. They had to go into a side room and wait for a decent time to get out.

I encoded one of the very first mp3's ever made, when it was still a "theoretical" model by Fraunhofer. I sung "I will survive" but in my very bad impression of William Shatner, accidentally posted it many years later on Napster, and found that copy following around many years after that on a torrent site. So, if you have a very old, very fake "Shatner" singing "I Will Survive", it might be me.

I won a large online poker tournament (~5000 entries). It was for SCOOP (Spring Championship of Online Poker) and I was sent a very nice trophy and customized hoodie with my username on it.

Rap Battles of History said they liked my idea and used it as an example of a good idea to some other people.

I said "Neil Armstrong vs Jacques Cousteau: pioneers of the final frontiers" or something to that effect.

In the end they did Jacques vs someone else.

Ha, Sway of MTV fame (now he does a show on xm or whatever it's called now) follows me on Instagram. I met him playing poker. Nice dude.

I spilled Diet Coke on Ann Coulter.

For a long time I was in the first image result if 'London goth' was typed into google.

Clips from my very old Sven Co-Op youtube videos were used in the NoClip documentary about Half Life. One of the friends I played with too has some old clips used.

I wasn't notified at all, I was just watching the documentary and basically did this:

I was among the first hundred people to join Reddit.

I ran in a 10km race and ended up taking a wrong turn. Everyone behind followed me. A small local newspaper interviewed me. I ended up in a quick tv segment and had a small write up in the paper.

I'm 2 degrees of separation from Elon Musk, Max Levchin, and Tim Walz.

Many of the songs I ripped and shared via Napster in the late 1900's continued to appear on legitimate platforms years later.

I set the world record on a Ballistic.NG track about a week after the leaderboard wipe

Back in WoW's Burning Crusade days, my friends and I ran one of the most successful guilds on one of the most competitive servers. That was true before and after TBC, but during is when we became slightly known.

We had invented our own loot system in an attempt to make one that was fair. It was designed to be fair not only in regards to accumulating points with which to bid on items, but also to encourage and enable participation of both existing and new members. Anyway, it was complicated and it worked.

Our loot system ended up getting a short article written about it in some gaming magazine. I wish I had a copy of it. My one friend still does. I don't even remember which magazine it was.

I was my states chilli eating champion and even competed in the national championship

As a child I was body slammed on a bouncy castle by Weird Al Yankovic.

I wrote for 7 or 8 books of a popular role playing game. Won an industry award at GenCon for one of them.

I was a disc jockey in radio, not clubs, off and on for several years. I was never a big name or well known.

A friend of mine and myself invented the word "twat-waffle" and no one ever believes me

I once came in 4th place in the world rankings on a Project Cars 2 time trial and used to regularly come in the top 5% on Gran Turismo time trials. I don't really race on PlayStation any more though.

I set up a SteamLink app onto a Raspberry Pi but I ran into a bug and couldn't get it to work correctly. Valve acknowledged that they were looking into fixing it but after a few weeks of checking, I just put it aside and forgot about it.

Well nearly a year later, the thought randomly popped into my head that I should check to see if they had fixed it. I went to the Steam Link section of Steam's forum, and sure enough, one of Valve's devs had posted a new version that fixed the issue.

... 30 seconds prior to me checking the forum.

I've never had something like that align so perfectly, but also for something so ridiculous as that.