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What useless information do you have memorized?
Usually when I ask people this question, I get a lot of phone numbers.
Having worked on a World of Warcraft database a decade ago I still remember the internal IDs of many items and spells. (12345 is Bijou's Belongings! And the lowest item ID I had found is 17, an internal item called Martin Thunder)
FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8
The Windows XP serial key for one of the early pirated versions. I have no idea why I still remember that and recall a bunch of odd ball serial keys to this day.
Oh my god, I had that memorised for years! Even as I read it just now, I could picture the sequence in my head.
I never came anywhere near memorizing that, but I recognize it. I wonder where it originally came from, and how many millions of XP installs were registered with that serial.
At first I saw this and it just looked like a string of random numbers. And then I looked at the penultimate group and thought to myself, I know this. And then I checked the others and I realized this is the exact key that I had to use on my pirate XP versions after the license sticker on my computer had been damaged beyond recognition.
Of course, the reason why I had it partially memorized was because I found myself reinstalling it constantly, because in spite of most people's rosy memories, XP still wasn't all that stable. Though to it's credit it was typically much more stable than previous versions of Windows.
4011 bananas
4060 broccoli
4061 iceberg lettuce
Used to work at a grocery store.
Came here to post the EXACT same thing!
4062 cucumber
4084 artichokes
4090 spinach
Don't know why I've held onto some of these for so long. It's been almost 20 years since I last worked at one.
Getting to be about that long for me too... worked there in high school. I mostly didn't want to come home stinking like fast food, so not so bad for a first job. Aside from it being, you know, service industry and all the trappings that come with that. Plus it gave me tennis elbow.
I'd never be able to do it again, but I will admit that there was something satisfying about being able to bang out a bunch of muscle-memory PLUs in a row!
My wife worked in a grocery store for years, pulls PLUs out of her head like it's nothing when she sees the cashier struggling.
4065 green bell pepper
4088 red bell pepper
Had no idea these were universal!
I've never worked at a grocery store but I buy bananas a lot that I have 4011 memorized. Seems to work at every store.
My better half working, in retail produce would be so enamored about this thread. She dislikes going to other stores, but if we're in self checkouts, she; who can't be decisive about is it raining; is totally on point as I try to weigh and identify products with the angry eyes of the next persons waiting.
19572 mix and match chips. 254096 cantloupe from a store that didnt use plu codes.
Useless fact that is in the same vein as this item...
A WoW player called Karatechop actually had Martin Fury incorrectly placed in his inventory by a GM who was helping him recover items that were lost when his account was hacked. Martin Fury was another internal item that was a shirt instead of a weapon and had an identical effect to Martin Thunder: it would kill everything within a 30 yard radius.
Karatechop did what any player who was inadvertently given god-like power would do. He decided to have some fun with the item by bringing some of his guildmates into Ulduar and using the item to one-shot as many trash mobs and bosses as possible. Seeing a random guild get realm-first and world first achievements riled up the community, and by the time Blizzard GMs caught wind of what had happened his guild had already netted almost every major accomplishment in Ulduar illegitimately.
Their response was a bit over-the-top and unfair, to put it bluntly. Every online member in the guild was suspended for 24 hours, regardless of whether they participated in Karatechop's little expedition into Ulduar or not. Karatechop on the other hand received a permanent account ban which pretty much drove him to quit the game. All because of a clerical fuck-up on Blizzard's end that they were far too arrogant to take any responsibility for.
You can't make that shit up.
I remember that whole drama! In fact item 17 is Martin Fury. Martin Thunder is 192.
I know both got changed later on. The shirt got changed to be useless after this whole incident, too.
Too many theme songs and ad jingles to get into right now, including a few I haven't heard in decades but can hear as if listening to it digitally.
But also one cool useless fact: If you had a strawberry banana smoothie, it would contain one berry... but it wouldn't be strawberry.
Oh god! The stupid jingles I learned growing up. It would be torture to actually have to hear them out loud. I don’t know how we as kids put up with the crap that spilled forth from our TVs back then, and I can’t imagine what our parents thought of it.
In the same vein, I recently learned that technically eggplant is a berry. That one made me real mad for some reason, haha.
two two two two two two one eight ninety two two two two two two.
This was when I had an exchange in Ireland around 2014/5. Don't know which company it was, but there was this corpulent character in a tutu dancing over the screen.
I still remember the mailing addresses, home phone numbers, and gate key codes of several of childhood friends as well as a lot of previous home phone numbers from various places I lived as a kid. None of them live in those houses anymore so it really is quite useless. But since I have them taking up space in my brain anyway, I’ve recycled them as PIN codes and passwords for various IoT devices around the house.
I used to live in apartment 42. At the time I knew nothing about the Douglas Adam's book, but I was a fervent fan of the X-Files. That's the number of Fox Mulder's apartment. I told that to a bunch of people on the X-Files mailing list and IRC (yep: I'm old). No one ever believed me. There were no webcams or smartphones at the time so I couldn't prove it. Which was a shame because I thought that was super cool.
There's something about this that I find funny, when compared to how relatively small it is. It's not like it's ridiculously unique like a license plate or something, but an apartment number. There's a bunch of apartment 42s within like a minute's walking distance of me.
Speaking of license plates in TV shows… Did you know there's an internet movie car database?
I came across it while googling a license plate i found in a TV series. It's fun to see cars recycled from TV show to TV show. Cars are actors too!
Oh man, years ago my company had an office at the Yahoo Center in Santa Monica that we would have regional meetings at. (It’s since been sold and renamed. It’s on the corner of Colorado and 26th.) So I went for some big announcement one time and parked in the parking garage under the building. It turns out that one of the movie studios (probably Universal which was just down the street at the time) kept all of their “picture cars” there. They had mint-condition cars from the 1950’s on. What’s weird is that the really old (1950s and 60s) and slightly old (1990s and 2000s) cars seemed relatively normal, in that you occasionally see similar cars driving around town. The cars from the 70s and early 80s, though, looked so weird because they were so poorly made that you rarely see them in real life anymore.
The convention in Brazil is three digits apartment numbers with a zero in the middle (such as 201), so something like 42 is actually pretty rare.
The cubic root of 343 is 7.
By virtue of the process of ricing my linux installation, I have memorised the hex codes of all colors from the Gruvbox Dark colorscheme by Morhetz.
-40 degrees Celsius and Fahrenheit are the same temperature, same thing for around 574 or so Fahrenheit and Kelvin.
I think "Period blood" is called Endometrium.
In the time I have played Among Us, 2 people posted their names in the chat, one their first name and the other their full.
I also remember some "child theories" (see r/childtheories) I had which is mostly useless since most of them have no meaningful significance.
All of the prepositions in alphabetical order. I forget why, but at one point we had to memorize them for English class in grade school.
About half of the Gettysburg Address for the same reason.
Partial lyrics to many one-hit wonder’s best-known songs.
Various obscure computer commands for long-dead operating systems or applications. (CALL -151, anyone? MODI COMM? Bueller? Bueller?)
The square root of 5 to however many places this is: 2.236067977499789696409173...
I read a book as a kid--I want to say it was A Wrinkle in Time?--where one of the characters knew sqrt(5) ≈ 2.236... offhand, so I decided to memorize more digits. Really pointless knowledge.
BEWAREOBLIVIONISATHAND
Another one would probably be all the info that I know about the King of the Hill TV series. I have probably watched the entire series through about 20+ times and could tell you the plot and progression for nearly episode off the top of my head. Spaced repetition learning at its finest!
I really tried to like King of the Hill. Did the whole first season. I know it's good quality but it's just so slow, and I dislike the art direction a lot :/
The art style does change from the grittier hand-drawn look from the earlier seasons to the crisper, computer drawn style sometime after Season 3 IIRC. I think if you are based outside of the US, some of the cultural jokes might not be so apparent either.
If you are curious on the art style and the do's and don'ts, this came out a few years ago:
https://imgur.com/a/PiJLk
Edit: I think I will make that style guide its own post. It might get more visibility and be interesting to someone on ~tv side.
Yes! Please post it. Where is it from? I can't find any original source beyond that imgur post.
According to my research, it was leaked by this twitter account, but the tweet was deleted:
https://twitter.com/xmasape
Deleted Tweet
Men are about 10% more likely to cheat on their partner than women. Also, boomers cheat more than millenials.
Mosquitoes prefer O blood.
Queen Elizabeth II's cows sleep on waterbeds. WATERBEDS!
525,600 minutes...
Songs from the musical we put on for Vacation Bible School when I was a child.
The worst part is that they have stewed so long in my head that I'm pretty sure I've subconciously melded them with better songs, so even if I could track down these extremely obscure songs, I wouldn't be able to recognize them.
EDIT: Oh. My. God. Google has found one of them. Apparently Jeff Slaughter wrote the soundtrack to my childhood because his name is on all the others that I remember too.
The cheesy song set to the tune of the Brady Bunch theme that my elementary school Spanish teacher used on us to learn the conjugations of ser. I haven't taken Spanish in over 20 years and I'm pretty sure I'll never forget that.
Also to combine two of the most common responses, the 90's radio jingle and phone number for the local paper's classified ads section. I don't think that ad has run in over 20 years now (and the version that had the phone number without area code stopped even earlier when we got a second and switched to 10 digit dialing), I was a child and had zero reason to list anything in the classifieds in my life, but I'll never forget 825-2525.
I can still remember quite a lot of friends' phone numbers from 1990-2000ish.
White-orange, orange, white-green, blue, white-blue, green, white-brown, brown.
Haven't put a RJ45 jack on an Ethernet cable in a decade plus. Might still have a crimping tool though. I guess this is not completely useless, but it's useless to me now.
The lyrics to Ice Ice Baby, by Vanilla Ice.
Age of Empires II cheat codes and chat commands. 11