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u/Roller_ball Feb 01 '16 edited Feb 01 '16
My rib cage is too big and bends inward.
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Feb 01 '16
[deleted]
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u/Roller_ball Feb 01 '16
oh, you mean of myself. I'd rather not. Google image search pectus excavatum and you'll see a whole bunch (some nsfw because chests). I got one of the milder cases. Also, the same condition but bending outwards is Pectus carinatum. I'm kind of glad I got the inward one.
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u/Wendy_Marvel Feb 01 '16
I've got the one where it bends outwards and I am glad I don't have ribs that bend inwards, isn't it hard to breath?
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u/Roller_ball Feb 01 '16
No, but I have asthma and I've heard they are related (although I'm not really sure why.)
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u/HippieBlanket Feb 01 '16
I am one person away from Bruce Springsteen, Pond and Tame Impala
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u/Astralogist Feb 01 '16
Wait, what? How are those last two related to Springsteen?
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u/HippieBlanket Feb 01 '16
They're not, Springsteen is though one person I know and the other two through another
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u/Astralogist Feb 01 '16
Ahhh, makes sense now. How do you know Kevin and the gang? Is Jay as fabulous in person as I hope? His instagram is pretty spectacular.
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u/HippieBlanket Feb 01 '16
I don't really wanna go into details but someone I know is the partner of one of Jay's friends. Haven't actually met them but I would love to some day!
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u/saku_RAWR Feb 01 '16
I was an exchange student in Japan. I spent 1 year in a japanese high school and lived with a host family in rural Kyushu.
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u/CptnMrgn246 Feb 07 '16
What was the hardest thing to adjust to and what was the best part of living there?
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u/jaketiger1116 Feb 01 '16
I have three small patches of naturally-growing white hair on my head, the most noticeable in the back. I believe they grow from moles.
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Feb 02 '16
It's called Piebaldism and it's a genetic mutation that effects pigments in the skin and hair. It's not uncommon. I'm not aware of it being related to moles.
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u/Astralogist Feb 01 '16
I'm going to Colorado on Wednesday. It's the furthest I'll ever have gone from my hometown, by a long shot.
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u/a7xmike6990 Feb 01 '16
This means nothing to us, we don't know where you live....
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u/pythagean Feb 02 '16
Well we know he isn't from Colarado, and he probably doesn't live in any of the neighboring states. His phrasing suggests that he is in America somewhere though. Narrowing it down
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Feb 01 '16
I had scoliosis as a young child and was teased for weeks when I was forced to wear a brace.
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u/LiquidAngelHD Feb 01 '16
I own over 100 games, yet have only played about 30 of them (Sidefact: my PC is shit.)
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u/wulfguitar Feb 01 '16
I've been playing music for thirteen years, and I have failed auditions twice in the past five.
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u/MrHydraz Feb 01 '16
I am boring
as
fuck
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u/RuggyDog Feb 03 '16
I don't know about that, this comment was an emotional roller coaster for me. The first line was pretty boring, it saddened me that you'd feel this way and that it was true. My heart stopped, I wondered how you knew you were boring. Did people tell you? Was it so obvious? After wiping the tear from my eyes, I moved down the the second line. I searched for meaning in your word, why "as"? It was powerful, it was simple, but it was meaningless to me. Until, I read line three. It. Was. Phenomenal. It was so intense, my heart raced, my breaths were short and rapid, my left side went numb, I couldn't speak, I couldn't move my arms. After sitting in the same position for hours, I dragged my half-paralysed body to the bathroom and threw up. I felt like I had experienced the same stress as you while you were writing this story, I felt like I knew your struggle. My heart ached as I broke down in tears, I hugged my vomit filled toilet, I understood your pain. I muttered through my half dead lips, "That was boring as fuck."
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u/chessgeek101 Feb 02 '16
I'm the primary reason that high-school and middle-school level chess tournaments in Washington State now offer cash prizes instead of trophies.
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u/HippieBlanket Feb 02 '16
Why's that?
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u/chessgeek101 Feb 02 '16
As my username suggests, I was a fairly important and enterprising young chessplayer. I'd been playing competitive chess since age seven, studied at chess camps with grandmasters (got a draw with one once, too. Story for another time). Long story short, I was dedicated and good. Also, because I was both a bit of a social butterfly and went to tournaments every weekend since about age 10, I was well known.
Now, the way chess tournaments work is that a space is rented out for the event, and there are entry fees to get into every competition. Sort of like how you need to pay for a ticket before you can see a movie in a theater. This means that tournament directors and tournament hosts tend to make a fair sum of money off of the players in the event.
Because I went to these tournaments so often, not only did I get friendly with all the players at the local chess club and those on the tournament circuit, I also got friendly with the tournament directors. When having an informal conversation with one of them, he noted that many of the scholastic chess players stopped attending tournaments in middle school and high school. He asked me if there were any reasons why I felt that might be the case.
I responded something like this:
"You know, I've accumulated a fairly large trophy collection (talking about 50+ trophies) at this point from various tournaments. And, I'm going to be honest, the prospect of getting new ones is starting to lose its luster. Not only because handing out participation awards to everyone who places in the top half cheapens the value of the trophy, but also because the trophy has no inherent value. Simply put, I don't need another trophy.
"What I do need, though? Money. Everyone needs money. Most importantly, money has utility. I can actually exchange money for things of demonstrable value. That's becoming MUCH more important than yet another trophy.
"I'll be straight with you, you aren't losing middle and high schoolers because they've stopped playing chess, it's that they've stopped having any reason to go to your tournaments. The good ones have moved on to play with the adults, and the bad ones have been stomped so many times that they've stopped wanting to come and pay the entry fees."
So, we struck a deal. He'd host tournaments with cash prizes instead of trophies. Also, he would go to the lengths to make sure that these tournaments would not just contribute to our Scholastic Chess Federation ratings (that would be utterly irrelevant by the time we graduated), but that they would also contribute to our United States Chess Federation rating that lasts into adulthood and beyond. In exchange, I would participate in his tournaments whenever there were multiple events on the same day (which was actually somewhat often).
Slowly but surely, word spread around that these cash prizes were actually working. Middle and high schoolers were sticking with chess, and coming back to the scholastic scene in hopes of cashing out.
It seemed obvious to me, but this was a RADICAL shift from the established status quo amongst scholastic tournament directors at the time. They viewed cash prizes as a form of bribery. But I thought this was slightly hypocritical of them, since the promise of trophies and achievements are a source of bribery, too. It just so happens that one is more effective than the other as one gets older.
But eventually, the guard was changed. Almost everyone came around to do things our way. I only knew one tournament director that vehemently disagreed with the cash prizes, and was shocked to find out that she has died somewhat recently.
I'm now going to a college across the country, so I've been out of the local chess scene for a while, but as far as I know they still offer cash prizes as incentives and rate the tournament games with both the scholastic and USCF rating systems. The status quo, it seems, has completely turned over.
All because of one off-the-cuff conversation with a tournament director that I had a decade ago.
Personally, I made about 2000+ dollars from these tournaments in total over the course of about 3 years. The tournament director I worked with went on to run the largest chess event in the state of Washington a couple years later. I still play, though I left the competitive scene a while back.
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u/WaffleBrothel Feb 02 '16
I often upvote whole comment strings because I like to make everyone there feel like they contributed something to the discussion.
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u/mrguykloss Feb 03 '16
I have 264 digits of the transcendental number pi memorized, and they are the first 264 in the order they appear (in base 10).
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u/chacurrterie Feb 01 '16
I was born with my kidneys fused together to make just one big kidney.