• loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.ml
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    21 days ago

    My conker disintegrated in one hit, and that just doesn’t happen … I’m suspicious of foul play and have expressed my surprise

    Whomst among us

  • Feinsteins_Ghost [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    21 days ago

    This is the very first time I’ve ever heard of this. Not just the controversy but the actual sport itself.

    <insert witty comment about men and their nuts competition here>

  • AcidSmiley [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    21 days ago

    idk if people who have English as their first language feel the same way about it, but conker, especially in a phrase like “men’s world conker championship”, always sounds like some regional British slur to me.

  • Sam [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    21 days ago

    I was always looking for reasons to avoid the gender segregated stuff on the playground as a kid so one winter I just gave everyone who wanted them conkers, when you destroy someone else’s conker you get to tie their string to your own. Since all the trading cards and stuff had been banned from the school it was the only gacha-brain activation we could get as pre-cellphone kids so it actually was kind of popular for a month or so.

    The first set of conkers I gave people were regular, but I made sure to rub Sudocrem into mine to make it stronger. Then the next set I gave out were soaked in vinegar. I didnt particularly care about winning I just thought it would keep it interesting to have a champion conker to try and beat. Eventually I had a thread about 1m long and we were running out of conkers so I gave another Sudocrem conker to my friend and let him beat mine so we could go out with a bang.

      • CloutAtlas [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        21 days ago

        Conker refers to the seed of a British chestnut, and is also the name of a game where you carefully drill a hole through the seed, feed a string through it, tie it so it becomes a tiny, organic wrecking ball. Your goal is to swing your conker at another child’s conker until one of them breaks.

        It’s one of those old timey children’s games like chasing a hoop with a stick or playing marbles or smoking cigarettes at the age of 9.

  • CarbonScored [any]@hexbear.net
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    21 days ago

    So the same person competing was prepping the conkers, including those for his competitors? That seems just poorly thought through from the start.

  • blobjim [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    21 days ago

    Jakins was responsible for drilling and inserting strings into other competitors’ chestnuts as the competition’s top judge, known as the “King Conker”.

    So a competitor prepares other competitors’ “gear”? I guess if it’s small enough that the only people at the event are competitors.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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    21 days ago

    There truly is no bottom to the well of human depravity.

    I wrote a quick and dirty set of rules for conkers in D&D once. The idea was pretty much this article; some kid had come by a magic +1 chestnut and was cheating their way through the city conkers leagues and somehow the party got roped in to a quest to end the kids reign of terror. Like all the other kids in the city scraped up five gp or something to hire adventurers. I’m not sure if we ever got around to actually playing it.