The We Hunted the Mammoth Tribute to the True Heroes of Gaming

@kittehserf: I prefer this colour combination:

Aww, it says that first Stewart Lee video is not available in my country. Prejudice I say! I’ll have to have a look for one myself… oh, the oppression.

So the question that has been foremost in my mind: How could you escape being tied up with your hands behind your back using only whatever is in your hair?

I couldn’t!

pallygirl, definitely! 🙂

I’m another UK-dweller who’s bemused by the sudden appearance of “Black Friday” stuff in shops this year. I’d been aware of it referring to the peak of blatant consumerism, but now it seems it’s a self-justifying label to enhance that blatant consumerism.

Are the downtrodden capitalists reclaiming the phrase? And does this replace or complement our existing Boxing Day commerce binge? *I need to know when to buy shit.*

I thought boxing day was for returning all the stuff, not buying more.

@Kim – There are a few possible origins for the name, but none of them is related to the serious business of drawing huge crowds in front of shops.

http://www.snopes.com/holidays/christmas/boxingday.asp

I spent my Thanksgiving with my dad and had a lovely time. Then I drove home and got stuck in shopping traffic >.< I swear with my dying breath that if everything offered in stores on Thanksgiving were free, I still wouldn't go shopping.

As a retail wage slave who has to work Black Friday today, I can tell you it's bad enough trying to enjoy Thanksgiving knowing the chaos that awaits me at work the next day* let alone having to interrupt the holiday itself with all that nonsense.

Sorry for the rant/whine. I really wanted to say that Dave, WHTM and all you Mammotheers are something for which I am truly thankful. Every bit as good as Pharyngula but with MOAR KITTIES!!!1! Also, I'm truly sorry that Black Friday is being exported to other lands 🙁

*Not to mention that we can't do the 4 day weekend getaway to distant family/friends thing like, ever. Not where I work, anyway; if you call out sick on Black Friday (and Saturday, too) you damn well better have documentation as to why or you're sacked instantly.

Storm of the X-Men once picked a lock wielding the lockpicks with her lips and tongue. The lockpicks were hidden in her headdress. Does that count? The lock was on a chair that held her limbs bound.

Sure, it would be easy to make it work if you were cuffed, not tied, but under the circumstances tied is a lot more probable.

So the question that has been foremost in my mind: How could you escape being tied up with your hands behind your back using only whatever is in your hair?

Ah, I see your family celebrates Thanksgiving much like my family celebrates Christmas dinner. Luckily this is a situation in which I have some expertise.

Your first step is defining what tools you have available in your hair. Lice are no good, and hairbands are only good if you’re handcuffed. The old trick of picking a lock with a hair needle is actually really difficult because it depends on the make of the lock itself. If you’re just *tied up* however, a hair pin is actually more useful because you can hold it with your teeth and jam it between the knots of a rope. This helps losen the knots so you can wriggle your hands more so you can jam the pin in more so you can wriggle more so you can eventually get one or two hands free.

I notice you don’t specify “tied to a chair”? That’s good! In that case Policy of Madness is absolutely right, you want to bring your arms out in front of you. If you curl up on the floor and arc your back, even without being all too flexible it should be possible to strain and bring your arms under yourself (as if you were skipping a jump rope). This is obviously easier if you’re flexible. You can also bend down, lift one leg, push it through and then get the other. Maybe lean against a wall while doing this.

( If you’re desperate, dislocating a shoulder allows a wider range of movement, hurts like all hell seriously oh my god it hurts, and isn’t recommended because it’s difficult getting it back in joint)

With your hands in front of your head you can riffle through your hair to acquire your tools. If you’ve brought a knife in your hair, congratulations. If all you have is a hair pin, see above. If you have nothing and you’re tied up, you now have to eat the rope. This is not particularly tasty, but you ca bite down, twist your arms to strain some of the coils, and repeat until enough have been broken / loosened. It takes a while, but gnawing through rope is entirely possible.

This is more difficult with modern rope because the tensile strength of each fiber is higher.

If you’re locked in a room with a chair and the chair is wooden, you can grab it and use it to smash nearby objects, hoping you an edge breaks in such a way as to be sharp. Congratulations, that’s a knife.

If you are in a perfectly empty room, I most congratulate your captors on their foresight and understanding of escape dynamics. However, you’re still tied with rope, so your best bet at that point is to wriggle your wrists until you’e got friction burns because knots rely on being tight to work and you can sometimes wriggle enough of them apart to start grabbing with your teeth, hold for leverage and then awkwardly untie.

If you’ve got a hair pin and a lock that relies on pressure switching, you can hold it with your teeth like freemage suggested above and pick the lock, then bail until someone else can untie your hands.

Fibinachi: Nice. Hey, weren’t we going to write an interactive fiction together?

Eh, Christmas Dinners without the impromptu trials of fear, suffering and Saw like ingenious traps is no dinner at all. How are you going to cook the potatoes otherwise?

@katz: yes we did talk about that! Then I messed up the e-mail thing and no further stuff happened. Annual dinner at the moment soI’m typing this one-handed while suspended over a pit of gravy. I’ll get back.

Was also personally disappointing at the “No personal stuff” disclaimer.

Wait.

Oh no.