The Factory Floor - 2015-07-27

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Worldbuilding Meta

1:04 PM

0

Q: Is the bullet-from-space question on-topic?

Can you shoot someone with a bullet... from orbit? asks about shooting a bullet from space to earth. This seems more like a physics question (how do trajectories work? how does gravity affect that?) than a worldbuilding question; I don't see where a world is being built here. The question recei...

discussion on-topic specific-question

2 hours later…

3:18 PM

hey, is it just me or are the questions rather terrible as of late?

in which sense, terrible?

hmm, maybe I'm projecting from my own questions

@bilbo_pingouin dunno, rather dull?

@SerbanTanasa without any judgement on the questions, it might be explained by the popularity of the religion theme, or some other questions (like the Towel). This attracted plenty of new users, which have to get used to the site.

ah, sorry, have been out of the country on business, haven't kept up with the meta site

We had the religion challenge earlier this month: meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2262/…

some of those questions got a lot of hotness points, and WB was often represented by several questions on the HQN

which in turn attracted some activity

3:26 PM

@SerbanTanasa That challenge was excellent.

@HDE226868 My favorite thus far, no question...heh.

Hello everyone, been a while!

I'm probably gonna pull an early version of the WriNoMo in August

@SerbanTanasa ?

@HDE226868 He is talking about nanowrimo.org

( I think)

Cool.

3:40 PM

I've been considering it this year @MonicaCellio have you ever participated?

Yeah, the US version is called that

@James I've not participated, but a bunch of people on Writers do so that site's chat room might be a good place to hang out.

@MonicaCellio Good idea

@HDE226868 the religion challenge was good. I feared it might get explosive quickly, but it mostly didn't. Lots of strong opinions to be sure and more downvotes than usual I suspect, but people kept it civil. Good job!

I may be alone in not liking the towel question. :-(

@MonicaCellio ...you're not.

3:52 PM

ah, forgot to add 'humans' to my latest question

towel?

111

Q: How to best upgrade your Towel for military combat

Often your Towel is something which is very useful to carry around with you, especially in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where you are taught to upgrade your Towel by, say, reinforcing the stitches in your Towel, or soaking a corner of it with nutritious substances so that you can suck it ...

@SerbanTanasa

whoa, 111 votes

what the ?

well, little do i know

the answer IS great. worthy of HPMOR

To be honest, the Towel question is off-topic...

... it is NOT about Worldbuilding

of course.

@bilbo_pingouin Yeah I don't really get the appeal either

vtc it bilbo! :)

The way some things take off here is amazing to me.

3:57 PM

don't even remember the towel mentioned in THGTTG

@bilbo_pingouin I see no close votes. (cough)

yeah, a chaotic system

@SerbanTanasa Then you clearly aren't a hitchhiker. :-)

one more upvote in the 12 seconds we were talking about it

le sigh

@MonicaCellio yes, I try to relax sometimes... I have started a few VTC who wasn't followed, and due to the popularity of the question, I thought it was one of those cases

3:58 PM

yeah, can't close the 1st (3rd?) most popular question evah

To be honest I hadn't looked at it til this morning

I don't want to be the mean guy around here shooting at all questions

oh fine, Ill do it.

@bilbo_pingouin if you think something is off-topic, please vote. If you think something should be reopened, please vote on that too. Ditto upvotes, downvotes, deletion votes when you get there -- use your votes to express how you feel, regardless of how other people used (or didn't use) theirs. This is how we as a community figure out what we are really looking for here.

wait...didn't we decide that the expansion of an existing universe IS on topic?

4:00 PM

It's not really expanding the universe, though.

@SerbanTanasa you can, actually. A question can attract a lot of attention and still not be a good fit for a site. It's not going away; it'll still be here for people to read and vote on. But open questions are, implicitly, examples of what we consider in-scope.

@HDE226868 That's the only argument I could think of...

(its not a great one)

oh wait, it got migrated?

where from? main ?

Okay, I've cast a close vote (as did someone else, before me).

@SerbanTanasa ? I don't see a migration notice on the towel question; are you talking about a different question?

4:03 PM

@HDE226868 3rd

I'm wondering about whether or not the towel question stacks up well against anything mentioned here.

@MonicaCellio one of paranoidpanda's comments

Though not related to any of the mentioned science questions.

I was looking through the other weapon-design questions just now and it does seem to have a little less to do about the world than most of the others.

Most other questions are what to create or how to create it given x scenario.

if you ask me, it should go scifi.stackexchange.com

4:07 PM

@SerbanTanasa oh I see. The OP had a different question migrated here (from SciFi, about HHGttG) and then went on to ask the towel question. His expectations about this site might not have been set correctly; somebody should look into that.

@MonicaCellio Maybe a moderator or something :P

@MonicaCellio @TimB might consider suggesting migrating the towel question to sci-fi?

they seem to consider "why did gandalf" type questions on topic...

I wish we had more questions like there were back in the early days. I missed private beta, but I loved some of the things I saw in the early days of public beta. Like This or this

or this series. Does anyone agree?

@James well, if the community can handle it, that's better. More immediately, this moderator is pretty busy at work right now and wouldn't get to it for several hours.

@James I think "how do you weaponize a towel" could be on-topic here, at least as much as the other weapon-design questions are. This one feels a little too much about HHGttG and maybe a little less serious than the others that I recall.

Four close votes, it seems. The question is still on the HNQ list, though.

4:11 PM

@HDE226868 I like all three of those. What's stopping you from asking questions like that now?

@MonicaCellio Nothing. I just feel like overall we're missing them.

Drawing traffic = ++ good; Creating wrong expectations about what WB is about ++NotGood

@James: Well, I never actually knew about this site until this question of mine was migrated here... So I assumed that this site accepts strange questions that other sites don't, and judging by the response to this question, I'm guessing that that is the case! :D — Paranoid Panda 10 mins ago

Misconception. Partly why I asked this. Science folks think we're sci-fi; sci-fi folks think we're science.

4:41 PM

honestly I think the towel question is ok. It's not core worldbuilding but we have plenty of weapon design questions that it's similar to and not every question asked here has to be super-serious

there's always room for a bit of fun

@TimB I had a question that is similar to this series. Is it okay if I build off of them?

It's about coastlines.

@HDE226868 sure, it's all cc-by-sa :)

Haha. :-)

5:31 PM

@TimB Thanks.

0

Q: Creating a realistic world map - Coastlines

Prelude Shortly before writing this question, I realized that it is quite similar to an earlier series of questions that TimB wrote, starting with Creating a realistic world map - Landmass formation. I decided to use this question to revive the series, as I think it is still useful, and TimB sai...

science-based geography

@MonicaCellio This is the kind of thing I was aiming for.

5:43 PM

@HDE226868 nice. I hope answers include explaining what makes fjords. Besides Slartibartfast, I mean.

@MonicaCellio Ah, I meant to put that joke in but forgot!

@MonicaCellio Just giving you a hard time. If there was sarcasm font I would use it regularly.

@HDE226868 Nice follow-on :)

5:58 PM

@TimB Thanks.

I just posted geography as a topic for the challenges in here: meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/1768/…

@James oh, sorry -- I didn't pick up on your tone of voice there. :-)

No problem...sarcasm is so hard to put into text...someone really needs to fix that.

@James Usually, emoticons/smiley can be used to convey that... I have to say that I tend to overuse them...

6:28 PM

@James and i upvoted your posting of it :)

Ah, Twelfth passed 10k yesterday, meaning that we have 10 users over 10 . . . k.

34 over 4k, almost the whole front page.

Chem and Bio both have the 10 over 10, but they have fewer over 4k.

They do beat us in total users, question rate, and visits, but still.

For a niche-ish site, we're doing well. That's my point.

Worldbuilding Meta

6:54 PM

0

Q: Is the "minor character wanting to be the hero" question on topic?

The question You are a minor character in a fictional story. How do you get to be the hero? has been drawing some auto-flags (not a bad thing in itself) and the more I looked at it, the more I wonder how it can be on topic. The question specifically asks: Can you suggest long-term strategies...

discussion on-topic specific-question

7:38 PM

our tags are kind of messed up... some are in plurals, others in singular...

planets and dragon, for example

@bilbo_pingouin Nice catch. You could either bring that up in general on an answer here or ask a new meta question.

I will... I mean we could multiply the synonyms... or decide on whether we should decide on all plural or all singular

Please don't make synonyms of singulars to plurals; auto-complete should just do the right thing there.

@MonicaCellio I would also prefer to avoid that, indeed...

I personally prefer plural tags for countable nouns -- planets, moons, dragons, etc -- unless there really is only one.

7:45 PM

+1 to that

Related and related.

8:02 PM

@MonicaCellio Random writing question for you, and maybe the answer is do whatever you want

I have a major historic figure (person) that spans history...kinda like...hmm an elf tolkein style

He is in my book as a sort of recurring guiding character.

So I am thinking of doing his backstory which is already in my head for nanowrimo but I am not sure with a character like that if it makes more sense to go first or third person...any opinions?

Obviously the story follows his becoming a person of immense power so he just starts off as a kid...

Anyone else is welcome to chime in as well...just started thinking about this today.

@James both can work -- and within first-person, there's the perspective question as well (write as it unfolds, like in a diary, or write from the "end" looking back). Do you see the story being more introspective, which might work better in first person, or more chronicular (event-driven), which might work better in third?

If you remember the discussions from last Thursday, about writing some how-tos in our tags wiki. I made some attempt tonight. Please consider it, and tell me how it is...

worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/tags/worldbuilding-process/info

Well in my imaginary world where my work has actually been published, this would actually release after the main story I am working on as a sort of "Thats an interesting guy whats his deal and how did he become who he is" so...I suppose first person

@bilbo_pingouin I went ahead and approved that edit even without reading the whole thing yet, as it's clearly an improvement and now everybody else can see too.

@bilbo_pingouin I missed it. Can you give me a link to a relevant chat message?

8:09 PM

the book would essentially be a prequel timeline wise but release after, so the end would be the beginning of the main story.

@bilbo_pingouin thanks for working on this! More when I've had a chance to read it. :-)

@James Consider the book en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Men_Are_Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir... the main character is similar to what you seem to want to do :)

@bilbo_pingouin Wow, nice edit.

@James ah, so not told at the end-end but at the end-of-prehistory-for-this-book point. Gotcha.

@HDE226868 chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/22960871#22960871 and following

8:11 PM

@bilbo_pingouin Thanks.

Nothing like making things complicated right?! So I would think First person and...writing it up "for history" after the events unfold

@James that can still work in either first or third person, I think. Were I doing it I'd probably decide based on how "thinky" I want the writing to be; I think that works better in first person. But if it's more about things that happened to him, and especially if it's important to bring in stuff he doesn't know (like actions of other characters), that pushes for third person.

@MonicaCellio thanks for the first feed back :)

@MonicaCellio You ask excellent questions...

if it is approved, then people can build on it, so it should be fine :)

8:12 PM

@bilbo_pingouin Agreed, nice edit.

Hmm...I think I would rather have him discover things than just tell the reader what happened...

@HDE226868 thanks. Now you know how I got the tag issue I mentioned earlier ;-)

@James btw, you might also consider asking about this in the Writers chat room.

They're a friendly bunch, honest.

@James thanks :)

(I'm happy to talk with you too -- just, in the interest of broader input, you might also try there.)

@MonicaCellio I suppose that makes a bit of sense... :)

8:16 PM

@James Simone de Beauvoir did it 1st person

if that's any indication of anything

@James an unconventional approach that you might also consider is (there's probably a formal name for this) "first person unfolding in real time". Stories told through diaries/journals, for example, but I've also seen what I think of as "first-person present tense". (Reaches for example from memory, fails.)

@bilbo_pingouin Lol I am NOT that good :) but i will take a look, thanks for the reference.

@MonicaCellio I think that his how Riordan did all his Heroes of Olympus series

First person present

Samuel rejected that edit. The reason was "no improvement". (?)

@HDE226868 that's puzzling. :-(

@HDE226868 erf :-/ I do hope it will be accepted, I spent some time writing it ^^"

8:25 PM

@bilbo_pingouin Monica's approval is binding, so you're good.

@HDE226868 yes I supposed so as I got my +2 rep...

@Vincent Regarding a chat comment you made that I never responded to - The post I made on the blog was an idea I posted because none of us had really had any time to put into it, and there had been some support for this one.

Okay, so a couple of close vote reviewers have chosen to keep the towel question open, and in the past - around when it was posted - about 10 reviews kept it open. It currently only needs one more vote to close, though.

Interesting.

It's finally off the HNQ, though, for better or for worse.

Worldbuilding Meta

1

Q: Tags cleaning: number

We have plenty of different tags, but while having a look at some of them, I realised that we have some in plural: e.g. planets, gods, cities, humans, ... in singular: e.g. dragon, alien, spaceship, society, ... I don't see any reason why we should have such a mix. There have been some discu...

discussion tags tag-synonyms

@HDE226868 I suppose he has a different interpretation of what should be on the Tag wiki.

Fun fact: The "17 questions" here has morphed into 294.

@bilbo_pingouin I guess.

8:42 PM

The Towel question is a good illustration that vote isn't a good criteria for FAQ selection... But a FAQ might be somewhat interesting

Is there a way to somehow find the duplicate or near-duplicate statistics?

@HDE226868 huh, yeah. I'd forgotten all about that meta question. An approach that worked for a few questions won't work now. I'm going to tweak the question a bit (bottom line: if there's stuff that needs to be done, do it; if there's stuff that needs to be discussed, start a new meta question.)

@MonicaCellio Makes sense.

@HDE226868 if the concept of tag wikis-how tos are adopted, that series should definitely be part of some, like geography

@bilbo_pingouin Good idea. People seem to like the questions.

I certainly don't have time today, but I might one of those days try to get it in. But the "older" among you should consider that, as you are more familiar than I am about relevant questions...

9:06 PM

@bilbo_pingouin I made an edit to the first portion of the wiki, just some clean-up, organization and grammar stuff...I will take a crack at the rest tomorrow.

@James Sure thing. It is meant to be built on. Not carved in stone :-)

9:21 PM

This question worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2/… should probably be included in that wiki...?

@bilbo_pingouin Dunno. It covers a lot. A lot a lot. Everything that's generic.

true... but I like the description of Cal West (worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/76/9685)

so if indeed the question isn't very good, a few of the answers are informative

@bilbo_pingouin The question's excellent, I think.

As are the answers.

I meant to be in the wiki

@bilbo_pingouin I know.

9:28 PM

It could be a good starting point after reading the worldbuilding-process's wiki

You're right. Put it on.

Edit approved, though someone else needs to review.

The Towel question has been put on hold.

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