The Playground

Child: "As long as I can, I guess..."

penny-arcade.com/comic/2014/02/21

How's your leg?

@curiousdannii Toxicity in a place meant for productive gathering of all members is wrong. In such a small community, one is either part of the problem or part of the solution. What you said hurt me.

yeah, we've become a weird morass of unnecessarily rigid laws due to people not using common sense and being overly litigious.

@Joe We try to make sure any questions about what to buy are all about qualities and things to look for in the item rather than about brands and the "products" themselves.

@TorbenGundtofte-Bruun Two pages of new users who joined in the past two days!. Holy guacamole!

StackExchange is by nature supposed to be a collaborative site. Most everyone agrees that capitalization and spelling edits are useful. Unfortunately, that's the nature of a site moderated by consensus. Not everything goes your way. I feel your pain on that. I have severe disagreements with the consensus on topicality on programmers.SE, for example.

OH meta-tip for parenting: sometimes it's ok to put the camera down.

We celebrated on Christmas Eve. My kids, their spouses, and my two grandchildren. I was very pleasantly surprised by some clay tools. Cool! I'm eager to work in clay again.

@anongoodnurse I don't know yet what I will do, but it didn't make me want to contribute to SE again. I'm not yet sure it is good for Monica, though. That newest "apology" is rather disgusting. I really wonder how people can write something like that. E. g. the part about her not understanding all the nuances etc. It seems she understood better than them, according to what I read, they did change the CoC the way she wanted them to.

Been using it for half an hour and I still like this webchat interface better than any I've ever seen. Someone did an unobtrusively superb job of design here. I'd rather like to know who.

I like this web-chat interface a lot. Clean, uncluttered, non-fussy fonts at good sizes, tasteful use of notification sounds and animations.

My opinions mean nothing in the greater scheme of things. The transcript and the way mods are supposed to be dismissed will count in Monica's favor.

I wish the transcript would be released. That would solve a lot of the conflict. I'm sure some would come down on the pro-pronoun side, but the vast majority would come down on Monica's side.

She was unfailingly polite.

SE would get some real publicity if they settled with Monica openly. That would be great.

@RoryAlsop It seems to me that, except for the CMs, SE employees are totally disconnected from the community. I would be interested to know why they didn't promote one of their long-term CMs to head the public Q&A. I guess the higher-ups ignored or didn't care the damage caused by incompetence and now they try to deal with it like every big corporation would. The real damage will be the negative publicity, though, not the result of the trial, IMHO.

It's such a crazy situation. Some of the CMs are brilliant and are obviously trying to help resolve the situation. SE seems happy there is publicity, no matter what the damage to others is, and Chipps appears to be the top troll, causing personal damage and chaos

Where do we draw the line? Monica was hurt. What about those who did that? Where's the public trial? Do we need one for everyone who ever hurt someone else?

No one deserves what Stack Exchange did to Monica. Period. Not even the worst troll. And no one was treated this way before. No one ever. That SE takes back their actions against her, retracts the accusations is a necessity and not depended on anything Monica does or doesn't do. Basically, they committed a crime against her. They put her livelihood in danger.

@AnneDaunted Thank you, kind of you to say so. It was a pleasure while it lasted. You too, take care, I always felt you were an excellent curator / mod-in-training around here ;-)

@anongoodnurse I don't think I will leave entirely. The company needs someone to remind them of its deeds in the future :-) Maybe take a break and also make changes to the way I participate here.

In this case, let's have a reason to come here to chat - music!

@anongoodnurse The 2nd Twitter incident that prompted SE staff to take action. What a contrast between how they react to complaints on Twitter, and how they treat their own moderators!

An apology in this case is owning what they did wrong and promising to never repeat.

@AnneDaunted If it's malignant to it's moderators, then it can't happen soon enough imo. We are volunteers, FFS.

@AnneDaunted Not enough. I wish I had the courage to follow.

@AnneDaunted To say that this is painful is an understatement. I don't like the TL and mostly stay out of it for reasons I won't go into here. But I have seen/read Monica for years now on various sites and the TL (when I do need to go there) and on the mod team site, where she is a frequent contributor, and I have never seen her act in any manner unbecomingly; in fact, the opposite is true. She is one of the best mods (and users) I've come across.

I have no idea why people don't read the instructions, or even lurk - that is how communities online and in real life have always worked

Is there a chance you could realize that in a country nearly exactly split down the middle, politically... presuming a hyper-partisan worldview might be inappropriate?

Holy cow! People chatting in our chat room! Yay :)

I wonder how useful anecdotal evidence is when the question is about health risks. In some cases, it might be good, but then there are answers that go like "my child never had X so Y is not a risk". It's like claiming that smoking didn't increase the risk of lung cancer, because one smoker didn't get it.

@Stephie and every other mom - Happy Mother's Day!

@DVK it probably was a mistake for me to show the preschooler that he could wrap tape around himself as well as the box...

Oy. Flag away. That's why we're here.

Very cool: younghouselove.com/2012/01/reader-redesign-a-monstrous-duvet

Congrats @RoryAlsop and @medica... You'll be great!

This is a big part of why so many kids these days are misdiagnosed as ADD/ADHD/ASD -- being bored out of your skull in a dumbed down class is a symptom now.

Which is why I'm changing it up by doing things that will bring me joy. Lillies, peonies, sweet peas, you name it, it is going in or has gone in.

@Beofett best way possible sounds just wonderful and it makes me smile just reading that! Congrats on a new great job, too! We swapped emails already, so we can always stay in touch as needed.

@MarieHendrix Thank you for the advice! This morning's breakfast was a pretty good success! Hunter had bagel with cream cheese, garlic grilled cheese (despite my slightly burning it!) and fresh banana. The banana in particular was a big accomplishment, since previously he did not want to touch it, but after I made a game of eating it, he took some from me, and alternated eating it with feeding me pieces of it!

My son still thinks I'm the cool mom. He told some kid who called him a momma's boy, "you don't get it, she's not just a regular mom; she does karate and built me a mad science lab and lets me have knives"

@Beofett Hope things are okay.