@NathanTuggy Only in this sort of case. Multiple accounts by the same user are totally legit so long as they don't use it to do things one account couldn't do (like vote to re-open their own question).
And I find it a little puzzling that someone would just distrust account investigations, which are classically one of the more critical things a mod can do and are rare enough to be carefully handled.
Happens, I guess. Continuing/commenting on some of the discussion above, all I can say is my formative college year gaming saw a whole of lot "I can't believe this is happening," situations.
@BESW True, I guess, although I assumed those would go away if/when the post was deleted.
@Novak Eh, you had no way to know. The only clue was material in the user profile's Personally Identifiable Info that normally nobody (including mods) see unless a mod needs to access it for a reason (like verifying that a second account claiming to be the same person really is or not).
"The Sister Thing" would be a good name for a band.
4
@lisardggY So, I was thinking about this, and this, and how Guam's time zone means we get to see movies in theatre before a lot of the world does, and out popped an idea:
Subject-oriented time zones.
It's a horrible idea that should never actually be implemented, but I may use it for a mad scientist in a game some day.
Instead of using different times based on geographic location, use different times zones based on what the time is related to. Physicists all over the world measure observations in the same time zone, but when they watch a movie it starts in the entertainment time zone.
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even if you did standardize things on universal time zones, you hit the problem of "well, I start work at GMT -20, but you start work at GMT + 4; when can we actually meet?"
For their day to day lives, people in different parts of the world would associate different times with different activities. While to someone in Greenwich 11:30 am might mean "lunch time", to people in the Eastern US it might mean "time to wake up", to others it might be "dinner time", or "middl...
(Another answer talks about the effect timezone abolishment had within China)
@trogdor well, that answer's examining what happens if you abolish timezones as a concept - without also having any effects on how time works across the globe.
Scenario: While poking around in an alien ruin, scientists discover a gateway which offers instant transportation to an Earth-like world.
The Observed World: The gateway leads to an area that is temperate (let's say it's similar to east coast of America, like Virginia/Maryland/Pennsylvania, for...
Well, let's be clear in our terminology: time zones are a man-made railway companies' response to the natural phenomenon of an asynchronous sunlight experience across the earth.
My version of the Points of Light setting could use time zones (it's a convex shield-shape), but probably doesn't because the difference is relatively small and precise synchronisation of events across long distances isn't a priority in what remains of its organised societies.
@doppelgreener The standard version is implied to be flat, but that creates a lot of "doesn't work like our world works" problems which can be fixed just by curving it a little bit.
With a slightly curved world you get a viable horizon, with a flat one you get no horizon at all, and instead things just disappear into atmosphere fog.
Wait a minute, the material planet in Points of Light is definitely round.
That's its origin story: the Primordials grabbed a whole lot of the elements, went out into that empty space way above the Elemental Chaos, and made a big chaotic ball, and they were happy with it. And then the Gods stabilised it and created continents, ocean, atmosphere, and life.
If they made something that wasn't spherical I've read its origin story wrong.
The aftermath of Nerath, however, might be located on such a small area as to be close to flat - like if Known Civilisation was spread out over an area the size of Europe.
@doppelgreener "Above the Elemental Chaos" is the key: If you start in the Mortal World and start spelunking, you'll pass through the Underdark to the Elemental Chaos, which is infinitely deep, without ever having to do anything except physically walk.
If the Mortal World is on the surface of a closed sphere, that means it's infinitely larger on the inside.
I don't have access to any 4e books, but I suspect this is part of the PoL's deliberate confundment and internal contradiction.
Just like Nerath collapsed anywhere from a few decades to a few hundred years ago, and Arkhosia and Bael Turath may have been a few hundred or a few thousand years ago.
...and nobody can agree on where dragonborn came from.
@BESW It's not Euclidean transport though, from what I've read (in Manual of the Planes and The Plane Below). The explanation I read is like this: very primal places in the world are still connected to the Elemental Chaos. Like quantum entanglement, maybe - that volcano is so ancient and untamed, the lava in it is still connected to the place the lava first came from in the Elemental Chaos. It's dimensionally tied to there. If you can survive the trip, you might wind up in the E.C.
Likewise the especially dark places, or especially wild places, are still connected to the spots where the Shadowfell and Feywild got torn loose from the World.
@doppelgreener That's definitely how it works for the Feywild and Shadowfell, and it can work that way for the EC.
But there's also clear indications in some of the material that the EC is physically, adventurer-tested and Euclid-approved, below the Mortal World and reachable by sandal power via the Underdark.
It's a joke about bots not cataloguing pages with a "robots.txt" file, so the band is actively telling search engines to not include pages mentioning them.
@BESW Basically, just like people might replace their real-world peer groups and interest groups with online ones, they can take the next step and replace their daily schedules, to align to their online peer groups rather than their accidental geographical ones.
But these are individual schedules. What you're proposing is a universal schedule. Say, everyone who does WoW raiding gets up at 8:00am UTC regardless of where they live or whether they game together. Just because that's morning for WoWers.
That's much more interesting.
In the "oh, god, this should never actually really happen" sense of the word.
This can lead to more extreme thoughts. I read a C.J. Cherryh novel, many years ago, where a city was inhabited by two different groups of people. One active by day, one by night, and they never met each other.
Now that I think about it, I think Jack Vance had a similar concept in one Dying Earth story.
Now apply it to this. People live in hte same city, but go by a different clock and a different calendar.
Think of what that will mean to their coexistence. They'd prefer to associate with each other as little as possible, because translating time-zones would be a pain. They would want to be clearly demarcated. Different clothing?
They'd go to different shops, and different bars. (when would Happy Hour start?). One man's Sunday driving is another's rush-hour traffic. Tensions would occasionally rise.
Given that they were back-to-back both in-universe and in broadcast order, and they featured the same villain, they were more like a two-part story than two separate stories.
Logopolis introduced the block-transfer computations which powered Castrovalva's surprise twist.
Just a quick survey; was my edit out of place? And what should I read into the fact that it was re-added despite the edit being reviewed and accepted? I dont know why, but I feel this answer puts way too much personal opinion into it...
@FlorianPeschka I wouldn't have said it was out of place (and whoever reviewed it clearly agreed), but it did conflict with authorial intent (as proven by the author rollbacking it).
As for what you read into it, clearly the author likes having that in their answer and won't accept it being removed.
If you want to pursue it further, leaving a comment on the answer explaining why you think it should be removed would be the next step.
Downvoting is an option that's always open to you.
Okay, thanks for the input... It just bothers me so much because i believe one of the best facts about SE is that personal opinion is not really relevant
Personal opinion isn't necessarily relevant, but neither is it forbidden.
Neither your edit, nor the answerer's choice to roll it back, fall into any objective category of "good" or "bad" with relation to the site's policies or goals.
@BESW ok. thats why I was asking for a second look. guess i am so invested in keeping this topic clean of opinion to just overlook that part of the answer
@FlorianPeschka I don't think personal opinions can or should be excised. They should be toned down when they impede readability or getting the actual point across, but like personal style, should only be edited out when they get in the way.
In this case, I feel that it didn't really interfere with the answer, and was apparently important enough to the original writer.
yeah, taking away the meaning of what someone was trying to say is certainly not good,.. and if this is what said origional author feels was removed,.... well then they have a pretty good reason to want to keep it in
if it was somehow offensive, that of course is a different matter, if not then they have the ability to not keep certain edits for a reason
@lisardggY I approved the edit on the basis the opinion wasn't actually doing much, and someone felt strongly enough to actually submit an edit - the answer looked clean and good (and more "professional", for lack of a better word) without it. I was surprised by the rollback, but let it be (didn't start an edit war / flag for mod attention) because it wasn't a huge and obvious improvement, and totally had room for it to just be a matter of taste in how answers get written.
I don't think the "yuk" improved anything, but up to them if they feel strongly enough to keep it in there.
(Contrast this meta question where my edit was rolled back, and so I flagged it for moderator attention because it was undoubtedly an improvement for our site to have that edit in place. A moderator put my edit back, and trouble started when it was rolled back again. Usually in these cases, whoever's resisting a strong improvement edit has some mismatch with our site practices, and the edit war brings that to the surface.)
None of that's disagreeing or anything, I find what you said to be pretty agreeable. Good context in which to share my own 2c.
The whole vegan scenario's the biggest red flag (it doesn't actually seem very plausible...) but the whole thing had a vague sense of plausibility to it. Like, it's extremely unlikely, but it could have happened. Mostly my gut was suggesting it was a sensational story fabricated for internet points, but I wasn't sure how to extract proof of that. Luckily they gave it to us on a platter.
It's definitely easy to become a GM who's a total [bad words] like that, and it's actually very easy to exert real life power over people in certain oppressive ways through in-game threats. It's kinda bad how easy it is. But... people going with it in the ways described is the implausible-sounding part.
And seriously, the Internet needs to stop with the vegan prejudice. It gets in the way of actually helping people make healthy diet choices--like understanding what veganism actually is.
[was raised by someone who was vegan in the days when that meant nutrient-counting]
(Also, I was surprised that a troll who exploits vegan prejudice knows it'd actually cause major gastric distress for someone to change their diet that drastically that suddenly.)
if it helps: imagine making an insensitive racial joke about coloured people instead, and imagine it with/without a :D at the end. not to say that's equivalent to what you said, but that will put into light what difference a :D makes - not much!
@Sejanus Certain portions of the Internet have latched onto the notion that vegans are self-important, pompous, braggart bandwagoners who self-identify purely as vegan and insert their diet choices into irrelevant conversations at every opportunity.
On the other hand, I've actually known someone who, because dialogue about veganism tends toward rhetorical posturing without specific information, thought she could remove meat from her diet without replacing those nutrients by adding other foods. Malnutrition ensued.
@doppelgreener i understand what you say, but i do not agree with it on a more fundamental level. heres not the place to discuss that... so lets leave it at "im sorry for offending"
one of my friends is a vegan and I didn't learn that until about a year after we first met, and I only learned it because we were having a conversation on different issues with ordering food abroad and she mentioned it's hard to ask for "no meat" if you don't speak the language
but I also used to know a guy who tried to choke a girl because she was putting chicken into her salad. Well not choke to death, just choke to teach her a lesson.
even in your own language its hard. brother-in-law is a vegan and he continually has to make exceptions just as to not inconvenience everybody... its really frustrating
From memory, its pretty easy to set up a map that all players can edit
The reason I haven't attempted to answer the question is because I haven't done it recently enough to be sure of the details, and I certainly haven't done the kind of thing you are specifically asking for
The song? It was recently a popular radio song in the US, by a relatively popular artist. It's the only one of his songs I like at all, and its primary virtue is in its wistfully tragic portrayal of drug abuse.
@doppelgreener I think a lesson here is that emoticons are insufficient to guard against Poe's Law.
...how should I decide how much rep to offer as a bounty?
I have enough to hand out 500-rep bounties as fast as possible for two solid months without losing any privileges, so my sense of scale is kinda warped.
I don't really feel like I should have to explain the mechanic I'm asking for expert help with; someone asking about combat in D&D shouldn't have to explain what an attack bonus is.
@Wibbs I deeply appreciate the chat-wise support, though, as I suspect it'll be about all I get.
@FlorianPeschka Aye. The use of irony punctuation to indicate satire is, however, a constantly-evolving form. It's often difficult to distinguish between "I think this thing and find it funny" and "I find it funny people think this thing."
A question like this generally seeks answers from places of expertise and experience. Since you didn't even know what the thing I'm trying to do is until a few minutes ago, it's hard to take seriously your unsupported claim that you know "everything that could possibly needed" to do it.
@Momonga-sama It's just a thing. We've got lots of ESL users on the site, and it just slows me down a little. I'm also experienced with ESL writing in my non-Internet life, but there's noticeable differences between European ESL and Asia-Pacific ESL.
@Momonga-sama I think some examples of what Deekit can do that are similar to what I'm looking for would be very helpful.
Also I'm confused by this line: Commenting feature allowed to improve the content that was not troublesome for the creator, but was for everybody else.
It sounds like the commenting feature is troublesome for everyone except the creator.
But I'm pretty sure that's not what you meant to say.
Convoluted, over-punctuated compound sentences are a bad habit of mine; in my formal writing I work hard to edit them down into pithier chunks which use phrasing rather than punctuation to shape their flow, after the style of Brenda Ueland.
(Notice that, for example, in this comment each sentence is divided into two parts by a comma.)
> Um, it was the 70’s, and I was doing a lot of drugs. Frankly, even I’m not entirely sure what parts of the movie are about. -John Boorman, according to the wikipedia page.
@BESW Good! Is there something special to do for that to work? You know, I'm using Chrome and the link's target is shown on a corner of my screen, so I don't really felt the need for it, but not everyone uses Chrome.
I have these concepts about things I'd like to do with my D&D characters that I can't really clearly define. They're more like a byproduct of reasonings that come up and dissolve as soon as they're formed.
Like, I'm thinking about the trope of the hair witch, which has a class representing it in Pathfinder, but not in D&D 3.5e. So I'm all "well, let's make a wizard with thematic spelss: hair, and let's have her unseen servants be just her hair serving tea, and her magic missiles be her hair leashing out". But then I need to go great lenghts to hide the fact that it's done through spellcasting, and I end up being weaker than a character that does not care about how it looks.
And then there's this quirk I have where if the character is not the best, the character starts feeling like she has made the wrong choices in life (when confronted with people who are stronger because of their choices)
It is why I can't drive myself to play a monk. I have seen people play like "yeah, you can do that with a weapon, but what can you do without it?" while I'd be "I can't do that, except if I switched to a weapon, why the hell don't I learn using one?"
