Funny thing happened today. I need to do laundry, was too lazy to do it today. I grabbed a t-shirt from the worn but still clean pile (ya know, barely worn?). I kept smelling something. What is that??
Remember the fennel experimentation?
As soon as I knew what it was, I stopped smelling it.
Some of his saute flips are downright pornographic
Haha. Relevant to your "doesnt measure things" point... I'm watching him make some oatmeal cookies with some co-host lady. He said just grab about 1.5 tablespoons (of cookie dough)
My girlfriend put collars and rabies vaccination tags on my cats a couple of days ago. Now I constantly mistake them walking around for some stranger fumbling with their keys in my apartment.
that's just what the Phantom Key Fumbler wants you to think
it's a classic MO - turn the girlfriend to your nefarious cause, persuade her to attach tags to boyfriend's cats, let him get used to the noise, then when he's fully lulled into a false sense of security...
Got a new job writing copy as well as doing layout; trying not to get into too much trouble with that.
An old friend is visiting for a couple months and I've got him in my RPG group, so that's nice.
My dad's got a detached retina, which is less pleasant.
As I understand it, the computer pretended to be a 13-year-old. Given societal stereotypes about the mental and social abilities of teenagers, I suspect that's cheating.
We've abandoned grammar and spelling. We expect teens to be vapid imbeciles. Of course a machine pretending to be 13 passed the Turing Test.
the effects are similar: pale, pasty skin, tendency to lash out angrily at the slightest provocation (eg unfavourable D20 rolls), the desire to wear cloaks...
Not necessarily; RPGs can be played at whatever level of detachment the player/group is comfortable with. Some people like to speak as their character, others prefer to narrate their character's actions in third person.
I always complain about how boring and unnecessary all the discussions about closing questions are, so I couldn't in good conscience nominate myself...
I'd vote for you and do a little campaigning if you'd like
As a mod you could have more influence about that.
Personally, I think it's cool that you have such command of the English language even though it's not your first. Since I speak exactly one language fluently, I find that impressive. I like your attitude too. I'd totally vote for you (if I can talk you into nominating yourself)
I just looked at your profile a bit on ELU meta. You'd be a natural.
Hmm. Ignoring me? OK. Wanna talk about food? I've got an interesting fennel experiment going on.
@AJHenderson Yes, that is exactly the problem. I'm not sure I would want to either enforce things I disagree with or continually argue and disagree with my fellow moderators, whom I consider to some degree friends.
There's an amusing case in rpg.se where the meta discussion arrived at one decision, but all the community's voting choices reflect the opposite sentiment. The mods agree with the sentiment expressed in action, and said in meta that they plan to enforce accordingly.
@Cerberus for the most part, I wouldn't so much worry about that being a problem. All the moderators I know are pretty light hearted types, especially amongst other mods. For the most part, mods just get frustrated by users that consistently and regularly make our lives difficult, not so much other mods we may disagree about something with
and the other thing that running could be good for is that if you mention in your nomination what you want to see different, then it lets the community speak towards if they want that or not
@Cerberus Oh, it's the same people in many cases. Just that in meta we were all very theoretical and talked ourselves into one notion... then when we ran into in the real world common sense prevailed.
@Jolenealaska Often a question like that suffers a different problem as well: SE specialises in answering specific questions about real problems people face, and many questions which could be easily and trivially answered by another website wouldn't be answerable that way except they're asked too generally out of a misguided attempt to be more useful to other people.
If the question gets edited with more specifics about the querent's specific challenge, it becomes a better question that other sites can't answer equally well.
@Cerberus Specifically it was about the scope of setting questions on the site. RPGs can and do use any and every setting, fictional or historical. This means that questions about ANYTHING from 1920s telephones to ion propulsion systems are related to RPGs. There's an ongoing conversation about where to draw the line so rpg.se doesn't turn into a site where literally everything is on topic.
@AJHenderson The situation is kind of unclear. We once agreed on Meta that the things I mentioned (Google, Wiki) did not count towards "too basic", but there is a current of users who close such questions. It may have become sort of the communis opinio by now, not sure.
@Jolenealaska Meta discussions tend to conclude that a wider scope is better. In practice, we flag and close most questions that are about non-RPG-specific settings (like 1920s New England) unless their answers obviously need an RPG perspective. History, fantasy, and science sites are better suited to answer them otherwise.
@Cerberus There are many subjects which are technically "on topic" in SE sites which are nonetheless thrown out. For example, anything which asks for an endless iterative list is frowned at by nearly ever SE site.
@BESW I'd hazard the difference in scope is probably the level of detail needed in an answer. You don't need (or particularly want) a highly detailed primer in ion propulsion, You want to know, what's a believable enough way to make an ion drive fail
To be honest, I normally research anything I need to know myself. I would normally not ask on SE. The few times that I have, I usually didn't get a useful answer. Sometimes, however, I found the information I needed through Google on some SE site.
if I can find it on google, I do, if I see an SE link in google results, I click it first
and if I can't find it on Google, I ask it here first
about the whole "too basic" argument. There actually use to be a reason like that for closing and it was actually removed
network wide
it's common for people that are knowledgable and established not to want to deal with basic questions, but they often forget that people do need basic answers and that basic answers tend to not have a lot of variety, so you answer them once with a good generic question and any future question like that is closed as duplicate
but it takes a few regular users of the site keeping track of what has and hasn't been answered and marking stuff as duplicates for that to work well
@AJHenderson Mmm. Quite often it goes hand-in-hand. A question that gets asked better becomes more on topic. "Were telephones common in rural 1920s Massachusetts?" can be re-phrased as "Should an investigator (Call of Cthulhu player character) need to roll or otherwise exert effort to find a telephone in Innsmouth?"
We've found there's no such thing as "not generic enough." Generalised questions get sadly vague answers which may not be useful to the specific situation, but specific answers are easier to generalise to someone else's problem and can demonstrate the process of addressing a particular situation.
@AJHenderson We have that reason on ELU. It's called "general reference". It is meant for what you can look up in a basic grammar book or dictionary without requiring further explanation.
@AJHenderson Frankly, I find answering the same question again more fun than hunting for duplicates.
@Jolenealaska How do you do it? (See, I enjoy asking in chat more!)
@Cerberus the idea with dupes is that SE tries to have the best available answers for a question. If a question is materially the same as another, then it isn't useful to split the answers so that only one of them has the best answer
finding the duplicate lets both questions benefit from the answers to either
@Jolenealaska that said, I'll still sometimes either answer or comment if it isn't quite a perfect fit to give whatever small bit of additional information may be needed to make it fit. I tend to do it in comments more than answers now though
@Cerberus clearly defined and what is actually followed don't always correspond :/
it's one of the few actions that actually requires two moderators to approve and is supposed to have a meta discussion before it and show clear community concensus
If most people seem to have chosen to interpret the closing-reason in a certain way that I think is wrong, I'm not sure I would want to force my will upon them.
and if they want to change it, then a meta discussion has to occur and a concensus reached. They can't simply decide that because you can find a result on Google, it is able to be found in a dictionary
because that isn't what the scope can reasonably be argued to mean
@AJHenderson You can always choose to interpret things in weird ways. For example, they say the first couple of Google results count as a "work of general reference".
@Cerberus yeah, but I'd argue that isn't a reasonable interpretation and that they need to define it more clearly. I'd probably also put a couple of very, very, non-general reference questions that get google results. Perhaps things that give results of one of their top answers
Eh, there are other methods that work. The lid isn't the be all and end all, but Dad ultimately got the eggs he wanted :) He was trying to duplicate what he had in a diner. His whites were solid, he liked that. Now he knows a trick.
@Cerberus SE stuff goes, if mods have a disagreement, then it is really go to the community for consensus and/or talk to the CM if that isn't clear
but as previously mentioned, the annoying part is that sometimes the community does disagree with you, and when that actually is the case, you still have to follow the general community concensus
learning to act in a detached manner is a valuable skill for a mod
