@MonicaCellio No problem, it's a good idea. I only say I'll move tomorrow because it's the wee hours here. Anything that helps us out is a good move in my book. — ArtOfCode11 mins ago
@ArtOfCode sorry, I forgot about what timezone you're native to. Get some sleep. :-) There was no intent to push you to do it now now NOW. I'm glad you like the idea!
I'm pretty sure that I can justify removing modern-in-medieval in at least a few questions. Am I editing with the explicit intent of just eliminating a crap tag?
@Green if there are other tagging changes that you think should be made, please make them. If you happen to notice other things (like typos in titles or something) please go ahead and fix, but you don't have to proofread every question just to make some tag improvements. Thanks.
Is it okay to clean up self-referential stuff where the OP says stuff like "I don't really know what I'm talking about...." Can/should I clean that up?
@Green ah, I wondered how we'd gotten so many of them. Oh well; these things happen, especially in beta. Tag taxonomies are hard, especially with many people editing them, especially when they "just grow" rather than being planned. (And no, you can't really plan them, not on SE.)
Personally, I'm a little leery of references to potentially copyrighted names like that. I don't have any alternate suggestions but copyright makes me nervous.
Maybe it's fairuse but I wouldn't want to chance it.
basically even if you use a name, but by using that name you might give the impression that you are in some way related to an original product, might fall under a copyright breach
it's a complex world... sometimes they know they'll loose, but hope you'll get drown by the length, stress and money required to actually prove you were right.
@ArtOfCode hi! Good (appropriate time of day). If you think meta posts are needed, go for it. What did you want to bring up there? Let me share what I was thinking in case it overlaps where you're going:
Once you move the blog, we use that and the upcoming birthday as a catalyst, asking people to prepare blog posts. The previous thread collected a bunch of ideas for material to cover, so remind people of that. You, as blog owner, appoint some editors to distribute the administration a bit, and tell people who want to be "invited" (I think an invitation is needed to contribute) to get in touch. Sound good?
It looks like Medium uses site-wide tags, so I recommend being conservative there. Maybe start by just tagging all our stuff "worldbuilding". If people post, say, short stories, those could be tagged "fiction";. game modules, "games". That sort of thing. Our tags fit into a broader mix and we don't get as many, so think broad.
@MonicaCellio Afternoon. I was thinking of going back over the name, and also another meta post inviting people to contribute and asking for volunteers to edit
@ArtOfCode ok, that makes sense. May I suggest one meta question where you ask for editors and contributors, with a community wiki answer for people to add themselves, and a separate one about the name?
You should probably clarify that "editor" here is more like "curator", not "people who are going to change your stuff".
I'm in the process of moving our old blog over to a new platform (Medium) as part of our birthday celebrations. In doing so, I'm reconsidering the name, which is currently The Magrathean Forges. That's an OK name, but it could certainly be better.
Has anyone got any other suggestions for names?
I'm in the process of moving our current blog over to a new platform (Medium), as part of our birthday celebrations.
Now let's face it. Our old blog didn't really get off the ground. Part of the reason for that was because of the entry barrier to the platform (Wordpress), requiring Yet Another L...
After a dicussion in WB chat, we decided to perform a tag cleanup/restructuring on the modern-in-medieval tag. (@MonicaCellio said it was okay) It was originally added in early April 2015 but has not been used since then. This tag was removed in an effort to clean up the tag space and remove pre...
I sure hope not. Anyone who reads the question will know that I'm not planning anything. Besides, asking a question like that on a public website isn't terribly smart.
I slightly bad about making a click-bait title, but only a little. :)
@Green I noticed that you calculated necessary yield from a nuclear bomb calculator. Would non-nuclear calculations give different necessary yields? For example, this 2.9kt explosion (conventional explosives) leveled 0.8 km, which is almost enough.
That wouldn't produce all the desired effects in this specific case, but the yield-area ratio is different.
Covering up an alien crash, taking over the world, building skyscrapers into the ground, rebelling against the government, shipping zombies to America, and claiming a space station as a counry.
I'm curious what the gravity would be like on an infinite area flat world. The plane of the world would have some finite depth but be infinite in all cardinal directions. This is, in effect, a Minecraftian world. This is expanding on the ideas presented in this question.
How deep would the world...
I seem to alternate between asking popular questions and average questions. My longest HNQ streak was six, including four religion questions during that topic challenge.
@Green I have no idea how to approach your question, at the moment. I think it would be tough to find papers on some of the specific characteristics you listed.
@HDE226868 it's really more of a community decision, but my feeling is "let a thousand flowers bloom": make the blog the center of activity here, and if people want to post stories or scene descriptions or deeper dives into some aspect of their worlds or (links to) whole worlds or question roundups (my favorite questions about X) or whatever, go for it.
So those of us that deal with science fiction have all seen space ships that can't be detected until you bump into them or physically see them. The project RHO website is commonly referenced when this topic is suggested.
Now before I explain, let me go over what has to be hidden for stealth in ...
@Samuel @HDE226868 I never rep-cap on this site (I think I did once); I'm impressed by folks who can keep turning out high-quality material. (Not just you, but you're here.)
@MonicaCellio I haven't hit the cap since December (not counting Monday; I exceeded 200 because of a bounty but didn't hit the cap), so it's been a while for me. I'm most impressed by @Green, because he hasn't been here long.
@HDE226868 It feels like that question is idea generation. The OP seems to be asking about alternative, not-so-sciency ways to get FTL travel but doesn't express that question very well.
@HDE226868 I voted for reopen because I think that changes made it of question of "is there space between space where a ship can hide or at least a theory that could support it?"
That's a clear yes or no
@MonicaCellio Thank you. The most difficult part is convincing my wife that it's ok to give ideas away for free.
@Samuel ideas are the tiniest beginning of the first step of the project. You probably already have more than you'll use in a lifetime. So what is it costing you to give them away? Somebody else will have to put in a ton of effort to turn them into stories/games/worlds, so it's not like somebody is taking your hard work and just filing the serial numbers off, y'know?
@Samuel yeah, brilliant new idea that'll lead to patents and a billion-dollar business is different from cool ideas for the game I run in my spare time. :-)
@MonicaCellio It lists out and describes step by step how to create a setting, city sizes, government types all the way up to cosmology...its pretty awesome.
@Samuel fair enough. But is Harry Potter successful because of the idea that you would have (hypothetically) summarized in a few sentences about a boy wizard in the muggle world who's secretly the descendant of... blah blah V-mort"? Or is it successful because of the writing and marketing?
@Samuel I think I have read all his fiction...I think. The Percy Jackson series (and the follow on series) are fantastic. I'm a huge nerd for Greek/Roman mythology so...yeah loved it.
Really easy reads to (its designed for young adults after all).
@Samuel the world, the writing, the YA target, probably something about timing... I'm speculating, not asserting, but I'm just saying there's more than just an idea.
And the marketing. For whatever reason, the publisher and bookstores plastered those books all over the place even before the movies started happening. That makes a difference.
@Samuel right, I'm not saying there's a magic formula. And it's not deterministic; you can be the greatest new author with the greatest novel and world ever and not make it, which is sad.
We have one unofficial blog on WordPress. Another unofficial blog on something called medium is in the works. When we first started thinking about a blog, Blog Overflow was down (the official Stack Exchange blog thingy.) Its back up and seems to be doing good now.
My question is, where does the ...
@Samuel Possibly, but that's incredibly unclear, and as phrased would actually be a separate question (as a proposal), not an answer to a question that doesn't want answers.
So once upon a time long long ago in a galaxy far far away in the kingdom of....ok I got carried away just now...
We discussed names for this chat room and chose to leave it as is
The main argument being we want people to know what the room is for...have we gotten to a point where we want to rename it? Or are we good with keeping things as they are?
@James if the community wants to rename it I think that'd be fine. Proposal: see what name we end up with for the blog first, and then try to find something that ties into that. That way site, blog, and chat are all somewhat hooked together.
On the contrary to most of you guys, I only volunteered to the behind the curtain job for the blog, because I am afraid I can't compare to the quality of your productions. I don't have a clear speciality, and I am not sure I would find the time to write a post a month. I may contribute very ocasionally, if needed.
@bilbo_pingouin I don't see any reason we can't help each other with content reviews and proof-reading so if you have something you want to write up but don't feel like its 'good enough' let us take a crack at it.
If we are going to do a share your world spot on the blog for the birthday celebration would it be useful to have a template with some of the base information, i.e. Name, era, magic, technology, races, social info and stuff like that? People could obviously add more if they were so inclined.
@ArtOfCode you need any help getting the blog set up?
@James if somebody wants to offer a suggestion along those lines, go for it. People should feel free to do whatever they feel is most effective for their work. For example, I'm not going to share "a world"; I'm going to share a scene from the story that's set in my world, that will (I hope) reveal some interesting details about said world.
(It seems like I'm making that all mysterious and stuff, but anybody who's seen my questions on the site already knows most of what I'll be exposing there.)
@James You wrote "I would also like the outer/smaller moon to orbit more quickly so that at times it is behind the larger moon and at other times is on the other side of the planet."
More distant orbits are slower, can it be slower? You'd get the same effect.
@James well, it's far from finished; I'm still in the "noodling around with it" phase. Will it go somewhere eventually? Who knows, but I enjoy exploring anyway. So I'll share some of that noodling, with no promises about whether you'll ever be able to read the whole thing. :-)
Next time this happens to me - maxing out midday - I'm absolutely going to set a bounty on some question, then recoup the losses later on. I wish I could retroactively do that, though.
The awarded bounty doesn't subtract from the limit.
@HDE226868 But I think downvotes subtract from it, from or against you, so you can downvote or be downvoted and get points back today. Sounds like the right time to ask a religion question.
@Samuel I did take the opportunity to downvote an answer - actually, the top answer to my Joe-taking-over-the-world question. It seemed ihghly unlikely and used several offensive (IMHO) stereotypes.
@HDE226868 Yep, why not? Some tags have surprisingly been created only recently , such as gods ans mythology despite the many questions about religion.