The Factory Floor

oh, I am also on

Monica has given me reason to research Judaism, it's a very strange religion

1:18 AM

@NewCoder Hi there.

7:06 AM

@SerbanTanasa => "Bonne chance" and we tend not to say it, as it suposedly take the charm away...

1:15 PM

@bilbo_pingouin Do you instead say "cassez-vous le jambe"?

"la jambe"

but we typically just say "merde"

the other one is more specific to theatre, or stage work...

and for an exam or something like that you could say "bon courage". Which would be hard to translate... like "be brave" but less dramatic

@bilbo_pingouin I really want to make a 'the French are cowards' joke here

but I also don't want to

merde

French are cowards because they don't want to rely on luck ;-)

AFAIC, go ahead... if it makes you feel better :-D

no, it doesn't... just reminds me I'm American

it used to be... I think it was repeated often enough to be a global meme...

1:27 PM

I guess it probably came from England, it is strange that we make fun of the country who helped our country gain its independence

I think it started in the WWII, when French surrendered to the Germans

and more recently was amplified when the French refused to join the coalition against Irak in 2003...

man, I'd definitely surrender in WWII

the more I know about the first world war, the more confused I get about how it happened again so soon

Apparently it partly started earlier... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

WWI was a disaster. But its outcome was prime material to create the conditions of a second one.

give it the largest global economic crisis ever recorded...

yeah, and I guess there was enough time for a new generation of soldiers to spring up

1:43 PM

answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071226070204AAnkbot the best answer is actually factual and interesting

actually, in some countries, like France and Britain, the main feeling was one of not wanting to start it up again.

but they failed to see how they were responsible for the increase of nationalism in some countries

2:00 PM

One of the reasons for WW2 was a lot of countries (i.e. the UK) not wanting to go to war again and as a result accepting promises of peace that really should not have been believed.

4:31 PM

OK, I felt the need to answer my own Big foot question. I think it's a decent answer and might spark even better ones!

@bowlturner I have a question from when the site was shiny new in beta that I have been meaning to answer....

@James so it's a pattern with you then eh? ;)

@bowlturner Yep...if I don't do something right away it tends to linger...

I hear you. You should see my work shop.

I'm still trying to come up with a second mythical creatures question. Not many are doing very well so far

@bowlturner Yeah, I thought my lemmings would get more love...

4:42 PM

So did I. Though I think the impending election is diverting peoples attention.

Big foot got 78 views before I answered myself. half of those I think were the close and then reopen votes.

lol

Serban Tanasa

people are into the heat death of the universe these days it seems

That's so yesterday!

@James I'm hoping to finish my tongs tonight

5:00 PM

@bowlturner I went in last night for a while, I found an old file in a scrap bucket that's probably 18 inches long, I am going to see if I can turn it into a short sword...

@James cool! good luck

@bowlturner I cut the little narrow handle part of the file off and got the tang more or less pounded out, I am planning to only hammer on the cutting edge half of the blade so the pattern from the file will still be there...

ooh, that could be cool. make sure you have well placed hammer strokes...

thats the trick isnt it...heh

yes, one bad swing and you have something 'new' to try

5:05 PM

I figure I can put this in the "learning experience" bucket.

Aren't they all? :)

I knew before I took the very first course that it was ambitious to want to make a sword, I had absolutely no idea just how ambitious until I got started...

:) Same here. I'm still planning on it one day. But I have other blacksmithing projects in line before that. some of them are to help me organize my wood shop.

5:40 PM

I keep on thinking I'm jealous of you guys and your smithing, but then I remember I have about a half dozen of my own hobbies that I hardly ever get around to

I think leatherworking would be interesting, I've recently been doing a lot of sewing with vinyl.

anyone here know anything about working with leather?

6:23 PM

Hiya everybody!

@Green ! hello

Hey @DaaaahWhoosh

Everyone get lots of rep while I was gone?

you've still got more than me :)

nowadays everyone's more concerned about the elections

@Green Yes.

@Samuel I anticipated nothing else :)

30K. Well done sir!

6:30 PM

Huh, I guess that happened while I was gone. I didn't really notice.

Residuals.

But yes, thank you.

I have a group of coworkers that I have lunch with every day. Worldbuilding questions often figure prominently in the discussion. It's good times.

Ah, I don't talk to anyone at work except for work.

Or take lunches...

That'd be cool though, to know other people into it.

@Samuel We have the opposite policy. At lunch, we don't talk about work at all. :)

@Green That probably best. I work on implantable medical devices, most other people here are 20 years older than me.

Actually I'm not even sure any of them eat lunch together.

I hadn't really considered how isolating this place is...

I used to eat lunch by myself but find eating with other people to be really nice. On a short-term social level, it's just nice to eat with other people. Longer-term, the level of team cohesion has gone way way up because I work with coworker friends instead of just coworkers.

6:42 PM

Yeah, I can see the advantages. Still, I'm highly introverted, so there is more pleasure in my current situation than needing to socialize daily.

eating lunch is for the weak

I'm on Soylent, does that count?

not sure, I only eat whiskey

Ah, I am right there with you.

I eat it neat.

I just discovered Johnny Walker Double Black on my trip. I hadn't seen that in The States before.

Johnnie Walker*

Still not available in my state...

@DaaaahWhoosh Not really no, I may have to figure something out to make sheathes though.

@Green Welcome back

@Samuel I like templeton personally

6:53 PM

@James Thanks! Work has calmed down and my WB burn-out has receeded considerably.

@Green Good, now go mod up. :p

@James You really think I should be a mod?

@Green Couldnt be worse than me as a mod ;)

Or me.

You can agree that there are people who would be a better mod, all you need to figure out is if there are more than three of them :)

I admit that as I was looking through the list of candidates, I saw a lot of people that I would trust with mod powers.

7:01 PM

@Green Its a solid candidate pool for sure

I have no delusions of winning but I would be happy to help mod this place so I threw my name into the hat.

@James As the first born of my family, I often go "YEAH! Responsibility! Give me more!" but as I age, I learn the benefits of letting someone else do that. :)

Apathy has its benefits

Said all youth everywhere.

Damn kids these days.

@Samuel I think I am older than you.

34

lol

Yeah, I'm 33 next month.

7:12 PM

35.5

So, we can all agree on damn kids these days.

Good.

@Samuel Oh my god yes.

Cause what-the-hell?

One of my cousins who is...i dunno 17 or so years younger was wearing tight jeans and had long hair, and I said "Seriously dude, from behind you look like a woman"

@James What did he say back to you?

7:15 PM

Well, we do usually not specify a child's gender. They seem to be taking that to heart.

I'm in Portland Oregon though, so I see that kind of thing all the time. Hipsters. Entitled hipsters are the plague here.

@Green Honestly I stopped listening and started making obnoxious comments and whistles ala construction workers bothering women in New York.

I occasionally have the urge to start hipsters on fire...

I think if you convinced them that no one else is doing it they'd be all in.

@Samuel I just snorted a bit of iced tea...

Hipsters, being different together!

@bowlturner Exactly. "Counter-culture" is the primary culture.

7:20 PM

Thankfully we don't deal with it much around here. I don't think I know any hipsters.

@Samuel They are living breathing paradoxes...

One of my coworkers has the beard, but he doesn't wear it ironically.

@bowlturner I read that as "thongs" at first and had to re-read

@DaaaahWhoosh A little, mostly through observation of others and seeing/using the results though (I'm a LRPer so see a lot of leather armour etc)

@DaaaahWhoosh mostly what I know is you need an awl.

@TimB ya, I almost made a clarifying statement to prevent that kind of misreading, but then thought, No, more fun this way. :)

A: What are the necessary conditions for a worldwide government?

Found a question of Monica's that she never accepted an answer on...so I wrote one up

0

If I want my world to have a global government that has real authority, should I be thinking of it in terms of having taken a very different path from Earth (e.g. a world conqueror), or is there some sequence of events that could bring diverse sovereign states together into a single wo...

7:44 PM

It certainly feels like the elections have put a damper on the question/answer part of the site. I'm starting to look back for old posts to edit...

8:07 PM

we're averaging 20 questions per day atm

@James that's a really good answer. Thank you. I hadn't accepted an answer because, while I got a lot of good input, there wasn't really anything to distinguish among several answers. Your analysis is deeper and more convincing to me.

somebody upvoted my answer on that question recently...

is it me, or is that question really not about worldbuilding? worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/35243/…

Hohmannfan

8:25 PM

It is of the type: "I provide this scenario, generate ideas."

apart from idea generation... it's a plot, not a world...

Oh, 3 hours old -- that's how I missed it.

Ya, I was having too much fun thinking of a way, that I wasn't paying attention to the Idea Generation of it.

I mean it can be interesting question. And it pains me to frustrate the effort the OP put in writing their question. But it does not fit our scope...

Hohmannfan

@bowlturner Oh no! You did actually try to come up with a good answer to a question? That is only the beginning of it, you know. Eventually you are going to spend a lot of time on an online Q&A site...

8:35 PM

It'd be nice to see a comment from the community about the idea-generation problem. hint hint

(I haven't read the answers, but gas appliances + sparks from electric switches can be an explosive combination.)

I think it is plainly off-topic, so I won't comment on it being idea generation... because it isn't the same problem.

maybe it should be on topic, it seems popular :)

but there were two VTC for IG before me :)

remember policy isn't fixed in stone, if there is a good reason to change the policy we can.

A comment about its off-topic-ness would be fine too. I just want to see the guy get some feedback.

8:39 PM

@TimB I see you start acting like a true politician ;-)

(Although I'm mostly saying that for discussion rather than arguing with your conclusion)

We need to (somehow) have a conversation about scope and where the boundaries between "world" and "plot element" are.

yep

@MonicaCellio well in the way that is the content of the most voted question for the elections

Migrate to lifehacks. :-) (No, not serious.)

@bilbo_pingouin yes, true. It's something I've been thinking about for longer than that, but if I had a concrete proposal you'd've already seen it on meta.

8:42 PM

Hi Monica! Good to see you again.

@Green hey, welcome back! Good to see you too.

@MonicaCellio It was a good question, I appear to have missed it along the way...I tend to notice a lot of those we get bombarded some days.

@James I have definitely missed questions when they were asked and only come across them later. I assume there are questions I've never seen. I do check the site multiple times a day most days, but (a) some days I can't and (b) some days even if I do the front page turns over quickly.

9:02 PM

@MonicaCellio For sure

9:15 PM

@MonicaCellio That's on there several time, as is "use a roomba to trim him down the stairs" that I first thought of.

@MonicaCellio I enjoyed my "botulinum toxin" answer to that question. It's so easy and requires suppressing only a single safety alarm instead of many (or removing stubborn safety interlocks).

@Green haven't read the answers yet, but a food-safety attack makes a great deal of sense.

I just wish that question wasn't idea-generation.

you answered it twice...

The mother in law really was another idea generation question that no one seems to care as much about.

9:29 PM

@Green That would be my pick too. You could get away with food poisoning quite a few times before anyone decided to look at the fridge. I mean, fridges just keep things cold. it's what they do. Who ever heard of a warm fridge?

@bowlturner do you want your question to be closed?

No, and it wasn't my question either

just pointing out that idea generation questions ARE excepted.

@bowlturner Saw you got the bigfoot question reopened. :)

@AndyD273 The great thing is that it's subtle. The AI could bring the temperature up for short periods at night then bring it back down again in the morning. Unless the human got a late night snack, they wouldn't ever know except "Hey, I got a bad batch of veggies that went bad before I expected".

yes I did. actually within a couple hours of it getting closed.

9:31 PM

Generally, I always avoid to vote for IG. Because it is always unclear. Typical IG questions are either too broad or too opinion-based. I then choose the appropriate one.

Closed questions make it harder to get the Socratic Badge!

@Green Hey! It's been a while.

@HDE226868 Hey HDE! Good to see you!

How's classes/running going?

@Green I just finished midterms on Monday, so that's going well. Cross country ended mid-November, and I ended up as one of the top two on my team, so that was cool. Track starts in early March.

@Green Also, the average person isn't going to notice the difference between 38 degrees and 45 degrees, even if they do check it while the fridge is warmer

9:35 PM

@bilbo_pingouin IG has a bunch more info than the stock close reasons though

@AndyD273 Good point....even sneakier!

@HDE226868 That's great news!

@TimB I remember a discussion about it on meta...

@bowlturner Huh, I thought it was still closed yesterday...

@AndyD273 it shouldn't have been, unless it was closed and opened AGAIN.

It probably wasn't. My week has been weird.

9:38 PM

@bowlturner I think the Mother in Law had a round of VTC also... but probably did not go til the end.

@Green also, if the AI makes geo-coordinated attacks, it can probably get investigators to target the common grocery store.

@bilbo_pingouin @TimB we get up to three custom off-topic reasons; anybody who has ideas for refining what we've got now, or adding to it, should propose it on meta.

@AndyD273 not a problem

@TimB and @MonicaCellio there was a discussion about it: meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/2336/… but maybe time has come for another round. Though it should probably wait for after the elections...

WOuld make sense to wait 'til after the elections

since the new mods will need to enforce it

agreed

in the same way, Monica's proposal to have a specific "plot" reason for VTC might be worth the discussion

A note on the killer AI, the OP will reword their question... as per comment below said question

9:52 PM

@bilbo_pingouin I'm very happy to see him offer to make those changes. I'll gladly vote to reopen when those changes come in.

I'll pass on voting to see how the community judges it

@bowlturner wouldn't that be of interest for WW: diy.stackexchange.com/questions/83718/… ? I'm not a member of DIY, merely saw it on the HNQ.

@bilbo_pingouin It is one we could handle, but it fits just as well in DIY IMO

I was just curious. Yes I think it fits on DIY. But again, not really a member there. That would not be the first case of a question having different possible locations.

They actually do send us some now and then.

I see... I guess if it gets too technical... or that they can't seem to find an answer for it in a given time...

10:06 PM

@TimB Definitely leave it for the new mods to deal with. . . :-) Unless you're elected, of course.

@HDE226868 your*

@Samuel What?

@HDE226868 Your comment on your question.

@Samuel Oh, yeah.

Fixed. Thanks.

@HDE226868 I'm sure you would have noticed after five minutes and hated having it there.

10:15 PM

Also, that's one of the least disturbing pictures I could find.

@HDE226868 You might want to place the world for your question. Is this something Saruman is waiting for in the LOTR world, or is it Dr. Saruman White of Earth?

@bilbo_pingouin oh, I said what people have been saying in here. I'd completely forgotten about that.

@TimB yes, after the elections.

@Samuel Thanks, clarified. Dr. Saruman got his PhD from the University of Isengard.

@HDE226868 pretty sure he copied some less known one to make his PhD... (sorry, for those not familiar with German politic, it is a typical sports for politicians to make thesis without full documentation).

@MonicaCellio and since that discussion, I've never VTC for IG... but I did not remember who made that comment :)

ArtOfCode

11:41 PM

@HDE226868 I seem to recall you were concerned about WB becoming more what-iffy lately; well, so am I. meta.worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/3033/…