@JDługosz he wasn't regularly walked in his first home. Also won't ever poop on pavement even if another dog did.

Also prefers medium height grass....

@elciott has some ideas on ET containment. Chat would be a good place to give them some air.

Morning peoples

@James Good afternoon

Anyone know how you would calculate the temperature at which whale oil burns?

with an oven

@Secespitus Hows it goin today?

@DaaaahWhoosh Just want to know if it would burn hot enough to allow for forging.

so it'd need to get up to 1500 - 1600 F

you want to make a whale oil knife?

@James Okay, I guess. And you?

@Secespitus looking for a new job, my contract is up at the end of the month.

@James Oil won't burn hot enough for forging.

@DaaaahWhoosh Theres a question about arctic metal working

@sphennings Dang...

@James You'd also need to render the whale fat first which would require a fuel source.

@James Sounds stressful

hey @James

@Secespitus Yeah it kinda blows...speaking of whales.

@Green Hola

@James How goes?

Eh. The joys of job hunting.

Which reminds me we need to get the podcast scheduled...

@Green Hows about you?

@James Also looking for a new job but with no urgency behind it. If I find one, cool. If not, I'm okay where I am now.

Can someone clarify too story based for me. Sometimes it is used to close question set in the real world (worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/83875/17720) and other times it is not (worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/84072/17720) so when should we close stuff for being set in the real world?

@Bellerophon Never. Its not a valid close reason.

at least from my perspective.

@James Something being story based or set in the real world?

@Bellerophon I would say if it's about the real world, and without any room for worldbuilding, then it's off-topic, not too-story-based

like 'Is Trump a Lizard Person' belongs on Skeptics, whereas 'What if Trump was a Lizard Person' is fine for here, though possibly too broad or opinion based

@Bellerophon How I've always understood it is if something is asking us to solve a narrative problem it's too story based. If someone is asking for a fact check we seem to be relatively OK with allowing fact checks of mundane settings.

@sphennings Part of the complexity is that strictly speaking a story is a sequence of events. Whether it's a sequence of events in "real life" or "imaginary life", it's still just a sequence. This acknowledgment then requires us to differentiate between in-scope and out-scope sequences.

Asking WB to come up with the plot for a story is off-topic (and likely story-based).

@Green I'm not sure I follow. I was asking which James thought was not a valid close reason, being set in the real world, or being story based. to me these are completely unrelated things.

@sphennings my apologies.

I agree with James. Neither being set in real life or set since we've else is a valid close reason.

... Some where else is a valid close reason

a question about the real world, with no fiction at all, seems plausibly off-topic to me

I can't tell if you're going to try again or not

@DaaaahWhoosh We can't tell whether something is real world or not based on the question often times the fantastic details of a worldbuilding scenario can be removed to make a question more general and answerable.

what I mean is, for instance, "Is it going to rain tomorrow" is off-topic

Yes because that's not about building a world.

right. So not story-based, but definitely not about worldbuilding

but I think generally, asking about the future of the real world is off-topic, assuming you have not introduced a hypothetical scenario.

similarly, asking about the past is probably better for History.SE, though I can see it working here

But I believe that "How long could a healthy adult with survival training but no supplies survive in the Sahara desert without dying?" is a better way to ask "How long can my spaceman survive after crash landing in my spacedesert?".

sure, I agree with you, and agree that such a question would be on-topic

like I said, you've introduced a hypothetical scenario

say there was a real person stuck in a desert somewhere, and you asked if he would survive. That would be off-topic

So why is my ravine question off topic? It seems like @sphennings desert example.

dunno, link it and maybe I can help get it reopened

@Bellerophon You asked us to solve a problem.

Right, I think I get it.

@Bellerophon A narrative problem to be more specific.

yeah, it's too specific. If you made it more general, maybe you could ask it on Outdoors

in a world (in a worrrrrrld) where you have to cross enough ravines for this to be worldbuilding, the travellers should have everything they need to cross optimally

I kind of do want to ask a question along the lines of "why would you bring your bridges with you" now

@DaaaahWhoosh Because it's faster to place a bridge than it is to build one. Look at the bridge laying vehicles from WWII onward.

@sphennings Real world. We ask about it all the time.

@DaaaahWhoosh I wonder if you'd just have something like a rope bridge, though those would need some major anchoring, which would probably be hard to do remotely. You'd almost have to have one person cross the hard way, and then the rest could cross on the bridge once it's been laid

@AndyD273 I'm really getting a sense of deja vu here

and this time it's not just because I'm remembering this conversation

@DaaaahWhoosh Hmm, not sure...

'this' being us conversing now, not the link

I tend to get deja vu when I think about things I'd been thinking about that day

but in this case, I was actually remembering a time in the past when I read a question about building a bridge

Gotcha. That question makes me want to finish my ballista...

yeah, they're so practical

This is a really solid first answer. Show some love

I don't know, it assumes that the Church has power, rather than the beliefs they represent

The question is too broad though.

I think it's potentially a fine question

@DaaaahWhoosh Considering the scenario I think its entirely plausible that the church has actual and serious power though.

I mean, they have a certain level of it. But it sounds like you actually have to believe in what you're selling for it to work

I don't think it'd be possible for the church to abuse their power, because if they did then they'd lose that power

like, if you paint a cross because you feel bad about Jesus, then it'll ward off demons. But if you paint a cross because you're getting paid to, it sounds to me like it wouldn't work

I guess unless there's a level of true believers being manipulated by the corrupt ones

@DaaaahWhoosh It's an interesting scenario. I'm sure plenty of good questions could be constructed based on it. The question that was asked "How powerful would catholicism have become in the world? What influence would it wield in people's lives in places that haven't been overrun by demons?" is far too broad.

oh yeah, I guess it is asking at least two questions there

Both questions are arguably too broad since they are asking about political ramifications.

that's not necessarily too broad

There are exceptions, but I'd say it's a good rule of thumb. In this case both sub questions are too broad.

I think in a scenario where it becomes the only political power the question is much easier to answer since inter-nation politics are so complex.

@James I haven't seen a question asking about political ramifications I've felt was a good fit for this site yet. Politics by their very nature are complex and highly dependant on their initial conditions. In this case you could just as easily argue "everybody flocks to the church for protection" as "nobody trusts the church because they wield far too much power".

@sphennings then I would say the OP should provide initial conditions, then it's not too broad

I'd argue the conditions are pretty well set in the question already.

All the other regions with other religions have fallen to corruption

@James That could mean that nobody trusts the church or that everybody trusts the church.

I just commented, it's unconfirmed that humans in this world are naturally prone to sin

like, if you're protected from demons, does that mean you wouldn't want to become corrupt?

I want to reference Wonder Womaaaaan here, but spoilers

@DaaaahWhoosh Is it a major plot twist? Does the movie hinge on the reveal? If not you aren't spoiling it.

I guess it's close to the beginning

basically, in Wonder Womaaaaaan, it's believed that Ares is the only reason people go to war. If he wasn't around, no one would want to go to war

@DaaaahWhoosh Fun movie.

other characters think this is stupid, it's just human nature that humans go to war

@DaaaahWhoosh Now you need to stop

or risk being a spoilinator

Speaking of movies I finally watched Power Rangers.

I was pleasantly surprised.

it did seem to get astonishingly good reviews

They had just enough cheese to pay homage to the original series which was nothing but cheese

and they managed to create believable, interesting (though still teenage) characters

Ill just say that one of them basically sent nude photos of a friend around school and got in trouble for it...another for a sports based prank etc

and then they fight aliens and learn valuable life lessons?

Did they try to explain how their powers worked or did they just say that they were now supercool multicolored space ninjas?

I love duping to my questions I answered, always gets me about 30 rep. Maybe I should just suggest every question asked is a dupe of a question I have answered.

@DaaaahWhoosh It's ok, I got to go see it, so it's all fair game now

As someone who has raised kids, I can say that they are naturally selfish, and it takes a lot of work to get them to think of others needs. Selfishness is nature, kindness is nurture.

yeah, it's like I said yesterday, evil is being stupid. Once you learn about being good, it usually turns out to be the better option

if you're selfish, you get short-term benefits. If you're selfless, and do it right, you should derive benefits from your actions for the rest of your life, and possibly even longer

so, kids are stupid. Once they realize that relationships aren't a zero-sum-game, they start investing in 'kind' actions. Eventually, the algorithm becomes so complex that their selfishness will appear the exact opposite.

Good morning

Could be, though I've seen enough of them that never did figure that out

@Hyfnae Good afternoon!

@AndyD273 I don't make many friends; as I understand it, the process produces more failures than successes, so I figure it's not worth putting extra effort into. I think kindness is the same, people see it as a waste of time and a good way to lose more than you gain, so they either don't try it or don't get good at it.

@DaaaahWhoosh That might be the most nihilistic thing I've seen this week.

oh. I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to be.

Don't apologize, I can appreciate the mindset even though I don't agree entirely.

It's good to have 1 or 2 solid friends in my opinion. The rest I agree fully on.

oh, I definitely agree friends are great. I just can't be bothered to go find them.

You only find true friends when you're not actively looking for them anyways.

It just happens.

Same with love.

I just try to be friendly to everyone, and occasionally it develops into a real friendship. But it doesn't come naturally to me. I had to work pretty hard to get that way.

The best friends are those who stick when you're in your natural state.

No pretense.

yeah, I guess I've been missing those kinds of people for a while. I just can't be bothered to find more of 'em.

it's like Andy just said, I'd have to work pretty hard to get that way. And I don't think I'm hurting anyone the way I am, so meh

Well, I think we'd be friends if distance weren't a factor.

(awwwww) eh, possibly. I'm much better in text form, though.

I just threw up a little bit.

Stop the lovefest it makes me twitchy.

@James but you're just in time for the group e-hug!

@DaaaahWhoosh I have viruses you probably don't want to e-hug me.

ewww... okay then, e-hug cancelled

@James (updates virus definitions) Come here man!

@AndyD273 crap, my one weakness...

So, who wants to record a podcast?

Am I the only one that someone secretly really likes singing in my entertainment...like movies and tv shows?

@James I like it, when appropriate.

@James like, you're the one singing, or the entertainment is?

@AndyD273 Yeah that delay is on me. I have spent the last few weeks looking for jobs...contract is ending at the end of the month so I got distracted.

@DaaaahWhoosh ...depends on whether I am watching alone.

@James lol. I like musicals, if they're good musicals. I thought La La Land was terrible because there weren't enough songs, and definitely not enough dancing.

I was listening to songs on youtube while I was working and one of the recommendations was for a glee song...and now I am like 15 songs deep in glee videos.

@EnderLook Two line-breaks for a paragraph or two spaces and a line-break for a soft line-break like you get with <br/>

Honestly, when it comes to music, I can generally take it or leave it. It's like romance. I'm ok with it in a show/movie if it adds to the story or fits thematically. But the dance number in the first episode of Legion was really nice

@Secespitus Sorry I don't know much of english. line-breaks is when you press the Intro button?.

@EnderLook I think you mean the Enter button

And yes, that's what I mean.

vimeo.com/203409964

@Secespitus Oh yeah! In my keyboard it say intro but I forget to translate in english!

if we're on the topic of music (and some of us are) I want to randomly recommend the album "It's Album Time" by Todd Terje. I listened to it recently and it very nearly changed my life

@DaaaahWhoosh Came so close! If only they had tried a little harder...

yeah, I think if I'd have heard it a year ago, my entire understanding of music would have been shattered. But luckily I've been investigating different genres recently, so I was more prepared.

@EnderLook no, and the same message explains how, and suggests using that only rarely.

All right. Well, I'm going to go home now.

@AndyD273 good speed and God luck to you

@EnderLook or are you asking about normal paragraph breaks? That's also in the same message and on the screen when you’re typing a post. Tip: if yiu ever want to see how somebody did something re formatting, edit that post and read the source text (then cancel without actually editing anything).

@DaaaahWhoosh so, the trailer is misleading?

@JDługosz it sure misled me. I was so disappointed, especially by the random ending

but I guess I'm not the target audience.

@EnderLook ha! I avoid all translation and layout issues on my PC’ keyboard.

@JDługosz Sorry, what?! What happened to your PC?

@JDługosz XD, I see!

dlugosz.com/zeta/?p=66

Great!

Just use a typewriter connected to a fax which automatically faces everything you write to a scanner which reads the writing, converts it to text and posts it.

It is much simpler.

@DaaaahWhoosh my wife's interested La La Land but we've not rented it yet.

@Bellerophon I've actually seen that, porting records from an old system. They printed everything and then scanned the printouts.

@JDługosz it might appeal more to people with more womanly qualities than I. And it won Best Picture, so it can't be all bad.

oh, wait, never mind, that was Moonlight that won. My mistake.

Are you talking about La La Land? I have seen this movie, it's... interesting.

@EnderLook is this what you use? en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Spanish

@EnderLook yes, that's what I was talking about. I was not a fan, and I tend to enjoy musicals.

@JDługosz I don't know about printing but it is still quicker to do big file transfers (whole servers and the like) by driving hard drives across the country than by sending it over the Internet.

@JDługosz No, this seems like the keyboards of my school's computers but my keyboard is different, I'll try to find a photo.

Seems feasible that printing and scanning could be quicker in some scenarios.

@EnderLook if it's QWERTY it should be on that page.

I am looking

Sorry, I didn't found my keyboard there. I'll take a photo.

@Bellerophon this was before internet or hard drives. The old system was storing records as individual sectors on floppy disks — I think they were 8-inch! A template sector described the form. I was under the impression that it didn’t have a CPU as such, but was hundreds of 1970’s era IC logic DIPs.

@EnderLook what kind of computer is it?

This is my keyboard

Sorry for the bad quality.

@DaaaahWhoosh If you want some metal, try 'Crack The Skye' by Mastodon. If you want classical music, then the number of suggestions is too much for the length of an allowed message

hey there @Mithrandir24601

@Shalvenay Rytsas - how's life?

OK, as for you?

also, @DaaaahWhoosh I know one other person who's watched La La Land and they also hated it...

@Shalvenay Well... Aside from the fact that I smell of smoke and that my building would have went on fire if the fire brigade didn't arrive when they did, pretty good, thanks

@Mithrandir24601 oh dear. what happened?

(bet you weren't expecting that!)

@Shalvenay Someone a couple of floors below me put a towel on a hob that was still on, then left...

bad plan, yeah...

I will now never, ever, ever complain of a smoke detector going off when I'm cooking. Ever

speaking of fires -- I read some stuff on the Grenfell Tower mess :/ one of the things being that the fire started inside, then managed to extend out to the outside through the unit's windows...only then it became a threat buildingwide -- heck, the fire brigade arrived promptly enough that had the fire not gotten into the cladding, it'd have been a nothingburger incident on par with what you just experienced

Yeah, it's such a close thing. If I had ignored the alarm (I was the only person in the building at the time), there would have been a fire. If I'd stayed on in the office a bit longer, there would have been a fire. If they were a few minutes later, there very well could have been a fire. Luckily, crisis averted by the extremely well co-ordinated, drilled and methodical fire department :)

yeah -- I'm actually not sure if having two stair towers, by itself would have saved the occupants of the upper floors there though -- now, if the stairs were pressurized that would have helped tremendously I reckon

Thought worldbuilders would be interested in a Gaiman chatroom on Mythology: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/60802/sandmans-corner

@Shalvenay Fire extinguishers and sprinklers apparently make a big difference if you're just got a single stairwell. I now understand completely - you can't go through smoke. It's like a wall that prevents you from going forward. You can't see properly, your eyes sting, you can't breathe

@Mithrandir24601 yeah, the other thing that helps is pressurizing the stair tower so that smoke can't get into it

@Shalvenay Yeah... That would definitely help

I'm thinking to myself "how would multiple stair towers save you in a building that's being besieged by heat and smoke on all four sides?"

and I can't believe that someone actually said that sprinklers wouldn't have helped that much in that fire -- a single head would have probably put out the original fridge fire before it ever got a chance to spread to the cladding

That's exactly what I was wondering, but I'm actually extremely impressed with how well doors keep smoke in/out

@Mithrandir24601 that's what a decent fire door is meant to do :)

it's interesting comparing to the one multi-unit building I've lived in recently (the dorms I was at when I was living on campus)

Yeah, but it wasn't even a fire door (to my knowledge)

only four stories tall, but 2 full stairwells, full sprinkler protection, fire-resistive construction throughout to the point where even the closet doors were solid wood doors in fire rated frames.

@Mithrandir24601 most solid wood doors will hold a fire back for a little bit at least

@Shalvenay what was it like?

@Mithrandir24601 we jokingly called it "Nerd Castle" because of how well-built it was and the generally geeky/nerdy inhabitants (me included)

we had a few smoke detector activations I recall, and one waterflow trip when a thrown shoe clobbered a sidefire sprinkler head in a 4th floor hallway

@Shalvenay That sounds good :) I'm in a 6-storey (although there are no rooms in the bottom floor), plenty of sprinklers and fire extinguishers, everything seems pretty solid (aside from the smell of smoke :P )

yeah. I think that my dorms would have given an arsonist fits. the building would probably survive being covered in Wildfire even :P probably would be pretty scorched/beat-up and in need of a rehab, but it wouldn't burn to the ground either

(we had a different, smaller (3 stories) building in the complex get fire-totaled despite being sprinklered -- fire started outside, went up the cladding, and got into the attic, basically. everyone walked away though.

@Shalvenay oh yeah, I've had the smoke detector activations a few times in student accommodation... They are actually too sensitive. It went off, and I was initially like 'oh, someone's just burnt their food, no big deal' as ingrained from all the false alarms in student accomodation, but it was still going a few minutes later and I just had to check for some reason

@Shalvenay At least everyone got out :)

@Mithrandir24601 yeah -- I was actually thinking it was the real deal when I heard the alarms go off and went down to the panel in the lobby, expecting "oh, just a smoke" then seeing that it was waterflow

Anyway, I've got to try to go to bed and get some sleep - night!

@Mithrandir24601 thanks for the recommendation, it's... interesting. It feels like something I should like, but with too many bad decisions made along the way. Mostly just makes me want to listen to Muse.