hey there @Mithrandir24601

Hey, random talk:

For immortal or really long-lived people, like vampires, elves, etc...

What should their version of the "Half your age plus seven" rule be?

Because it kind of completely breaks down when you get to centuries old

I noticed the discussion from earlier today about Shog and Robert. ^^^ I just wanted to mention that we the mods have basically no more information than any of y'all do - I wish we did, but we don't. You can certainly add me to the list of people who are puzzled and upset and confused and seeking a good deal of clarification. cc @Hosch250 @Gryphon @AndyD273

@JasonClyde Depends on your perspective as an author, I would think. Sure, a two-hundred year age gap seems like a lot, but when one party is 800 and the other is 1000, it's not that bad.

Also, I'd imagine the dating pool for immortals vampires is relatively small.

@Halfthawed Well, depends on the lore how rare they are. But yeah, it is a fascinating question. Everyone knows the stereotypical "Teenager dates vampire old enough to be their great-grandfather" situation is creepy, but when would that stop being creepy?

Well, according to the rule, at around, give or take 90 years when the teenager is old enough to be a great-grandmother. But I suspect what you're really chaffing at here is the fact that they were first introduced to each other at that point.

In other words, with immortals, it's probably not the age gap that's the concern, but what the first relationship was like. No matter how old you are, it'd still be pretty awkward to marry someone you had a hand in raising from childhood.

Of course with elves, they might have a total society shift to the contrary, given that they can form an insular society, whereas vampires leech off the human one. So it might not be a problem.

@HDE226868 Yeah, I noticed a lot of mods didn't even realize it happened unless they were active on Meta.

This conversation starter is crossposted from another site but does anyone else have characters based on people from real life that they dislike? It's fun to vent your frustrations by making a character who is just different enough that you can get away with writing bad things happening to them.

I have a pair of minor characters in my story that are a pair of baby boomers inspired by my paternal grandparents. My dad turned out pretty well due to some miracle, but my grandparents have been known to abuse animals, thump the bible to ridiculous ends, be homophobic, and be mildly racist.

For the context of the story the couple is exaggeratedly racist to fit the setting more (and make it less obvious that they're specifically based on grandma and grandpa) but they're still self-indulgent punching bags lol. They're gonna deal with being bitten in the ass by their bigotry a lot.

@Hosch250 I found out from Shog going on Twitter and saying he was in need of a new job. :-/

@HDE226868 I found from another chatroom, and linked it to a few more.

@JasonClyde Could be when you've reached full maturity? Take the Mandelorian series, where you have Baby Yoda, who's 58 years old, and still basically an infant, coming from a species that lives to be over 900. If their rate of maturity is that slow, then the age of consent might be 300 or more.

Meanwhile in Peter F Hamilton's "The Dreaming Void" you have a guy that is about 58, and just went through his first rejuvenation, basically turning the clock back to 20, and he's married to a woman that's 150-200 and who's gone through rejuvenation multiple times. Now, he's fully mature, has lived a life, and at that point does their ages actually matter?

@SamiNo It depends on if they are well written, or just paper targets? There's a lot of poor character writing where a character is a 2D stand in for the reader for the purposes of wish fulfillment. In your case it sounds like you could end up with a reverse case of that, with a 2D "bad guy" that is just a stand in for someone you don't like, which is fine, but also boring.

True. I'm probably gonna play around with the concept before I properly write parts of the story that include these two

I'd even give them some good qualities. There are very few people that are actually completely evil. Even Hitler loved dogs, which some people see as a positive trait. It's just that the bad very much outweighed the good.

Should we organize a reinstate Shog9 protest?

@HDE226868 Check this: meta.stackexchange.com/q/296587/259412 The death of the A51 was foreseeable years ago, check also the score

@Hosch250 Yes

Eh, I'm sure he'd be complimented, but I doubt he really wants to be reinstated.

@Hosch250 The problem is that Shog is probably bound by some NDA, and also the workplace ethics is that he can't say any bad from his previous jobs.

And we all know they won't listen anyway.

@Hosch250 We could visit them and protest there. They are on the 28th floor of a big NY office building.

Sorry, I haven't budgeted for a trip to NYC.

And my pets need me for their emotional support.

The streets are probably narrow... and likely we won't be allowed to enter the building, so we will need to demonstrate on the street...

We could probably enter the lobby.

Probably just not their area.

What will likely cause a little traffic jam

Alternately, we could ask Trump to have a little talk with Kim Jong-un about the proper target for their missiles next time they talk.

I mean, they couldn't hate him any more than they do already...

@Hosch250 I think the company is misusing social inertia, this is a case what the law does not handle until now. But it should be.

Yeah, but I'm not sure the law could effectively handle it without making everything way worse.

@Hosch250 Similarly as the anti-trust laws are related to the free-market capitalism. A completely free market turns the race out. Bell was dismantled, and also Microsoft was nearly dismantled.

I mean, all SE would have to do is point out the protesters are still in a minority.

@Hosch250 Also anti-trust law exists

And if the majority of the people are cool with what they are doing, there's nothing to do.

@peterh-ReinstateMonica They'd have to prove that SE was actively trying to keep a monopoly on QA sites.

@Hosch250 That is a cheat - the ratio of the protesters should be count to the people regular meta activity.

Reddit and Quora easily prove wrong.

I don't say that antitrust law would match. I say that antitrust laws were required because it became clear, that the full-free market capitalism ultimately turns off the free market (by trusts). Now we have a similar situation: misusing social inertia is also a new phenomenon what ws not handled by laws until now.

Not only the SE does it, also FB is a s....uboptimal system, we are there only because all of our collegues, friends are there.

Ah.

I'm not on FB :)

But yeah, that's the only reason I've got an account on SE.

And I'm still considering leaving. I just don't yet have another community of programmers to talk to.

If I could find a small-ish group of primarily C# devs to share knowledge with, I'd probably walk.

@Hosch250 Social inertia. After the SE has build up the initial "critical mass", there is no rce any more. We could develop a far better software, a far better system, it would die, because no one would ever there.

@Hosch250 And then you would google for the problems you did not find there... and you would find SO hits

chess-mate

Well, the other site could download all SE's content and host it under the CC-by-SA 3.0 (or 4.0...) license and attributing SE.

I know of a site that's trying to do that.

codidact.org

@Hosch250 Physicsoverflow tried it with catastrophal results. You can freely copy its content, but the visitors, the 99.9% of the herd, won't ever even know that your site exists (where they find all the SO content + 0.01% of your content)

@Hosch250 Also Wikipedia had a similar phase, one of the close friends and business partners of the founder Jimbo Wales, has split and made the citizendium. Did you ever heard from the Citizendium?

No.

@Hosch250 social inertia

That's my concern with this site, but the least I can do is give some help.

What is it this time?

@Mephistopheles SE fired a couple of long-time employees.

Shog9 and Robert Cartaino.

Why?

Apparently because they were bigots, for all we can tell :(

i.e. an extension of the same reason they fired Monica.

@Hosch250 So can the company misuse social inertia. Literally they can do everything, including breaking their own words, doing any nasty and evil, anything. And, what's then? Sara gets yet another -2000 post, but still she will be the *Director and the 99% of the users won't even know what is going on.

One thing is several of the most active users have quit.

They can lie, chat, trick, misuse anything and everything, and the only what you can do, is that you go away. Doing that, you punish yourself, while the herd won't even know what happened.

<0.1%

Yeah, but whatever.

I mean, at the end of the day, what's a law going to do? Tell SE to listen to their users?

Furthermore, their content is already there, that they can't make un-written

Let's just put it this way--if even 50% of the experts leave, whole programming communities will have to stop using SO because the content won't be up-to-date.

@Hosch250 I don't know, but I say, it is a similar new scenario, what required a shift from the 100% free-market capitalism, as the anti-trust era was

@peterh-ReinstateMonica Exactly. I agree it's wrong, I just don't see any way a law could really help.

So it either comes down to leave, and use SE anonymously and minimally as needed, or stay and be part of the social inertia.

And at this point, I'm ready to leave if I find a new community to be a part of where I can maintain and grow my dev skills. I know there are some on Discord and other sites--I just haven't had enough time to look.

@Hosch250 Then you punish yourself. You say you don't have fb. But your career depends on the m$. Today, they play the nice guys. Just like the SE did it nearly a decade long (meanwhile, also the MS is actively working on to collect yet more social inertia, see github, linkedin).

They were fired because SE thought they were bigots? I mean, if they kicked @Gryphon out for that, I could understand why they'd believe that, but...

@peterh-ReinstateMonica Yeah.

I mean, I'm really happy with where MS is going, making stuff open source and all. But I could see it swinging back with another CEO in 10-20 years.

@Mephistopheles Both of them were white stright males, probably white christian straight males. So...

@peterh-ReinstateMonica How do you know that?

@Hosch250 Another option is the passive resistance. You remain here, communicate here, you even vote, but... you commit so less content, as you only can.

@peterh-ReinstateMonica That doesn't help me.

I'm basically only on for chat since a couple years already.

SO content is already covered in my field--99.99% of the rest are dupes. I tried to give back on CR, but eventually I got broken-record syndrome.

@Mephistopheles White is known, they have photo. Male is strongly suspected from their name and photo. Christian heritage is likely: Cartaino has an italian name, and Italian are catholic. Shog is from Colorado, they are nearly-all Christin. Straight, that I don't know but likely (both have family with children)

@peterh-ReinstateMonica Shog's name is Josh, so far as I can tell.

So basically, I'm on chat, and leaving chat and removing my account is the best I can do.

@Hosch250 He might have also Jewish cultural heritage (although it never influenced his activities, as far I know). Note, Monica Cellio is an observant Jew and the SE fired her for "bigotry".

*her

@Hosch250 I think the best to do: remain here, vote if you can, communicate if you can - but never forget, what happened. Passive resistance.

Yeah, everyone needs to make their own choice. I've been doing that already :)

@Hosch250 I use m$, if I need to. But I boycott it everywhere, where I can. At home, none of my devices has a windows. But my wife can not handle anything (she can't even really handle windows), so there I tolerate it. If I get a w$ work in m job, I do it, but if I have a word in any sw/hw solution, m$ can be sure that I won't say anything for them…

@Hosch250 I have a fb account, because only there can I reach a lot of people. But if I can choose, no way that I would ever contact anybody on the fb.

Meh. Who else is there? Linux where you need a good bit of time and extensive computer knowledge to get it started, even if it's easy after that?

Oracle, who's just as bad as MS?

@AndyD273 Where were we. Oh, pistols. You see, a longsword is deadlier than a knife on average, but it's also much more expensive, so a larger portion of criminals would opt for it, which also means more attacks, committed with knives, and more deaths than longswords. If longswords were cheaper we'd probably have more longsword crime.

@Mephistopheles Well, there's one big difference here.

@Hosch250 It's a very rough analogy

Someone is walking down the street with a longsword, you know they have a longsword right away and can keep out of range.

@Hosch250 I clone many github repos, if I need to, but I deleted all my github repos after m$ bought them, and moved to gitlab.com . I have a linkedin account, but my profil is not up-to-date, I do not read and answer messages, and it has only a link to my real homepage.

Passive resistance, active boycott

With a knife, they can conceal it until they are within arms reach.

I don't left them, I know them... but I am roughly independent from them.

@Mephistopheles There was a long time when lots of people carried swords. You don't just whip it out and start slashing, because lots of other people will hack you to pieces if you do. Self defence

@AndyD273 Where was that at El Passo, Columbine, Virginia Tech...

None of the good guys had guns

@Hosch250 Learning Linux << Learning C# and related techs/frameworks on professional developer level. The reason why can m$ SPAM your home desktop, is the social inertia.

Spam my home desktop? They've never done that to me.

@AndyD273 One concept: gang violence

Armed police

It's just been horny girls in my area trying to sell viagra...

@AndyD273 "damn state wants to disarm us so we'll be their cattle"

See

I'm really glad that you have total confidence in the government

@Hosch250 Well, actively supporting them is evil. You can live from them, it is not surely a sin, because we all need to live from something. But actively supporting them is evil.

Maybe :)

@AndyD273 I mean, yeh, no one can invade the US, not even its own government, in exchange it's a breeding ground for a big beautiful civil war

Maybe. Probably not. But if someone is going to start something, I want to be able to defend myself from it.

Whether it's organized, or just some crazy person with a zip gun that forgot to take their meds

@AndyD273 Then make a well-regulated militia

;)

Yeah, I'm well regulated

but only one guy

One properly trained good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun

> gang violence

What gang violence?

They already have guns that they got illegally

@AndyD273 NIG...

I didn't say it!

Keep that nazi talk to yourself

Okay, how bout' Al Capone and Polpo and the entire cast of part 5 but only Mista, but with a tommy?

Does that scare you?

The bad guys will get weapons

I want the good guys to have them too

All of the good guys

@AndyD273 Who's good is for me to decide

Granny would still be vulnerable, even with a Barret.

Also, Death Stranding taught me the concept of not-so-lethal-weapons

gimme the bola guns, the pepper grenades and OP airsoft SAWs

@Hosch250 The same should be done to the SE, imho.

Still gets a chuckle out of me. Imagine if we made it slightly more powerful...

@Mephistopheles Non lethal weapons are also good, and also illegal in many places. But after watching people in Paris and Hong Kong just walking down the street through clouds of tear gas, I don't know if I'd trust it to make sure that an attacker was incapacitated.

@AndyD273 Then switch. Rubber bullets are always a viable option, as they're basically ranged punches.

@Mephistopheles They also lead you into a false sense of security; You can very easily kill someone with a rubber bullet.

I mean, maybe better than the alternative, I suppose.

You can do something similar with a shotgun; bird shot, bird shot, buck shot, bird shot, buck shot, buck shot, buck shot, buck shot. First bird shot is a warning, second you put into them when they come at you. it'll hurt, but is less lethal. If they are meth head and don't feel the bird shot, then the buck shot will put them down. Then another bird shot for the junkies friend that was around the corner, and after that it's all buck shot.

@AndyD273 Alternatively, we could develop and fine-tune potato cannons for that purpose.

@Mephistopheles Same as using a rubber bullet

@AndyD273 Still better than a buckshot

Note: Video's unrelated, but still interesting

@Mephistopheles Depends on what outcome needs to happen to keep you and yours safe.

@AndyD273 Incapacitation?

If you can

But listen, I'm perfectly OK with you staying unarmed.

So, on an unrelated note, what does a color difference of 4.56 in deltaE 2000 mean?

@Halfthawed Ohio

!

In paper, my laptop's display is sitting at an 59% coverage of sRGB and its quirk is being physically restricted to muted colors (which I do love)

@Mephistopheles Ohio is a state, I think. Pretty sure. Haven't looked at a map of the continental US for a while, give me a second.

Yup. Looked it's a state.

@Halfthawed thoughtco.com/ohayou-simple-japanese-phrases-2028335

(I must now take the opportunity to apologize to Ohioans for making that joke. Please understand my crude taste in humor. I also apologize if the general term isn't Ohioans, I'm just kind of assuming that.)

I always wanted to make that joke

Normally, I'd complain that you spelled it wrong, but even if you spelled in right, I don't speak Japanese, so I wouldn't know.

Hehe

Any tips for cable management? I have a really loooong HDMI cable, and the last one's connector got accidentally ripped in half while plugged into the port.

@Halfthawed I'll be back in a minute. I have to 1: Clean my laptop's (Acer Aspire 7 A715-71G) IPS screen, and check the PC

Looks like a dream

Talking about dreams. That Indonesian (or Filipino?) volcano eruption looks like a dream. Or did the other day.

I also have an asus monitor so bright, I'm convinced it's only a few candras away from becoming a kugelblitz

@Mephistopheles flexible tubing and velcro cable ties

@Halfthawed ... buy cables?

I tend to accumilate them

yo

any chance there's someone from Korea here?

I have a lot of stuff an little space for them. Two printers (a lame hp deskjet and a chad Epson L3050), my multi-media laptop, a regular PC and a television. The lap's color gamut is small, so I occasionally hook it up to the tv. Any advice?

@FailusMaximus North Korea? Not really...

South Korea? I don't know of any offhand, but it's not exactly unlikely.

ok, nvm

on another note, I just made an A4 of exposition on cannons of my civilization

and I don't know what to do with it, kek

also @Mephistopheles that video sucks

really, Jordan Peterson is... far right personality?

@FailusMaximus Which video?

@FailusMaximus No, just a gateway

alt right playbook one

that's bs

@FailusMaximus It's a hard-to-swallow pill but it speaks the truth. That's how I almost ended up in the alt-right.

I mean the guy is kind of shady in that he mixes his self-help guru bullshit with his profesional psychiatry

no, it's a bullshit pill

I understand that for far left, anything right from them seems like gateway to far right, but for people who understand that politics aren't one dimensional line, it's just bs

and I say that as person who at least by American standards is basically far left

well, at least would have been like 5 years ago

@FailusMaximus That's the beauty of the alt-right. It's insanely decentralized, with each group believing the others to be a myth, they can cover up each other

Brenton Tarrant? He's either unrelated or a kike/communist conspiracy

see?

indeed, when all other groups are alt-right to you, then people who are centre left, centre right, look like decentralized groups, because they are indeed decentralized

I don't know who Breton Tarrant is

and what does Elder Scrolls have to do with this

@FailusMaximus Neo-Nazi, shot up a mosque, high-score: 50, status: alive, nationality: kangaroo

oh, that piece of shit

@FailusMaximus He even shouted "Subscribe to PewDiePie" before beginning his speedrun

your point being

you're not so retarded as to imply he was doing that for reason other than amplify his message

"Leave Pewds alone, you monster!"

-my thoughts

I mean, that would mean that you've not "almost become far right", you've become far left loon who's on par with creationists and flat earthers in terms of being delusional

@FailusMaximus Heh?

I mean, it's not even fair to call that position far left, since it already has little to do with normal left, but same usually works for far right losing similarity to right as it approaches extreme

Far right and far left are both way over the totalitarian side. More accurate to call them far bacon and far necktie.

Both totalitarian, both racist

I mean what we call far far right usually isn't extreme in "right" policies - they're not going around trying to end taxes and public services

No determinable difference from a moderate footing

they're more like "but ma homeland, no people of ethnicities I don't like in my homeland"

And the Nazies were just a flavor of socialist

What are you talking about? Felix is naive and underestimates the nazis in his fanbase, he doesn't understand dog-whistles, but neither does he condone hate crimes or /pol/

I am asking whether he's going to imply that

He's a Thanos-type centrist

Only the racists hear the racist dog whistles. Which is why @Mephistopheles is pointing them out all the time.

nah, because of far left, we do now too, all of us

Not really. Just pointing at shadows and phantoms.

@AndyD273 Only a sith deals in absolutes, I do what I must *unsheathes katana

like three days ago I helped my dad count his money and it was 1488... and I'm like... "well fuck"

"That guy did a thing, and I don't like him, so it is racist!"

well my dad is an old man and we're not living in English part of the world so he has no idea what it means

I don't even know what it means...

Anyway, dog-whistles are a thing, and re-appropriating them is the right course of action.

@Mephistopheles I will agree with the second part

some 14 words which I don't remember what I mean, and 88 seems to stand for HH, nazi greeting

Dog-whistles aren't a thing, but reappropiating symbols is generally preferable to trying to squelch them

@AndyD273 Grammatically, that's impossible

But yeah, I want cool Nazi outfits without Hitler

yeah, that's dumb. Like the juvenile idiots that giggle whenever 69 appears anywhere...

I still dont know why 4chan never decided to make Fanta into hate symbol

I mean it's literally nazi drink

Still waiting on the rainbow hate flag...

Gotta run

I know most people on 4 chan are horrid cnts, but every now and then, something glorious emerges from there

like charging iphone through microwave

Sturgeon's Law, I think.

@FailusMaximus Is it made from Jews? No. So, no

@Mephistopheles That got dark fast.

Yes, that's a soylent green reference

@Mephistopheles Also a historical one

Fanta was literally made by nazis, when Americans stopped exporting coke there

to replace coke

I'm guessing you're not aware of this, but the Nazi regime actually use corpses from the camps for various things.

@Halfthawed Fertilizer?

gold extraction from hair, if I remember, was one

like Minecraft

@FailusMaximus That was extracted from the teeth of certain prisoners

telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/4930165/…

@Mephistopheles Like Dark Beast from Age of Apocalypse.

Is there a rule that no matter what you can come up with, reality is more horrifying and did it first? There should be.

I remembered it wrongly

Anyway, back to America in WW2, I doubt bombing Hungary or Dresden and shooting random farmers in the countryside is even remotely close to peacekeeping, and are more like war crimes one can get away with

Sure, let's change the subject.

Meph, WW2 is different era

Shooting civilians is a war crime. No one argues with that. It was at the time, and it was now.

no precision guided bombs, nothing

obviously some war crimes were commited by allies, but bombing cities was standard strategy

@FailusMaximus We were already in WW2 crimes against humanity, so might as well have a quick rundown