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12:33 AM
0
Q: Kids book about a cave

bob andersonThis was a great book I read in middle school in the early 1970's. What I remember is that a boy is lost in a cave and is rescued by or somehow meets up with another boy that he cannot see and they become friends. The surprise ending reveals that the friend is black, which the other boy had not r...

 
12:53 AM
Hi there. Was there any science-fiction or fantasy elements in that? If so, please edit them in. If not, I'm afraid this will be off-topic for this site but you may try asking it on Literature. Cheers! — Jenayah 30 mins ago
@Jenayah it'd be "Were there any", not "Was there any" (sorry, I'm part of the pedants club)
 
 
2 hours later…
2:33 AM
0
Q: Early 80s puppet sci fi

Luky BellI can't recall alot but Im pretty sure it was early 80s. All I remember is puppets. A princess having been captured by an evil sorceress. small round fluffy guard dog type creature was the princesses pet. There was an army? prince? sent to rescue her...super dramatic ending. It was def intergalac...

 
 
3 hours later…
5:27 AM
@Stormblessed duck I saw that and thought I had corrected it
 
 
3 hours later…
8:33 AM
0
Q: Fringe – What is the real name of the Ending Theme?

Yellow SkyIn the American science fiction TV series Fringe (2008–2013), at the end of each episode when the final credits are shown, a beautiful 30-second-long piece is played which I found on YouTube where it is called Fringe Ending Theme. Is Fringe Ending Theme the correct real name of that piece? If no...

 
8:53 AM
0
Q: Why did Saruman lie?

ParrotmasterI was looking at this interactive map of Middle Earth, and noticed that when you click on the node at Isengard, one of the dates says: The Black Riders visit Saruman who lies that Gandalf has "confessed", and gives them directions to the Shire. (emphasis mine) Why did he lie? My best guess...

 
9:52 AM
0
Q: George Lucas ever explained why Obi-Wan doesn't remember R2?

DavidProbably at the time he didn't even have the backstory in his head, but did Lucas ever explain why Obi-Wan Kenobi didn't recognize R2-D2 in "A new hope"?

 
10:35 AM
49
Q: Make it possible to retract comment flags

RevetahwI misread the content of a comment, and flagged it. Then I realized that the comment wasn't what I had initially thought. Would it be possible to have the ability to retract comment flags, just like we have the ability to retract flags on questions and answers? I'm aware of this support question...

^ completed! 😀
 
10:52 AM
0
Q: Are the senior Kree wearing make-up?

OrangeDogIn Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season five, there are many Kree individuals. Most minor and background characters are "regular" all-blue Kree. However, the major Kree characters all have distinctive unique facial pigmentation - symmetrical light patches and black areas around the eyes. In particular K...

 
 
2 hours later…
12:31 PM
0
Q: How did Carlos get beaten up in The Preacher TV series?

tgrignonIn the TV series 'The Preacher' Carlos gets terribly beaten near the end of the first season. He's given a crowbar and a gun and then the next thing you see is Carlos hardly able to walk. Did Jesse use his Genesis voice power to force Carlos to beat himself up? Or did he fight Jesse and Tulip? I ...

 
 
1 hour later…
1:37 PM
Greetings, Earthlings.
 
@Donald.McLean greetings, Hubble guy!
 
2:12 PM
@DavidW FYI "muttation" is spelled that way in the books
 
2:23 PM
@Jenayah It wasn't a quote in the answer (I don't normally fix odd spelling in quotes) and it looked like an obvious typo. Sorry.
 
no worries :)
7
Q: Old nuclear war film

Gunner MillerThis Film was during the gung ho period of war movies 50-60's and I think black and white. What I remember part of it was on a SAC airbase in the Midwest. They knew that there was going to be an attack so they converted some old powder bunkers to emergency shelters for all of the staff. When th...

^ doesn't seem really on-topic?
I mean nuclear war sure and people in a bunker but... That's all
 
2:52 PM
More to the point, it barely even seems SFnal for the time it was produced...
("Would have been produced," I suppose, since that's still hypothetical.)
<400 views in >5 years, hasn't even been edited in all that time, so probably essentially abandoned.
 
21
A: "He's dead, Jim": Which Star Trek characters have returned from the dead?

Paulie_DThe Original Series Lt. Commander Benjamin Finney Supposedly killed during an ion storm the the Star Trek TOS episode Courtmartial. In fact, survived and hid on Enterprise during whole trial. Kodos Presumed dead 2246, actually masquerading as Anton Karidian. Discovered in 2266. See Star Trek ...

^ This list needs some <s>TLC</s> hard work from someone who's familiar with Star Trek.
 
Define "TLC"? In this room it's commonly used to refer to @TheLethalCarrot :P
 
@Jenayah I accidentally pressed leave open... :( I went back and VTCed later
 
@b_jonas strikethrough code in chat is ---that's striked out---
like this
 
3:03 PM
@b_jonas There are a lot of "was pretending to be dead" entries in that list. Do they actually count?
 
@Jenayah We all need some carroty goodness every now and then
2
 
@Voldemort'sWrath I was wondering about that. You actually went to the bother to write a custom close message, and then voted "Leave Open." It seemed odd. :)
 
@DavidW Questions says "Which characters have either died, been pronounced dead, or were otherwise believed dead" so I think they count.
But the answer should probably be clear about what happened.
 
Ah, okay. Thanks.
You're right. That does seem like work. :)
 
@Jenayah closed it!
 
3:16 PM
@Stormblessed and edited it afterwards, which will send it to the reopen queue ahah
 
Huh. "a SAC airbase" vs. "an SAC airbase" I would write "a SAC airbase" because it's "a Strategic Air Command airbase" not "an Ess-Ay-Cee airbase."
It's entirely possible that's a personal preference thingy though.
 
@Jenayah Do people know The Simpsons in France, really?
 
@Stormblessed ? How not?
 
@DavidW well I was thinking it might be something not so well-known in other countries
Like there are no French animated comedy shows I can think of
And comedy is something that is really variable between places, I’d think
 
3:30 PM
@Stormblessed Granted, not as well known. But I'm pretty sure there's at least some awareness of it. From the ubiquity of US-generated content, to the longevity of the show, its spin-off merchandise and references to it in other pop-culture, I believe it would be pretty hard to avoid at least having heard of it.
 
2
Q: Black bird wreaks havoc

AllegraI once read a truly scary short story: a bird sits in a cage. From heaven comes a huge, dark bird. It enters the cage and after a few days(weeks?) the bird in the cage hatches a kind of monster bird, and dies. Now awful things happen in the formerly peaceful little town. People start lying about ...

 
@Stormblessed yes
 
Great show
 
@DavidW Yeah, but you're going to pronounce "SAC" as "Ess-Ay-Cee" -- especially if you don't know what it stands for -- so I'd use "an".
Pretty much every website seems to say the same thing.
 
@DavidW agreeing with Null, always go with letter name pronunciation
 
3:40 PM
I wasn't trying to say it was wrong, just that it was unexpected.
Overloading of initialisms does lead to odd cases, though. "SAC" - to me - also expands to "Student Administrative Council" which is pronounced "sack." So my brain automatically expands (depending on context) "SAC" to "Strategic Air Command" as I read it, so "an strategic" really doesn't sound great.
 
@DavidW Sure, but even a(n) SAC would look kinda weird, right?
 
0
Q: How many times has an AI gone bad in Star Trek?

userThe plot of season 2 of Star Trek Discovery involves an AI that turns bad and decides to kill everyone. The Original Series had several episodes where AIs got out of hand, usually ending with Kirk talking them to death. Maybe this explains why there are so few AIs in the future. By the time of T...

 
@Voldemort'sWrath Yeah, like there's more than one. That'd be really weird... :)
Interesting. The ISFDb entry for "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" uses different punctuation than the publisher does.
 
Just write the whole thing and be done with it :p
 
4:00 PM
I like Nintendo but their weird aversion to analog triggers is dumb
They’re so great when used right
 
@Jenayah I don't think you're wrong. Except in informal contexts like chat (YMMV :D) I tend to - at least the first time - write things out the long way. You never know when next year's hot movie/game/political topic will re-use an initialism and create confusion.
 
9
A: Abbreviations in question-titles, okay?

user56In such cases, please edit the question to have no abbreviation in the title, and all acronyms expanded the first time they're used. (As you did. Thank you.)

 
How many people in the tech field these days would see "ADA" and think "American Dental Association?"
 
4:28 PM
@DavidW [raises hand guiltily]
 
@Voldemort'sWrath I'm not sure if that supports my point or not... :)
 
no, it really doesn't
 
4:42 PM
Well, it kind of does. 'Cause of you work in tech, and one of your co-workers mutters something about "ADA" and you think "dentists?" then an unexpanded initialism has caused a communication problem.
(At this point I kind of expect everyone in the English-ish-speaking software world to have a singular understanding of "ADA" because everything, even if it's not explicitly for use in the US, and even if it's not customer-facing, seems to need to be ADA-compliant. :-P Because dog-forbid some blind truck driver can't use his screen reader to use his company's fleet-management software! :-P </rant>)
 
1
Q: How big are the Choedan Kal?

CBredlowThe Choedan Kal are two large statues that are the focus of the One Power in the Wheel of Time series, both of which were either buried. Is there any specifications on their heights? Every wiki I've found says "massive" but did they ever give anything more specific, or relate it's height to any...

 
4:59 PM
-1 you have no sources for any of these bold claims. — Stormblessed 2 days ago
Dang I got 52 comment upvotes :-O
xkcd.com/1138, re: "crime is mostly located in cities" -- anything that scales with population density is mostly located in cities. :) — Charles Duffy yesterday
 
Fishing for more?
 
@Stormblessed Looks like a one-flag-auto-delete comment. ;-)
 
1
Q: Highlander: How does the Quickening affect Mortals?

Russ RainfordThe Quickening in the Highlander series and movies is characterize as magical lightning which transfers the knowledge, skill and "power" of a defeated Immortal to the victor. Generally speaking, this is someone nebulous; while many Immortals have been slain by Duncan MaCleod, we've rarely seen hi...

 
5:44 PM
What's with the dash to the right of this user's name?
It's also on the right of their name on other sites
 
Looks like it's the badge that indicates "top X% overall" or similar.
It probably needs to be recalculated.
 
6:15 PM
Ah that’s weird. New users don’t have anything there at all.
I wonder if it’ll count gain during the suspension
 
@Stormblessed <span class="js-rank-badge grid--cell s-badge s-badge__votes fs-fine bc-blue-3 fc-blue-700"><!-- unranked --></span>
 
 
1 hour later…
7:16 PM
0
Q: Does a question have to come after another question of which it is a duplicate to be closed as a dupe?

Voldemort's WrathFuzzyBoot's question here was written 6 days ago. Yet, this question, which was written 1 year and 7 months ago is closed as a duplicate of FuzzyBoot's question. This shouldn't make sense, right? Shouldn't the dupe be the other way around?

 
7:50 PM
0
Q: What Is The Fastest We Have Seen The Flash Travel?

opticyclicWhat is the fastest that we have seen each of the main Flashes (Jay, Barry, Wally, Bart) travel in any continuity? I'm not interested in characters talking about potentially how fast they could travel. I'm only interested in them actually traveling at their top speed. I'd like to know the issue...

 
8:50 PM
0
Q: In Harry Potter deathly hallows part 2 Harry Potter dies and goes to “heaven”

JamesI don’t understand what the skeleton under the white bench was when harry died to Voldemort.

 
9:00 PM
@Marvin Well, I don't understand how to turn the title into a question, so we're even. :-/
 
0
Q: Would a Zoan Devil Fruit that would turn someone into a fish person be affected by Sea Water?

Russ RainfordIn the One Piece universe, Zoan Devil fruits tend to give people animal-like abilities. Now granted, there are already amphibious mere-folk in this manga, but that's not to say there_isn't_ [or at least, I have not yet seen] any Devil fruit that can give someone fish-like abilities. If that's th...

 
@DavidW uh, tech and Ada makes me think of the language. But then again, being French I rarely encountered the ADA I think you're speaking of :)
 
9:29 PM
"ADA" these days, in all the contexts I encounter it, refers to the Americans with Disabilities Act. Here's a recent example of it cropping up again.
In a previous job I had to deal with the fallout. How, precisely, would you go about making an interactive multi-mode chart accessible to blind readers? If it were a single graph line, you could read off the values. But if you have 2 discretely-sampled data sets, each plotting average and envelope but against different y-axes, plus an overlay of event-based annotations, how do you read that out? And if you're overlaying 2 sets of data from different base times, then what?
How do you meaningfully describe a scatter-plot?
 
9:49 PM
0
Q: How does Captain Jack Harkness become the Face of Boe?

split second thoughtBased off the question "Is there anything beyond subtle hints that Jack becomes the Face of Boe?" How does Captain Jack Harkness become the Face of Boe?

 
I voted to leave closed after effectively voting to re-open :P
 

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