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1:30 AM
 
1
Q: Who wrote a book about a libertarian moon colony?

SlopezianI read a sci-fi book once about a libertarian colony on the moon. They rebelled against earth, I think. What is the name or title?

 
2:01 AM
0
Q: Manga about miniature people piloting cloned women

Daikyu MaryuThere’s a really disturbing manga that I remember reading, but for the love of all things, I can’t remember the title. However, I remember the story. It’s about people that pilot these things that resemble human women, but are partially mechanical, kinda like Evangelion, but way more screwed up. ...

 
2:27 AM
0
Q: Romance/Supernatural book about a girl who falls in love with a male ghost after moving into her grandmothers house

ShelbyI remember that it there grandmother had passed away and the family which was mom, son, and daughter. The father might have been there and the girl starts to notice that the house is not normal. Their mother grew up in the house and knew the people around. The girl starts to like one of the boys,...

 
2:52 AM
1
Q: Guitarist passing test to open alien doorway

Matt WoodwardTry to find the name of a book I read years ago. All I can remember is that the government? Is trying to open the last door into a alien spaceship? Or a alien portal of some kind. They have opened previous chambers by passing tests in science and reasoning but have been stumped by the last one in...

 
 
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6:18 AM
0
Q: Sci Fi novel/short story about a time traveler executing a heist in the past

Aakash AhujaI'm not looking for a particular story. Just anything similar to this that you might have read/come across.

 
6:59 AM
@xkcd absolutely true but... Of little added comedic/informative value... :/
 
 
2 hours later…
9:17 AM
 
 
3 hours later…
11:49 AM
@Jenayah there are disagreements with these, but I do find it amusing
 
0
Q: Which was the first story to feature the use of "spiritual energy" to enhance the user physical abilities?

PabloIn Hunter x Hunter (1998) people use Nen, which is the ability to control one's own life energy or aura for strengthening one's own physical abilities and creating energy attacks among other things. In Naruto (1997) Chakra is made of physical energy and spiritual energy, increasing one's spiritua...

 
 
1 hour later…
1:12 PM
Greetings, Earthlings.
 
1:33 PM
0
Q: Which book in Asimov's Foundation series describes a video communication system just like our "Zoom"

SlopezianLong ago I read all the books in Asimov's Foundation series. In one of them, people are living alone or very few at a time on separate worlds that are far apart. They communicate via a video system that I remember as being very much like today's "Zoom." I can't find which book that is in. Can any...

 
1:59 PM
1
Q: Story starting with the Siege Perilous

AshI believe I've read three stories that all started with characters sitting on the legendary Siege Perilous and being transported to another world. The first is Andre Norton's Witch World the first book in that saga and the second is Stephen R. Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane the first in The Chronic...

 
2:49 PM
posted on February 04, 2021 by Jack B Nimble

Stats Top Question: The highest voted question was Where did the concept of a (fantasy-style) “dungeon” originate? asked by Mason Wheeler and answered  by FuzzyBoots.  Top Answer: The highest voted answer was to the question Why is Sauron’s name similar to Greek/Latin word for “lizard”? asked by Enlico and answered  by Edlothiad.  Top Viewed: Th

 
3:06 PM
@Marvin From "video calls" + "Foundation" + "sparsely populated planets", I think you can pick any two to get an answer. But I don't know that anything satisfies all 3.
 
In the Naked Sun, on the sparsely populated Solaria, they can have zoom like meetings, but also they have holographic tele-presence communication as well.
Meh, other people have already commented as much.
The OP could easily be mistaken too, convinced it is in Foundation, when it is really in the Robot series.
 
That's true. Asimov also retconned everything together in the end, so you might also say that the Naked Sun falls into the Foundation series (I wouldn't though)
 
3:31 PM
Good point about the retcon.
 
3:42 PM
2
Q: Old sci-fi novel where people live in domes controlled by aliens and only traders can move between them

KenThe setting is a small village that lives under a dome (can't remember why but it's a pastoral setting, no tech). Traders can move between domes as they have permission from aliens to do so. Aliens have monitors that fly around like bees, only they are larger (maybe drone sized?). The story beg...

 
4:08 PM
0
Q: Manhua in which Female lead is stepmother of villain

Rj MaddyIn this story Female lead is stepmother of villain of the novel in which recarnted and try to change his fate or way as well duke wife

 
4:49 PM
posted on February 04, 2021 by tech

Click here to go see the bonus panel!Hovertext: The part where it gets really weird is when you realize you've made up entire memories to explain why you wrote down the note. Today's News:

 
4:59 PM
0
Q: Tracking down a short story with the term "abnotechia"

JesseHi I am curious about the term "abnotechia" which I encountered in a short story that I am now trying to look up, but google searches are coming up empty. I am pretty sure the story appeared in Analog, though I would not swear to it. The premise: some people are naturally averse to technology-- a...

 
5:25 PM
0
Q: Who is more powerful: the Overlord or the Oni?

ABilal 40129In Ninjago season 2 ending episodes, the Overlord is shown a powerful evil Oni that wanted to rule the world and realms and the Oni are the darkness in the light the first Spinjitzu master was half on half dragon so who would win in a battle?

 
6:14 PM
Currently refactoring a 3300-lines class because I got assigned a feature task on it and barely stayed calm when I began reading the thing. I told the lead I grasped how it worked and could do the task, but I was going to take two days of refactoring prior to that. He replied that he didn't know whether we had that kind of time.
I told him it was either two days now, or a lot more days later when someone (possibly me) snapped and outright killed the dev who wrote the thing. He laughed and greenlit the refactoring 😂
 
1
Q: Short story about "assembly robot"

bobcLooking for the author and title of a story about a man at a remote outpost in space, who spends a lot of time assembling "flat pack" machines that are delivered to him. To save time, he orders a robot to perform the assembly. When it arrives, it also requires assembly.

 
6:29 PM
@Jenayah I once worked on a project that had a 2200 line function. There was one part that had ten levels of nesting.
 
@Jenayah Very nice! I envy you that. We have some ridiculously enormous classes that could definitely be broken down, but nobody will sign off on the work.
I've been able to chip off bits around the edges under the guise of "making them testable" but there are still dozens of thousand-line methods around. :-P
 
@Donald.McLean *screams*
@DavidW I did start that as "if I just fiddle this but here it'll be enough" but it turned out it wouldn't have been
I'm down to 2800 lines today so that's already good
I don't think that thing can take less than 1500-2000 lines while staying in a single class, but that'll already make reading it a lot easier without all the redundancies and commented-out unmaintained stuff
Basically, it's a code generation tool. Prior to the refactoring, the Convertor class had more lines than the template file x_x
 
6:57 PM
Heh. It's not a converter, it's a pseudo-code compiler. :)
 
7:08 PM
-1
Q: Jackie Chan anime (not "Jackie Chan Adventures")

Gaurav MishraThere was an anime I used to see; it aired on either old Disney XD or Animax. It aired around 2012 or 2014 I guess, but it didn't air for so long. It had a story very much related to the anime "Jackie Chan Adventures". The MC had to travel to receive magical things. There were even some desert an...

 
7:27 PM
@Jenayah Yeah, exactly. I rewrote it from scratch figuring there was no way to save it. Especially since neither refactoring nor unit testing had been invented yet.
 
-1
Q: Flying at high speeds with electronic devices (no plane)

NephThis question could be about every superhero or supernatural being who is able to fly without the need for a suit (like Iron Man) or a plane but I'll limit it to Anne Rice's "Vampire Chronicles" because it is mentioned specifically in her later works: A lot of Anne Rice's vampires are able to fly...

 
I once wrote a thousand-line function.
Or, more accurately, I wrote a program that wrote a thousand-line function.
 
8:01 PM
Is there a term for replying to a question asking "how" with an adverbial answer rather than an adjectival one?
 
@Jenayah I can't remember if it was 1000 lines or 5000 lines, but I've been there....jeeze that was a nightmare
@DavidW tom sharpism?
@DavidW But did you write a program than wrote a program that wrote a program?
And then threatened to kill the dev who actually did it?
 
@AncientSwordRage I'm afraid the reference eludes me.
@AncientSwordRage I desperately hope never to do so. I can't imagine how to write the first program to adequately document how the second program writes the third.
 
@DavidW it was very easy to delete
that's all I know
@DavidW it's a book series, but I forget the names?
But it's full of things like:
> "We need more knives" he said sharply
> "Don't pull that face" he said expressively
it's not quite what you're after I think
gah it's Tom Swift
 
Oh, yes, I've heard of Tom Swift!
It is adverbially related, but not the same. :)
 
A Tom Swifty (or Tom Swiftie) is a phrase in which a quoted sentence is linked by a pun to the manner in which it is attributed. Tom Swifties may be considered a type of wellerism. The standard syntax is for the quoted sentence to be first, followed by the description of the act of speaking. The hypothetical speaker is usually, by convention, called "Tom" (or "he" or "she"). == Origins == The name comes from the Tom Swift series of books (1910–present), similar in many ways to the better-known Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, and, like them, produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. In this series...
 
8:23 PM
There was a point recently where Puzzling.SE chat was obsessed with those.
I'd forgotten how fun it was to be hunting down story-IDs.
2
 
@AncientSwordRage Ah, yes. That covers it.
 
Today's unfortunate email subject line: "VD Gifts That Everyone Will Love!"
 
8:44 PM
@Donald.McLean yikes
 
0
Q: Short story about science fiction editor in thrall to a 'witch doctor's' aspirations to scifi authorship

LexibleThis was a self-consciously hokey story which I read in one of the magazines around 1989 or 1990. Primary POV character was a science fiction pulp magazine editor (I think… may only have been a science fiction author with an established publication history) who is contacted and bewitched by a 'wi...

 
9:08 PM
Don't judge a class by its lines.
 
9:26 PM
@DavidW it's a damn piece of software shame is what it is
@Donald.McLean ahah!
@Mithical I know right?!
 
9:54 PM
@Jenayah You've been slacking off recently yourself, I've noticed. ;)
 
10:13 PM
That’s the second post today where an edit has broken the formatting due to the renderer updating. Hadn’t really seen it happening before
 
There aren't that many posts with multi-paragraph quotes, and I figure many of the more experienced users (who are disproportionately likely to be editing old posts) are used to checking the preview before saving edits, and would fix that kind of thing.
 
Well you’d hope, but if you’re just fixing a small typo I wouldn’t expect a lot to check the formatting on the whole poat
 
Well, no, I guess not. But I'll always check the post again after I save edits...
 

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