The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Marvin

00:16

0

Q: Story in collection: "To attack a culture destroy its roots". Humans became teachers of aliens to do so

For years and years I have been trying to locate a story I read in a collection... a very long time ago. Anywhere from late '70s to early '90s, with highest probability being at the earlier end of the range. And the title of this post tells almost all I remember about the story. I think it is tol...

-1

Q: have you seen this video?

what do you think? i do not know

science

Marvin

00:42

0

Q: Did Kang the Conquerer exist before the events of Loki?

In "Ant-man and the Wasp : Quantumania" we learned that Janet met Kang when she went to the quantum realm, but that happened before the branching of timelines, does this mean that Kang existed before the events of "Loki"?

marvel-cinematic-universe loki ant-man-and-the-wasp-quantumania

Marvin

06:16

0

Q: Muggle AU Sirius raises harry potter fanfic

I read a Muggle AU Harry Potter fanfiction where Sirius gets out of prison and the Dursleys are abusive. Harry runs away to live with Sirius. Sirius hires Lucius Malfoy as his lawyer for the custody dispute. Draco and Harry I think get together. Does anyone know what fanfiction this is?

harry-potter fan-fiction muggles sirius-black

Marvin

09:15

0

Q: Soldier VS Warrior

I remember a conversation between two characters in an RPG a "Soldier"(Lawful good type) and a "Warrior" (neutral-evil type). I don't know the exact dialog but: Warrior: Talks about how he is a proud warrior who defeated many enemies. Soldier: Angrily calls the warrior out for being little mo...

story-identification video-games

Marvin

10:06

0

Q: State of repaired object by Reparo spell [Repairing Charm]

Say I have statue in my garden. It's very old and thus has moss growing on it and certain scratches and chips/pieces missing from over the years. But now someone ran into it and it fell, completely destroying the statue in tens of pieces. I'm about to cast "Reparo", how will my statue be repaird?...

harry-potter spells

Marvin

14:48

0

Q: At what point of what we watch as the MCU movies the branching started?

This question is based on my assumptions/understandings of the following: Way back in the past there was a multiversal war "He who remains" fought his variants and won the war. "He who remains" united all timelines into one main one before the event of any films we watched. What we watched as th...

marvel marvel-cinematic-universe loki

Cereal Bot

15:58

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Wish

posted on March 01, 2023 by tech

Click here to go see the bonus panel!Hovertext: It's time. It's time for a resurgence of T Rex arms-related humor. Today's News: Enter to win a free copy of Bea Wolf!

Mithical

16:20

@AncientSwordRage around?

xkcd

I was eventually kicked out of my architectural engineering program because I wouldn't stop referring to HVAC as "the fandom."

Marvin

16:56

0

Q: Book about a good dark lord think "not sauron"

I started reading this book earlier this year at my library and haven’t been able to find it again. It is about a “dark” lord who was once part of a group of gods? God like beings? I think there were seven(maybe more, maybe less). They had some disagreement about how life should work (free will r...

story-identification books magic

AncientSwordRage

18:12

@Mithical just about for 10 min?

Marvin

0

Q: Story Identification: Nanomachines Building Cities

Looking for the title of a book in which nanomachines create city buildings, skyscrapers, and the like. But there was a virus that hit the nanomachines, and at some point they started creating buildings that were more like... abstract art, I guess? Many of which weren't conducive for people to ac...

story-identification

Mithical

@AncientSwordRage I don't want to get into an edit war, but I wanted to get your eyes on scifi.stackexchange.com/posts/143892/revisions and scifi.stackexchange.com/posts/148018/revisions

(see also the comments on the latter)

AncientSwordRage

@Mithical can you send a custom mod flag?

Mithical

sure

AncientSwordRage

I can't handle it right now, but will clue the others in

Thanks

DavidW

18:47

I don't get some people? How is that not making it worse? I can understand "I don't like your summary, let me write a better one," but not "I don't like any summary and I insist on nothing useful being said."

Mithical

I do not understand the motivation. They came up in my query with already-clicked links, and I remembered editing them, so I went to check what happened.

DavidW

Boo. It's a thankless enough job without people making it harder.

Thank you, by the way.

I haven't had time to contribute in a while.

But I still have a tab with the query open in my browser.

Mithical

Thanks for the appreciation :). I've been doing it less frequently also, so finding people undoing it is especially annoying.

Query count is currently 10933 posts.

DavidW

Ugh. Sisyphus would probably choose to go back to the rock.

2

Mithical

Hey, on The Workplace it's down to 151, and I have edits pending on two of those already.

...SFF just happens to be a very image-heavy site.

DavidW

19:01

Very much so.

DavidW

19:18

There we go. 10930. :D

SFF Blog

19:56

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Community Blog: Jack’s Bad Movies: Black Adam (2022)

posted on March 01, 2023 by Jack B Nimble

IMDB’s description: Nearly 5,000 years after he was bestowed with the almighty powers of the Egyptian gods–and imprisoned just as quickly–Black Adam is freed from his earthly tomb, ready to unleash his unique form of justice on the modern world. This movie. Maybe the movie wouldn’t have felt so long and boring if the trailer ... Read more

Marvin

20:47

0

Q: Cartoon Network cartoon about power stone with greek lettering

I'm searching for the name of a cartoon I watched in my childhood in Cartoon Network. In this cartoon everyone uses cube shaped stone for power. There was greek alphabet in every single stone. I remember one of the villain using this type of wrist gauntlet for power. I also remember yin yang sym...

story-identification

AncientSwordRage

22:26

@SFFBlog the only correction is that they want to re-hide the crown

I can't believe Jack got that wrong

He's dead to me

Marvin

22:55

0

Q: Do you know of a science fiction story in which the edge of the universe is a wall of sand

I have no additional information. I have tried several search engines and even chatgpt. The only other thing that I remember is that explorers tunneled into the sand but only found more sand. Thanks and best regards.

story-identification

ibid

23:17

@Mithical - Responding here because the answer was locked, but when an image has a caption, the correct alt-text is an empty string. When your alt text just says the equivalent of "see caption" then that isn't correct alt text. It's debatable if that is better or worse than the default "enter image description here"†, but it's still 100% incorrect.

†(Personally I'd argue that it's worse, as with the large frequency that "enter image description here" is used, I'd imagine that screen readers can easily filter that out, while they won't be able to filter out custom useless alt text.)

In any event, as I've said in the comment, I don't particularly care to add alt-text myself to all of my answers. If you wish to correctly do so, that's fine, and I won't remove anything which actually improves the answer. But not all images are supposed to have any alt-text, and I generally provide adequate captions in my answers that alt-text is very often not appropriate. I don't consider incorrect alt-text to be an improvement to an answer and so I roll back such edits.

DavidW

@ibid I don't believe that's how it works. If the alt text says "enter image description here" then that text will be read. If you're going to have alt text, make it meaningful.

If you believe that your image is completely described by the surrounding text and unnecessary for a disabled user, then set the alt text to empty.

At least you'll be making a positive action, so even if people don't necessarily agree with you, they have to argue with your editorial decision instead of a null decision.

And if you disagree with the alt text that is set, fix it, don't roll it back to "enter image description here," which is always wrong. That comes across as arrogant and passive-aggressive.

2

After all, you're saying you're too lazy or apathic to bother setting the alt text, but you'll set a high bar you have no interest in reaching yourself for anyone else who does so.

Laurel

23:39

The correct syntax for an empty alt is ![](url). Any text between the square brackets will be read back with a screen reader. And it's not a link — you can't have linked images with no text otherwise the screen reader won't know what to say (iirc it spells out the link url for you)

ibid

@DavidW I know it's not how it works now, but I think it can hypotheticaly work like that, while a custom incorrect text cannot be as easily fixed. I'm not saying it's correct, just that both options here were wrong.

DavidW

@Laurel Well, either that or the equivalent [![][1]][1]. And if you're saying that the alt="" attribute has to be present otherwise the link will be read, then you're correct.

ibid

@DavidW I think the proper response to an incorrect edit is a rollback, possibly followed by a correct edit if needed. I don't think answers need to have correct alt text and don't add them myself. But regardless of that, the edit adding incorrect alt text should still be rolled back.

Laurel

@DavidW It's not equivalent since it reads out the URL. You need text of some sort for the link. You could do [![][1] see full transcript image][1] which would help everyone out. It's not very obvious that some images are links when you're just looking at them.

ibid

@DavidW also personally I think stack exchange should stop adding that default alt text placeholder. I'm going to guess it's done a lot more harm than it's helped.

For every user who sees it and is motivated to add something there's probably another 100 users who won't touch it regardless and now their alt text is cluttered with that garbage.

But maybe it helps with seo or something? Perhaps there's some metric like "percentage of images with alt text" which that helps meet even if completely useless.

Laurel

23:51

The primary purpose of alt text is for people who can't see images to have a coherent experience. That would include blind people who use screen readers and people who have Imgur (or all images) blocked for some reason

ibid

@Laurel yes, but in the case in question the proposed edit wasn't helping with this

Knowing that there was a picture and then seeing a transcript under it is more coherent than adding an alt text between the two saying "see transcript".

And when I looked up guidelines for alt text I saw the same thing. That you're not supposed to repeat information already on the page. You either add new information if needed or if not needed you leave the alt text blank.

DavidW

@Laurel If an anchor tag has content, it should read the content instead of the link text. The content is an image, and the reader will speak the alt text, if present or the URL if it is not present, but if the alt text is present (it is) and empty (it is) it should skip it.

Transcript for

The Restaurant at the End of the Univ…