The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Marvin

00:07

0

I am looking for an animated series or a movie, which I suspect is an anime, that I've seen somewhere in 90s. I barely remember anything about it but it has been nagging me for decades. In one of the scenes, a group of people are observing/studying a 'new' robot. This robot can transform into s...

Marvin

00:33

0

Q: First story of aliens pretending to be humans especially a "human" family (like Coneheads) that is trying to fit in, maybe for a long time?

My sense is that this is a fairly new (like post 1940s) idea because aliens themselves are fairly new, but I am not sure. I think while The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers is an example, I think there is probably an earlier one. And in Bodysnatchers, they do not really pretend, barely at all -- the...

aliens history-of

Marvin

03:04

0

Q: Is Spiderman the only marvel character that has been represented as multiple non-human characters?

Spiderman has been represented as multiple non-human creatures: Pter Ptarker - A Pteranodon in a Tyrannosaurus rex body. Peter Porker (SpiderHam) - A Spider, that was bitten by an irradiated Anthropomorphic pig. Has any other marvel character in any continuity been represented as a non-human ch...

marvel marvel-cinematic-universe character-identification

Marvin

05:11

0

Q: I can't find an anime

Said anime has a white haired MC who ages backwards. He uses cards to fight. Using time to accelerate and decelerate the cards. He has a son about 16 who uses Water blades to fight, same system using time. MC also has/had a wife who is now like him, aging backwards and has forgotten some memories...

story-identification anime

Marvin

06:01

-1

Q: What book or movie contains the most scientifically realistic depiction of a zombie?

Over at Worlbbuilding we're frequently asked for help creating a scientifically realistic... well... anything. But zombies are a popular subject. So, to create a useful reference point to help questioners prepare their questions, I'd like to ask this community for some help. Which book or film ha...

movie books zombie science

Marvin

12:18

0

Q: Cartoon series about a word-saving agent, who is a Indiana Jones and James Bond mixture

I am looking for a cartoon TV series from my childhood: The show is an animated television series for children, named after the main character if I recall correctly. The main character is a (secret?) agent, described as a mixture of Indiana Jones and James Bond by the creator. Not so much in loo...

story-identification

Cereal Bot

13:26

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Practical Eschatology

posted on June 02, 2023 by Zach Weinersmith

Click here to go see the bonus panel!Hovertext: I wonder when the first cult run by a robot will start up. Today's News:

Marvin

14:24

1

Q: What does it mean, "Vine strike's still loose"?

In Avatar (2009) extended version, Jake, who is in his wheelchair, meets Trudy in a large hall with weapons: Trudy: Hey, Wainﬂeet! Get it done! We bounce at zero-nine. Wainﬂeet: Yeah, I'm on it, capitaine! Trudy: Vine strike's still loose. Jake: You guys are packing some heavy gear. What does i...

avatar

DavidW

15:07

Took you long enough smokey, I was just about to manually post this.

Marvin

0

Q: What exactly are "Ph monitors"?

In Avatar (2009) Extended version, Dr Grace speaks inside a class room on the Navi planet: Dr Grace: This was our school. Now it's just...storage. The kids were so bright. Eager to learn. They picked up English faster than I could teach it. So, we'll take a couple of these Ph monitors... ...and ...

avatar

SmokeDetector

16:15

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title (192): Stop bullying KEMONO_PANTSU‭ by user164849‭ on scifi.SE

Marvin

16:30

1

Q: Who are all the different versions of Spider-Man, Spider-Woman and the alternate universe villains in "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse"?

Who are all the different versions of Spider-Man, Spider-Woman and the alternate universe villains in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse? After seeing the movie yesterday afternoon, I was curious of who all the Multiverse characters were.

marvel spider-man spider-man-across-the-spider-verse

0

Q: What does "alpha" mean?

In Avatar (2009) extended version, Max and Dr. Grace are trying to wake Jake Sully up from the pod: GRACE : Jake. Jake! MAX: He's in alpha. He's coming out right now. What does "alpha" mean?

avatar

DavidW

16:55

It's interesting. I just looked at my history and I started flagging posts a bit more than 4.5 years ago (Oct. 2018). A quarter of all spam flags I've raised in that time have been in the past 2 months! This KP person is very persistent, but I haven't seen their spam on other sites I'm on. What's special about SF&F?

SmokeDetector

17:17

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Link at beginning of answer (36): In Project Hail Mary, why wasn't nitrogen in the normal human atmosphere a problem for the taumoeba?‭ by Cassiopeia‭ on scifi.SE

SmokeDetector

17:41

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Few unique characters in body, repeating words in body (135): testtesttesttesttest from i is game‭ by user164851‭ on scifi.SE

Marvin

-5

Q: testtesttesttesttest from i is game

testtesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttesttest isi si si sisis si s s iis is is is is is is i isi sis i si si s is. is. is. i.s testtest is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. is. i...

revenge-of-the-sith

DavidW

18:10

@SmokeDetector How do these completely non-responsive "answers" get upvotes?

@Jenayah *waves*

Jenayah

@DavidW Hiya :D

How are things?? :)

DavidW

Same stuff, different day... Got the same bug reported for the 3rd time in a month, but nobody who's reporting it can ever manage to explain what page they were on, much less what they were doing or how they got there, so we can't debug it.

You? What's new?

Jenayah

Ahah same with the new QA team over there :) "sometimes the file's size as displayed in the table does not match the one on the drive" _ "Never saw that, but no problem, we'll look into it. So, sometimes being...? Often? Are we talking 1% difference or 1000%? What was the data you sent to the sensor pre-processing? What kind of filter did you apply?" _ "uuuuh I don't remember" _ "😤"

DavidW

Fortunately our QA team is better trained than that, and all their bugs come with scripts, and sometimes even test data, to reproduce. (It helps that they're working from standard patterns using mostly canned data in testing.) But this is coming from a customer, and because I'm 3 hops away from the customer, and isolated from any PII I can't even tell if it's ever the same customer.

Jenayah

18:34

Other than that, adulting, I guess. Lots of stuff since 2021. Like...

Moved out of my 1-bedroom studio to love with my partner, lived through a big big BIG reorganisation at work, ran through dozens of board games with my partner, got married, bought a house, almost ended up homeless because the notary office screwed up big time, lived through another reorganisation at work,

moved into the house, spent 4 months' worth of free time adding insulation to the walls with my partner, got Covid, guess what new reorg at work, planted a lot of stuff in the garden that doesn't seem to ever grow, fought my hierarchy NOT to become a software architect, won for the time being,

managed to finally find a chill mobile game that I did not give up on after a week, continued to go to the charity association on Saturdays, handled re-increasingly difficult family stuff, biked here and there, refacto'ed months of if/Elif/Elif/elif/else code into an actual Finite State Machine, tried jiu-jitsu, hated it, discovered I'm getting allergic to pollen

Marvin

0

Q: Is the Ahsoka novel still canon?

In the final episode of Tales of the Jedi, the story is very similar to the plotline of the 2016 Ahsoka novel. I think Filoni did confirm that the episode is based on his original ideas for the novel. And it wasn't explicitly said, but it is hinted that the Inquisitor that Ahsoka fights in TotJ...

star-wars ahsoka-tano tales-of-the-jedi

Jenayah

Read a lot of comics, watched a lot of series with my partner, read way less books than I'd have wanted (but still more than in yester years,so it's a win), had my "fireman" status at work made more or less official, meaning I have to cover lots of more or less interested stuff but never in an expectable schedule, had some friends over, yadda yadda yadda

Mostly I'm really <expletives I'm sure are still not OK with the COC> tired, which does sound normal once I've re-read that summary block, but still 🤣

DavidW

Actually, for all the pace sounds frenetic that sounds like a lot more accomplishment than I've managed in 2 years. Congrats on the marriage, house, and other adult bits, BTW.

It is a lot, I'm quite impressed. :D

Jenayah

Thank you :)

DavidW

Three re-orgs in two years is a lot, though. Like, crazy a lot. You ever think of finding a different job?

Jenayah

18:45

(well technically it's not called a marriage in France but a Pacte Civil de Solidarité... Mostly it's the same legal status than a marriage, tax benefits and all, good separated between each partner, but it's free and a lot less of bother than an actual marriage, no ceremony with dozens of guests and all 😂)

DavidW

...sort of what a marriage ceremony should be, shorn of its religious trappings and one-upmanship. :-P

(Cynical, moi? Rien.)

FuzzyBoots

19:32

@Jenayah Japanese or Brazilian Jujitsu?

Jenayah

@DavidW yes and no. The reports are fairly common (for that company) on big projects like mine, they do bring a lot of problems in the development process, but overall my direct project hierarchy (SwEM) is golden, he does his best and more to shield us devs from the money/planning management folks and their eternal penny-pinching, so that we can work in (relative) peace.

Most of the colleagues I get along with, the rest I can just work with for what I we have to do together. I can theoretically manage my own hours, within limits but always useful to have. The tech stuff is more or less interesting at times but I like being able to touch everything (and I like being recognised as someone who can touch everything).

Friday afternoons are historically "go home earlier" which is plenty nice too. Dress code is inexistent, I'm in black T-shirt + sport shoes + hiking trousers and I'm pretty much overdressing :D

And last but not least, I've been on this project from the very beginning and I want to see its end 😁

So overall, bunch of bureaucrats be breaking my patience at times, but not enough to drop all this in the hope that there's less bureaucracy elsewhere... Lets' be honest there's probably not :)

(sorry for the delay, got sidetracked)

DavidW

@Jenayah Not at all, it's not like I'm sitting waiting for you to reply. :D

Jenayah

@FuzzyBoots Brazilian. No idea what it would have been like for Japanese JJ. To be honest though, I'm fully aware that me and my partner disliking the week we took was probably partially due to 1/ us both being hands-feet boxers prior, and 2/ the club mentality being pretty... Inefficient? To newcomers

"Okay, I will do nothing while you attack me." _ "dude, I've done this for 20 minutes in my life. I have no idea what the starting position is, but I sure can try to replicate the exercise if you start attacking" and then they go all slow and artificial, while we'd clearly stated that we were both used to take hits and not exactly combat-shy

DavidW

I admit that I believe I understand your point of view. A previous place I worked at I lasted at least 5 years longer than one might think; some of my co-workers bailed when we got bought by a big US multinational, and the culture shock was potentially pretty huge. But the rest of us on the dev team stayed because we had a huge amount of mutual respect, and 2 layers of management above us determined to keep as much of the garbage off us as possible.

Jenayah

19:48

Also, while size and weight difference don't matter (that much) in French boxing, they very much do in BJJ. At some point I was signalling a guy that he had "won", and he was "no, the grip is not complete, that does not count as an ending". Hm, you're 80 kg, I'm 50, and you're literally sitting on my chest while I have all members incapacitated. Fairly sure it's ended

DavidW

It mostly worked; that team was hugely creative and productive and we all got to do challenging, deep, new, fun things. And we just tried to ride out the churn of conflicting directives and priorities that changed every quarter for the sake of doing interesting things with good people.

Jenayah

In boxing you make up for weight difference with speed and different attack zones, even at beginner level 😁

@DavidW aye

DavidW

@Jenayah In my experience the only cure for bureaucracy is to work for a small company. But there's a magic size between "not big enough for bureaucracy" and "too small not to have executive meddling;" I'd put that at between approximately 40 and 160 people.

Basically the size between when you need a dedicated HR person and the size at which the HR team can't share an office.

Jenayah

Plus now that all the "work hard to get that school the hell away of my mother's home, work hard to be financially independent, work a lot because I hate being alone at my place and I'd rather be doing work" is finished...

... I'd rather just be able to come home and enjoy time with my partner, or me time in a house I like, than having a more fulfilling job... But undertaking months of mentally draining job searching+job quitting+teaching my replacement+being onboarded at the new place+different schedule, different pros/cons to get there.

I know, pretty disillusioned and indifferent talk for someone who haven't even reached 30, but oh well 😅

@DavidW I've been very put off to small companies by an internship that went... Poorly

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Offensive body detected, offensive title detected, potentially bad keyword in body, potentially bad keyword in title, toxic body detected (164): (potentially offensive title -- see MS for details)‭ by user164858‭ on scifi.SE

Jenayah

19:59

(well it was a combination of internship "management", roommates being a hassle, foreign country being expensive, to be honest)

@SmokeDetector tpu

SmokeDetector

@Jenayah You are not a privileged user. Please see the privileges wiki page for information on what privileges are and what is expected of privileged users.

Jenayah

Oh duck I forgot 🙄

SmokeDetector

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Mostly punctuation marks in title, repeating characters in title (101): Can't you just say "sorry it was my fault"? /////////////////////////////‭ by user164860‭ on scifi.SE

Jenayah

Tpu'd at Charcoal 😁

And again :p

And again for the next one :p

DavidW

@Jenayah That's absolutely fair. I've worked at a couple that had serious issues. (One I was only at for a few months before leaving, and less than 2 years later the founders were before the courts suing one another.)

Jenayah

20:11

@DavidW grabbing popcorn while watching them must have been fun

DavidW

It's always a bit of a gamble, joining a new company. The best way to find a good company to work at is to keep in touch with your ex-co-workers, or at least the ones you work well with and respect.

@Jenayah I was well quit of them by then, and good riddance. I only found out from a friend who, it turned out, knew one of the founders, and that was years later after the drama had played out.

But the best job I had, and the one I learned and grew the most from, was a company with about 50 people, that grew slowly over a few years to a bit over a hundred.

Jenayah

@DavidW noted. So far though, all of my "ex-colleagues" are still technically colleagues, just not on the same projects. (Same company, lots of big projects, lots of environment from one building to another)

DavidW

(Then, of course, they got bought...)

When I was just out of uni, it was my classmates who formed my initial group of contacts; one of them pointed me at the aforementioned job.

8 spam in a row now. I can't believe it's increasing.

Jenayah

Pretty much all of my school friends were in different majors than mine 😂

@DavidW little bit more and I'll have caught up on my number of yearly spam/RA flags 🤣

DavidW

@Jenayah I think I'm at that point in just the past 2 weeks. It's crazy; why us?

Jenayah

20:26

I'd have no idea, considering how active I've been the past two weeks... I mean months... I mean years?

But well, it's been a meh day so if some spammer wants to try me at whack-a-mole, I say bring it 😁

DavidW

*pictures Jenayah tying a kerchief around her head and picking up a large mallet*

Jenayah

Mallet not so much, but with all the insulation work, you can picture me with a mortar blender and a jigsaw XD

Also, a dozen vials of physiological saline for the dust that inevitably ends up in our eyes 😅 (not toxic though, just painful)

DavidW

I dunno; I have done some plastering and the MSDS for those products can be pretty scary. I always wore high-quality filter masks and eye protection.

(For "some" read "several entire rooms, including ceilings.")

Jenayah

21:02

That was cork though, so no risk for the amounts we were handling. I do have glasses for when I mix the whitewash mortar, but it quickly appeared that cutting straight with the jigsaw, while wearing glasses, was a fool's errand

When jigsawing indoors and making mortar I wore masks, obviously

Adamant

21:15

@DavidW - They are also trolling many other websites about being banned for their trolling.

DavidW

@Adamant I guess I don't have the right mindset for a troll, I just don't get it.

Jenayah

Wy isn't their main account deleted, by the way?

DavidW

They actually have a real account?

Jenayah

Incapable Troll

1 1

It's a doozy :p

DavidW

> The suspension period ends on Apr 9, 2123 at 14:11.

Jenayah

21:26

Winner

DavidW

I don't know what's worse; a hundred-year suspension, or a hundred-year suspension timed to the minute.

Jenayah

Doesn't the minute immediately comes with the time of ban application?

DavidW

I'm sure it's always there; the end time of the suspension period would presumably be stored as a date, and that will have millisecond precision unless you intentionally round it off.

Nice to see that they've moved to 64 bit dates though. :D

Adamant

@Jenayah Is someone trolling the troll? Or are they insulting themself?

Jenayah

@Adamant beats me

I got the profile link from the Meta discussion on Discord though, so it seems to be the real deal, unlikely to be a fake

xkcd

22:15

After a pail of water was thrown on the Wicked Witch of the West outside Salt Lake City, Utah's Great Salt Lake was measured to be 7 parts per trillion witch by volume.

Transcript for

The Restaurant at the End of the Univ…