The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Marvin

05:54

1

Q: Looking for an Ark Spaceship story from the 1960's

I am searching for a story and it's author from the 1960's about an ark spaceship that has been traveling space in search of a new planet. The hero tends the onboard forest which produces oxygen for the travelers. Although he is more intelligent than his peers, as a young person he was passed ove...

spaceship

Marvin

07:09

-2

Q: Movie about wife having sex with kidnapper

Wife and husband travelling at night in the rain are abducted by two men the husband later finds out that the wife works with the kidnappers when she has consensual sex with them on the couch .Is it a tales from crypt episode? Or some movie ?

movie

Marvin

08:50

0

Q: What should I know and watch from The Walking Dead series before watching The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon?

I recently learned that there is a new spin-off TV series in The Walking Dead universe that focuses on one of the most popular characters from the original series: The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. What do I need to watch or know from the other The Walking Dead shows before I start this one? Are the...

Marvin

11:22

0

Q: Anime about a boy and a girl trying to keep three robots safe from capture

I'm searching for an old anime, I think it was the '90s when I saw it but it's probably from the '80s. There were two kids helping either two or three robots (about their size if I recall). The general plot seemed to be trying to keep them from some organization or the military trying to capture ...

story-identification anime

Marvin

12:12

0

Q: What's the title of this comic about an emerald iceberg?

I'm looking for a Disney comic, in which the characters (pretty sure it's about Uncle $crooge and his nephews, but it could also be Mickey Mouse), go after an Iceberg which becomes green when the sunlight go through it. Those who found it think it must contain a gigantic emerald, and everyone sta...

story-identification comics disney

Marvin

13:28

0

Q: Can this be translated into English?

Can this tattoo be translated into English?

tolkien-languages

DavidW

13:58

@Marvin I completely disagree with this being on-topic. We might as well accept any question about the Simpsons because radiation isn't green, so that's clearly science fiction. And South Park because Mechastreisand. And Coyote & Road Runner since Coyote is building rockets and huge electromagnets. And everything else that's the least bit counterfactual. Heck, dream sequences might be alternate realities, so let's have questions about Dallas too.

Laurel

15:00

20

Q: Are the Donald Duck comics on-topic?

We have already determined that Duck Tales is on topic. Is Donald Duck on topic? There was already 1 question on the Duck universe, How wealthy is Uncle Scrooge in the Don Rosa/Carl Barks universe?, but after I created my second question, What was Scrooge McDuck protected against because of his ...

discussion scope

b_jonas

15:14

Smart toasters are dumb; blog.reedsy.com/short-story/7psp98 — Valorum Apr 18 at 2:26

^ xkcd.com/293

DavidW

@Laurel I didn't say I was confused by the community consensus, I asserted that the community consensus was, IMO, stupid.

b_jonas

I was wondering if Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney the game was on topic. It seems to me that there are too few fantasy elements so it's off-topic. But the problem is that it's got many sequels, and all those sequels are fantasy. And the tricky part is that the first three games (with better graphics) are then republished together as Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy. Does publishing that way make the whole thing on topic?

A funny comparison is Jules Verne's Michel Strogoff, which was published serially first, and only becomes sci-fi retroactively when a sci-fi element is revealed in the very last chapter. Everyone reads it as a novel now, so I think the whole thing counts as on topic sci-fi.

Laurel

17

Q: If a sequel contains SFF content, does that make the original property on-topic as well?

There are a number of vanilla films, books and TV shows that have included science-fiction or fantasy content in sequels. The Oscar™-nominated "Weekend at Bernie's" had zero fantasy content. The sequel revolved around Bernie being reanimated with voodoo magic (with predictably hilarious results...

discussion scope

May be worth clarifying tho

b_jonas

I'm not asking this for any practical reason, I don't have a question about Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney right now.

Laurel

I'm just here to link to the relevant meta post (that applies to both conversations in here actually)

b_jonas

15:25

@Laurel Yeah. I think Michel Strogoff is simpler, even if it was published serially it was clearly intended as a whole serial novel, whereas Ace Attorney only got sequels planned after the first game sold well enough.

I would say Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney counts as off-topic (you can of course still ask about the minor fantasy elements) but I'm not sure about this.

I know little about Donal Duck and Duck Tales so I can't tell about their on-topicness.

Mithical

@Laurel you're ribbing me about alt text from six years ago? :'(

Anyway, fixed the dead image and added alt text this time :P

Laurel

@Mithical FOR SHAME! But actually I'm the same way since I only really got into accessibility after I had been posting here for a while

Mithical

Unfortunately, the no alt text query pushed past 11k on SFF during the strike and it's proving difficult to bring it back down...

Laurel

16:02

@Mithical I once thought of writing a bot that would prompt users to make their own alt text. It never got past the idea stage since I'm not sure that I actually want to pay for hosting

Mithical

cough cough cough meta.stackexchange.com/q/352683/294691

Laurel

@Mithical You know, going out in public in public when you're so obviously afflicted with something means that other people might catch it too!

Mithical

heh

Marvin

16:24

-1

Q: If the Star Wars galaxy, were to have a tech revolution after Rise of Skywalker; what would it entail?

The Prequel Trilogy proved that Star Wars technology does advance (but slowly) and I believe there is room for technological booms for infinitum. While it is unknown if Star Wars has long past the Singularity (or had several already); I wonder what a tech revolution in Star Wars would look like. ...

star-wars canon biology genetic-engineering

Mithical

16:36

@Laurel I've been considering running a Meta.SE contest where users can earn bounties for going around the network adding alt text, but that'd require having each user maintain a list of edits they've done and then have someone trusted review every single edit to make sure it's actually useful. It'd also require being careful of site-specific policies (such as the "homepage flooding" policy on a few sites). A bit too much effort for me at the moment.

But cc @SpencerG since we were talking about community(-run) contests.

DavidW

@Mithical I'm not sure that crafting useful alt text isn't exactly the wrong thing to try and gamify.

Mithical

The entire SE system is built on gamifying high-quality content.

DavidW

Especially these days, someone's just going to start feeding the pictures to some chatbot and pasting the resulting description into the alt text.

Mithical

But that's why I mentioned that every edit would have to be reviewed manually by someone trusted to do so.

DavidW

@Mithical True, but alt text is meaningfully different in that it's not something that attracts a lot of eyeballs for review; hardly any, really.

Laurel

16:43

@Mithical Yeah, the homepage thing sucks. I wish that there was a way to get around it, somehow, for any type of necessary edit. For example, imagine if you made tons of edits at once: Instead of the homepage being 40 old posts you bumped and 10 other posts, it could be 49 other posts and "user### bumped 40 old posts" with a link to your edit activity. (We wouldn't want new questions/answers in that batch, otherwise it would be the same problem but slightly different)

Cereal Bot

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Research

posted on September 11, 2023 by Zach Weinersmith

Click here to go see the bonus panel!Hovertext: I have this fear that one day an all-powerful AI will be able to examine a statement you made and determine precisely where you got the information and it will be the most shame-filled moment of your life. Today's News: Very sweet review of Bea Wolf from Gene Ambaum, whom I've known since ancient times.

DavidW

And unlike a post, people can't up- or down-vote alt text to encourage good and discourage poor quality content.

Laurel

@DavidW You'd just have to be careful about it. It's easy to create bad alt text, plus if you're suggesting edits, you have to be careful enough to not make your reviewers go "wtf, is this person blind? nothing changed in the diff!" (yes, irony intended)

Mithical

Also, such a contest would have to have instructions for how to do it properly in the post itself, with examples. Anyway, chasing Meta.SE rep requires a very specific set of interests :)

Laurel

(I try to also suggest other changes, which can be hard to justify in some posts)

Too bad curation itself can't be bountied. There are so many people behind the scenes that do so much for no rep.

Mithical

16:48

imagine if a helpful flag gave +1 rep

(up to a cap of, say, 1k rep, to match suggested edits)

@DavidW Let's say, outside of the reviewers needed to approve suggested edits, you had five users trusted to review alt text for such a contest - such as, for instance, the three of us here. At least one of those users would need to approve the edit for it to count for the contest, and if it wasn't good, one of those users can then submit an edit to fix it.

That's why it'd be a lot of effort to run such a thing, since it's a lot of oversight that'd be necessary.

I'd also want it to be points-based and you can get more points for fixing other things at the same time, such as dead links and images.

Laurel

It would be perhaps easier to restrict it to a certain type of image. Like we could tell people to go out and find images that are of text and replace them (yeah, barring the exceptions for when you really want the effect of the original typography). That's perhaps the easiest type of image to handle

Mithical

Finding just those would be quite difficult, though, since it... doesn't have text describing it :)

Laurel

17:09

Depends what sites you're on

I mod a site called Writing whose name might have some not so subtle implications on what type of images we get

Mithical

Fair enough. Writing hasn't been one of the sites I've focused on

DavidW

@Mithical That it would. You'd need to find enough people who could devote enough time to it, for long enough. (I could maybe commit an hour or so on a day-by-day basis, but not as a blanket commitment for a week or a month.)

Marvin

2

Q: Hired By A Necromancer: Story Identification

Looking for the identity of a short story. Heard it on a podcast 5 or so years ago and I know there is a short story written somewhere. A man is hired as an assistant to a necromancer because of his skills in translation. Set in the 1950's....ish? He doesn't know that he has been hired by a necro...

story-identification short-stories horror

Laurel

I'm not sure I have enough time T.T

I never have enough time

Mithical

Being unemployed for the moment does have its advantages :p

Although I've been procrastinating finishing this

Laurel

17:17

@Mithical AHAH right now is work time for me (shhhh)

DavidW

You'd also need a mechanism to submit and review entries that mimicked a review queue, which might be possible with people self-reporting their edits to a chat room, but you'd need a way to distribute "points," make sure submitted edits didn't get missed...

Mithical

@DavidW That's simple enough - everyone entering maintains a list of their own edits in their own Meta.SE answer.

DavidW

@Laurel Likewise. I won't tell on you if you don't tell on me. :D

Laurel

@Mithical Maybe I can take that course because my company is all for professional development

Mithical

@Laurel A lot of it so far is extremely basic, but I'm only a third of the way through. It's been mostly useful highlighting different tools I wasn't familiar with, such as a phone screen reader or a braille display.

DavidW

17:19

@Mithical I did a couple of those courses years ago; long enough that I wonder if the advice/rules have changed.

Laurel

Hmmm, yeah. I think I'm missing out on the full experience since I only use a screen reader on my phone instead of on my computer

I do web dev so this is pretty relevant to my job

DavidW

At the time it gave me a good foundational basis for some well-deserved stringent feedback on some stupid ideas the designers were trying to bake into our product, though.

Mithical

I eventually want to get certified as an accessibility tester, so this is some... preliminary studying

DavidW

One of my co-workers wrote a simple tool that basically ripped the text (plus button/action names and alt texts) out of a page into a LaTeX-like document (so having indication of headings, but removing styles) in page traversal order.

Since were writing a page toolkit (not pages themselves) this was really useful since we could see how our widgets broke down when someone else configured them and built them into a page.

Mithical

DavidW

17:30

Since all the professional UX people had been laid off, we relied a lot on tooling to try to watch for errors. We also wrote a tool that searched all the HTML and CSS for colours, and then did distance calculations and flagged anything too close as a bug on the designers. They really loved that one. :D

Mithical

Sorta like that?

"242 errors, 620 contrast errors" - i.sstatic.net/oD7Sj.png

hmmmm

Laurel

@DavidW Chrome has the accessibility tree, but it's too hard to use

I already use WAVE

Probably what using a full screen reader would do is allow me to get really into it and learn how to be faster navigating the page. Like skipping to the next landmark or something. It's harder to do that on mobile VO (tho you can do it a little)

DavidW

I'd have to see what it looked like on a page with actual content instead of just controls. This was also long enough ago that we were competing (internally) with another toolkit built on the then-new Angular 0.9, so a lot of the ARIA stuff wasn't really well-known or baked into browsers yet.

@Mithical Contrast errors? Yeah, exactly like that. Like I said though, this was 2012-ish, so we didn't have any tools like that.

One of the things I wanted to try, once we were given permission to dump IE6, was to invert the page order. Instead of putting a hidden "skip to content" link ahead of the navigation stuff, using flexbox we could have put the content first in the page and then just reordered the display in the browser. I imagined having a "go to navigation" link instead and proceeding directly into the page content so a screen reader wouldn't need to take positive action to avoid the menus and stuff.

Laurel

17:59

@DavidW That's an interesting idea. I've never seen that done, so I wonder if there's a reason why not. Maybe because it would be hard to go to the content if you decided there was nothing useful in the menu?

DavidW

18:23

@Laurel Well, it's a navigation action to get to the menu/navigation part, so the back action should return you to the content. In theory (my knowledge is seriously out of date, so I may be wrong) it's potentially simpler than two action "HOME" "skip to content" if you decide (after you start) you don't want to go through the navigation stuff the other way.

But I've never worked on a page that's properly set up with ARIA 1.2 tags on all the content, so it could be simpler to deal with it now.

Marvin

0

Q: Why does Alex sing "Singin' in the Rain" in the bathtub in "A Clockwork Orange" (1971)?

Knowing that he is in the home of the victim of his rape and assault, and the man can hear him singing, why would he sing the same song while he is bathing in the bathtub that he sang when he was raping the man's wife and beating him? Wouldn't he realize that the man would recognize the song and...

clockwork-orange

b_jonas

@Mithical can I claim points for edits that I've done before this system was set up?

Mithical

In this hypothetical scenario? No, it'd be for edits made during the period of the contest

b_jonas

also can I get partial points if I correct mistakes in existing but badly OCRed text?

I know I have some edits like that, though they may be on Lit SE rather than here

Mithical

that'd probably be worth a point

b_jonas

18:37

@Laurel how have you not seen that done? the default skin on en.wikipedia does that

Laurel

@b_jonas I don't usually navigate by keyboard unless I'm testing keyboard accessibility :p

DavidW

@b_jonas It does? If I look at the returned source, it starts with all the nav/site settings stuff, including the list of all supported languages, before getting to the content.

Laurel

You know, now that I think about it, you could just post a Q&A announcing what you plan to edit and your progress on editing it and you'd get upvotes the old fashioned way. For example, I made a similar announcement here (but not for rep, because I'm so noble and also you can't get rep on child metas):

56

Q: Removing link shorteners from posts!

According to Blacklist the use of common link shorteners in posts, SO no longer allows most short links. (Note that some of the blacklisted domains are not technically link shorteners.) As someone who edits old posts, I don't like to be surprised when I cannot submit my edit because the rules ha...

discussion edits short-links

Of course, the whole don't bump too much thing applies

b_jonas

@DavidW Doesn't look like that to me. Unless you're looking at the mobile interface under en.m.wikipedia.org rather than the default one at en.wikipedia.org ; the mobile has some navigation in front, but even there the languages seem to be after the main content

DavidW

@b_jonas I just hit the regular web page, then looked at the returned HTML source.

It does start with a "skip to content" link, which is good, because there's a lot of stuff in front of it.

b_jonas

18:53

odd, I may have to look at this further for why we're seeing different things

@Mithical that's a pity. I like points and would like to claim some for edits I've already done. scifi.stackexchange.com/a/256997/4918

Can I get a point if I add transcript for voice in a video, not an image? scifi.stackexchange.com/a/213777/4918

Laurel

@b_jonas There's no good reason to leave the original image in the post, by the way.

b_jonas

@Laurel there is no reason to leave it if the image is easily accessible, like a screenshot from a book in archive.org ; I left it here because it's from an anthology that the reader might not be able to easily access, you can delete the image if you believe that my transcript is accurate, but it isn't always so

Marvin

19:46

0

Q: Book I read about 2017 with a society with alien orbs that enhance you

Some kids live in a society where they have colored marble-like orbs that enhance beauty, your voice, strength, speed, etc.. There's a rare golden orb that they find, and every major person wants it because it's one of a kind. It ends with the revelation that they're the baby aliens of bigger orb...

story-identification novel aliens

Marvin

20:11

4

Q: Can you identify the movie "Rat King" (or something like that)?

The film is very old. I am 98% it's in black and white. 95% that it's even a silent movie. It was probably from a Scandinavian country. The Hero and his girl fight against rats that can take human form. It's quite easy to remember by the signature trope: When his girlfriend wants to have sex with...

story-identification movie

1

Q: A fantasy story about a king who forgets everything after drinking the incorrect potion

I'm looking for a short fantasy story that I read in the early 1980s. Because of the story's not child-friendly nature, I am almost sure I did read it in a young adult fantasy book with no illustrations and probably as a part of a collection of similar stories. Sadly, I don't remember the title o...

story-identification short-stories

Marvin

21:02

1

Q: Is the Thing a man covered in rocks or a man made of rocks?

A member of the Fantastic Four, pilot Ben Grimm is transformed into the super-strong, ultra-durable rock man known as the Thing after cosmic radiation mutates him and the rest of his team. The Thing has one of the most iconic looks in comics, but I am not familiar enough with his physiology to kn...

marvel fantastic-four the-thing

xkcd

21:21

Sequoia Brussels sprouts are delicious but it's pretty hard to finish one.

Transcript for

The Restaurant at the End of the Univ…