English Language & Usage: Multi-Layered Discourse Room

Q: This is a rhetorical question to make overt the IQ of the addressee pseudonym, the potential reader of the latter

8:36 AM

-2

IQ TEST: If you are 2 percent sure that you are not sure, what are you sure about?

vocabulary

8:49 AM

@Robusto well, the closer we came to level 12, the more the activity rate dropped. Stupid, really. At 10 points to go we had one out of three people active. (And God knows for how many of them "active" was "log on once a day and spend a bar for 3/7 60/70".) Most of our farming material is now below us, soon we can only farm them for 1 point. So, short of getting 40 fresh mercs, I see no way for us to get the 350 points needed to reach the next level, for which the reward is useless.

I kind of want to get to level 150, just for shit and giggles, but for that I only need to log in once in a while and spend a bar on AF4.

But for the time being I'm just taking a break. My current goal being simply not to fire up the game today.

good morning

Alohae's.

I'm quite a lackadaisical WMT player. I think I'm still at level 11.

Q: Can 'whose' be used for objects?

9:05 AM

Oh FFS.

1

Possible Duplicate: Is the word 'whose' referring to an inanimate object correct in this sentence? Is there a more appropriate word? Basically I'm wondering if a sentence like this is grammatically correct: "Meaning is thwarted by its delivery, whose poetry is relative to taste...

grammar

I think I must renew my pledge.

what is your pledge?

Dear next person who answers a question about a vs. an, whose vs. whichs, or the Oxford comma: you are awesome and I love you, but your answer will be deleted without further notice. Do not waste your time and mine. Thank you.

5

Anything you could say has been said, seven times over, and much better, too.

oh! that pledge

Yeah.

I spent the entire Monday merging questions.

It's a major PITA for everyone involved.

that sounds disheartening

how many merges happened?

9:13 AM

The asker wastes time asking something that has been asked, the answerers waste time answering something that has been answered, and the mods waste time merging stuff that has been merged over and over and over again in the past.

@MattЭллен no idea. I think I could count them in the mod activity list, but the point is not that the number was huge, but that just one merge can amount to a mountain of work.

I see

I have to look at every comment and every answer, and clean them up so they fit the new context.

But now let's talk about some funny shit or something.

Thanks, Reg. It can't be easy

For starters, I saw Inglorious Basterds yesterday. @Rob

Oh! did you enjoy it? I haven't seen it

I tried to attend band practice without my drum sticks

didn't work so well

9:18 AM

I wouldn't call it a disappointment, I wouldn't even say I expected more, but I dunno, I found Reservoir Dogs or Kill Bill II to be stronger.

There were lots of intense scenes in IB. Where I could barely breathe. But the thing is, I expected them. But I didn't know what else I had to expect, and turns out that there wasn't much.

Oh, and one thing was rather disturbing. Lots of allusions to, or even direct quotes from Kill Bill. Not dialogue, but visuals or music.

That's odd, considering it's a film set in WW2

There were at least three tracks that I recognized from Kill Bill. One was identical, another one was a slight variation, and the third one was an allusion of sorts, but a rather obvious one to me.

was it jarring, or did the things fit?

It fit nicely. But certainly Tarantino can't be out of music just yet.

Indeed, there's been over 9000 songs written since Pulp Fiction

9:25 AM

So perhaps he's just finding his One Style. Like Oliver Stone, whose movies you can smell from a mile away. Which would be a pity, really.

Natural Born Killers is Any Given Sunday is U Turn.

I heard of his films. I'm not sure I've seen any. Maybe JFK

Maybe Tarantino's going through a phase...

To know for sure I'd have to see Death Proof and somehow I really don't want to. That one didn't really sit well with anybody at all.

Or maybe his pulp fiction style is being honed to perfection

IMDB tells me Kill Bill 3 has been announced

Haha. Yeah right. And it will take place on the Titanic 3.

I have footage of Kill Bill III right here.

►

Maybe he'll jump on the webisodes band wagon and make it in 100 parts

hmmm, I can see what should be happening on the time scroll bar, but the video is very green

9:35 AM

I can't see most videos at all because they are not available in my country, so I have to post them blindly so to speak.

►

Try this one.

this one works for me:

►

Well it doesn't work for me exactly as well as the other two don't.

Ah, I see, Kill Bill 3 is about chess and lady boys

Q: use of "to be" and "by having"

No, it's about breaking the fourth wall and telling David Carradine's story.

R.I.P.

0

here i can not understand use of "to be sorted" Parallelizing a sequential sorting algorithm involves distributing the elements to be sorted onto the available processes here i can not understand use of " by having " We can perform comparison by having both processes send their elements to...

tense

image not found. also the uri for the image keeps bouncing me to the blog's front page

@RegDwightΒВBẞ8 so lite it's floating.

9:46 AM

@MattЭллен I am tempted to answer "No". I am evil like that today.

Q: Parentheses around more than one paragraph

lol

Meysam رها در بند

can I replace "against" with a better word here? or is it OK? "to secure the network against malicious attacks"

Sounds fine to me...

It is OK

thanks

9:50 AM

0

Does English allow one to put parentheses around more than one paragraph? Example: Paragraph 1. (Paragraph 2. Paragraph 3.) Paragraph 4. (Of course, this is just a simple example. In reality, it looks more clean since the paragraphs are more than one line long, and are not se...

sentence-structure

Why that tag? (@_@)

paragraphs are just big sentences

Nah, the game goes like this, try to figure out what the OP started typing that got autocompleted to that tag.

I suppose it was "structure".

structure

jinx

Hugh, cherry coke.

Hello, BTW.

9:53 AM

hugs cherry coke

@RegDwightΒВBẞ8 Cool. What did you think? Hmm, reading on in the transcript, it seems like you were underwhelmed. I just drank it in for the texture and for the dialogue and for the performances, which were all fascinating. I'd put it in the top three Tarantino films.

Hello, Gigili

Meysam رها در بند

Hello gigili

I do wonder how it pans out for other sites. And what is the most hilarious combination in history. As in, you had a question about cars, and started typing "car", but then it got autocompleted to "oscars-2012" and you said, oh right, that one's okay as well.

@Robusto read on from there.

:D

9:56 AM

Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Inglourious Basterds, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill II — Top 5 Tarantino films, in that order.

@Robusto well not underwhelmed by the pieces I knew I wouldn't be underwhelmed by. But underwhelmed by the rest.

@Robusto I'd put the last two way higher.

It's a weird comedy. But Christoph Waltz's performance was outstanding.

The cinematography was excellent. But I knew it would be excellent. Christoph Waltz was spectacular. But I knew he would be spectacular. Two scenes had me at the edge of my seat, start to finish, but I knew these exact two scenes would have me at the edge of my seat, start to finish.

Now, what I didn't know was, oh say, the rest of the story, or, say, Brad Pitt's role in all of this, or whatever. Well, turns out there isn't much to the rest of the story, and Brad Pitt is basically nonexistent. Etc.

It had this murky transference between chilling drama and murky caricature. But I do think QT pulled it off.

@RegDwightΒВBẞ8 Yeah, Brad Pitt's role as Captain Redneck America was the least interesting thing about the film.

The film as a whole is great. And a big service to Germany, as Spiegel once put it.

10:01 AM

How is it a service to Germany?

Because it finally puts an end to all this nazi shit.

When you can make movies like that about the nazis, you know you're over them for good.

By lampooning it the way it did?

I mean, it's one thing to make The Great Dictator or whatever. But it's another thing entirely to just rewrite history for the heck of it.

Excellent.

Maybe you're right. I kind of think that sort of thing put an end to the Soviet Union. When they became a punchline, they just sort of gave up. Yakov Smirnov brings down the commies. Who'da thunk it?

OK, helps bring them down.

Yeah. Well, not him perhaps, he's virtually unknown outside the US. But yeah.

Oh, and I had to laugh at Brad Pitt talking Italian. So I suppose it was okay to have him in after all.

10:06 AM

What amazes me is that Tarantino can write one of his big, engrossing, dialogue-heavy black comedies and have it work in four languages.

Well it only had to work in three here.

I guess I will watch the original one day.

This one didn't have an English track.

There's more dialogue in one scene in a Tarantino film than there were in the entire three films of the Bourne series.

@RegDwightΒВBẞ8 WTF? They dubbed it?

It was on TV, and on RTL at that.

RTL?

I was surprised to see it there.

@Robusto yeah kind of like Fox News for imbeciles.

10:08 AM

When I was in Germany there were like three TV stations.

@RegDwightΒВBẞ8 No redundancies in chat.

Not a redundancy.

Fox news is for imbeciles.

But if you prefer a different metaphor, it's like Bild-Zeitung for people who can't read.

But it's too bad you saw it like that. Also, probably with commercial interruptions as well, yeah?

Nah I put it on hold for like half an hour, so I could fast forward through any commercial breaks.

10:10 AM

@RegDwightΒВBẞ8 Oh, Bunte for people with no depth? Something like that?

Yeah.

Anyway. At some points it did leave me wondering which language they must have been speaking in the original.

If I say "blahblah1 since blahblah2", do they need to be relevant?

Well, glad you saw it anyway. See it again in the original. (I mean, why the fuck would you dub that movie? Kind of defeats the purpose. Cripples it, in a way.)

Anyway, Mahlzeit.

In fact for a brief moment I thought they'd replaced German with French, just like they replaced English with German. But that made no sense, obviously.

Mahlzeit.

I said it anyway, relevant or irrelevant.

10:12 AM

@Gigili like "we've been correcting grammar since 2010"?

I think it's since as in because.

oh

so like "babby must grow up since we have adults"?

More like, "I have to go to bed since you insulted me in every possible way".

@MattЭллен Exactly.

Well, ideally the first part should be a logical consequence of the second part

More Cherry Coke for Matt.

10:16 AM

d'oh

cries explaining the 7 8 9 joke. This is what we've sunk to

well, it could be worse

we could be explaining why the chicken crossed the road

Well we did have to explain the one about Hollandaise. And that was during the beta.

So not much sinking, actually.

Meysam رها در بند

what's the opposite of "greeting message" (goodbye message?)

Q: What term is used for the closing of a letter?

Valediction.

4

Salutation is the term used to describe the beginning of a letter or other correspondence. What is the term used for the closing of a letter? Here are some examples: Yours truly, Sincerely, Best wishes, Love? Searching for 'antonym of salutation'1 was not helpful. EDIT: This need not be express...

terminology letter-writing correspondence

Meanwhile elsewhere,

0

Q: What does "Systematic analysis" mean?

I have a report due in soon and one of the pointers in the report guide is: "Give a systematic analysis of the relevance of your placement to your degree programme, and vice-versa;" Does anyone know how I would go about answering this question? I have tried googling but more or less every webpa...

writing questions writing-style

10:38 AM

jinx

Yeah.

I'm fresh out of coke.

just my luck

On the other hand, I am stocking up on maths jokes (edit: it's a PDF)

Too much cherry coke is no good for you're health.

so I heard

someone drank 18 litres a day and got sick

Ugh. PDF warning!

10:40 AM

oh, sorry, it's a PDF

Those maths jokes are surprisingly unfunny.

I mean, it's not the unfunniness that is surprising, but the degree.

my maths not being up to the level of a mathematician, I don't get some of the jokes

the "proof bys" are a bit dull

My maths is up to the level of getting most of them, but that is actually detrimental to finding them funny, unless you define "funny" as "wanting to stab oneself in the eye with sharp things over and over again".

A mathematician trying to construct a joke is like a cobbler trying to construct a space shuttle. Not his line of business.

I think the funniness is secondary to the grouping it cements

at least, that's what the paper is telling me

user19161

I am Superman. QED.

10:46 AM

You are not! QED

user19161

See the S?

which S?

user19161

S=Superman.

No, S = Jeff in your house.

user19161

But Superman also has an ass, it's true.

10:47 AM

the there are 7 of them right here: SSSSSSS

user19161

10:57 AM

@RegDwightΒВBẞ8 your

No way.

Grrrr.

> Matt Эллен already edited the body of this post; your edit must be more substantive to override the current edit.

hehehe. I'm your site, pre-empting your edits

The thing is, my edit was more substantive. Stupid algorithm always wrong.

uh

I fixed the title, the tags, the formatting, in addition to your stuffs.

11:04 AM

you've set the title to is

No you must reload.

It's a glitch.

oh! phew

Yeah no idea why that happens.

11:20 AM

Laters. Gotta commute.

CU

@RegDwight So, where have you been getting targets? That tracker's been down/out-of-date for a while, hasn't it?

I've been farming the same five-odd factions over and over again.

And yeah, the tracker went dead just a couple days after the official announcement.

Still, I sometimes use the numbers from April 15th as a reference.

Knowing that a faction has got X points in the last 3 weeks is sometimes enough to assess its activity.

user19161

openSuse 12.1 GNOME is very good.

Damn.

11:34 AM

But basically I'd always check Last Survivor, Immortals, Atlantis, Samurai Japan, Metalowa Husaria, Dulo, Juggernaut, destroying birds.

Actually a couple factions seem to have disbanded yesterday.

Or they are out of reach for us now.

Law and Order, for instance.

The Tyrant Fansite tracker only lists the FB factions, it seems.

I guess it's the latter, our level is simply too high. Otherwise it would be a really strange coincidence.

user19161

I learnt the pronunciation of "openSuse" only a few hours ago from Jimmy.

user19161

Now I am wondering how many names I have always read wrongly.

Actually, there's a Kong version, too.

user19161

11:40 AM

Wow there are 4 consecutive red badges on the main page, fascinating.

LaPingvino

@mplungjan Now it does

user19161

@LaPingvino OMG you just replied to a message three months ago!

@JasperLoy they are awarded by the same script, so they are always consecutive.

user19161

@RegDwightΒВBẞ8 Fascinating. QED.

LaPingvino

@JasperLoy I felt the original was outdated ;)

Mr. Shiny and New 安宇

11:53 AM

Morning all

Heyae's

KitFox

Hiya.