@Cerb This new phone upgrade plan from T-Mobile is interesting

German word order sure can be cool.

Earlier today have I a by an English in Taiwan studying person written story posted.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 No, no, not harpsichord. You're thinking of virgineagles.

@KitFox shudder

Harpies? I thought it was that thing you were supposed to tame.

@KitFox you're thinking of those ubiquitous non-toxic markers.

Not Sharpies...it's the other thing, you know, the stuff secondary to an explosion that can cause fatal hemorrhaging.

Oh FFS. Who wrote this crazy shit?

Probably my cow orker.

Wow. That took a whole lot less time to fix than I thought it would.

Yay, it's @Matt!

ohai :D

Where have you been, young man?

looks at watch pointedly

nowhere in particular. just hanging about

it's not even 8!

I don't remember seeing you yesterday, either.

In particular, I remember not seeing you yesterday.

yesterday? I was here

I even posted a blog post

How am I supposed to—oh, really?

scrunchy face

Carry on then.

carries on

Oh right, it was I who was not here yesterday.

@KitFox that's a Yorkshire accent

@KitFox ha HA!

it was me whom weren't here yestermorn.

grr Why is this stupid query taking so long to execute?

I made a nice view for it and everything.

@MattЭллен I like your blog post!

@KitFox at least it isn't going to take seven and a half million years

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 thanks! :D

:D

I can't even read the execution plan. It's just too frigging big.

@KitFox or maybe it's Middlesbrough

yeah, I think that's it

I like they ooo-ey-ness of it.

ohh, hooow she tooombles

:D

soooch a looovely boook

@KitFox No, no, not ... herpes?

Uh no. I was thinking of shrew.

No, no, not a shrew. You're thinking of that word for absolution.

Something I eschew? I don't think so. Maybe you mean that word for studying what happens after, with the mortal coil and the shuffling and whatnot.

I was thinking of shrove or shriven.

Well, it's still true that I eschew it.

So much writing advice and proofreading requests lately.

Maybe those should be decoy tags.

j/k

Shreveport.

In the following sentence, would I say "monocultural" or "monoculture"?

> Monoculture (?) techniques often limited nutrient diversity.

Hmm. I think I would prefer monoculture there.

Monoculturing?

If it is about cultivating organisms in a controlled environment, then definitely monoculture.

"Monocultural" has to be about people, really.

@DavidWallace What do you mean?

OK, well what is the context of the sentence? What are you writing about?

@DavidWallace How the effects of monoculture (growing only one type of plant in a specific area) contributed to the failure of early settlements like Jamestown.

I originally thought monoculture techniques, but then I thought about it. People usually say things like "driving techniques" where driving acts as an adjective

Right. Monoculture. It's about growing organisms. "Cultural" and "Monocultural" are properties of people.

@Reg I just cannot get used to capitalizing one but not the other. Sorry. It seems so unbalanced to me. Either both or neither is no weirdness, but the mixed case means that the difference is always that one is capitalized and the other is not. I always misread those.

@DavidWallace So monoculture is directed towards agriculture while monocultural is used to describe monotony in culture?

yes.

I was imaging scientists growing bacteria on petri dishes myself, until you mentioned plants.

@DavidWallace Oh, sorry. Yeah.

Alright, thanks.

ok

@KitFox like Daphne on Fraiser?

Or was she Irish?

I thought she was Welsh.

Yeah, that's it.

And I thought that the Alice girl that KitFox gave us was Welsh too, but Matt thought otherwise; and he would know better than I.

Certainly from either Wales or Western England though.

Nah, Daphne's from Manchester.

Really?

OH, Daphne. Sorry, I thought you meant the Alice reader.

I don't hear Welsh in that at all. She sounds northern, almost Scottish to me.

My memory of Daphne doesn't sound Mancastrian. But I guess you are right.

Ahm fixin loonch for your faahthah.

Matt said Middlesborough, right, for the Alice girl? That's north east. Close to Scotland but very far from Wales.

I seem to be crap at this.

Welsh is much flatter and less juicy iirc.

Haha, what does a juicy accent sound like? Can you demonstrate?

Sounds like the girl reading Alice.

No! I mean can YOU demonstrate?

Welsh is more like Rose Tyler. Really kind of the awfulest kind of British.

hahaha

Whoever SHE is.

Rose Tyler is East London.

The Doctor's bimbo companion that he implausibly fell for.

which doctor?

@MattЭллен More like Swindon.

@DavidWallace The Tenth.

@KitFox Well, yeah, that too. :D

wtF?

But she's meant to be East London.

@MattЭллен See! See! I remembered something funny!

@MattЭллен Is she? She sounds awufl.

Oh, do you mean Dr Who?

That's what I said. The Doctor.

Who would you think I meant?

How should I know? That's why I asked.

There ARE other doctors.

Yes, there are eleven of them.

And all the same one.

Troll

that's Welsh

Ha, I knew some idiot would star @Reg's balrog salvo.

@KitFox Not eleven. You're thinking of that word Tolkien made up.

Not elevensies. You're thinking of those kids who got lost in a wardrobe.

@MετάEd No, not elven. You're thinking of that word used to describe petite, mischievous yet attractive young women.

@Robusto No, not KitFox, you're thinking of those injections you get in your face.

middlesbrough

@DavidWallace No, not botox. You're thinking of what Kitfox has to do when she takes too many drugs.

Newcastle

@MattЭллен boggles What's a onesie? Does she actually say that word? I can barely understand her.

@KitFox aye, a onesie! Isn't that an American invention?

@Robusto No, no, not detox. You're thinking of that jazz style.

@MattЭллен Like things babies wear, yes.

carrot onesie

omg

indeed

I need to go home now.

lol

My 12yo son has a onesie.

cf. footies.

Commute. Later.

CU

@KitFox Bye

@tchrist well yes, you are weird, no news to me!

@Robusto so did I. What do I win?

@MattЭллен holy crap, who is that guy in the Tom Jones suit, and why didn't he iron it?

@RegDwighт I know when you're trolling for stars. As for what you win, I think you already won it.

@RegDwighт har har :D

@Robusto nah, that's too harsh. Stars are of no use to me. Sometimes it's easy to be confident about which crap of mine has a chance to get starred, but I still post it just because it's crap of mine and that's what I do.

I am also probaby the only person here who cleans up the starred list regularly.

@RegDwighт I kinda felt you testing the waters with that one. "How low can I go? What is the minimum effort I can make and still get starred?"

@Robusto ah, but that record has long been set.

I once had a message starred that read, in its entirety, "And.".

Doesn't mean you aren't interested in variety.

Sure enough, if I try to search the chat for "and", I get the cat wurking on my problemz.

@Robusto Varieté. And I'm not interested one bit. I don't know how they make a living.

And yeah, variety is one thing, but you were talking about least effort.

Don't turn this into a moving target.

So. Um. The Comms Room has plane sex or what?

@RegDwighт You probably set a personal best for masturbating at some point in your life, but that doesn't mean you stopped doing it.

Now you're just clutching at straws.

There can be no such thing as a personal best for masturbating.

And that's another message that could get starred, BTW.

But I digress. I have some foodstuffs to attend.

BBL

It doesn't count if you TELL people to star things.

The star leader board doesn't care about whether it counts.

Well it should. There should be countable stars and uncountable stars.

@MετάEd No no, not Bebop. You're thinking of that pie sold on "Prairie Home Companion"

@Mitch no, no, not bebop-a-rebop.

You're thinking of that town in Wisconsin.

No, that town in Washington.

How bad is it to use tofu past the expiration date?

@Jeremy you're taking monoculture to be monocausal. That's so monoheaded.

@MετάEd kalamazoo? (no that's Michigan) Beloit? (no that's the sound of a ball bearing dropped into a toilet bowl) Wakka-Wakka? (no that sounds like a town in New Zealand).

I was thinking vaguely of Walla-Walla.

@KitFox Tofu is like styrofoan. It doens't have an expiration date, it has a half-life.

@DavidWallace I can't count the stars. So those must be the uncountable ones.

@KitFox I say eat it if it's not mouldy

takes life in hands on advice of strangers

what could possibly go wrong?

mold is the best part. It's like getting extra food on your food.

Except I'm allergic to penicillin.

But that's bread mold, so...

some of those highly toxic ... er... toxins can give you superpowers. Or if not actual powers, delusions that you have them which is just as good except for the waking up in the emergency room part.

Also, any thing extra to tofu is starting from zero anyway. Actually the natural taste to tofu is negative. You have to add lots of taste to it to get to just a baseline tasteless state.

tofu takes taste out of your tongue?

The food that tastes YOU!

Soviet Russia blah blah blah waves hands

I'm going to fry the crap out of it.

woo!

Not Soviet Russia; I mean the tofu.

oh

Tasty either way. One's kind of a mouthful.

Later! (I hope)

CU (I hope)

I just hope.

I try to justify hope, but it keeps coming out left aligned

@RegDwighт But everybody aims for that. It's like dangling a carrot in front of the donkey.

@KitFox Wait...bread mold is penicillin? I must be the effing healthiest person cuz my breakfast toast is often made from... well, I have a hard time waking up, my eyes are barely open, and one side of the bread can look really just fine... and... yechh.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 No, I was just a little Balroggy by the end of the night.

That can't be comfortable.

No. cornbreadninja is penicillin.

Me cats is tellin' me it's time for their supper. They are quite sure of that.

I read this sentence somewhere: "Nothing scares you, does it?" The 'does it' part sounds wrong to me. So, is it incorrect?

It's correct.

Oh

@DavidWallace Thanks for correcting me!

thegrammarexchange.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/340600179/m/…

Read that.

Nothings scare you, do they.

Don't listen to Ed, he is trolling.

I see, thanks again.

No worries

See, @Kit is fishing for Soviet stars as well.

There are soviet stars? Cool!

@KitFox waves back

Thank God for the KGB!

@tchrist Which one?

The one who does my testing for me.

Former intelligence officer.

@tchrist Wrong which one.

You were perhaps thinking of Kentucky Grilled Bullfrog?

mmmm... bullfrog.

@MετάEd that's to be expected.

For Derfder:

@DavidWallace yeah, like Nadia Comaneci.

Oh, she's Romanian.

Uneven parallel bars always looked so fun.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 I just felt that someone should finish off the little bit of Gran Balrog at the bottom of the really big bottle.

That’s Bullfrog, you know.

Just whitewashed for palatability. Somebody told it to get the f out.

@tchrist Fo' shalrog, ma' nalrog.

Tir na nog'th.

@tchrist Tir na nauga.

Alright, so I know we use block quotes when quotes exceed 4 lines of text. But is that when they exceed 4 lines relatively or absolutely? Relatively meaning they span for lines, and absolutely meaning if you put them in a blank document (formatted the same), the text would exceed 4 lines.

@Jeremy There's no general rule. But when a publishing house, or a university, or Chicago Manual or what have you, says four lines, it means four lines when published.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 (imagines Cornbread on asymmetric bars)

@Jeremy And each style standard will define "4 lines" its own way.

@MετάEd Okay, I see. Thanks

Visually, what you want to avoid is the reader getting lost and being unsure what is being direct quoted.

@Jeremy Absent any specific direction to the contrary, I think it means up to four full lines are okay, but when the text wraps to the fifth line (at either the front or the back), it's too much. This means a quoted text having three full lines and wrapping at both the front and the back onto a partial fourth and fifth line would be too much.

Oh, okay. So relatively, as per my explanation above?

@Jeremy Right, but that's just my humble opinion. If you are trying to get something approved by a publisher or a professor, you will just have to check the style guide (or ask).

@MετάEd It's just for an essay with a casual teacher, but I was just wondering. I always thought the relative way looked cleaner anyways.

@Jeremy Someone here might have a copy of Chicago Manual and know what it says.

@Jeremy So who prescribed the rule? It's not a standard rule of English. If it's something the teacher prescribed, then the teacher is the authority on what was meant by it.

@DavidWallace Exactly. It's not a rule of English, it's a matter of style.

Meh. Anyways, anybody here use Ubuntu on a mac or familiar with EFI?