And you're suddenly worrying about this now?

Did someone delete several posts before I had a chance to read them? I don't see any CAD bashing at all, nor do I see anyone saying that formulaic = bad.

(If that last were true, would we all have been likely to end up posting at a forum attached to a site at which formula has frequently been flogged to within an inch of its life? I rest my case.)

I'm sorry, but when people go like this...

CV: Given the formulaic nature of the joke, Ctrl-Alt-Del?

...I start to Hulk out. Figuratively, of course. Nothing against CV, but lately I've been seeing far too much CAD bashing. Far too much. [Typical Nate rant deleted] So once again, I apologize to CV. He just had the unfortunate luck to provide the hair that broke the camel's back.

Okay, on to a lighter subject...

PNQ: How much work and/or HTML knowledge does it take to be a viable contributor to TV Tropes? I'm not sure I want to jump into that pool without knowing how deep it is, if you know what I mean.

Does anyone know how to create wikis? I just ask because after all of the other things I've seen wikis devoted to (Tetris springs to mind, not to mention long-ended webcomics such as Kid Radd), I think FiveMinute.Net deserves one, too. It might be nice to have pages explaining the jokes for each fiver, hyperlinks between fivers that reference each other, profiles for major fivists, and so on. Not to mention areas where we can post fivers for stuff that'll never show up on the main page, such as animes and non-scifi movies.

The software isn't the problem (Google knows all), it's just like any other website you've got to have somewhere to host it.

Well, that's sort of implied in the initial question.

Okay, how about this one...

Was I the only person in the world who spent YEARS thinking that the "she's just a girl" who shot down the skater boy in "Sk8ter Boi" (ugh, that name...) was the same person as the narrator? For years I thought it was

A. She has a crush on the guy.
B. Her friends use peer pressure to make her shoot him down.
C. Cue a horrible relationship and breakup on her part, stardom for him.
D. She decides to take him back.
E. Happily ever after.

Only to learn that it's really another girl saying "too bad, so sad, you had your chance, now he's mine, neener-neener-neener"?

A reference that would strike me as likely to be hilariously obscure. Like Za--no, wait, I did that once. Dagnabbit. Ummm.

*tries to visualize the space of usernames, with his prior aliases stretching out like axes, and then move in a different direction*

. . . Well, I do think I would do my best to find something neutral yet distinctive again. "NAHTMMM" has worked amazingly well in that regard (accidentally, as it were) and I appreciate the freedom of not being tied down to something like "Pizza" or "DS9Rocks" or "Irritating_Posting_Style".

No me-referential acronyms allowed? Bah. I dunno, I'm stuck. All that comes to mind is "Rodov", but that would carry too much baggage for me. No, no, wait, I've been inspired. :D Let's see . . . "Frogs in the Tide" is the only one that really works. A bit long, but it would have to do.



Easy: everybody loves strawberry! :) If we can have cherry colas and fifty varieties of candy cane, why not strawberry licorice?

Speak for yourself; I'll take raspberries, every time.

(Yes folks, I guess this is your cue.)

Raspberry = Good Stuff too. :)

I'm still stumped about that a bit myself. After all, I'm hardly a fan of using your real name and then adding numbers after it until it's unique. There is a board where I'm nate42, but that mostly consists of people who know me in Real Life, so it's important that my username not be too farcical.

The combination of letters hbcai (or more specifically HB=C,A,&I) have long held meaning for me, but it hardly rolls off the tongue. How would you pronouce that, anyway?

There's always kabutchka. Don't ask me to explain that one, it's a long, LONG story.

"hb-că-i"?

You say each letter phonetically. And there is no connection at all between hbcai and kabutchka.

Sorry, didn't realize it was a rhetorical question. :p

Here you go. http://i57.photobucket.com/albums/g2.../raspberry.gif

My faith in humanity is restored!

But is your hope and charity in humanity restored as well? Lame...

Stand still while I beat you with this wooden spoon.

You know, a whisk would be so much more effective...

Have any of you ever used a fountain pen?

How about a slide rule?

Does this business about TI-89s being allowed in exams and TI-92s not make sense to anyone? As I understand it, the only real difference is the keyboard, right? Does having a full keyboard really just automatically make an electronic device a "laptop," even though it doesn't have any more capability than the keyboardless model?

How much different would our lives be if they never invented microchips?

Or LCDs and other flatscreen technologies?

I have a slide rule. Rather nifty how someone worked out how to get all the scales to work together, i think.

I have a slide rule. Got it at an antique shop. It's great fun to use, though I'm glad it's no longer the standard pocket tool for calculations. UW's math department (or is it Carleton's?) has a giant slide rule on the wall of the lounge.

The scales "fit together" because they're based on logarithms -- base 10, to be specific. For example, the number 2 is found about 30% of the way along because log₁₀ 2 is 0.301. When you multiply numbers on a slide rule, you're basically adding their logs. (Whatever base <i>b</i> you pick, log_bxy = log_b x + log_b y. By hand, adding is much easier than multiplying, so log tables were a revolutionary shortcut when they were first published.) Because the base of the logs on the slide rule is the same base our number system uses, the 2 can represent 20, 200, etc. as needed; you just have to remember where to move the decimal point afterwards.

I actually figured all this out myself. The tipoff was that my slide rule (like most) has an L scale for logarithms, and that one IS evenly spaced.

'Fraid so. Avril (or her label) has a bad habit of choosing her worst songs as singles. "Sk8er Boi" and "Complicated" are the low points of Let It Go, and "Girlfriend" has an even more annoying concept than "Sk8er Boi". (Not that it's hard to find a bad track on The Best Damn Thing. Oh, Avril... why did you dumb yourself down so much?)

This reminds of a story told by Robert Fulghum. There was once an abacus-versus-pocket calculator competition, and the abacus won. The calculator guy was in such a hurry to show off that he input fuzzy facts.

In fact, more than once in school we've had lectures teaching us to NEVER take the calculator at face value and ALWAYS keep in mind the range of where the answer should be. What order of magnititude? What units? That sort of thing.

...Panditur interea domus omnipotentis Olympi, conciliumque vocat divom pater atque hominum rex sideream in sedem, terras unde arduus omnes, castraque Dardanidum adspectat, populosque Latinos.

And yes, I frequently use a fountain pen. It's a tool of distinction from a more civilised age. Using a biro by contrast is like leaving a black-tie dinner party for McDonalds.

Whoa, biros. CV, have you ever heard the story from Hitchhiker's Guide of the guy who decided to find out where all the missing ballpoints went, only to find a planet inhabited by pens?

Okay, a sort of game. What's THE most esoteric thing hanging on (any of) your bedroom wall(s)? Just looking around, I can see (and this is the SHORT list):

A wall plaque that says "If a man speaks in the woods and there's no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?" :)
A set of Yu-gi-oh dogtags.
A Schoolhouse Rock refrigerator magnet.
A toy duck umbrella.
A suction cup Chicago Cubs teddy bear (named Cubby).
Two medals I won in Science Club back in high school.

I have used neither - about the most archaic thing I've ever used in that regard is an electric typewriter. I don't write with pen anyway, unless I have to - propelling pencils are my thing. I once had a really really cool one that had a cunning mechanism whereby if you gave it a shake the lead would come out, rather than having to press in the end. Never been able to find that model again, annoyingly.

Most esoteric thing... hmm. I've got a pair of clippy picture frames that have a collection of various (mostly SF) images I've printed off in them - two concept art images from the game Homeworld 2, one from Red Alert 2, a piece of artwork from Nausciaa of the Valley of the Wind, a fanart image of the TARDIS in the vortex, a cutaway artwork of the refit Enterprise, a fan rendering of the USS Excelsior flying through an asteroid field, a piece of Chris Foss artwork (used as the cover for the Asimov collection The Complete Robot), a cityscape of Mega-City One, a piece of cover artwork that I scanned years ago from a comic in which Judge Dredd teams up with Batman (you heard me), and... two photos of Ash, a deceased cat.

Otherwise, my walls are nearly bare. I've a Simpsons cloth poster thingy that was a present years ago pinned to the ceiling, and filled in tennis draws from Grand Slams blutacked to the walls, and that's it.

At one point my ceiling had an Escher print on it. It was the one where the fish gradually turn into birds via a modified tesselation. It was cool.

So somewhere on the Internet I saw a modification of the Even/Odd rule of Star Trek movies, which says in effect: evens are good, odds are bad, multiples of five are HORRIBLE.

Opinions?

Eh, they'd have to make another eight or thirteen to be sure. I'm not sure Paramount's spirit of inquiry stretches quite that far, though. ;)

Have we talked about the TOS HD-DVD set yet? Besides that offer of a phaser remote if you preordered of course. That thing still looks cool.

"Have we talked?" Does that really count as a PNQ? Does this? Or this?

;)

Fine, Mr. Smarty-Pants. What are people's opinions on the HD-DVD set? Worth it? Not worth it? Best thing ever? Will single-handedly kill the franchise?

In (late) answer to the esoteric things question, I can't decide: Does a foot-tall statue of Horus as a falcon count?

Yes, it does.

Do you ever ask him why he has a long face?

What, is it Lame Punchline Week or something?

Only every other Thursday.

"It must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays..."

I don't have a counter-joke, so I'll just have to respond with "By gad sir, you're a chap worth knowing!"

My sister has claimed that I'd like the show Big Bang Theory. Any opinions from you guys? I'm elsewhere the nights that it's shown, so it'd involve taping for later viewing (I don't have TiVo or anything similar) and I want to know whether it's worth the bother.

Here's a question for all you Metroid fans out there. It's not particularly persistent or niggling, but it probably doesn't warrant its own thread, so I'll put it here.
Which do you think I should buy: Metroid Fusion or Metroid Zero Mission. I'm planning on buying one or the other of them (eventually I may want both). I haven't entirely ruled out the other handheld Metroid games either (Metroid II, Prime Hunters, or Prime Pinball), but I'm leaning toward either Fusion or Zero Mission, and I don't really have a preference for one over the other. So, any suggestions?

Sorry, I've never seen it. From the little I've read, though, the concept sounds interesting.