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Messages - neminem

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Site Suggestions & Support / "unread posts since last visit" - wanted to say thanks
« on: April 06, 2007, 11:22:19 PM »
So, I haven't been here in many ages, and there are a lot of reasons for that (schoolwork, a girlfriend for the first time ever, getting addicted to Kingdom of Loathing), but one of the biggest reasons was that, unlike other forums I frequented, this one made it a pain to look through only threads with new posts. Well, apparently that was fixed ages ago, but after I stopped checking.

Anyway, I was midway through White Night, when I was compelled to pop by here again for the first time in a while, to check whether anyone had mentioned a thought I had (incidentally, someone had: I was happy about that, and have now put a watch on that thread)... first thing I noticed: that option is enabled now! So I just felt the need, for whoever was responsible for enabling it, to thank that person for bringing me back here.

Of course, the fact that the age-old community over at OverClocked Remix has been steadily, and rather quickly, dying... that helps the process of me returning here, too.

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Author Craft / Re: Favorite Words?
« on: July 06, 2006, 06:48:51 PM »
Yeah, and in math jargon, "onto" is an adjective.

What it meant in German is really of little importance to English-speakers. In English, it came here as a prefix. Every once in a while, though, *fixes become full-fledged syntactic words, as appears to be happening with uber.

Uber is a good lexeme, anyway, though I'm far fonder of it in prefix form than word form.

As for BelleMorte's post - my favorite word in another language has got to be the Latin word "facio" - translates, "I do". The c is hard, by the way.
Then there's "fac", the imperative form, as well as "facit", "he did".

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Site Suggestions & Support / Re: No More Politics
« on: July 04, 2006, 07:27:12 PM »
Presumably it should be easy enough to differentiate between discussion of political philosophies, which should be allowed, because there's politics everywhere you look, and discussion of particular current political entities/actions ("this thing in Proven Guilty reminded me of how much George Bush is screwing over America"), which shouldn't be allowed, as it leads to off-topicness quite rapidly.

P.S. I don't really think the Black Council is much of a political group. The White Court, on the other hand...

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Author Craft / Re: Favorite Words?
« on: July 01, 2006, 08:26:35 AM »
A friend of mine just used "gorram" completely naturally, earlier today. It made me happy, a lot.

Incidentally, "frell" is a fun word, too, even though I'd much rather be thought of as a Firefly fanboy than a Farscape one.

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DFRPG / Re: Magic and Technology
« on: June 29, 2006, 03:08:03 AM »
I have this to point out about Harry, though - he seems like the sort of guy who generally does something, assuming it works reasonably well - because he's always done it that way. We know it's possible for wizards to stay around technology without anything going wrong - we saw that in Death Masks. The spell he used was ridiculously complicated, required complete concentration and failed at the least mistake. But he also probably didn't spend a long time researching the problem. Suppose we had a geek-minded person like Butters, who also happened to have wizardly powers on a Dresden-like level. Do you honestly think that person wouldn't research the hell out of the problem, until they'd found a spell that required less constant thought, and was more reliable?

I honestly don't buy your thought, johntfs (does your name have anything to do with the file-system, incidentally?) - Harry is a huge wizard-nerd, yes, but that's about the only kind of nerd he is. I've always gathered that he doesn't use technology because, well, that's just the way it works.

Then, too, I gather that in the Dresdenverse, magic often does what you think it will. That's not the only issue, of course, but I imagine that he'd at least find it easier to figure out how to ward technology from his effects, if he thought it would be easy to find.

P.S. You know, if it were just a matter of probabilities... a phone requires way less delicate calculation than, say, a human brain. :P

Wow, this thread is going way off topic... sorry for contributing to that, but it's an interesting discussion.

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Author Craft / Re: Favorite Words?
« on: June 29, 2006, 02:53:28 AM »
Defenestration has always pissed me off - if you parse it, it should really mean, "to remove one's window"!

On that note, I've always been a fan of words whose etymologies are amusing and obvious to those in the know - words like, say, antediluvian. Literally - before the flood. I.e. really freaking ancient.

Also always enjoy new slang, especially when it fits a niche that previously lacked any sufficient word. For instance, from the world of cs-hackery, words like "hack" (in the original, MIT sense, that is), or "munge", or "frob", or for that matter, "foo" and "bar". Especially when such slang also has amusing etymology - for instance, it's common at my school to refer to anything particularly nasty with the nounal form, "nast". You can have, therefore, things "made out of nast", or "looking like nast", or etc. I've even heard phrases like "liquid nast". And of course, there's a shelf in our dorm that always collects dust and never gets cleaned, so it's been named "the nast shelf". :D

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Author Craft / Re: Fanfiction - Good or Evil?
« on: June 29, 2006, 02:45:51 AM »
Quote from: pinkdoom on June 28, 2006, 06:01:01 PM
But I know people who are frighteningly possessive of these worlds, so much so that they become warped, thinking that they're not just good, but better than the fandom's creator(s). 

You mean like how Timothy Zahn's Star Wars novels are about a hundred times better than anything Lucas ever made? :P

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Author Craft / Re: Beginnings
« on: June 28, 2006, 02:10:07 AM »
So, simply put, yes. I've definitely read enough first-pages-of-books in the bookstore to know that if a first page is boring, I'm probably going to put it down. Conversely, if a first page reads like, well, a page from the Dresden Files, I'm going to drop what I'm doing and continue reading. A lot.

Quote from: Steven Pinker, ridiculously brilliant linguist, in The Language Instinct
"Of course, forcing modern speakers of English to not -- whoops, not to split an infinitive because it isn't done in Latin makes about as much sense as forcing modern residents of England to wear laurels and togas. Julius Caesar could not have split an infinitive if he had wanted to. In Latin the infinitive is a single word like facere or dicere, a syntactic atom. English is a different kind of language. It is an "isolating" language, building sentences around many simple words instead of a few complicated ones. The infinitive is composed of two words -- a complementizer, to, and a verb, like go. Words, by definition, are rearrangeable units, and there is no conceivable reason why an adverb should not come between them:
   Space -- the final frontier... These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
To go boldly where no man has gone before? Beam me up, Scotty; there's no intelligent life down here." (386)

And Finn is right - the whole killing witches thing? I've always been impressed with that one.

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Author Craft / Re: Fanfiction - Good or Evil?
« on: June 28, 2006, 02:05:26 AM »
We're discussing two different things here, I see. One I can comment on, while the other I can't, really.

I'm not an author, can't write to save my soul. So I can't really say whether writing in another's world would be helpful in terms of getting better at, well... what? Writing? I can't imagine it wouldn't. If your goal was to get better at world-building, then obviously you wouldn't get much practice if you used someone else's base. But if you were just practicing writing, I don't know why it would be any different - in fact, I imagine it could be harder in some ways, having to adapt your own writing style such that pre-existing characters spoke and acted in ways that wouldn't break existing characterization.

As a voracious reader, though, I can say this - most fanfic sucks a lot, to the extent that I really don't bother with it, as it's mostly a waste of time. But that's not the fault of fanfic itself, it's merely the fact that the genre attracts far too many people who write about as well as I do, but have much bigger egos ;). I love to see different takes on the same stories, or the same characters, or the same worlds, but only when they're worth bothering with. If I were a famous writer, I'd be flattered by any and all attempts at fanfic in my world - even though I'd be even more saddened at how much most of it would suck a lot.

Incidentally, I absolutely love covers; in fact, I go out of my way to collect them. Have gigs and gigs of it. I've also deleted gigs and gigs, because again, I only keep ones that are actually worth keeping. It seems that fewer people with little talent consider themselves to have talent in music than it writing, though, so it's at least worth bothering. Or at least, less of the music that sucks ends up being discussed and passed around the internet.

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Site Suggestions & Support / Re: Will There be a Celebration for 1,000 Registered Members?
« on: June 22, 2006, 02:58:16 AM »
Quote from: Valiar Marcus on June 22, 2006, 01:31:30 AM
I'm quite sure I don't want to know...  ???

Eddy Izzard. Specifically, Dress to Kill.

Quite brilliant, that.

Of course, you could also make a joke about this Cake ;).



(Moderated by Mickey to fix a typo in Eddy's name)

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Site Suggestions & Support / Re: a link
« on: June 15, 2006, 06:44:25 PM »
What, you mean not everyone moves around sites by manually editing the url in their browser?  :o

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Site Suggestions & Support / Re: Finding Specific Posts
« on: June 10, 2006, 07:16:41 PM »
Quote from: Ellie Mae on June 10, 2006, 01:40:22 PM
Is it possible to activate/switch on the option to 'show unread posts' or 'unread replies to your posts' its a useful feature that I use a lot on other boards and miss it :(

Yeah, I already suggested that one :P. I'd be happier using it, too.

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Site Suggestions & Support / Re: Live Chat?
« on: June 09, 2006, 09:00:58 PM »
I imagine it would probably be easy enough to set up an IRC channel somewhere, wouldn't it? Now whether Jim or Shannon would ever show there, that's a different story, but it could at least be a place for bored fans to hang out.

That and Wolfe seems to have far more free time to hang out with the fans, at the moment ;).

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Site Suggestions & Support / Re: Mortal, Apprentice, Wizard
« on: June 05, 2006, 07:42:18 PM »
Quote from: Phil Boswell on June 05, 2006, 12:38:00 PM
Quote from: Donna on May 28, 2006, 04:02:21 AM
Quote from: iago on May 27, 2006, 10:42:30 PM
Well, I can always adjust the number of posts per level, or add more. I'm not expecting to attach a lot of meaning to 'em.
I don't see the big deal about rising in the ranks either, but unfortunately some people do. The biggest problem, I've found, is people making loads of nuisance posts -- one liners, smiley only, or nattering on about things that add nothing to the topic being discussed -- to see the title change under their name.
I assume that the existence of the "report to moderator" link implies that it's possible to remove nuisance posts, in which case the question would become: does your total get decremented if one of your posts gets nuked?

Course it does. In any noninsane forum system, it keeps track of your posts in real time. For instance, over at OverClocked Remix, a handful of months ago they removed all the threads with over a few thousand posts, to save on disk space. Some people (mostly postwhores) lost upwards of a thousand posts each.

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Site Suggestions & Support / Re: Mortal, Apprentice, Wizard
« on: June 02, 2006, 07:48:17 PM »
Quote from: Kalium on June 02, 2006, 05:40:35 PM
Quote from: Priscellie on June 02, 2006, 05:38:26 PM
Quote from: Kalium on June 02, 2006, 05:21:53 PM
Just to make a point, there are currently two users who have attainted Wizard status. Both today.

Holy cow!  One of them is me!  Uh, I kind of need to shut up a bit, yes?  :D  Which I'm not doing by posting this message.  Gah!  *falls over*

The other one being, obviously, me. Oh, and just because I can, I was first. Ha!

I clearly don't post enough. Then again, I have over 10,000 posts at OCR, I clearly spend enough time on the internet already :D.

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