Persistent, Niggling Questions

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

I hope that helps. I didn't describe this in the first post because...well...I didn't want my embarassment catalogued for eternal posterity on the Net, I suppose.

And you're suddenly worrying about this now?

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

Seriously, what's with all the CAD bashing? As TVTropes says, formulaic isn't necessarily bad.

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.)

[Nate the Great]

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.

[Nate the Great]

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.

[Nate the Great]

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.

[PointyHairedJedi]

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.

[Nate the Great]

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

[Nate the Great]

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"?

[NAHTMMM]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

Suppose you had to create a new webalias for everything you did online. No variation of anything you'd gone by before would be allowed, nor would any variation of your real name. This means no adding on numbers, modifications such as CamelCase and underscores, etc. What would it be?

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. Let's see . . . "Frogs in the Tide" is the only one that really works. A bit long, but it would have to do.

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

It's Food Day again in the PNQ thread!
2. I can sort of understand the evolution of black licorice, but why make something the exact same shape, only strawberry-flavored? Not that I'm complaining, I love red vines and gag on the black ones, I'm just saying that while the evolution of black licorice is understandable, the evolution of red ones is less so.

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

[PointyHairedJedi]

Originally Posted by NAHTMMM

Easy: everybody loves strawberry!

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

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

[NAHTMMM]

Raspberry = Good Stuff too.

[Nate the Great]

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.

[NAHTMMM]

"hb-că-i"?

[Nate the Great]

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

[NAHTMMM]

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

[mudshark]

Originally Posted by PointyHairedJedi

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

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

Here you go.

[PointyHairedJedi]

My faith in humanity is restored!

[Nate the Great]

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

[PointyHairedJedi]

Stand still while I beat you with this wooden spoon.

[Nate the Great]

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?

[NAHTMMM]

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