[If Second Life was real what crime would you be convicted of?]

So, you are saying you are without conviction? Huh.

[A Derail Thread]

Oh, he is most assuredly no-mod, in terms of whatever point he's making. Phil doesn't waver. The derail works around 'permissions', you see.

[If Second Life was real what crime would you be convicted of?]

9 hours ago, Alyona Su said:

I've read the entire thread up to here and now.

ALL OF YOU ARE FARKING ANGELS.

I mean, really, so tame.

I'd probably be not only convicted but immediately tossed into solitary confinement strapped into a Hannibal Lecter rack and gagged just for uttering the words to describe it.

/me nods affirmatively with wide eyes and an 'uh-huh, uh-huh'.

We lied, Alyona.

We just talked about the things we didn't mind sharing. Below all that is a level of iniquity to stagger the imagination. We didn't talk about that because until you got here nobody was willing to call the bluff.

More fava beans?

[A Derail Thread]

I don't know if it's wanting to be bigger than the next guy, Coby. I think it is just seeing those sliders for the first time,  maxxing them out because, well, because. And then saying "Whoa! Am I a big boy or what?". It's like they can all become Jack Reacher, or at least the book Jack Reacher. In the novels he is a very large man (who is also smart as hell, honorable almost to a fault, and skilled in all types of fighting). Funny thing is, his character is quite convincingly played in the movies by an actor who may be shorter than either of us in RL: Tom Cruise. Since he obviously couldn't play it on size, he concentrated on just inhabiting the persona. I had read all the novels up to the point the movie came out and frankly I had my doubts, but he nailed it as far as I'm concerned.

Why new people don't at some point in their slives back off on the height button a little I have no idea, but at least I have a theory for why they start that way.

 

ETA: Thanks for stopping by! Now that you've posted it's surely only a matter of time before the Battling Brit shows up :-). There still won't be any way to get him to admit he's lost an argument—the title of Phil's biography will be "Undaunted Stubbornness", I  think—but at least we can derail him!

[A Derail Thread]

5 hours ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

Speaking of non sequitur tangents ...

Ha! Allow me to demonstrate how to remove that 'non' by application of the Technique Levenque: simply using but a single oh-so-slightly unusual word from one post to spin up a complete maelstrom of nonsense. Behold.

The use of the word "Velvet" in a recent post about "Velvet Goldmine" spun me right out.

I own a record by 'The Velvet Underground'. These days they're quite well known but back when they were first around they were unheard of in regular rock n' roll on AM Radio, my only real source for new music. This was in my late teens or early twenties. Was no internet (Arpanet was either just about to start or had just started) and decades would pass before public access and the World Wide Web.

How I got the record way out in the boonies of North Central California I don't know. Saw it in a shop? One of the more outré girls I sometimes dated suggested it? Dunno. I do know my friends and I played it often. It isn't great rock and roll, but it was so DIFFERENT we didn't care. We played this song a lot. Yes we knew it was about a heroin addict. I don't think anyone I knew ever got into heroin, but still. Ugly. We still liked it.

and then.....

I worked while I was in Silicon Valley for several years with a really good mechanical engineer. He was quite a character and we hit it off right from the start. When new builds were under way he'd spend half his time on my production floor assembling, going back and red-lining his drawings, and then trying again. He built personally about half the new stuff (and we were constantly doing new stuff: customs were us). I once told the CEO in a Production Meeting that I had my two best guys working on a project, then named my lead assembler and the engineer.

One time he and his wife went to Prague (city of her family's ancestors) on vacation. As it happened I had recently read a history of what (coincidentally enough) is called 'The Velvet Revolution'(so-called because it was virtually bloodless; there was no fighting), Czechoslovakia's first attempt to get out from behind the Iron Curtain. While reading this history I came across a passage explaining how one of the motivating factors behind the creation of the original anti-Warsaw Pact/Soviet resistance was official government suppression of a musical group. The group in question played decadent American rock n' roll, and were accused of being degenerates and possibly drug users.

I was stoked! American rock n' roll helped fuel the end of the Iron Curtain? Hot Damn! So when I learned of my friend's planned vacation I asked him to see if he could find anything at all by this group even though it was about thirty years after their heyday. When he came back he had a CD (not an old record as I'd expected). He said, somewhat resignedly, "They were having a Reunion Tour". He told me he'd listened to the CD and they were horrible, even though he was much too old to judge that ;-). He may have been right, though. The group was 'The Plastic People of the Universe'.

There were two recognizable American songs on the CD, sung in accented but mostly correct English. A long, long cover of "Light My Fire" contains the colorful malaprop "...no time to wallow in your mire...", always good for a chuckle.

The big hit, inevitably (and you knew it would be): covering The Velvet Underground and Nico. "I'm Waiting For My Man".

You have not lived until you hear them sing "Hey white boy, whachoo dooink uptown?"

Regrettably (or perhaps lucky for you) I could not find that song on YouTube. Short of becoming a YouTube channel and (violating copyright by) posting the contents of my CD, I don't know another way to deliver it to multiple anonymous users.

 

ps: Yes, we did eventually peel the skin off the banana. Tragically, my possibly valuable old album has been violated. Woe is me.

[A Derail Thread]

Indeed. My fiendish plot is working PERFECTLY!!!!!

[A Derail Thread]

12 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

“..some scholars say..”

Well, no, you can't use that. ALL scholars say. One who doesn't know that is not a scholar on the subject. I am not a scholar,  I assure you. They're my sources.

Actually, that's incorrect.  Historians are MY sources; scholars are sources for the historians. The historians crawl through the scholar's painfully acquired data to find the detail they need to assemble the narrative. I actually obtained a regular library copy of a scholar's work. As I recall he was someone who was frequently footnoted in Gibbon; I thought I'd mine a deeper strata.

As I read along, I had this feeling I was slowly turning into the Picture of Dorian Gray. I never went there again.

[A Derail Thread]

5 minutes ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

Well, there is The Roman Forum and then there are other, smaller fora in Rome. 

You have demonstrated the reason I preceded my comment with "...most of us are familiar...", making it possible for the casual reader to assume (possibly inaccurately) that I was among those cognoscenti aware of the multitude of others once present in Rome. ;-)

[A Derail Thread]

5 hours ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

Actually, fora is the plural for the specific case of forum as it relates to roman political venues.  Even in English.  However, with any other sense of forum, the plural is forums.

Well, okay then. Venues. That would make it a very little-used variant in today's world, where most of us are familiar only with one in Rome. Thanks.

See what I mean? Learn something everyday around here. :-)

[Five word Story Game]

I love when that happens :-)

[A Derail Thread]

Cool. What a bunch of interesting responses to a question that was "sort of" implied in a post.

I guess from Rhonda's explanation that LL promoting the Forums wouldn't really help; people either like this sort of conversation or they don't, and that's always going to be true. As a member of both of the two big SL forums (I know the correct Latin plural but to me it seems an affectation to use it in English) I have to say her observations on the numbers sound pretty accurate.

Something Pamela said REALLY resonated: ".... no effort to research on their own before asking others to do it for them...". Seriously. There's SO much information already in print, by no means all of it in archived forum articles. Get online and look. All it took me was one (slightly out of frustration over unproductive research) out of left field research try, when I opened Google and typed, "How do I change (can't remember an exact example) in Second Life?". Bam. A page full of responses, most of which were relevant. After that a flat-out question on Google would be my first step whenever I had an SL question. That way when I finally gave up and asked in the Forum I could at least say what I'd read so far, so people would know they didn't have to start at rock-bottom to answer me. I learned how to do Outfits from a Google article, long before we had the folder. Revolutionized my Second Life—I could finally start trying on anything I fancied without being in deathly fear that I'd lose a part of my existing avatar. Prior to that I'd spent hours trying to put the 'self' I'd been back together after carelessly wearing something that chomped. Now I could just store me.

I used to spend a whole lot of time with my father; we had a family business. After school I'd walk the few blocks to the business and when it closed for the day an hour or two later I would do all the facility/janitorial work while the old man did the books, then I'd ride home with him. Whole lotta stories and philosophy in those rides. I've always remembered one thing he told me; not sure what the conversation was or why I remember it so much (although it's possible I remember ALL of those conversations). He told me there was possibly no greater pleasure in life than talking with an intelligent person or better yet, several of them at once. It was even better if the person was a little more intelligent than you are.

This and the one other forum I frequent have proved that to me so long ago I don't even think about it. That got mentioned in the responses above, too. "It helps that there are also a lot of smart people here, with a really quirky sense of humor."  Rolig Loon

 

[A Derail Thread]

3 hours ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

I seem to have started a sh!t storm though.

I got here later than usual so I had no idea what you all were talking about. Had to do some looking. I'd thought I recalled something about Ace and I saw a bunch of thread activity from him right around the time frame of Clover's first Nancy Drew post here; checked it out and BINGO!

He's right about a couple of Forum things, though. Nobody comes  here anymore. Of course, relatively nobody ever has come here! It's too bad, really. I'd been in SL almost a year before I finally took a peek, and I've been lurking or contributing ever since. I've learned volumes of things and had a whole lot of fun. I wish LL would promote it a little.

The other thing is that yes, we are all terribly mean and cruel and all we do all day is pick on people. Terrible. lmfao. imma flounce.

[Five word Story Game]

OVERLOAD! SHUT IT DOWN, TEX!

[If Second Life was real what crime would you be convicted of?]

Was an NFL player named Andre Rison once. Wide receiver and a damned good one, although he never seemed to last long with any of the several teams for which he played. He was of course known, inevitably really, as "Bad Moon Rison".

[If Second Life was real what crime would you be convicted of?]

10 hours ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Had to google it.

What? These kids today! Don't they teach 'em the classics?

Sing along with me, all you Jets (or Sharks): Officer Krupke, we're down on our knees, 'Cause no-one likes a fella with a social disease. Officer Krupke, what are we to do?

(big finish, now) Gee, Officer Krupke, KRUP YOU!

 

 

[If Second Life was real what crime would you be convicted of?]

Loitering. I just happened to be leaning on the streetlamp cuz I was checking my watch, Officer.

[A Derail Thread]

33 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

adding half a cup of water to pre-baked gypsum or limestone and getting something literally as hard as a rock.

From a geologist's perspective (or in this case that of an avid student of geology) it literally IS a rock; adding the water just restores what was extracted from the rock in the baking process.

[A Derail Thread]

32 minutes ago, Rolig Loon said:

I do not know why Burl Ives did not see fit to mention any of this instead of railing on about porpoises and porgies.

When I finally stop laughing about that line, I may have to go back and edit in the word "some" into that sentence concerning the "Wave to Saturn" deal, about scientists having a sense of whimsy. :-)

[A Derail Thread]

5 minutes ago, Clover Jinx said:

Good grief I can't even derail a derail thread. *mumbles to herself as she goes to look for catnip*

But Clover, that's kinda the point. Derails don't derail this thread, they ARE this thread. Besides, you derail a thread just by appearing in it, much as they used to say Bogart would dominate a scene just by entering it.

[A Derail Thread]

2 hours ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

I have always wanted to watch a night launch.

I've seen lots. Solid fuel launches are great at night because the flame is constant all the way up; liquid fuel multi-stages like the Atlas have less visible fire, but there you get the added bonus of seeing the second stage ignite way-y-y up there.

I grew up a tic over twenty miles inland from Vandenburg Air Force Base and have seen or heard lots of launches; you could hear the rumble quite clearly even from our distance. Best launch I ever saw was from a beach party in the cliffs up near Pismo; was a cave up there just above the beach where we could all sit around, build a campfire, and hang out. One night they launched a Minuteman (SFR). Because of the curve of the coastline we had a view across open water all the way to the launch pad. Spectacular.

 

I've seen the effect shown in the SpaceX launch before as well, more than once but not often. It is a combination of things. The primary condition is that launch happens close enough after sundown from the observer's position, so the observer is in Earth's shadow but the rocket's in sunlight. As the rocket reaches higher in the atmosphere it displaces ice crystals and the sunlight makes those seem to glow. If the light is just right, you see the rainbow colors (I've seen that when the launch was just after sundown from our perspective; the sky was still light). Because the rockets were going pretty much straight away from us going downrange over the Pacific, It was a pretty spooky effect.. The ice cocoon just expands around the rocket and it looks just like something has gone horribly wrong: the rocket has reversed course and is coming right back atcha! First time I saw one I was thinking, "Uh, fellas? Isn't it about time to punch the old Self-Destruct Button?". I knew those worked; I'd seen enough times when that got used.

[A Derail Thread]

Love it,  and thanks! I've never seen a shuttle launch but I did see a landing once, at Edwards Air Force Base here in California: STS-6. It was the tragically ill-fated Challenger. This was long before the disaster; I think it was Challenger's first mission. I could go in the next room and look at the mission patch image on the big parking pass we'd gotten (useless; nobody ever even glanced at it) that's still on the door of the youngest's former bedroom. He didn't actually watch the landing, but his presence was felt: we'd just learned of the pregnancy a couple weeks before. STS-6 landed early in April of 1983; the youngest was born, an estimated six weeks premature, in late October. We went with our friends in two cars. Got there late afternoon. They just directed us all into long double rows right out there on the desert with about a driveway's worth of room between each set of double rows. After sundown that Mojave Wind got going, and of course cars kept arriving long into the night, adding even more dust to the mix. By the time we finally left the next morning I think I was dirtier than I've ever been in my life. But it was so worth it.

They had us out near the upwind end of the runway; the approach end. We had about a quarter mile gap between us and the fence that closed off the runways. As soon as it got light people started drifting down to the 'viewing fence'. Our bunch got there early enough to get some space right up against the fence; once that all was taken people just filled in behind. We heard the two sonic booms and we were all looking at the sky trying to spot her. Suddenly someone nearby yelled, "THERE SHE IS!", and sure enough, there she was: coming right at us and starting her big turn to come around for landing. She flew right over our heads and then on past us before finishing the turn and flying back over our heads once more, much lower now. It was almost dead quiet; I think we were all too tense and excited to speak. Then the main gear touched down and started to smoke, and not too long after the nose came down as she continued straight as a stick down that runway. I think we all lost it when the nose settled and we knew she was all right. The place just exploded. Yelling, laughing, crying, back slapping, hugging....it was something. You'd have thought we were Mission Control.

This clip of STS-1 (the equally ill-fated Columbia) gives a really good idea of what it all looked like except that STS-6 landed on the paved runway. The late John Young was the pilot for this one.

 

[A Derail Thread]

About V'ger  (I started a small thread once about her in this Forum, a few years back): as a manufacturing person it pleases me beyond measure that both Voyager craft are still functional as they venture into interstellar space, and still sending data back to Earth even from beyond the boundaries of our Solar System. Voyager 1 launched in late August of 1977, Voyager 2 a couple weeks later. This Summer they will have been functioning in the frigid vacuum of Space for forty years. Imagine the pride anyone still among the living who worked on that build must feel, to have been involved in making a machine that still works WITHOUT MAINTENANCE after all this time. I personally consider it the greatest manufacturing achievement of the Twentieth Century.

[A Derail Thread]

Quote

 

Ceka posted a link to Carl Sagan’s narrated animation “Pale Blue Dot” (I’m pretty sure it was in a since locked thread). The whole thing is based on a composite image taken at Sagan’s request by my beloved V'ger 1. It had completed its mission of studying Saturn and Jupiter and was on its way to leaving the Solar System back in 1994. Sagan asked NASA to have Voyager “turn around” and take a photo of Earth from space; that’s the seed of the “Pale Blue Dot” narrative.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO5FwsblpT8

I first saw that in a thread I started on an earlier version of this forum, several years back. Someone (possibly Ceka) posted it there. My thread was also based on an image captured by NASA, one they took on purpose from the Cassini probe back in 2013. They saw there would be an orbital conjunction that would put Cassini “behind” Saturn (in that Saturn would be totally eclipsing the Sun for Cassini) giving Cassini a clear in-system view at a time she would have a line of sight to Earth. They advertised the date and time in advance and asked Earthlings to smile and wave at Saturn while Cassini took their picture. Just because someone’s a scientist doesn’t mean they don’t have a delightful sense of whimsy.

I missed seeing anything in advance but did see it mentioned the day after the fact and I was completely knocked out by the image itself: there was Earth, far in the distance and moving through space, with every single one of us on board. I had to post it, and did so. I think all I said about it was “That’s us.”, a comment I was pleased to hear Carl Sagan use in his narration. My unspoken thoughts at the time were just that, like it or not, the whole bunch of us are right there. I thought most readers would form similar thoughts. Sagan got considerably more vehement and admonishing, but he was a Hell of a lot smarter than I am. All that said, the sum of us right now is on that one little spot in a low rent district on the fringes of a Tobacco Road of a galaxy. We better figure out how to get along; ain’t nobody going to do that for us but us.

Here we all are; that's us down there in the lower right quadrant of the image.

[A Derail Thread]

In the Five Word Story thread (thank you, Tex!) there was a fairly recent entry from Rolig Loon, whose several contributions to that thread have been not just intellectually stimulating but hilariously funny. I’m glad we get the gift of at least a few of her contributions here in People; she can’t spend all her time over in Answers helping newbies put their clothes on and stuff like that.

She dropped a post in Tex’s thread that contained the first five words of “Eddystone Light”. I was really hoping someone would run with the rest of that in some way but instead the direction changed altogether. I managed to at least honor the thought a bit later with a post that mentioned a sailor, but I’d love to have done more. Can’t in only five words, but I can in a thread created just for derails, now can’t I? First, the song. Burl Ives, "Eddystone Light":

I picked Burl Ives because of someone I know (who BTW told me I wasn’t posting enough: blame her for all this), but there are several versions on YouTube. The image for Burl’s contribution is an old photo of the current lighthouse (it’s been modded a bit since, most obviously by the addition of a helicopter landing pad on the top).  The lighthouse has a very interesting history as sketched here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddystone_Lighthouse

I loved Louis 14’s comment after a French privateer interfered with the original construction: [During construction, a French privateer took Winstanley prisoner and destroyed the work done so far on the foundations, causing Louis XIV to order Winstanley's release with the words "France is at war with England, not with humanity"]. Gotta love that way back then someone in his position had the decency to say that. And that probably wasn’t written by an ‘adviser’ either; Quatorze was a pretty sharp dude (and, probably, should he ever decide to engage the English Fleet in their own crib a way to avoid the Eddystone Rocks would actually be helpful).

[A Derail Thread]

Reading through an active thread and see a post that triggers a memory of a favorite image, clip, quote, etc.? The item you want to reference is now several pages back and you don't want to post something that would be so far after the fact? Post it here. You can’t be called out for derailing this thread; this whole damn thread is a derail!

Because I don’t keep an eye on this Forum all the time I frequently arrive to see threads that I somehow missed earlier are now active and then when I click in I find they’ve been going on for days, I had an idea I might not be alone, so I thought I'd give all that a home. Anytime I am attracted to a new thread I always start at the OP and read a post at a time until I get current. I usually spot any derails or trolls by the third or fourth page. I tend to skip the trolls from then on. The problem is, there are frequently posts in there that click with me (often in the derails) but by the time I reach the current end of the thread they’re so far back even mentioning them would be a waste of time. I just move on.

Much less frequently but every now and then, a thread I’ve been following gets locked (happened quite recently). Sometimes there will be a derail that got IBFL that I would like to respond to but can’t.

Given all that, I decided to start a derail thread. It may or may not inspire posts; it will at least allow me to drop the two derail follow-ups I’ve been carrying around for a couple of days.

ONE RULE: It’s a Forum Rule but rest assured it’s an OP rule for this thread also. DO NOT even come close to responding to a topic that was a subject (other than a derail) under discussion in any thread that was later locked. I can’t stress that enough.