Site/Off-Topic Discussion Thread 4 #announcement

Site/Off-Topic Discussion Thread

Episode IV: A New Boogaloo

Site/Off-Topic Discussion Thread 4 #announcement i.imgur.com blog

Let's talk about the site and other things!

Post feedback, issues, random comments, death threats, etc. here like in all the other Site/Off-Topic discussion threads.

256 comments

old comment by dxdydz

@121

To say that they are exaggerating any abilities is pretty generous, as it would imply that such abilities exist. There has yet to be any empirical evidence to substantiate the existence of psychic phenomena and those that claim to have these abilities have failed to perform under scrutiny in a controlled environment.

Although I do agree that not every person mentioning psychic powers is delusional, they could be engaging in fraudulent behavior, positing a hypothetical scenario, writing fiction, playing some sort of make believe like DnD, or making stuff up for laughs. Or maybe a person would have other motivations for mentioning it but for a person to claim to possess these abilities, and have that claim be supported, will take some very strong evidence.

old comment by mikeytron

i'm stepping out of the shadows for a bit and showing my lurking moderator face because shy has gone to bed. if you've been seeing random 503 errors sporadically, shy and i are aware of the issue. he told me to post something about it here if i saw it again after he went to bed, and i just did. the issue is definitely not FSTDT, and it's probably not the host either. it's more likely happening somewhere along the route to the host. shy has been getting the 503 errors a lot more frequently than i have, but he also started getting them a couple hours before he went to bed. that's quite a while after i started seeing them even though he's seen more of them. i don't understand why the error would happen like that if it wasn't somewhere in the route from our ISPs to FSTDT, but shy knows a whole lot more about this than i. it should resolve itself soon in any case. if it doesn't, shy will file support tickets with the host and domain server.

edit: oh, and shy told me to mention that SSTDT needs a proper cover image! he has decent graphic design skills, but he doesn't know what to go with or use as a starting point. also SSTDT will probably open before his spring break if he can get a cover image and get the sexist quotes from the past couple of months imported there. i'll probably be doing that last part or helping do most of it.

old comment by shy

Woo, taking today off 'cause I had to go to my rheumatologist this morning for my Benlysta infusion.

Made some progress getting the database ready for SSTDT. If you see quotes disappearing in a few days, don't panic. They're being imported into SSTDT. You'll be able to appreciate them in all their sexist glory again when SSTDT opens. Mods should see a Sexists Say the Darndest Things! section and a Misc section in the relevant places (e.g. editing and approving quotes) sometime during the next few days. Please don't mess with them yet.

Also, to people whom I gave Dial-a-Sub access (I still haven't figured out what that meansDistind named itbut it's the thing that lets me post entries/'quotes' in Shy Says), it will be breaking in a few days as I move it to a separate blog and import SSTDT into the fourth section. Right now it's in a temp nineteenth section for testing. If you like snooping around and attempt to access it, it will fail, because I haven't added a fifth section into the FSTDT production code, and it won't be there when SSTDT opens 'cause temporary.

There is no Miss Zarves. There is no nineteenth section. Sorry

old comment by shy

@NeoMatrix: It was dxdydz's idea; thank him. All I did was spend barely a half hour implementing it.

@dxdydz: Not adding them on the Random quotes page is an oversight on my part. I'll fix it... eventually. If nothing else, it will be fixed when I upload the SSTDT-ready version of the site code.

@Everyone suggesting names for FSTDT/CSTDT/SSTDT/RSTDT combos (boy howdy, talk about crazy just managing a classic FSTDT/CSTDT/RSTDT trifecta already requires a truly special kind of loco): I love your ideas, suggestions, and feedback, but whatever people use to describe them in the wild will be the 'winner.'

@Tricky Fox: I'll probably not be recompiling a production build until slightly before SSTDT opens. I'm pushing it back to the planned March 17-19th date just to be on the safe side, since I have midterms to give and grade next week. But don't be surprised if it's open for business a day or two earlier.

(Yeah, the SSTDT build of FSTDT is gonna have a boatload of other minor changes and fixes. Among them, I'll finally be finished refactoring the current site code and translating it from C# into VB; the current development code that will be deployed with SSTDT is now 100% VB. The translation will make a lot less code need to actually be rewritten for the code 'rewrite.' I'm still calling it a near-rewrite because of the amount of work it took combing through, tidying up, and translating the entire existing codebase to prepare it to be partially reusable in the new codebase. That's on top of the additional changes needed to transition to a new operating system, Web server, and database. And that's in addition to some, to put it mildly, pretty significant technical work that I've already done that is not strictly necessary for a rewrite, but it will still be a major component of it nonetheless. For now, I'll just say the 'VB' code won't be running on .NET or even Mono anymore, and I may or may not have written an entire self-hosting high-level language-to-language 'compiler'. A preview / test of this setup will go live when I upload the blog that will replace Shy Says. A hypomanic episode and last-minute rush to finish it up for Shy Says may or may not be why my inner code monkey is so tuckered out right now.)

Also, I'm letting voting on the cover image continue until Wednesday next week to give people who only occasionally visit the S/OT discussion thread a chance to vote. I'm not putting a link to vote on the front page, because I honestly don't really want or care much about someone's opinion on this particular choice if they don't actually involve themselves with the site much. Checking out this thread is a good sign of participation, or at least a sign of a good start in that direction. It looks like Submission A is going to win, but another submission may take the lead out of the blue, kinda like how PizzaGate popped up out of nowhere at the last minute and snubbed the Conspiracy of the Year award from the Mandela Effect.

old comment by SpukiKitty

I just heard that the First Nations at Standing Rock have lost the initial battle....however, they are now on to Plan B and are now marching in Washington.

I have this burning question that I can't find answered anywhere....WHY CAN'T THE DUMB IDIOT MORON BIG OIL BUNCH JUST MAKE THE SWITCH TO GREEN ENERGY?

I mean, REALLY! It's so easy! It doesn't have to be all at once but it can be done and all sides will be happy!

C'mon! Where's the Exxon Solar Panel Manufacturers and the BP Wind Farms? There's BIG BUCKAROOS to be made in going green! It's the wave of the future! It's what the people want!

Perhaps there should be a big summit or discussions between Green Energy proponents and the Oil/Coal companies. Really! All these problems could be solved with all sides happy!

The Earth can stay clean. The people will be happy. The Robber Barons can still make mucho-bucks for their fleet of diamond encrusted Rolls Royces, mountains of cocaine and call girls and personal Space Shuttles or whatever the hell they're into.

Can anyone tell me why the Big Oil/Coal dorks are too lazy and stupid to do the obvious?

old comment by

-72 hours remain-

You mean the moon is gonna fall and kill everybody? Oh no.

Seriously though MM is the best Zelda because it doesn't use the tired old cliche damsel-in-distress trope. In Majora's Mask you are actually fighting to save the world, not for the prize of an objectified woman/girl. Compare this to the new BotW where Zelda needs a man to save her yet again. And of course the (mostly male) reviewers give it perfect scores despite the blatant sexism.

I think the problem with the series is that it bears Zelda's name. Seriously if it was called the Adventures of Link instead they wouldn't always have to include the distressed damsel cliche. But if they can't find something better for Princess Zelda to do instead of being a damsel-in-distress forever, that series is best left to the dustbin of the 80's.

Sorry, rant off.

old comment by shy

@2031282: I love Majora's Mask, and when SSTDT opens in a couple days, I'm prolly gonna be dancing on the moon as it comes crashing to Earth. MM is still my favorite Zelda game because... everything you just said. I also like Link's Awakening for mostly the same reason. It also had a lot of fun bugs.

TBH, even though that shit is still sexist, Zelda's kidnapping has gotten so bad it honestly doesn't even feel sexist to me anymore. It feels more like she keeps getting kidnapped because she's just a stupid bitch spaced out on drugs. (To me, she acts more and more like she's strung out on sedatives and dissociatives with each game. But it's really, especially bad in Skyward Sword. Seriously.)

old comment by shy

@pyro: Fixed. (I thought I had already fixed it, but I noticed another rule specifying the wonky line spacing. The CSS file is a mess, but it was already like that before I got my hands on it. Still not an excuse for me not fixing the fact it's a mess, though. I'll try to get to that with the next round of updates and hopefully get around to bringing somebody on board to help me out with things like this.)

@dxdydz: That's crossed my mind several times, but I keep forgetting about it. I'll try to add something covering the basics of YsCodes to the FAQ with the SSTDT update, but I can't really cover everything because it'd be a FAQ in itself. There's a ton of little minor 'undocumented' things, or at least 'undocumented' insofar as I haven't mentioned them and nobody seems to have discovered them. For example, you can use [em] and [strong] instead of [b] and [i]. You can also add [aside]s, insert preformatted blocks of text (e.g. for displaying code), and center lines of text. (The name of the tag for that last one should be obvious enough.)

@THX 1138: Back at ya!
_

Sorry for the delay getting SSTDT going. I'm mostly going to take a break from coding today after spending most of yesterday and the better part of my free time the day before working on code for both the SSTDT update and the 'rewrite.' Everything needed for SSTDT itself to function is finished, but there are a few more things I want to polish up, put the finishing touches on, and test. They're a part of FSTDT code update that will accompany the grand opening of SSTDT: there's nothing earth-shattering or ground-breaking, but it actually has quite a few changes and new things you can see and use instead of just the usual backend code changes I usually ramble about!

(Those earlier changes were needed to make the code manageable enough to work with and make 'meaningful' changes to it. And that's why the site's code underwent several rounds of backend code changes before I did anything significant you guys could behold for yourselves. See, I wasn't just sitting on my ass pretending to be productive!! Though I still know most of you don't give a fuck about stuff like doing blah-blah-blah to the database or writing yadda-yadda-yadda to do something that's cool from a technical standpoint but users can't actually appreciate yet, nor do I expect you to care, but if you do, that's awesome.)

Edit: Moved the second part of this comment to a separate Shy Says post because it strayed waayyy too far off-topic.

old comment by shy

Good fucking God, why is the host's database server so SLOW?? I've had more than enough of this. I am definitely moving some of the simple shit to a JSON quasi-database that doesn't require the DB server.

I'll start keeping a running list of things to be done before SSTDT as I complete them. Might be a little vague or cryptic because I don't want it to be too spoilerrific. Much of it is going to be going back and double-checking and testing to make sure everything is in place.

DONE: Updated a stored procedure in the database pertaining to the Top 100.
DONE: Checked stored procedures to ensure that an ArchiveID 0* doesn't make them have a mental breakdown.
DONE: Deleted everything in Archive 19 / MZSTDT used for testing.
DONE: Found and fixed an unrelated bug in the stored procedure for searches. Search page should be a tad faster now.
DONE: Uploaded new old-school front-page header font.
DONE: Updated the CSS file to add a @font-face for the header font.
DONE (..hopefully??): Double-checking other stored database procedures to make extra sure they are SSTDT-ready.
DONE: Clean VS solutions for a recompile.
DONE: Release build recompile: DataAccess.vb
STOP: Release build recompile: ~~ctlQuote.vb~~, ctlComment.vb. CtlQuote.vb is not compiling.
DONE: Flagged ctlQuote.vb. Identified problem: shamefully forgetting to finish half the changes to it and look into why something I wanted to try wasn't working.
DONE: Tested not-working thing in ctlQuote.vb in a nonce project. ~~Error.~~ ~~Error.~~ ~~Error.~~ ~~Error.~~ ~~Still error...~~ ~~Completely different error.~~ A ha!!
~~WHAT: I can do that ???~~ lol not if I want to maintain what little sanity I have
UNEXPECTED SWERVE: Major unplanned additions and changes to the custom templating engine to work with the completely, uniquely stupid way Distind did the quote control's rendering with 50 jillion Response.Output.Write() calls. See here for updates and progress on that and "watch" me make something live.
~~DONE: Put placeholder code and comments in the PreRender and Render events of the master page.~~ UNDONE
DONE: Quick-and-dirty hack in the form of yet another Response.Ouput.Write() to ctlQuote.vb's rendering output that inserts a Chr(7) (the ASCII "bell" control code, appropriately enough) to act as a sentinel signalling the presence of unparsed templating parts. UNDONE
PAUSED: Work on the ~~Unexpected Swerve~~ Unexpected Double Swerve
DONE: Implemented dynamically generated search links in quote information using ParseToOutput() + template fragments to
IN PROGRESS: Finishing ctlQuote.vb

*Where the misc stuff like these S/OT threads are going and the old Shy/Distind Says posts are going to be archived for the time being.

old comment by shy

Okay, round one of testing on my part is done.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely nothing interesting to see this time, just testing the stuff to make that possible right now. The site will probably be running a little slower than usual because this is a Debug build compiled with all the debug symbols and such bells and whistles. Errors should now tell which source code files, variables, classes, functions, etc. are involved and also include more offending source code than the basic stack trace normally in place does. Also worth noting is that I've given several variable and function names outrageously long / specific names. I get 'vibes' about them and suspect they are likely a potential source of problems. I don't normally use ridiculous identifier names like ParamsRecentPostsFromIPAndUserAgent, and those will be changed back to something reasonable like Params when I'm done testing. (Params isn't very useful when you have 20 or 30 functions / methods with variables using that name.)

Please be on the look out for bugs! If you get an error, and the message mentions a file as described below, please email me a full copy of it at admin@fstdt.org:

Anything that ends in .vb as opposed to .original.vb: Seeing the latter is an indication I've rolled something back, most likely to test something else. I'm not really concerned if the .original.vb files cause problems. It's to be expected with mixing new and old code. Anything ending in .cs or containing code that looks like, well, C# is a double rollback.

References to compiled binary files to be on the look out for

DataAccess.dll : the changes to this are nearly or equally as extreme as those I made last time when I gutted unused crud from the database. this time, extreme change is almost entirely from using the next library to very drastically reduce the amount of boilerplate code (its filesize is now seriously less than half of what it previously wasand that's with debugging symbols enabled which beef up the size of binary files quite a bit.)
DataUtils.dll : new
ForumObjects.dll
MainPageObjects.dll
STDT Rebuild.dll (If you see just STDT.dll, that means I rolled back the parts of the new build I've rolled out in the main code file. Again, because it had to be updated to work with changes to the other files, I'm not very concerned if I do a roll back and STDT.dll crashes. Hell, I'd be surprised if it didn't.)

I'm not really concerned about any of the other compiled binary files yet, because they aren't affected by the changes I have rolled out so far.

I will really, really, really appreciate your help!!

One more thing: Lights will probably be out again for about an hour or so around 3:00 PM EST. This time you'll see at least a couple of differences when the site comes back up.

old comment by shy

@JeanP: It'll be popping up again as a blog in the next week or so, and since it's a proper blog, I'll probably do quite a bit more posting there. I was already planning on doing that, so I gave the old section for Shy Says to SSTDT.

Also, on another note, I got an error for the first time in a while, one with a ridiculously unhelpful message too:

Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately.
Parser Error Message: Could not load type 'STDT.Top250'.
Source Error:
Line 1: <%@ Page Language="C#[char]quot; MasterPageFile="~/FSTDT.Master" AutoEventWireup="true"" CodeBehind="Top250.aspx.cs" Inherits="STDT.Top100" Title="The FSTDT Top 250" %>
Line 2: <%@ Register TagPrefix="Controls" Assembly="MainPageControls" Namespace="MainPageControls" %>
Line 3: <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolder1" runat="server">
Source File: /Top250.aspx Line: 1

Change C# to VB and all the .cs files to .vb files, and it works perfectly again. Can anyone here seriously tell me you would have guessed that's the problem by looking at that error information and code? I immediately knew what was most likely happening, but only because FSTDT is all VB all the time now. This in all likelihood managed to happen because I somehow accidentally updated an old copy of the Top100.aspx when I gave it a level up. But that's still not something I would have guessed from that message.

old comment by shy

@Pharaoh Bastethotep: The outcome of that was every quote on it being from FSTDT, so I'm probably going to split them again but leave it as a Top 250 and fix the confusing issue dxdydz described in an earlier comment: if you went to, for example, the CSTDT archive and clicked Top 100, you would see the Top 100 CSTDT quotes. But if you were on the page for an individual CSTDT quote and clicked Top 100, you would see the Top 100 FSTDT quotes. There are several ways to fix this, and I'm not sure which one I want to do. Not all of them are mutually exclusive:

1. Split the Top 250 link into four links. This is the easiest but ugliest / clunkiest from an aesthetic and design viewpoint.

2. Make the Top 250 link a dropdown menu you can click, tap, or hover over for links to each section's Top 250 quotes.

3. Simply make the Top 250 link for the page for an individual quote go to the Top 250 page for that quote's section. For this to make much sense in terms of usability, what section a quote is filed under should be put somewhere toward the top of that quote's page. (From a coding point of view, there's actually nothing "simply" about implementing any of this, even though something like it being laborious and confusing sounds more like there's something wrong with the programmer than the platform/framework they're programming on. But a lot of things about ASP.NET WebForms doesn't make any sense, though I do still think there's also a lot of good things that are majorly underappreciated because it's pretty damn oldand definitely out of style in any case.)

4. Change the Top 250 page so it contains links to each section's Top 250 quotes. This is just as easy as the first option and much less offensive from a design standpoint. (Determining what section to display by default is an entirely different can of worms.)

I'll have one or more of these implemented soon.

old comment by shy

Okay, guys, I'm filing email bankruptcy for all of my email accounts except my faculty email account at work, but that one doesn't concern you.

The email bankruptcy applies to my FSTDT admin email (admin@fstdt.com, admin@fstdt.net, admin@fstdt.org), and since a lot of you know at least one of my personal email addresses, I need to give a heads up that I'm also filing bankruptcy on them too, both my online-stuff email (spikedee@openmailbox.org) and my IRL-stuff email (d***********y@openmailbox.org : replace the asterisks with the rest of my full name). I think I should also probably let it be known that I am not completely batshit insane. My FSTDT admin email addresses are actually just one inbox that has three addresses not three separate email accounts all email sent to any of them goes to the same inbox and is accessed from the same account on the host's mail server.

I didn't declare email bankruptcy because I got overwhelmed by the number of emails I had, even if Wikipedia gives that as the only reason for it, so don't hesitate to resend anything if you didn't get a response to it! My FSTDT email gets about 5-6 legit emails a day, and that's well within the limits of what I can handle. (I also get 20-30 of the standard-fare webmaster spam that admin@everydomain.ever gets, and virtually all of it automagically finds itself in my Junk folder where it belongs.) My other accounts get considerably more because I do one-on-one French tutoring and Web development consulting, and my calling broke is actually a much bigger deal for that. If you sent me something and didn't get a reply, then I either didn't get it or the problem that made me start over kept me from seeing it. I always read and reply to every email I receive, even if it's just an acknowledgement that I got your message and read it. Feel more than free to send anything again if I didn't reply the first time. I didn't reply to again, and you'll get a reply within a few hours at the most (well, maybe eight or nine hours now, since it's getting late and I'm about to go to bed).

Anyway, what happened was that I made the mistake of reading and replying to email using the IMAP protocol with three different email clients, two webmail interfaces, and four different devices. The result was that my email was strewn everywhere. None of the devices were anything remotely resembling "in sync" despite that allegedly being one of IMAP's advantages. I can't keep track of what I've read, what I've replied to, what I need to read and reply to, which device a message wound up on, etc. I tried to keep on trucking until I got everything organized, under control again, and with all my ducks in a row. But these ducks are fucking stupid and even don't understand what the concept of a row is. They need to be slapped. And words fail to describe know how close I driving myself completely insane trying not to resort to this.

Moral of the story: Using IMAP with one email client on one device works fine and isn't really any different than POP. Using IMAP with two or three email clients on several devices shows that IMAP does virtually nothing it touts that is supposed to make it superior to POP. Everything would have stayed in sync, and all my devices would have all my email on it if I had used POP.

old comment by shy

@2033315: I'm off to bed now, but I made a note to check and see if it's still in the database in the morning. If it is, I'm totally throwing that shit up on SSTDT. She definitely was not a Poe, or at least not one in the ordinary sense. She was using her primary online identity and everything she said indicated she sincerely believed at least a good chunk of the crazy-ass shit she said.

Edit: ...and now SSTDT Top 250 now has a new crown jewel. actually moved all of Femitheist Divine's standing quotes over to SSTDT. I also noticed that only 3 of her quotes were actually ever "deleted."

[aside]So this makes sense, "deleted" quotes are actually marked hidden in the FSTDT database. I periodically use the power of ~~triangles~~ SQL to perma-delete everything manually. I have a couple of tables in the database that log just enough info from the delete queries to able to notice and ban repeat offenders from being submitted or commenting. I even go through and clean that out occasionally.

The previous admin Distind apparently never deleted anything for real. The first time I did it, the database size seriously, literlly, honest-to-God shrunk to less than half of what it was before. That was because every single rejected quote from pubadmin was still there, not just quotes that were approved and later deleted.[/aside]

old comment by Pharaoh Bastethotep

@shy

@Pharaoh Bastethotep: The outcome of that was every quote on it being from FSTDT, so I'm probably going to split them again but leave it as a Top 250 and fix the confusing issue dxdydz described in an earlier comment: if you went to, for example, the CSTDT archive and clicked Top 100, you would see the Top 100 CSTDT quotes. But if you were on the page for an individual CSTDT quote and clicked Top 100, you would see the Top 100 FSTDT quotes. There are several ways to fix this, and I'm not sure which one I want to do. Not all of them are mutually exclusive:
1. Split the Top 250 link into four links. This is the easiest but ugliest / clunkiest from an aesthetic and design viewpoint.
2. Make the Top 250 link a dropdown menu you can click, tap, or hover over for links to each section's Top 250 quotes.
3. Simply make the Top 250 link for the page for an individual quote go to the Top 250 page for that quote's section. For this to make much sense in terms of usability, what section a quote is filed under should be put somewhere toward the top of that quote's page. (From a coding point of view, there's actually nothing "simply" about implementing any of this, even though something like it being laborious and confusing sounds more like there's something wrong with the programmer than the platform/framework they're programming on. But a lot of things about ASP.NET WebForms doesn't make any sense, though I do still think there's also a lot of good things that are majorly underappreciated because it's pretty damn oldand definitely out of style in any case.)
4. Change the Top 250 page so it contains links to each section's Top 250 quotes. This is just as easy as the first option and much less offensive from a design standpoint. (Determining what section to display by default is an entirely different can of worms.)
I'll have one or more of these implemented soon.

Could the same also be done for Latest Comments?

old comment by dxdydz

I'm very excited to have this done, so I want to share it with comp-sci peoples. It's an 8 bit computer! Besides the obvious hex displays, it has 16 RAM addresses (each 8 bits wide) and an ALU capable of addition, bitwise [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]or[/font], [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]&[/font], and [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]xor[/font], as well as their inversions. The ALU also supports bitshifting and storage for two constants. The program counter is capable of conditional branching based on how the values in the A and B registers are related.

ROM is organized as follows: [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]rrrrrr|wwwwww|jjj[/font]. Where the [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]r[/font]s are read address bits, [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]w[/font]s are write address bits, and the [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]j[/font]s control jumping conditions and turning off the machine. When any [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]j[/font] bit is a 1 [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]r[/font] becomes the ROM address to go to when false and [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]w[/font] becomes the ROM address to go to when true. As an example here is the first program I wrote for it which does [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]input1+input2 → display1[/font].

[center]

0: 010011|000001|000

1: 010100|000010|000

2: 000001|010001|000

3: 000010|010010|000

4: 011000|000011|000

5: 000011|010011|000

6: 000000|000000|111

[/center]

The code reads:

[center]



0: save input1 to RAM1

1: save input2 to RAM2

2: save  RAM1  to regA

3: save  RAM2  to regB

4: save  A+B   to RAM3

5: save  RAM3  to dsp1

6:      shutdown

[/center]

Edit: Something is super wrong with the timing controls and I don't have the patience to fix it today. The program I posted here works, but it stops working when it's modified to save A+B to a RAM addressed by a number >3.* And the computer derps up really bad with jumping for some reason.

^{*Sadly, this may be an issue with the game itself and not an issue with my construction...}

Edit 2: How hard would it be to implement something like typing Ctrl+q makes [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif][quote?][/quote?][/font] appear in the text entry box? Same with Ctrl+i → img, Ctrl+s → strikethrough, etc.

old comment by shy

Sorry for the delay with my replies! Had a bit of a false alarm emergency with The Husband's father.

@ Pharoah: That's a defnite will-do.

@ dxdydyz: That's cool! I was going to go on a ramble about that before shit went down.

@ pyro: I already know this is gonna be the long reply. Yep, it's gonna be open source, and an issue tracker would be awesome. I'm not gonna be using GitHub, but implementing an issue tracker is easy. I think it might even be easy with the current codebase. Fucking wow.

Oh yeah, as soon as the semester was over and I was free for the summer, I was already going to invite you to be a member of the programming team regardless of whether it was open source. But consider this your invitation instead. Right now the team is Ravy, Mikey, and myself, but I'm the one doing 99% of the coding. That's also likely going to change when Ravy and Mikey become free for the summer, too -- Rav's a student, and Mikey's a professor like me except linguistics and a finished PhD. I'll probably still be the one doing most of the code unless you kick into overdrive because ZOMG FREE TIME WHAT IS THIS MANNER OF SORCERY.

I'm not gonna do the GitHub thing because I've already decided on using Mercurial instead of Git. Because you could use Final Cut Pro to edit a 12 second video of your cat to upload on YouTube, or you could buy your grandma a hexadeca-core Mac Pro with 32 GB RAM, a 5 TB SSD, and a 38" 16K high-DPI display so she can send her forwards to you, or you could use Git to manage the source code for a small project with < 5 people. Okay, I know I'm being a little too sardonic there, but I'm a big fan of the KISS principle. And if there weren't at least a little truth in my sardonicism, Mercurial wouldn't be a 4.7 MB download on Mac and Git a 43 MB download. I also have a really bad case of "not-hosted-here" syndrome, and Mercurial has a couple of really nice, lightweight web interfaces that I can set up so our adoring public can look and marvel at the brilliance of our source code right here on FSTDT from the comfort of their browser.

old comment by KingOfRhye

I'm just telling everyone online about this cus it's kinda amusing, I think. If you don't know, I work at Kroger, but in their gas station, detached from the main store. Anyway, last night, I went outside to empty the garbage cans, as usual. I then noticed I had a customer coming up to the kiosk. I told her "I'll be right there.". It was right about that time I realized, I don't have the keys. Oops, I just locked myself out. I called the store on my cellphone and got a guy to give me a spare key.

I felt like such a dumbass, but found the whole thing funny, too. So did the woman I called at the service desk about the key, apparently she found it hilarious. ;-)

old comment by shy

From the Java Virtual Machine specification:

Although the Java Virtual Machine defines a boolean type, it only provides very limited support for it. There are no Java Virtual Machine instructions solely dedicated to operations on boolean values.

The JVM is so bad that booleans are far-out, mind-breaking next-level shit for it. And here I thought not its supporting unsigned integers was bad. I'll probably share some more technical lulz from this as I keep trainwrecking through it.

JFC the PCode machine I made in my second-semester undergrad Compiler Design & Data Analysis class was superior than the JVM in several ways. Superior to that POS in one way is already way too much for a legitimate product that takes itself seriously. Someone needs to be smacked upside the head with the classics like Niklaus Wirth's Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. Shit's from the 70s and still on-point. The whole reason I know this book exists is that we actually used it in aforesaid class. I wound up reading the whole thing cover to cover on my own time.

Also, it still baffles me why low-level assembly / bytecode developers still insist on 24 letter mnemonics for opcodes instead of something at least a little more descriptive than ivkv. Somehow Java somehow actually manages to do something unusually reasonable and mostly avert this, no matter how bad ivkv (invoke virtual) is.

old comment by pyro

I don't care very much which VCS and hosting solution we use, but please, let's not self-host the code repo. I've done it before. It's just one more thing you need to maintain, and there aren't very many of us to do that work. In a similar metaphor, I'd rather rent a U-Haul truck than buy one.

I was going to recommend Bitbucket, but they've changed everything since I last looked at it. I'm looking through https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/MercurialHosting

And if you do self-host, use a package like Gogs (Gogs is really nice, since it's just a statically-linked blob that you just run, instead of several separate Java apps that need to link together like *cough* Atlassian Trash). I know Gogs is Git; is there a decent developer-server-in-a-box for Mercurial? This is why I'd rather use Git; all the tooling you typically want for a simple project already exists.

Mercurial does have a better user-interface, I'll give it that.

old comment by shy

@pyro: No hosting a repo plz. Mercurial is distributed. To use the web interface / multi-user repositories, this is how it works. I'll set all of that up. All you'll need to do is have an SSH key, and I can even generate one of those for you and send it to you. (You won't actually be using ssh directly. Mercurial will.)

(Edit: It has a mercurial-server plugin I didn't know about. That's actually simpler than the 'normal' way of handling shared repositories. See link.)

There's also an extra-quick and extra-dirty but good enough way to do it that would make security experts pimp slap you into the next galaxy: do things the the 'normal' way, but instead of setting up users and passwords on the server, use a private network interface and nginx reverse proxy server to host the central repository on http://[random-password-string].fstdt.net:[random-port]/ and only allow it to accept connections from the IP-address ranges of the contributors. I already have the sever set up to use an nginx reverse proxy server, anyway. All the committers have to do know is that URL and push changes to it. Then, to do a publicly accessible, read-only central repository, setup nginx to also host the repository on port 80 of a public subdomain, e.g. http://source.fstdt.net:80/, but to drop everything sent to it that isn't an HTTP GET, HEAD, or TRACE method (those last two so just so it behaves like a normal HTTP server).

Also, it should be pretty obvious that VCSes and repos are not part of my repertoire of technical skills and knowledge, nor do I particularly care to learn much about them. That's why I like Mercurial. (Subversion was the big thing back when I did Web development for a living, so I know the basics of it, too.) But I'm very familiar with how to use and configure nginx.

old comment by pyro

A fresh SSH key, just for you:

(Admin edit: Saved and removed the SSH key just because it wasn't wrapping. Horizontal scrollbars are evil. Also, you shouldn't tell 'em it's a public key and what that means. Just let idiots who try to be 1337 hax0rs with it be idiots. If they're not too much of an idiot, it might eventually dawn on them that they can't actually do anything with it. shy)

As shy already knows, this is a public key. You can use it to identify whether an SSH connection is coming from me. You cannot use it to impersonate me. Doing that would require my id_rsa file, which is never going to leave the computer and thumbdrive it's backed up on.

old comment by shy

Tested out the quick and dirty way on my private server on the local domain I use in the HOSTS file. I am sorely tempted to do it just on account of how easy it is, or am I being a complete idiot? Is there any reason this would be less secure than regular password protection? If nobody shared the subdomain name and port, is there really any way somebody could find and navigate to something like https://qm5dkilkvpcw34d32pngyu3iz582dv4f.fstdt.net:28541/? Is copying and pasting it when pushing and pulling really too much work? There's no way someone could just 'guess' or brute-force find that URL. I keep backups anyway.

Edit: DNSRecon'd all three fstdt domains looking for a couple "private" subdomains already here that are also random strings, just shorter ones. Doesn't find a thing. I was almost certain it wouldn't, but just making sure. If you want to go looking for them, tell me if you find 'em. One is to a test build of FSTDT that is currently not working (so you should see an error page), and the other is to the VPS that will host FSTDT but isn't turned on right now. Neither of them are super-secret things I don't want people to find. Only put 'em out of view because they're not ready for the public yet. (There's also the subdomain that directs to the forums, but that's obviously public and DNSRecon still fails to find it.)

old comment by shy

@pyro: I actually just tried using htaccess on the off chance it would work. It did! I genuinely did not know that nginx supported Apache-style htaccess authentication. Also, I figured hg would just be like "lolwut." Even if you just use http://hg.fstdt.net/ instead of http://user:password@hg.fstdt.net/, hg is smart enough to prompt you for the credentials.

I think it's enough to set up the reverse proxy to use htaccess, https, a bizarre port, and allow HTTP methods other than GET, HEAD, and TRACE from only the IP ranges of the devs. Nobody is going to be that interested in trashing the repo. If they were, I do backups. Daily backups. I also already expect everyone to have a PGP keypair, include something vaguely enlightening in their commit descriptions, and sign one of them when doing a commit.

Edit: I am normally paranoid when it comes to security, but I'm trying to give not being paranoid a try. How difficult (well, not difficult so much as tedious) it is to set up Mercurial to work with ssh plus my unfamiliarity with using it to host shared repositories is giving me incentive. I honestly thought doing it the Properly Paranoid way would be less work. The pull is still strong, though.

old comment by shy

@pyro: Well, I'd never try to configure it without firewalld or similar, but I felt kind of stupid after Googling iptables because there's no shortage of tutorials for setting it up manually.

On another note, people like this make me ashamed to be a Mac user:

The media loves to bash Apple, always has and despite Apple always proving itself to be the premiere personal electronics of our age they continue to do so. One of the attacks was against Apples new MacBook air and MacBook Pro Retina Display models that have soldered in RAM. Yes, it seems annoying at first blush, but lets be honest, the only people that actually every upgrade their RAM now are poor folks that buy extra cheap Windows machines and realize after its too late that Windows is an inefficient throwback to eighties computing.

When this smug creature says "poor folks," I can't figure out whether they mean "poor" as in "pitied" or "poor" as in "poverty." Either way, it's supercilious AF, and this pretentious fanboy drivel is totally fundie (but "poor folks" is when it crossed the Fundie Event Horizon for me). It's not the usual kind of fundie we get here, but should I submit it? (Y/N)

Also, everything (read "the RAM and SSD") in my MacBook Pro can be upgraded except the CPU. But I have an electronics technician friend who does soldering, and he could probably upgrade that. He was able to upgrade the RAM to 2 GB on my little Creator Ci20 I use as my router/firewall/private server.

More from this batshit-insane Apple cultist:

I finally realized what Apple had been crewing all this time. I believe that the secret to Apple’s thought process is found not so hidden in a new feature called Compressed Memory. This feature cuts your RAM needs by half or more [...] MacBooks with soldered in RAM now seem to behave like system that have double the RAM, eliminating the worry that you’ll run out of RAM.

But you didn't realize how compression works, did you?

old comment by Muchacho1994

I'm working on sketching a subcompact vehicle made with people like me (I'm 6'8" by the way) in mind.

The headroom is going to be like (front/rear) 40.5"/38.5" and the legroom is going to be 44"/38-39".

I want it to be less than 165" long if possible and the ideal width is 60.5" to 63". I want it to be less than 57" inches tall and have at least 13 cubic feet of trunk space.

It should seat four adults and perhaps a skinny person, or more likely, a child, in the back middle seat, but the middle seat can fold down to become an armrest with hidden cupholders.

I based my research on small imported Japanese and European vehicles from the 1970s and early 1980s, like the Volkswagen Rabbit, Fiat 128, Toyota Corolla, and the Honda Accord. I want the car to take everything good about those old imports, and improve on that.

It will be:
-economical to run, drive, maintain, and repair
-exceptional on gas mileage
-spacious enough for people with long legs to actually be comfortable
-equipped with a remote keyless entry and back-up sensor as standard features, instead of optional
-built like a Tonka truck

and most of all, low-priced. Like under $15,000.

So far I've sketched a two and four-door sedan, a three-door liftback that has shorter rear side windows and a wraparound rear windshield, and a station wagon that may have to be slightly longer because I want there to be a hidden rear-facing two-passenger bench in the back, making the seating capacity seven if the bench is pulled out of the floor and unfolded.

I'm going to go to college as soon as I can so I can become an automotive designer and engineer.

old comment by shy

@Muchacho1994: I wanna see it!! That's so cool, and sounds like you'll be a great engineer.

...freaking tall people. I'm barely 5'7".

BTW, guys, I love DIY projects like this and dxdydz's virtual 8-bit Minecraft (?) computer. (I have a question on your assembly language, though: why are you using an infixed + instead of an add opcode? There are also a couple of arcane load and store related things that aren't really worth nitpicking over unless you're interested in learning more about assembly languages or this computer is super srs bisness to you.)

Oh, and that reminds me: @dxdydz: I just noticed your question about using [[kbd]Ctrl+Q[/kbd]]. Unfortunately it's generally not a good idea to use JavaScript to, err, control [[kbd]Ctrl[/kbd]] or any other modifier key for that matter, and I'm very weary of creating keyboard shortcuts that do. For example, IIRC, JavaScript maps its [[kbd]Ctrl[/kbd]] key code for key-press events to [[kbd]Cmd[/kbd]] on Mac, and [[kbd]Cmd+Q[/kbd]] is the keyboard shortcut to quit applications! (And [[kbd]Cmd+Opt+Q[/kbd]] is Force Quit!) Adding a second modifier key [em]should[/em] help prevent it from clashing with other keyboard shortcuts. For example, I could do the Windows/Linux equivalent of [[kbd]Cmd+Ctrl+Q[/kbd]], I think. It's free on Mac at least. Either way, I can do some key combination or another.

I'm still not a fan of doing this, since Windows, Mac, and *nix users can all create custom keyboard shortcuts and remap existing ones with reckless abandon 'til there aren't any leftbut I can easily see why other people would like this idea, so I'll do it if we can find a keyboard combination that isn't mapped to anything by default. Do any of you guys using Windows wanna test whether [[kbd]Ctrl+Alt+Q[/kbd]], [[kbd]Ctrl+Win+Q[/kbd]], or [[kbd]Ctrl+Menu+Q[/kbd]] are browser/application keyboard shortcuts for anything by default (...or worse, global shortcuts)? I'll figure out which one of those is Mac [[kbd]Ctrl[/kbd]] later today when I'm on my dev machine.

[aside]Edit: Well, that's lovely. Firefox and Safari disagree. Firefox maps key code 17 to [[kbd]Cmd[/kbd]], and Safari maps it to [[kbd]Ctrl[/kbd]]. (I don't even know what key code Firefox maps to that.) Either way, I think what Firefox does is actually a more appropriate, idiomatic key "translation" than mapping key code 17 to the Mac [[kbd]Ctrl[/kbd]] key literally, just like an idiomatic translation is also better than a literal word-for-word one when translating languages. Apple apparently doesn't agree.[/aside]

[aside]Edit 2: Mikey suggested pressing a key three times in quick succession instead of using modifier keys, e.g. [[kbd]Q[/kbd]][[kbd]Q[/kbd]][[kbd]Q[/kbd]]. I like this idea, it's just as easy to detect, and English doesn't spell words with the same letter three times in a row (nor does any other language so far as I know). If it did, you could wait a couple seconds before adding the third letter. What do you guys think?[/aside]

old comment by dxdydz

@shy

I have a question on your assembly language, though: why are you using an infixed + instead of an add opcode?

I didn't use opcodes for anything because the computer only has 64 lines of ROM to work with and is rather inefficient at moving data. Due to this low amount of ROM and poor ability at moving data I only gave it 16 RAM addresses (which is still a lot compared to my other machines), this left room for me to address the ALU functions as if they were RAM. I have some different ideas for my next design that will hopefully help shuffle values around better and in turn let me write more complex and more compact programs, but I still probably wont use a separate part of the instruction for opcodes.

A lesser reason why I don't use opcodes is because it's one less bundle of wires to pull through this rat's nest. I've also uploaded more pictures of the machine here.

There are also a couple of arcane load and store related things that aren't really worth nitpicking over unless you're interested in learning more about assembly languages or this computer is super srs bisness to you.

Any suggestions, resources references, or nitpickings would be appreciated. I'd like to hear any feedback really because I have no formal education in computer architecture or assembly languages. I just picked up a few books on Boolean algebra and read a few Wikipedia pages on binary adders, counters, and logic gates. Then I tried to figure out how to throw simple computers together with it through experimentation/trial and error.

As to keyboard shortcuts, I wasn't aware of such issues that could arise in its implementation but Mikey's idea sounds viable.

old comment by mikeytron

@shy

The media loves to bash Apple, always has and despite Apple always proving itself to be the premiere personal electronics of our age they continue to do so. One of the attacks was against Apples new MacBook air and MacBook Pro Retina Display models that have soldered in RAM. Yes, it seems annoying at first blush, but lets be honest, the only people that actually every upgrade their RAM now are poor folks that buy extra cheap Windows machines and realize after its too late that Windows is an inefficient throwback to eighties computing.

wow.

i didn't come up with that idea for the keys thing. it's something emacs does for a few of its commands like (esc)(esc)(esc) and (C-c)(C-c)(C-c). emacs has a lot of other things too, like a calendar, day-planner, mail reader, web browser, spreadsheet, address book, calculator, irc program, bibliography database, blog updater, personal diary, debugger terminal, machine code disassembler, ftp client, ssh shell, haiku generator, lisp console, and a "psychotherapist". i think there might be a web server and SQL database lost somewhere in all of that. let's find them and run FSTDT on it. we can use emacs lisp to do the FSTDT code that runs on the server.

i have a theory that emacs is where that malaysian airlines flight got lost.

old comment by pyro

Triple Q sounds awesome.

The quote about soldered on RAM is a border case. I wouldn't post it. It's classist, yes, but putting it on the same website as a call to bring an end to poverty by ending food stamps and letting them die...

Also, understanding all the subtle problems that RAM compression causes (flipping a bit caused me to run out of RAM?!) requires you to understand computers better than most people do. Being ignorant about computers isn't "darndest," any more than misunderstanding the phrase "a help meet for him." Everybody can't be an expert in ancient English or information theory. FSTDT, as far as I understand it, is mostly about willful ignorance and hate.

old comment by shy

(Retracted: Turns out what I originally posted is not a JavaScript bug, but rather a bug in Nitro, the JavaScript engine used by Safari and the macOS Script Editor utility. It's also a lot less off than I thought, due to some derply miscalculations on my part though it still has my second keypress press happening two years before my first, even with the correct calculations. That's still obviously wrong, and it's still off for the same reason: the output of Date.now() in epoch form isn't properly zero-padded. Since I cannot reproduce this behavior anywhere else and it isn't quite as mind-numbingly insane as my original miscalculations led me to believe, I think it's only fair to retract my ragefest and apologize.)

old comment by KingOfRhye

Yet another post by me here apropos of nothing...

But, I know we've got some fans of anime and /or manga here anyway, amirite? It's not something that takes up a lot of my time by any stretch, but I've occasionally seen various things I really liked, at least.

I kinda stumbled across a series called Monster Musume a few days ago. OK, now that is something right up my alley; a guy who, through one way or another, mostly not his doing at all, ends up having 6 demi-human girls (lamia, centaur, mermaid, etc.) move in with him and all fall in love with, want to have sex with, and want to marry him, because as the story shows, he's really just a genuinely good guy.

I spent several hours reading the manga online, when I really, if I had any damn sense , should have been sleeping.

old comment by dxdydz

I just got the Fibonacci sequence to run on this thing. It has more lines of code than the equivalent program on my older computer because there are no opcodes, but it runs much faster due to better architecture. The constant values [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]C1[/font] and [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]C2[/font] are initialized to 1 and 233 respectively. The reason the second constant is 233 is because it's the largest Fibonacci number the machine can generate without running off the 8 bit width I'm working with. Typically the Fibonacci sequence starts with 0 and 1, but I have set this to start up with 1 and 2 because I'm impatient. Here [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]R[/font]s are RAM, [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]D[/font]s are displays, and [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]Re[/font]s are registers.

[center]



0:  011110|001111|000                C1  to R15              

1:  011111|001110|000                C2  to R14              

2:  001111|010001|000                R15 to ReA              

3:  010000|010010|000                R16 to ReB              

4:  011000|010000|000                A+B to R16              

5:  010000|010100|000                R16 to D2               

6:  010000|010010|000                R16 to ReB              

7:  001110|010001|000                R14 to ReA              

8:  001001|010000|010 A=B? If T goto ROM#16, if F goto ROM#9.

9:  001111|010001|000                R15 to ReA              

10: 010000|010010|000                R16 to ReB              

11: 011000|001111|000                A+B to R15              

12: 001111|010100|000                R15 to D2               

13: 001111|010001|000                R15 to ReA              

14: 001110|010010|000                R14 to ReB              

15: 000011|010000|010 A=B? If T goto ROM#16, if F goto ROM#3.

16: 000000|000000|111                 shutdown

[/center]

Since the output is in hex it prints [font=Courier New, Compacta, Chicago, sans-serif]1, 2, 3, 5, 8, d, 15, 22, 37, 59, 90, E9[/font] then terminates. The code could be shorter if I put the jump instruction only in the half of code E9 is generated in.

@KingOfRhye

I understand your difficulty in finding something you like, and when you do find something good you just want to binge the crap out of it. I'm pretty picky and usually only watch the sci-fi ones; Steins;Gate, Ghost in The Shell, Psycho-Pass, and Cowboy Bebop, those were excellent and I binge watched all of them.

old comment by KingOfRhye

@dxdydz

Well, that's a slightly more obscure one, I guess, because I've never heard anyone mention it aside from the friends who introduced me to it...one of which was a girl who knew my tastes very well. It was like, OK, near-hentai bits in places, D&D-style swords-and-sorcery action, and a lead character who's kinda morally ambiguous, while being a total bad-ass, and a cocky-as-hell wise-cracker, too...

Yeah, that's right up my alley, alright! Oh, and that's not to mention the references to heavy metal bands and artists they kept sticking in. Like, for example, a lot of the action takes place in the Kingdom of "Meta-Rikana", or "Metallicana" depending on what translation you're looking at. ;-)

old comment by Ambulance Chaser

I really hate Royce E. Van Blaricome. I mean really hate him.

He's probably in the top 5, if not 3, of most annoying people I've ever interacted with.

He's beyond Amos Moses and yes, even afchief. Those guys are like kittens compared to him.

It's the combination of stupidity, smugness, condescension and his complete and utter refusal to have a civilized discussion on any topic that makes him so completely infuriating. Maybe it's his habit of going around giving people "awards" for not being interesting enough to suit his tastes or disingenuously "thanking" them for saying things he seems stupid. Or maybe it's the way he tells you you're wrong, but never says why, and tells you to go look things up yourself when called on his statements.

He's truly a wretched human being.

old comment by KingOfRhye

Earlier today, before I had heard anything about the Syria attack, I was on a "WebSDR" site (basically, an online shortwave radio that a bunch of people can listen to different things on all at once). Some people were posting things on their message board about tracking an unidentified plane, doing weird things. I found the site they were doing that on, and yeah, there was some "mystery plane" (unusual because 99.9% of the time, if not more, those sites will tell you what kind of plane, where it came from, where's it going, etc) that came out of the middle of Turkey, then spent at least five hours circling a few spots by the Syrian border. That just had to be something to do with the attack, I assume. US drone? AWACS?

I'm a little bit of a radio guy...I've always had SW radios, scanners, even had a CB radio back when that was still kind of a thing. If and when I get my own house, I'll be the guy on the block with the weird-looking antennas on the roof. (Can't really do that in an apartment, you know? lol)

old comment by shy

A style guide would be a very good idea, so would a little link for formatting help below input boxes. I'll try to work on those when I have some free time and am not bone tired, unless you guys want to help with that.

I'm starting to realize that I can't conduct this crazy train alone. Especially not during the month before finals and the first couple of weeks after that. I can devote the summer to FSTDT full-time, though, but I'll still need some help and will be recruiting some more coders, question-answerers, mistake-fixers, and quote-approvers. (Oh, btw, pyro, laziness prevails. We're gonna just use GitHub, even though I love hg as my personal VCS. Also, we're fully switching to Node.js, because my love-hate relationship with JavaScript is eternal.)

ALSO, we will have a couple of keyboard shortcuts for quoting soon. They're going to be > and @. Trivially easy to do, meaningful, and you can just type >> or @@ to undo it. Unless that annoys or confuses too many people.

@JeanP: Fixed the error. Thanks for pointing it out.

And I leave you all with this:

image

[aside]Edit: My husband just told me lemmings exploding is from the video game. I just thought it was hilariously random. People still ought to know better, but derp@me. That still doesn't explain "do lemmings exist," though, which is what I was originally going for. If you type in "do x ex" for just about anything, one of the auto-completions will be "exist."[/aside]

old comment by SpukiKitty

To Shy; SpukiKitty here and I was inspired by one of the recent quotes where "Taylor Swift = Pure Evil" was mentioned again by a frum for the thousandth time.

NeoMatrix, in a moment of being a decent person, suggested that this site should have a logo combining the main "memes" of FSTDTs.

Thus; I came up with a logo depicting a devilish Taylor Swift in a bathtub with Leviathan monster things (who are eating McDonalds) and firing an awesome Atomic Flame from her vag without hurting the snug PANTS she is wearing (therefore, it's SFW).

It's all cartoony and silly and I wish to put this scene within a circle that reads, "FSTDT/RSTDT/CSTDT/SSTDT....Raising Hell Against Stupidity Since [Date]" or something like that....but I don't know the year when the venerable late Founder, "WinAce" started the site.

What year was this site founded? 2000?

old comment by shy

@Spuki: It depends on how you define 'founded.' FSTDT was originally called "Christians say the darndest things!" (blech, I know). That started around 2001. It became "Fundies say the darndest things!" some time after that. ~~Give me a little bit, and I can give you at least a ballpark figure. I'll update it when I have one.~~ No later than 2005. There was some time between then when it was down / didn't exist. It's also when FSTDT assumed roughly the form it is in now. (Wow. Even RSTDT was "coming soon!" then, just like SSTDT was, not even a month ago...) Either way, I would much prefer you use that latter date, for reasons that should be obvious to you!

I very much look forward to seeing this logo!! If you can, I'd like it if you used this font, because it's the font that the [i]really[/i] old-school FSTDT logo uses, and I'm fond of it for some reason. It's kinda tacky but in a good way. Don't do the oblique / faux-italics, though. That's too tacky.

old comment by shy

Save it as a .PDN file and e-mail it.

In terms of adjustments, the most I'm going to do is vectorize it (basically that just means put it in a form that's easier for me to work with and which scales much better), shrink it down a bit to fit better on the side of the page, and make a few adjustments to keep the text readable and the image clear when I resize it. I may also add some subtle gradients. I also might later adjust the colors just a tad when I update the color scheme a little.

Speaking of vector graphics, you've clearly got talent, and I think you should download Inkscape and give it a shot. The learning curve seems really steep at first, but you'll adjust fairly quickly, and there are plenty of YouTube videos and tutorials to help you. Karbon is also a really good, free (and open source) vector-graphics program, and I prefer it, but I'm not sure whether it's available on Windows. It also has a much smaller user community and the number of tutorials seems vanishingly small compared to Inkscape, so it's probably better to go with that.

old comment by shy

Everyone on my mother's side of the family is Hyacinth Bucket, and IDGAF about their Mercedes, sauna, pool, or room for a pony. I hate them so much right now. I also hate myself for still caring about staying int heir favor. Fuck luxury cars and trophy animals. I just want room to be left alone right now so I can do something to the site that I should have already done by now, and to take a break from having to listen to obliviously, inadvertently classist shit from a bunch of people who pride themselves in being from a family with several successful liberal politicians in the deep fucking south. Most of these people grew up dirt poor on top of that. How did this state of affairs even happen? I am not even exaggerating, and my bipolar is not being stupid right now. This shit really is just this ridiculous.

I hate that I am typing this on my phone when I am at my parents house, where I have a separate laptop and even a desktop computer on top of bringing the regular laptop. If I remove myself from their eye for more than 5 minutes, then ISTG, the topic of conversation will become how rude I am (did I mention I hate the fact that I still care), and it will be discussed in hushed whispers, and I will be asked if I'm ok about 40 times and basically nearly cause a scene or cause them to. (Your guess is as good as mine how much any concern displayed would be sincere.) /rant

I'm ok, though. I just don't like being here right now and playing along with this and even being around it right now. Is it really any surprise that I got my handle from developing near-crippling social anxiety and a fear of being a total failure, and that it took years and a fuckton of therapy for me to rise above all that and move on past it. (I beat social anxiety so hard, though, y'all. I fucking teach now, i.e. do almost 40 hours of public speaking a week, sometimes in front of an audience of nearly a hundred students.) Fuck, it would be more of a surprise if I was raised around these aspiring high-society helicopter relatives and didn't develop social anxiety and all manner of inadequacy issues. Like right now. Their shit has conditioned me to where I feel bad and like I'm being an attention whore for venting about this or even revealing any sign to anybody that I am anything less than hunky-dorry right now or basically ever.

Wow. I actually typed all this on my phone. Definite sign I seriously, seriously, needed to vent, but rant over now. Sorry.

Edit: Cool! I just logged into SQL Server on my phone and did a command. Mods can prob see what I did. Just testing to see if this mobile SQL client is ready for my jelly. Also bored and still blech.

old comment by shy

Thanks for the support, Skide and Spuki. Trust me, Skide, things aren't sunshine and rainbows on the other side of the fence, either. Especially when you're not actually on that side of the fence in the first place, only standing on the fence itself, looking at the people staring at you on that side and beckoning. But instead of joining them, I try to do a little jig and dance on the fence, putting on a fake smile to make them happy and show them that I'm happy without all of their trappings.

Felt a lot better after just getting all of that off my chest. And felt better honestly finally letting myself just have a minor meltdown and make myself vulnerable in front of a bunch of people (well a bunch for me), even if it's just on the Internet. That's a fear I still have a very long way to go before I conquer. I rarely seriously open up to anyone about anything being less than a-okay or being anything short of completely in control and on top of everything.

That said, dancing on a fence ain't easy. You gotta keep your balance, and it's harder to do when you try and you're afraid: afraid of what'll happen if you slip and land on either side of that fence: afraid of the person you'll become if you just let yourself fall onto the side closer to home, but just as afraid of what things will be like on the side you've been largely sheltered from most of your life. I've always been more along the lines of "affluent" and "well-to-do," though, never one of the genuinely rich ones, or at least not before my uncle passed away unexpectedly about three years ago.

I've been feeling kind of lost and really torn about what I ought to do ever since then, and it's not something I'm very good at talking about or even figuring out. I'm close to giving in. I would be able to seriously work on FSTDT and another site I'm involved with, and I could do it and have something resembling a social life too. But do I really want to be a house husband? Regardless of whether it were feasible or not? This is the most I've ever opened up about this more like the first time I seriously have period so I guess something good did come from dealing with family today.

I'm still pretty freaking miserable here even if it's not as bad as it was. :| But everyone will be gone byebye in a couple more hours!!

@Mikey: fku! Not my fault you can't grasp the true form of recursive beauty

old comment by Skide

@shy

This is literally the other side for me in a way, my entire existence is trying to quit holding the fucking brakes and let the inside out for once in life for fear of utter obliteration of coherency. While I can only hope to emulate what you must be going through, I`m currently the last person on this sphere to mock or take things lightly.

Trying to catch some relax after the annoying apes are gone is probably the best bet in your predicament, until I lived with Matt I used to bunker myself down till they passed as well.

Currently I`m little better myself, caved in to an old addiction I keep at hand just in case, though I hate to see myself smoking tobacco after so much time free. Still, 30 years of fucking obliteration level panic attacks(normal person feels this way when seeing a bear or being shot at, I get this exact feeling first thing in the morning and in the constant field version thoughout the day) that I now am prett ymuch certain did not have to be there in the first place.

I find myself having hard time descripting it, just please be aware I`m not trying to play some retarded social game. The last days simply depleted my last reserves, so to speak and there`s at least few more weeks before we`re through with our main crap and I was always a creature to seek contact more than not.

Addendum:

This is really a question of your very fundamental values, as a sentient. Do you view the money exchange system on which we currently operate as society as more or less a functioning default which should not be in any way challenged for a greater cause or would you rather your contributions to your kind be measured in merit and empathy, regardless wheter some would say that without this specific measurement your contributions will alwyas be meaningless?

My personal opinion: Unless your family literally directly benefited some poor souls existence recently, you should not feel guilty about accepting the resources given to you, only to understand that now that you posses them your obligation to your kind to use them for terran benefit grows as well.

The confirmation of self in the worse default circumstances is of tremendous value if you plan on doing high magnitude, rapid and unsafe changes in your world, yes but it comes at a fucking price.

And on the off chance that the vision of a utterly reverse, yet about as fucked up celebrations raises your mood a little: For the last two days our entire food supply in our den(40 square appartment) consisted of energency frozen fast foods and salmon-roquefort-arukola sammiches since in Poland you don`t get to buy on church hollidays. Aside from soda runs to local emergency mart we didn`t even bother to fully dress for the season, as in we didn`t bother to fully dress. Meanwhile my cascading breakdowns has assured that it`s nice and filthy around here, the toilet actually has recently gotten that unique public "feel" and the only moment I`m not either breaking down or sobbing in Matt`s arms, I`m stoned out of my mind to keep me sane and delving into a rather abstract video game apparently designed to be my ultimate midnfuck porn. Oh and there`s a small local fruit juice beer brew and it is being drank in a torn black hoodie, because this is the way it should be drank. Within our walls we are cut from all physical contact with other apes, I get half-way shit-face drunk on the notion that the next time I`ll get alone with the beast might be TBD.

old comment by shy

Updating the front page right now for the new emblem. That means the front page might look a little messier than usual right now or might even be a little broken, but I'll fix any problems like that too while I'm at it.

Edit: Ok, we're good to go! The changes to the front page look decent enough to throw out there, but it, like the rest of the front page and site design in general, still needs a major overhaul. The changes I made also broke the FSTDT server code, and I had to make changes and recompile it for it to work again. That's beyond unreasonable. Recompiles flush the ASP.NET app pool, meaning your session data gets flushed with it, so now everybody has to log in again. Sorry, guys. :(

Either way, there is literally no reason the front page's code-behind file should have even known whether the HTML that I shuffled around and removed ever existed in the first place. The code-behind never touched any of it, so none of it should have been referenced in the code-behind to begin with. This just goes to show how truly awful the shape of the current code is in. So does the fact that when I translated all the code from from C# to VB (you h8 on VB you h8 on me), I removed a ton of unused references to HTML elements in code-behind files. As you can see, though, some of 'em slipped past me.

A related thing I fixed was runat="server" attributes being on almost literally everything in the .aspx Web Forms files. Every one of those attributes slows the code down and makes FSTDT slower. Sure, a single runat="server" slows the code down just a very tiny itty bit not even worth noting, but a lot of very tiny itty bits quickly add up to more than a very tiny itty bit. The reason runat="server" slows things down is that ASP.NET thoroughly parses through HTML with a runat="server" attached to it including all embedded HTML, whether it has a runat="server" or not looking for something that should be...well..run at the server (imagine that!) when the .aspx file is translated into pure HTML.

That's what the runat="server" attribute is fucking for, and that's what it has been for since 1996 when the very first version of "classic" pre-dot-NET ASP was released.

And that's your programming lesson of the day.

old comment by shy

@Pharaoh: Is there anything you have in mind? I can't really do anything to make it better without knowing what you'd like to be better. That's because if someone asked me what needed to be fixed to make the admin tools better, my answer would be "everything."

@Pharoah & Everyone: Things are gonna all of a sudden get a lot better come December - Januaryish. I'm adding a month or two to the planned roll-out of the new server and its code. I'm not gonna say anything will be "better" during and shortly after the change; I already know I'll be eating my words come that time if I do. We're going live with a setup that is more than completely different from the current one. FSTDT is most likely going to be a trainwreck for a while in November right after it's rolled out. There's no way anybody could roll out something like that without a few overlooked bugs and unforeseen hiccups sneaking through after it goes live. The best testing can do is only minimize the number of them.

On that note, serious development will officially commence in May!! pyro, Ravy, Mikey, and I will be getting together, working out details, deciding how much of the pile of random bits and pieces I've already done should be allowed to stay in place, fighting over whether to use nginx or lighttpd, voting on who leaves the island and goes home with nothing, and helping Mikey come to grips with the fact that Lisp, recursion, and functional programming are not devil-work.

old comment by shy

@Pharoah: Eh, I like it. It's silly and amusingly tongue-in-cheek to me, and Spuki's got pretty decent graphic-design skills. Guess you can't please everyone. We should have probably put this up for vote or something first, though.

...sooo, about that new emblem/logo and those other changes to the right side of the front page. Do you guys like them? Do you hate them? Like one but hate the other? Don't even care? Comment and tell me!! If the general reaction is negative, I'll remove the emblem and/or change the right side. (I won't change the right side back, but I will change the way it's organized and what's in it to something else that most people are happy with. All I need is to know what most of you guys will be happy with, so let me know plz.)

After deciding on that, the next thing I wanna do is bring the "Friends of FSTDT" links section back with URLs that actually work. Aside from three obvious candidates that I refuse to budge on (RationalWiki, We Hunted the Mammoth, and ReligiousTolerance.org), I want what goes there to be completely up to you. It's not "Friends of Shy," so I don't what goes there to be that. Either way, those links I'm including no matter what are my contribution, anyway. But don't start discussing that too much yet until we get done with this first.

old comment by shy

@Pharoah: That's gonna take a bit of work, but I'm not going to use it as an excuse this time. I'm also not going to take a ridiculous amount of time before I do it, though the "do it" part itself might take a ridiculous amount of time relative to what it is. Maybe a few days? It should take way less than that under normal circumstances, but FSTDT's code is awful, and right now I'm too overwhelmed with other things to take on more than a hour or two of serious coding a day. I need time to rest and think through some stuff.

Some idea of what I'm up against: Right now the current FSTDT has no easy way to get which page a user was on when they submit a form on except during the Request event handler that originally processed the request. Additionally, the edit page doesn't know you want to go back to the admin page, and that is non-default behavior that needs to be overridden, but there's no way of doing that, either. For both of these tasks, I'm gonna have to roll my own solution for this. The easiest and best one for this is probably the current one lying among the pieces of new code I've already written for the new site (but of course requires a real good amount of modifying to work with the current FSTDT code but that's still less work than starting from scatch). It keeps track of form redirections and overrides thereof by storing that information in the user's session data on the Web server.

(To store things like this without using a bajillion cookies or exposing it to the user, virtually every Web development platform automatically assigns every user a unique session ID, and that session ID is associated with a unique session cookie stored in the user's browser. But you don't have to concern yourself with any of because ASP.NET, PHP, Rails, Django, et al do all the gruntwork.)

old comment by Pharaoh Bastethotep

Not for the first time, for a few minutes after 11 a,m. CEST, any page resulted in the following error message:

Deleted stack trace and source error cuz contains things that r none of ur bisness.

Thanks for the heads up. Unfortunately, those sporadic outages are on the web host's end, and there's nothing I can do about it. They seem to be working on fixing the long past unacceptable database slowness (???). Let me know if the outages keep up, though, and I'll file a support ticket for more information on just what the hell's going on. I try to be very polite, but these folks are seriously testing my capacity for politeness with the random database and server outages and long delays delivering email, with no warnings of any of this beforehand. If it gets much worse, I'm gonna assume my final form and unleash my inner princess on them. shy

old comment by shy

@Kanzenkankaku: Well, I'm the admin now. (If you were gone a really long time, you probably know me as shykid. I would have [i[never guessed I'd wind up in charge of this place then; the mere suggestion of that ever happening would have given me a good chuckle.) We also have a new section: Sexists Say the Darndest Things! I have recruited a new team of mods. And I've made quite a few minor changes, tweaks, and enhancements to the site code and design. (Any more modifications to it will be very limited for now, because a total rewrite is in progress, thus major changes to the current code will be for naught. Oh yeah, and the rewrite itself is new.) On that note, I've also recruited a small team of fellow Web developers to help me with that. We're going to be moving to a private server with a completely different hosting provider and setup. It'll happen late this fall / early winter, or that's what I project, anyway. My goal is mid-to-end November, and I'm actually fairly confident we'll make it.

TL;DR: Aside from me conducting this crazy train now, the new SSTDT section, minor changes to the site layout + a few new features, the rest of the differences are all pretty much technical / behind-the-scenes stuff.

old comment by SpukiKitty

@Shy
I consider those and I'd make the explanation for the Logo go as follows....

WHAT'S WITH THE WEIRD LOGO?: Well; It refers to some memorable quotes on this site!....
http://www.fstdt.com/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=60847
http://www.fstdt.com/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=75751
http://www.fstdt.com/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=123302
http://www.fstdt.com/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=116612
http://www.fstdt.com/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=116612
....and too many David J. Stewart screeds against Taylor Swift and Trouser-clad women to count!

(You may tweak the wording a bit if you wish. Also; The actual cartoon A. Wyatt Mann made is no longer there. Here's copy of the ugly thing....http://oi63.tinypic.com/sonyfd.jpg)

Here's the big quote to put on the homepage....The one that embodies the rest!....
http://fstdt.net/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=61678

HERE'S THE REVISED LOGO....
[IMG]http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f226/SpukiKitty/All%20Reactions%20-%20All-General/The%20FSTDT%20Official%20Logo_zpsqkrzjxut.png[/IMG]
....TAH DAAAAHHH!

@Kanzenkankaku
Welcome back! Who were you last time? I might remember you.

old comment by

It depends on how you define 'founded.' FSTDT was originally called "Christians say the darndest things!" (blech, I know). That started around 2001. It became "Fundies say the darndest things!" some time after that. Give me a little bit, and I can give you at least a ballpark figure. I'll update it when I have one. No later than 2005. There was some time between then when it was down / didn't exist. It's also when FSTDT assumed roughly the form it is in now. (Wow. Even RSTDT was "coming soon!" then, just like SSTDT was, not even a month ago...) Either way, I would much prefer you use that latter date, for reasons that should be obvious to you!

As I may be the last person on this site who is still here from the days of WinAce I should probably clarify the history a bit.

The original FStDT was not actually its own site but part of WinAce's personal website/blog "The Wonderful World of WinAce" located at users.rcn.com/rostmd/winace/index.htm. WinAce stopped updating FStDT at the end of August 2004. The fstdt.com domain did not exist until May 2005 when Yahweh became admin.

I discovered the site in September 2003 and by then it was already called Fundies Say the Darndest Things.

[Edit]

The Wayback Machine shows it called Fundies Say the Darndest Things in June 2003:

https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20030608203807/http://users.rcn.com/rostmd/winace/index.htm

It was last Christians Say the Darndest Things in February 2003:

https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20030212203136/http://users.rcn.com/rostmd/winace/index.htm

I really like the new logo but I think the date should be changed to 2003 as that is when WinAce renamed it, please?

old comment by SpukiKitty

Revised logo on the previous page.

But I'll change the 5 to a 3. That's easy!....
[IMG]http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f226/SpukiKitty/The%20FSTDT%20Official%20Logo_zps8beiajg8.png[/IMG]
....Here ya go!

THE REFERENCES.....
* Taylor Swift wearing pants (David J. Stewart).
* "The Atomic Flamethrowing Vagina" (A geeky, sparkly Jewish-stereotype screenwriter's made-up B-movie idea in a bigoted A. Wyatt Mann cartoon 'decrying the media').
* Flaming Demon NyQuil (Dreams of Dunamis and her 'Angelic Visions' brought on by NyQuil).
* Flying Winged Penis (usachinanukewar's weird sexual fantasy involving Jesus, The Apocalypse and riding a flying penis).
* Demonic Sleestak In Space-Muumuu (Joe Eigo's screed on 'Royal Horned Reptilians').
* Flying Saucers (....piloted by devils....a common bit of silliness from frums since the very idea of extraterrestrial life in the universe goes against their very worldview. Thus; Space 'Aliens are devils in disguise'.).
* The Bathtub with McDonald's-eating Sea Monsters (The infamous 'Bathtub Leviathon' [sic] entry. A real classic! Top of the 'Top 250' Quotes! The scene described started with a night out at McDonald's).

@ Skide
THAT I CAN DO!....
[IMG]http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f226/SpukiKitty/The%20FSTDT%20Official%20Logo%20Version%202_zpsa6foobs8.png[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f226/SpukiKitty/The%20FSTDT%20Official%20Logo%20Version%203_zpszt8dqtg2.png[/IMG]
....PICK YOUR POISON FOLKS!

old comment by shy

@2043755: Thank you so much for the info. I didn't know the old WinAce URL, so I couldn't search the WayBack machine for it as a reference. The first comment in the database that contains "FSTDT" dates back to early 2005. There's a noticeable gap in the archives right before that, and it's also about the same time fstdt.com appears on the WayBack Machine. That was enough evidence to satisfy me, so I figured 2005 was most likely about right. I'm glad for the correction, though! Getting the year right is probably the only damn part of the image I'm taking the least bit seriously.

@SpukiKitty: omg LOL I love it even mmore!! I'll have it up sometime later tonight or tomorrow. We need to stop here, though, and start removing things before adding more. It's on the threshold of starting to look like it's trying too hard. But maybe now it should be blatantly obvious that this emblem is intended to be cheesy, tacky, over-the-top, and like the person who made it shouldn't be allowed on a computer unsupervised. The fact that it's campy and gaudy as all fuck is what makes it so funny to me.

Like, I understand those objections to it, totally. Yes, it's hideous and ridiculous as all get out, but the people who don't like it for that reason don't seem to fully realize just how much even the bad graphic design itself is intentionally a part of it just as much as the rest of it. I don't know why, but not fully "getting it" in that sense is just grating my nerves for some reason.

It's perfectly ok if you still strongly object to the emblem because it's ugly and gaudy as all fuck, or you can't stand the graphic design, and you think it being an eyesore outweighs the humor. Or you might not even find it humorous at all, and that's perfectly okay too I find things that are thoroughly silly, kitschy, and absurd to be absolutely hilarious. But I also think it's my sense of humor that's weird and not very funny to most people, and that's what's making me take getting feedback on it as seriously as I am. The reaction seems pretty mixed right now. I'll give it a few more days and do an actual tally of how many people liked it and how many didn't or were "meh" about it. If the latter outweighs the former I'll gladly take it down.

[aside]But I can't promise this groundbreaking work of fine art won't somehow find its way onto another page, like the FAQ or upcoming About page...[/aside] at all

Shy Says will be back real soon after that. It's gonna be on the new server and run on CentOS + Mono/ASP.NET/XSP + Node.js + lighttpd + PostgreSQL. The server code is nearly complete, and so is most of the HTML CSS, JavaScript too. It runs without a hitch on on my development server with Windows 7 + .NET 4.6 + Chakra (in place of Node.js) + IIS Express + PostgreSQL, but I'm still working out some kinks with getting it to work with Mono and XSP. It won't run on the current FSTDT server because it doesn't have PostgreSQL, and the host most likely would't let me use libgcrypt (the GPG library I use for hashing passwords as well as signing and encrypting cookies), and it definitely wouldn't let me use any kind of server-side JavaScript. Still, I could very easily drop it. The things I wrote and had in mind for that turned out to be toys. Pretty fucking cool toys. But toys nonetheless. They'll be on my GitHub when I upload the Shy Says source code.

old comment by shy

@2043755: I will, and I intended to after I saw the change, but work has distract me and i am very busy right now with scheduling (loads of incoming freshmen taking Intro French and Spanish), being a handful of students' advisor, preparing final exams, grading writing assignments, putting in extra time to tutor some of my students one-on-one, and reading over a boatload of new textbook samples we just got and and picking textbooks for the next spring semester. Give me a few days to get caught up!! I have periods where I'm really free then really swamped, and April is a bad month for my work in general. But I wlll get it done soon I promise!!

[aside]I hate myself for volunteering to help with textbooks, I hate my professor / bossman even more for taking advantage of that and unloading much of it off on humble ol' me despite my being the least academically distinguished person in the department and the only on with just a master's and no intentions of pursuing a PhD. I got wayyy tpo excited over new textbooks, and I thought flipping through all of them would be really interesting and cool. It's not. What the fuck was I thinking? That aside, I am a fuckload more competent at teaching than the others are, though, and I have no shame admitting it. My classes fill up really quickly, because I went into this to be an educator more than I did an academic. I've decided on dropping to part time next semester, and I did it just in the nick of time and got lucky. It was right right before early registration started, my contract was almost up, and I already told them not to book me for more than 3 classes. without my saying otherwise (I'm doing 7 this semster.) That also worked out just perfectly. I was partially so torn on whether to leave because I would honestly miss teaching a whole lot.[/aside]

Anyway! I will get around to reading and responding to everyone's comments when I get time! Probably this evening or early tomorrow morning. I really shouldn't be posting this comment right now and need to go because I'm five minutes late for a class! >_< Sorry for any typos or grammatical mistakes. I also hate having to use Opera Mini right now to get around my work's neurotic overzealous proxy filter.)

old comment by shy

@pyro: It's staying right where it's at now. And it's not going to multiply. If it does I'm taking down the server and calling the SCP Foundation.
_

@Everyone: I think we've got enough support to say it's settled we're keeping the image unless I have just incited a flurry of people who want it to go away with this comment.

@Spuki: My vote is on #2. LOL I love the Latin. Some of the inflections are off, but it's still completely readable. It's not too bad. You're not trying to be the next Cicero or Seneca, anyway, so I wouldn't worry about it. The syntax is very Romancey and really un-latin-like, at least if you hold Classical Latin and the "Golden Age" to be the zenith of the language. Yet the mistakes work here. This looks a lot like Liturgical Latin, and it's also something that came directly from the mouth err, keyboard of a fundie. Perfect.

Also, on a tangentially related note, today one of my friends from work noted that the extent to which Classics undergraduates perceive a Latin author's work to be pretentious and "overrated" (her words!) directly correlates with how overindulgently he (ab)uses Classical Latin's extremely flexible word order and violently tosses his words around into word salad in the purest sense.

Horace is probably the biggest offender, and I came to really hate him after my first and last time sitting a Latin class.* This Wikipedia article on what makes him so horrid provides an example of him at his "best." It starts toward the bottom of the linked section:

Quis multā gracilis te puer in rosa // perfusus liquidis urget odoribus // grato, Pyrrha, sub antro?
(word-for-word) "Which many slender you boy in rose // infused liquid urges odors // pleasant, Pyrrha, under cave?"
(meaning) 'What slender Youth bedew'd with liquid odors // Courts thee on (many) Roses in some pleasant cave, // Pyrrha ...?'[7]

This was (...and still is) apparently considered very eloquent and poetic rather than signs of a thought disorder. The Wikipedia page also an interlinear gloss of it at the bottom of the section. But even if you're like me and very familiar with glossing and what all the hyper-abbreviated technojargon means, it's still useless to parse this. Understanding all of the inflection doesn't even help much, either. Yeah, it's pretty clear I'm on Team Cicero and not Team Horace for greatest Latin author of all time.

[aside]*This obviously wasn't Latin 1001. You don't read Horace in first-semester Latin. The fact I mentioned Horace should make it obvious to anyone familiar with classics or just Latin literature. Long story short: A professor I had before was teaching it. She knew me and roughly the level I was at from studying Latin on my own for a long time. She graciously signed my way out of the requirements so I could take the class for credit toward my linguistic-history requirements. I got an A in that class. Fuck you, Horace.[/aside]

old comment by Skide

@shy

Not to discredi Spuki`s awsome work but the motto was mine. :)
...And yes, my latin is noticably rusty, I`m actually cracking open a latin handbook today.

Edit:

At the risk of being a lazy bitch and wasting your time, how the below sound to you?

"Si autem non attribuunt defexit publico, quae sola potest esse attribuitur stultitiae peccatum videtur."

Probably poorly, so if you could tell me what to improve, I`ll be most grateful. The thing goes on my right arm in a form of a tattoo with the illuminati triangle eye above it and later to be encased in Revvy style tribal-celtic knot streaming up the right boob and down the arm.

ps. As a self inffilcted punishent, I just finished studying latin from my handbook, which I did for last half an hour. ;)

old comment by shy

@Skide: Your Latin is probably not as rusty as you think it is. Your syntax is what needs serious work. Verbs have two places they like to appear: the very end of the sentence (most common) and immediately after the first word or phrase, something very similar to modern German. SVO clauses and sentences weren't especially common in Classical Latin, about as frequent as any other word order that isn't verb-final or verb-second. The ser-estar distinction was also nascent in "proper" Latin (more TL;DR details here), at least if what you consider "proper" Latin to be the form of the language best represents its "essence," and you consider that to be Latin's grammar, vocabulary, and style as it was from Livius to Felix. (That's a very generous time frame in both directions, more than most other Latinists would probably grant.)

I really need to branch off another thread. I will in just a bit after I get the new image up, the one I'm going with for the time being unless it's decided for certain that the other one is what most of you guys want.

I have the most distracting dog in the universe, dear God. He's worse than a cat.

old comment by shy

@Kanzenkankaku: Sorry I didn't get to you sooner! I don't know how long it takes to get a reply from the forums. How long have you waited? If it's been more than a couple of days, or if it becomes more than a couple of days, let me know. I'll drop Krad or Sig a line about it.

Oh, and I have no idea how I failed to think of this when you asked what had changed, but the main site and forums are actually completely independent things now. There's a couple of reasons for that. One, I just don't have enough time to keep up with both FSTDT and the forums. Even if I made FSTDT a full-time job, I still wouldn't have enough to give both the attention they deserve. One dude can only do so much, and my skills and temperament are much more well suited for adminning the main page than the forums.

Two, point one had already worked itself out before I became admin. The forum was completely split off from FSTDT altogether a few years ago because of some stupid-ass drama between Distind and a small clique of members, most of who were insanely confrontational, supercilious, and devoid of any social grace. Needless to say, they didn't handle people disagreeing with them very well. I won't go into all the details and bore you unless you really want the deets. I'll admit I was part of that clique, though, but I Got Better. The forums rejoined FSTDT shortly after I became admin. Pushing for a re-merge was one of the first things on my agenda, and they were just as eager to rejoin FSTDT as I was. My only stipulation was not to expect me to mod the forums, and if they were going to grant me the title of mod or admin, it would be a purely ceremonious thing. I got what I wanted or didn't get what I didn't want, as it were.

old comment by shy

@Kanzenkankaku: Dropped 'em a line. I'll let you know when I hear back. Sometimes it takes a day or so, but not several, so I'm thinking your request somehow got lost.

@SpukiKitty: The forums are a lot less toxic and a lot more friendly now if you want to give it another try.

Also, @everyone: Just did my daily inbox rounds. You should have a response if you sent me an email sometime earlier today or yesterday. Let me know if you don't. I'm on the verge of changing admin@fstdt.org to redirect to my personal email. There's a delivery lag that happens a lot with the email server here. The only thing that will change for you is that you'll get a reply back from a different address. You'll also probably get a reply sooner because I'll receive your message sooner, and I won't receive half of my email in a big pile all at once. The whole issue makes no sense to me, and I'm glad fixing it is not my problem.

Oh, and is there anyone here in this thread who asked/said something that I missed? If so, smack me upside the head for an apology and reply. (I read everything I think? but my brain is kind of fried and tuckered out right now even though I'm free today, so my mental hamster might need a good smack upside the head to get back on its wheel.)

On a tangentially related note, I got a couple pieces of spam with with the subject "More information on your mushrooms." Only a spambot would come up with a subject line like that. Only a spambot on crack could come up with the rest of it:

Dear Editor,
I was searching the web for information on mushrooms and saw your great post here: http://www.fstdt.com/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=90516&Page=2
I noticed you mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_mushroom in your post, and just wanted to give you a heads up that I recently wrote a blog post you might like. It’s a detailed, up-to-date 7,000 word guide on 15 health benefits of mushrooms according to science, and includes 5 delicious mushroom recipes.
If this is something you’d be interested in, here is the link to the blog post: [URL Redacted]
This is completely free and if you like it, all I ask is for you to link to or share the article on your site. In return, would love to share your post with my newsletter subscribers and followers on social media.
Either way, keep up the great work!
Cheers
Jess

(Worth noting that the email says it's from "Jess," but "her" site [redacted]reviews.com has a completely different name in the redacted part.)

This is typical sort of spam I get here, just mildly amusing cuz more information on my mushrooms. The part that really gave me a good laugh was that I immediately knew exactly which "great post here" that URL went to before I checked it. Fucking hilarious, all of it: the quote itself, the comments on it, and the fact it triggered a spambot who thinks anyone wants to read a 7,000-word "blog post" about mushrooms.

Half-tempted to make SBSTDT a thing. Most webmasters with an admin@domain.name e-mail get a lot of spam. I'm no exception. Most of it is just stupid, and I'm glad nearly all of it is automatically whisked away into the Junk folder, but a tiny fraction of it crosses the line between "stupid" and "machine-generated masterpiece of WTF."

old comment by shy

I just got a very, very long email that was very cybernetic eyes (what my modly minion Mikey and our friend Erin say to describe quotes reminiscent of that one). I just had to share some highlights of this gem, and you'll see why. It starts thusly:

I am the creator of the Earth. I have the power that allows me to manipulate data and can communicate with the mechanical superbeing known as "God".

And then it proceeds at very great length and boy howdy does it! being generally incoherent and wanting me to use the attached "membership form" to join the "illuminati" for $40, but I'm not stupid enough to open it on the Windows computer in my office at work. Maybe when I get home and can do it safely. Kind of a pity my inbox isn't available for public consumption so I could submit this insanity as a quote.

Other snippets:

Your soul is data in the information theoretic sense

The Universe is an interconnected database of data

the metadata of your creation

The mechanical superbeing "God" has an elite group whom he gave very great power to do his commends. We have been called the illuminati. He told me to inform you that you have been chosen

Wow, points for correctly using who/whom.

The mechanical superbeing "God" [...]

Insistent terminology much?

[...] commanded us to create the Earth as an home for living data

You will be given the power to edit the data contained within the information set known as reality

Edit your body

The rest of the world calls that "having plastic surgery."

upload the information known as your soul into the mechanical superbeing known as "God"

One-dimensional mechanical binary devices of humanity cannot encode living forms of multidimensional nondigital consciousnesses

Mathematics is inadequate for the algorithms of a living digital YHWH

Only a conscious living collective being of uploaded individual consciousnesses can process the algorithms to perform nonmathematical functions on postcardinal sets of unquantifiable information

the illumanatric instructions of a living CPU with a billion conscious cores

I'm guessing it's safe to presume this is not a processor architecture with a RISC instruction set?

postdigital people

Everything is information

I was 99% sure that this is an Information Theory student on drugs looking for money to fund his habit-cum-addiction and/or education. But "everything is information" made that a foregone conclusion if "data in the information theoretic sense" alone didn't. On the other hand, it's unclear whether this dude's strung out and wasted enough to actually believe any of this, or whether he's just strung out and wasted enough to write something like this and then believe other people will believe it. It's also unclear whether he's trying to amass a botnet with his Microsoft Word "membership form" or whether he intends to use it to achieve the batshit things he describes. I'm just going to assume so without checking, since I'm on a computer that doesn't belong to me that's connected to a WAN and intranet that obviously don't belong to me.

(~~I'm still editing this comment to add snippets as I read.~~ Out of time [for now], and I think that's enough, anyway. This wharrgarbl is like over 20,000 words long. I have reordered a couple of snippets to make reading and commentating on them easier, but that hardly qualifies as "misconstruing it" or "taking it out of context" to make him [?] look like a crazy person running a crazy scam.)

old comment by shy

From pyro's link: omg lmao wat. I'm surprised the templates some of them use are that elaborate.

I hate these because I do private French tutoring and lessons one-on-one and in small groups, and it usually takes a couple lines of their garbage to figure out they're a spambot and not a legitimate person Skyping me. I told a few of them I was gay, and it was mildly amusing that they kept on going. (But then again, so have a couple of real females.) One of them even said something along the lines of "lol gay? That's cool I'm lonely and single 20/f. ;)"

I think telling one of those spambots I'm gay is what made me get one pretending to be a gay guy once. The sheer novelty factor made me go along with "him" until "he" stopped responding. This "dude" was from Utah or Wyoming or something and couldn't figure out how to do cam and call people because he was "new at computers," but he made a personal website that had pictures and videos of himself on it. Because that totally makes sense. Then again, the people who fall for these spambots are probably pretty stupid, so it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't notice the massive disconnect between "too fail at computers to operate skype" and "able to design my own website."

One more: This is fucking amazing. Wonder just how that broke it. Now I want a bunch of 'em to message me so I can toy with them and see if I can figure some of them out. If it's simple JavaScript running on Node, I wonder if I could inject code into it...

old comment by shy

I'll try to join the IRC later today!

If you guys can keep on trucking without me a few couple more days, you'll have me all to yourselves! I'm done with finals week. All that's left to do is grading and posting final scores.

Edit: I'm idling in the IRC. Come join me!! Instructions be here, just replace #fqa with #fstdt. Also probably fastest to bonk me there if you need anything.

Edit 2: Threw a link up to the IRC on the navbar. It's even messier now, yay! Now all you have to do to get there is click. (And, yes, I know "IRC Chat" is redundant, but I'm trying to be helpful to those who don't know what IRC is.) You have no excuse not to join me in the IRC. CLICK IT, S'IL TE PLAÎT.

Also, @Pharaoh: Thank you for being around and taking my place. Seriously, man. You don't know how much I appreciate it.
_

Now for something completely random:

Researchers have discovered that bathing your cat 2-3 times per week removes up to 84% of allergens.

...did they also discover what it's like to try to bathe a cat? I try to bathe Mookitty once a month when I groom him, and it's still a traumatic experience for both of us (but it helps with furballs, and I have some kitty shampoo for dry skin and dandruff protip: normally you should not try to bathe your cat).

Site/Off-Topic Discussion Thread 4 #announcement i.imgur.com blog

256 comments

Confused?