Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Rowanas]

Because I know literally zero people IRL who talk about Star Trek, and i don't frequent places online that talk about Star Trek. So where am I going to get Trek-related information exactly?

Same way anyone else does - cultural osmosis. Open your pores and let the trekkie knowledge flow through you.

Or the correct answer, which was Northern Ireland

Oh fine, yes, NI I suppose. Let me check what PnP is like to NI.... Not significantly more than shipping them on the mainland, actually.  I would genuinely ship you my boxset if I thought you'd watch them (and, for the true live-on-tv feel, you'd need to rewatch the Teal'c groundhog-day episode 14 times).

[Teneb]

Oooh! Oooh! If people are going to not know about important scifi, has everyone here watched Stargate SG1?  I lent it to a friend of mine and he watched a couple of episodes before declaring it shit. I don't know why we're still friends, because he's a stupid, j-pop-soundtrack listening, dicks-for-fingers weeb.

I watched the entirety of SG-1 and am halfway through Season 3 of Atlantis. The reason your friend thought it was shit is because the first season is really not that good. Most of the episodes are just straight-up filler, and the plot started in the very first episodes is only really continued at the very end of the season. It does get incredibly good as it goes on, though it does suffer from having been extended after the main overarching plot was done and then cancelled not too long before the new plot was wrapped up (though they did address it with the two movies, one for each remaining antagonist).

[TD1]

Well, I'd certainly watch them, but I'd be wary in general of sending things to randomers online.

[ChairmanPoo]

It has been remarked to me that apparently I tend to "hm" a lot. I was completely unaware of this and I think I didnt use to do that

[Rolan7]

Same here.  I eventually managed to cut out "um" and "like", but grunts with intonation are *useful*.  Particularly while listening.  You can encourage someone to continue speaking, and even show your opinion of their current tack, in a very efficient amount of time.  Which is useful when certain people try to monopolize conversations.  Gotta be succinct to get a word or utterance in.  Or be rude/forceful, I guess.

It works well in my in-person strategy of interested listening, leading questions, and the occasional lengthy diatribe once I feel ready to speak with certainty.

Edit:  I didn't realize I was using "hm" so much until a friend of my dad mocked me for it, making exaggerated "hummmms" every time I did it.  I'm glad they pointed it out.  I also avoided talking to them afterward, despite having moved very close to them.  It was obnoxious and they were kinda gross, anyway, despite being cool in other ways.

[JoshuaFH]

Same here.  I eventually managed to cut out "um" and "like", but grunts with intonation are *useful*.  Particularly while listening.  You can encourage someone to continue speaking, and even show your opinion of their current tack, in a very efficient amount of time.  Which is useful when certain people try to monopolize conversations.  Gotta be succinct to get a word or utterance in.  Or be rude/forceful, I guess.

It works well in my in-person strategy of interested listening, leading questions, and the occasional lengthy diatribe once I feel ready to speak with certainty.

Edit:  I didn't realize I was using "hm" so much until a friend of my dad mocked me for it, making exaggerated "hummmms" every time I did it.  I'm glad they pointed it out.  I also avoided talking to them afterward, despite having moved very close to them.  It was obnoxious and they were kinda gross, anyway, despite being cool in other ways.

Using Hmmms is a no-lose conversation strategy. Well, almost no-lose. It can mean yes, or no! It can tell people to keep talking, or to stop talking! It can show that you care, or that you don't care! It means anything the listener wants to hear! I've had to purposefully add it to my daily lexicon, replacing my far less useful "Uhhh"'s or "Well.."'s that imply uncertainty or a lack of charisma and therefore intelligence. Honestly the only person who's ever, and I mean ever, called me out on it was a person who was bonafide batshit insane, but they correctly interrupted my Hmmms and called me out on it as the meaningless and condescending bullshit it is. I was actually really impressed.

[Rolan7]

I see what you mean, and it makes sense in internet-discourse.  But not in person.  People can tell whether I'm agreeing, unconvinced (I love the squiggle of pitch), disagreeing but willing to hear more...  Or simply signalling that I'm interested in what they're saying.  There's a lot of information there.

I just realized that it's primarily an adaptation for speech-only communication (skype calls), though it happens to work for in-person communication.  I'm verbally signaling things my face would be signalling.

[JoshuaFH]

Sometimes my friend uses it in text form, and it honestly took me a while to realize that he always, without doubt, means "No" when writing it out.

Another thing I do almost subconsciously is say "I apologize" instead of "I'm sorry" because at one point I decided that "Apologize" sounded more sincere than "Sorry", and my old grandma coworker noticed after a couple years of my using it. I don't want to sound sociopathic, but I grew up as a lonely child, and learned almost all of my conversation skills from talking to myself, and theorycrafting based on the conversations I'd held with myself. Moreover, being an awkward child, I found actual conversations to be very stressful, and so strategies that allowed me to escape conversations became finely honed, to the detriment of what was to become my future, lonely adult self.

[misko27]

Last night I learned that flies can be killed by very slowly raising a suitably large and heavy object very close to them, and then crushing them. My mind boggles at this: I understand the underlying theory (flies are stupid), but it's so strange to move a large object near a fly and see it not react at all, right up  until the moment it dies.

Other wtf: our kitchen has at least 7 flies at this point in time. I am not amused. Flies must die. Spiders are to be given an amnesty for the duration of the fly crisis.

(Also my spacebar has started skipping as I wrote this, despite this being a new computer, and holy shit is it irritating.)

[Rolan7]

A venus fly trap might actually help?  I got one from the local science museum as a kid.  I fed it flies I swatted, sometimes, but I assume they have some way to actually attract the prey they eat.

And my laptop's spacebar started sticking like 3 weeks ago after I spilled some soda in it.  Water resistant just means harder to service, I grouse.  Sticky keys are extraordinarily frustrating, but it did eventually wear off.
(I have taken many laptops apart, including this one once, and I'm not eager to do so again.  Things never quite fit together exactly the same.  Even if no screws are left over.)
(It can be necessary, and it is better than the overcharge of a shop, but it is not to be done lightly.)

[JoshuaFH]

My favorite fly killing device was created by accident: I had a double-paned window, with the first pane broken partially (from me hitting it to kill a fly, ironically) and that made a gap between the first and second panes that flies loved to crawl into. I could naturally see them, and then just press down on the first pane to inflict pain on the flies, killing them by the dozen with the greatest of ease.

[scriver]

Me favourite way of fly killin is when yer on tha shitter and a fly lands on yer bunghole and ya squeeze it ta death between yer buttox

[Doomblade187]

There is always flypaper.

[ChairmanPoo]

Me favourite way of fly killin is when yer on tha shitter and a fly lands on yer bunghole and ya squeeze it ta death between yer buttox

[Tack]

Drove through some actual smog this morning with my windows down.
Granted it was on a foggy winter morning in an area which had been seeing a lot of road work last night (so a lotta diesel in the air) but still. I live in one of the least densely populated cities in one of the least densely populated countries in the world.
This is legitimately my first time experiencing smog, and light as it was it was equally surprising and crap.