WarKitty's Feline Frenzy Random Banter #216

[LaZodiac]

Now it's time for weekend. I need that.
(I also need some cure for wistful thinking after talking about days of yore. Send help!)

Be sure to enjoy your weekend! We should hang out if we can, that'd probably be a good cure for wistful thinking. Even if we don't hang out as much as we used to, I still care about all my cool and nice friends I've made here.

*sends hugs*

[DataNinja]

Also, I can't rule out the possiblity that today's Playgrounders are less interested in the form of social interaction which was commonplace back then. Not only RB has waned, but the Avatar Theme Week is officially dead and we couldn't keep the You! thread alive either. The same thing seems to be going on in the Arts and Crafts subforum, where the OotS Style Art/Fanart Showcase is living on the border to undeath and Iron Avatarist is plain dead and buried. I'm pretty sure it's probably the same thing in the other subforums as well.

Also probably depends on the type of people. For instance, there are people like me (who is also a fairly new arrival to the forum, I wasn't here in the Days of Yore), who basically never introduce new topics, but are quite happy to go along with what's being talked about. And that feeds into your reactor metaphor. Because if it all ends up like me, nothing will ever start up.

Turned out that today was the day of "But this worked two days ago, why isn't it working now?!", as I uncovered two rather nasty bugs which had completely failed to trigger before.

Oh dear. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than "This worked last test and I didn't change anything!"

Now it's time for weekend. I need that.
(I also need some cure for wistful thinking after talking about days of yore. Send help!)

Hmmm... The only cure I know of for thinking about the past, is by making new memories of the present. Generally with friends. Those help with that a lot.

[2D8HP]

....Generally with friends. Those help with that a lot.

What are these "friends" that you speak of?

I don't think that I know this word.

[Amidus Drexel]

RE: RB is dead and we have killed it:

Pretty much. Some of the people I used to talk to are still here, but we're all less chatty than we used to be, for various reasons mostly boiling down to lack of time or inclination. Certainly, I have both less time to dedicate to posting, and less really to say in general than I did 3-5 years ago or so. (Plus, I swear a lot and that's frowned upon here).

I might try to put in a bit more effort to drop by and chat instead of lurking, though.

Turned out that today was the day of "But this worked two days ago, why isn't it working now?!", as I uncovered two rather nasty bugs which had completely failed to trigger before. Good thing was they were pretty easy to fix once I turned my attention to them, and in the end of the day, I managed to finish typing up my last emails and gather my stuff exactly on time to catch my bus with some frantic running.

Now it's time for weekend. I need that.
(I also need some cure for wistful thinking after talking about days of yore. Send help!)

Hey, I spent all of last semester doing that! We encountered all kinds of fun, bizarre problems once we finished testing a section of code and moved on to something else.

Hear, hear!
(Can't help you with that one, though, I'm afraid)

Also probably depends on the type of people. For instance, there are people like me (who is also a fairly new arrival to the forum, I wasn't here in the Days of Yore), who basically never introduce new topics, but are quite happy to go along with what's being talked about. And that feeds into your reactor metaphor. Because if it all ends up like me, nothing will ever start up.

Oh dear. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than "This worked last test and I didn't change anything!"

It is certainly easier to jump in on an existent topic than it is to start a new one, for sure. I find myself doing that from time to time; partially because I'm not particularly curious about most of the topics that get floated through here, and partially because I don't have anything I really want or need to ask the collective.

That has a simple solution - always run make clean, then make all. Don't want any leftover object files getting linked instead of the code you've been making changes to.
Unless, of course, you're not using make, in which case I can only say that I know your pain and I hope you have backups.

--
ION: Maryland's had its first sunny day since I moved up here, which was wonderful. Took off work early and went on a nice long drive to get lunch, then a somewhat shorter walk after I'd gotten home. It's slowly starting to feel like summer. Slowly.

I'm sure the feeling is in some part due to lack of sleep, but grey days are just depressing - I really need to move to a desert or something where I can be away from all of the rain.

[DataNinja]

ION: Maryland's had its first sunny day since I moved up here, which was wonderful. Took off work early and went on a nice long drive to get lunch, then a somewhat shorter walk after I'd gotten home. It's slowly starting to feel like summer. Slowly.

I know that feeling. Or, at least something approximating it. In the span of roughly one day last week, our weather changed from typical February weather to typical May weather. Finally. It was February for far too long.

[MoonCat]

Hang on, the You! thread died too? I missed that one.

If I were more tapped into the SMBG subforum, I wonder if I'd be seeing their games having a slowdown comparable to that of RB and the rest of Friendly Banter. Is there anyone else who frequents that area and has noticed something similar?


ION: So today I just finished the last of my classes in Rome. I'll be taking finals into next week, and then flying home on Wednesday morning. I'm really looking forward to that. Living in Italy for ten weeks has been interesting, but I want to be home!!

Admittedly, I won't be home for very long-- thanks to idiotic achievements in over-achieving, I'm registered to begin summer classes down in California literally the Monday after I get home. I'll be in Washington for only two full days before I start school again.

[factotum]

Oh dear. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than "This worked last test and I didn't change anything!"

It's definitely better than "This works fine on these 99 PCs I've run it on, but mysteriously fails on number 100 and I'm not sure why"...

Admittedly, I won't be home for very long-- thanks to idiotic achievements in over-achieving, I'm registered to begin summer classes down in California literally the Monday after I get home. I'll be in Washington for only two full days before I start school again.

There is such a thing as trying *too* hard, you know? Seriously, though, if you've got the opportunities to do this sort of stuff then best to get it all done while you've got the youth and energy to pull it off.

[Qwertystop]

Oh dear. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than "This worked last test and I didn't change anything!"

It's definitely better than "This works fine on these 99 PCs I've run it on, but mysteriously fails on number 100 and I'm not sure why"...

It can get worse. I'm busily making a scraper because a certain company isn't bothering to make an API for the data provided by their service (still entirely available on the website). The target is a (slow, seemingly overbulky) web-app, and I need to navigate to and scrape a sequence of tables (well, constructs defined entirely in JavaScript that act mostly but not entirely like tables, with several redundant extra divs and other tags at every layer).

The same exact command fails one time in ten on consecutive runs of a loop where the only difference is the row number in the pseudotable. Apparently at random, different rows each time I restart the program. With no error message until the next command fails because the not-technically-a-checkbox didn't get checked.

[Thufir]

Also, I can't rule out the possiblity that today's Playgrounders are less interested in the form of social interaction which was commonplace back then. Not only RB has waned, but the Avatar Theme Week is officially dead and we couldn't keep the You! thread alive either. The same thing seems to be going on in the Arts and Crafts subforum, where the OotS Style Art/Fanart Showcase is living on the border to undeath and Iron Avatarist is plain dead and buried. I'm pretty sure it's probably the same thing in the other subforums as well.

I could likewise cite the essential death of the UK meetups.

Also probably depends on the type of people. For instance, there are people like me (who is also a fairly new arrival to the forum, I wasn't here in the Days of Yore), who basically never introduce new topics, but are quite happy to go along with what's being talked about. And that feeds into your reactor metaphor. Because if it all ends up like me, nothing will ever start up.

I mean, I'm like that mostly. I never start that many conversations but I respond to them. In the course of the Old Guard drifting away from RB there was a lengthy period of time in which my rate of posting was basically directlly proportional to Curly's. But then getting to know people by responding to their conversations makes it easier to sometimes be the one who starts the conversations. On the other hand then it's harder again when those people go.

If I were more tapped into the SMBG subforum, I wonder if I'd be seeing their games having a slowdown comparable to that of RB and the rest of Friendly Banter. Is there anyone else who frequents that area and has noticed something similar?

I can't speak for the main area of SMBG, but the Werewolf games in Structured Games were already in decline when I stopped really paying attention to them, which was probably before I largely drifted away from here, so yeah, it does seem like it's something of a forum-wide trend.

[Teddy]

Also probably depends on the type of people. For instance, there are people like me (who is also a fairly new arrival to the forum, I wasn't here in the Days of Yore), who basically never introduce new topics, but are quite happy to go along with what's being talked about. And that feeds into your reactor metaphor. Because if it all ends up like me, nothing will ever start up.

Well, there were people such as you back then as well, but stick together enough yous and the combined mutation rate of a single topic will keep the discussion running for much longer. Plus, the more you banter along with other people, the more inclined you'll become to add some story of your own day to the thread.

Oh dear. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than "This worked last test and I didn't change anything!"

This is "this worked the last five or ten times I tested it, but now it fails repeatedly" (whenever I encounter a bug, I run the same test again to see if it's repeatable), so worse.

Hey, I spent all of last semester doing that! We encountered all kinds of fun, bizarre problems once we finished testing a section of code and moved on to something else.

Most of the bugs I have to deal with require another test to already have run to trigger. Merely testing one part (unless you test trigger conditions for a known bug) is nothing but shooting yourself in the foot.

That has a simple solution - always run make clean, then make all. Don't want any leftover object files getting linked instead of the code you've been making changes to.
Unless, of course, you're not using make, in which case I can only say that I know your pain and I hope you have backups.

You could also be working with a large program communicating and coordinating multiple pieces of hardware, harware such as RF synths which actually require time to stabilise their output, so all synchronisation is done via Thread.sleep(int) calls. If something suddenly fails, it's practically guaranteed to be a case of acting on old data before new data has had time to arrive.

Hang on, the You! thread died too? I missed that one.

Yeah, in the end it was just Dire Moose, FinnLassie, Spanish_Paladin and I who posted in it. The bit where people come in and fawn over your pictures was almost gone, and eventually, three months passed. And then another three or four or five...

If I were more tapped into the SMBG subforum, I wonder if I'd be seeing their games having a slowdown comparable to that of RB and the rest of Friendly Banter. Is there anyone else who frequents that area and has noticed something similar?

I wouldn't wager against it, that's for sure...

ION: So today I just finished the last of my classes in Rome. I'll be taking finals into next week, and then flying home on Wednesday morning. I'm really looking forward to that. Living in Italy for ten weeks has been interesting, but I want to be home!!

Yeah, it turns out that sometimes we all need to rest.

Admittedly, I won't be home for very long-- thanks to idiotic achievements in over-achieving, I'm registered to begin summer classes down in California literally the Monday after I get home. I'll be in Washington for only two full days before I start school again.

... or you could go and do something like this instead. I hope you'll be having fun at least.

It can get worse. I'm busily making a scraper because a certain company isn't bothering to make an API for the data provided by their service (still entirely available on the website). The target is a (slow, seemingly overbulky) web-app, and I need to navigate to and scrape a sequence of tables (well, constructs defined entirely in JavaScript that act mostly but not entirely like tables, with several redundant extra divs and other tags at every layer).

The same exact command fails one time in ten on consecutive runs of a loop where the only difference is the row number in the pseudotable. Apparently at random, different rows each time I restart the program. With no error message until the next command fails because the not-technically-a-checkbox didn't get checked.

That reminds me of the time I'd get corrupted output when running a program, but only at intervals exactly divisible by 32. Turned out the garbage collector in the programming languaged I was assigned didn't allow a shared mutable state, and thanks to some kind of black magic, this overwrote every 32^nd entry in my datastructure...

I suggest setting a breakpoint before the checking command. Stepping into it 9 times to find the trigger on the 10th sounds like a chore, but still doable.

[MoonCat]

There is such a thing as trying *too* hard, you know? Seriously, though, if you've got the opportunities to do this sort of stuff then best to get it all done while you've got the youth and energy to pull it off.

I think I'd have youth and energy a lot longer if I weren't pulling nonsense like this. Yesterday I was actually complaining about the state of my knees, can you believe it?

I mean, I'm like that mostly. I never start that many conversations but I respond to them. In the course of the Old Guard drifting away from RB there was a lengthy period of time in which my rate of posting was basically directlly proportional to Curly's. But then getting to know people by responding to their conversations makes it easier to sometimes be the one who starts the conversations. On the other hand then it's harder again when those people go.

I can't speak for the main area of SMBG, but the Werewolf games in Structured Games were already in decline when I stopped really paying attention to them, which was probably before I largely drifted away from here, so yeah, it does seem like it's something of a forum-wide trend.

Then there's that factor of coming back and the thread is mostly people you only sort of got to know whom you vaguely remember...

That's concerning. And it also leads to the question: are we seeing the slow death of a forum, or are we simply not recognizing the new life this forum has found because we are used to seeing it in a previous incarnation?

Yeah, in the end it was just Dire Moose, FinnLassie, Spanish_Paladin and I who posted in it. The bit where people come in and fawn over your pictures was almost gone, and eventually, three months passed. And then another three or four or five...

Yeah, it turns out that sometimes we all need to rest.

... or you could go and do something like this instead. I hope you'll be having fun at least.

Well boo. I kept meaning to add things there, and never having the energy to compile a post. Sometimes I think about how long it takes me to do a simple response post on RB and I am amazed that any of us were ever as prolific as we once were.

Yeah... resting... I'm taking an intensive 0-to-grad-student-level Latin course in ten weeks... Teddy, why didn't you stop me???

Honestly, part of me is expecting this upcoming course to feel easier than the Rome program. I was blessed with terrible roommates in a bad apartment, awful social dynamics, and personal misfortune throughout the last ten weeks, so I only have this next challenge to look forward to.

[Amidus Drexel]

I know that feeling. Or, at least something approximating it. In the span of roughly one day last week, our weather changed from typical February weather to typical May weather. Finally. It was February for far too long.

Ours was hanging around April weather, thankfully (it wasn't cold, at the very least), but yeah. And I'd already gotten the April rain -> May sun transition once, before I moved. But now I got to go through it twice, which is a thing, I suppose.

If I were more tapped into the SMBG subforum, I wonder if I'd be seeing their games having a slowdown comparable to that of RB and the rest of Friendly Banter. Is there anyone else who frequents that area and has noticed something similar?

ION: So today I just finished the last of my classes in Rome. I'll be taking finals into next week, and then flying home on Wednesday morning. I'm really looking forward to that. Living in Italy for ten weeks has been interesting, but I want to be home!!
Admittedly, I won't be home for very long-- thanks to idiotic achievements in over-achieving, I'm registered to begin summer classes down in California literally the Monday after I get home. I'll be in Washington for only two full days before I start school again.

I know the games and users were changing around when I stopped posting there. I don't know about declining or not (it's been some time), but it wouldn't surprise me.

You know, I always try to give myself at least a full week between moves - not that giving yourself no break at all doesn't have advantages (no need (or time) to unpack!), but I find 1-2 weeks is about enough time for me to get bored enough that I want to go back to work or school.

Hope you have fun in CA, though - I hear it's nice out that way.

Most of the bugs I have to deal with require another test to already have run to trigger. Merely testing one part (unless you test trigger conditions for a known bug) is nothing but shooting yourself in the foot.

You could also be working with a large program communicating and coordinating multiple pieces of hardware, harware such as RF synths which actually require time to stabilise their output, so all synchronisation is done via Thread.sleep(int) calls. If something suddenly fails, it's practically guaranteed to be a case of acting on old data before new data has had time to arrive.

That reminds me of the time I'd get corrupted output when running a program, but only at intervals exactly divisible by 32. Turned out the garbage collector in the programming languaged I was assigned didn't allow a shared mutable state, and thanks to some kind of black magic, this overwrote every 32^nd entry in my datastructure...

It was an embedded systems class, so almost all of our tests were behavioural - we were nearly always looking at the output of the whole program and hardware combined. Things that worked perfectly for a week or more would suddenly fail in ways that indicated something much older and more fundamental (that had been extensively tested and was working all along) had some irreconcilable problem.

That'll definitely do it. I'm very glad to not be working directly with hardware right now. I have nice, simple file I/O code that I can unit-test. And all of my problems will be a result of my own logical mistakes instead of having to account for hardware.

Even more reasons for me to hate garbage collection. \shakes cane
(the obvious solution would be to leave an unused entry in every 32nd spot in your data structures)

That's concerning. And it also leads to the question: are we seeing the slow death of a forum, or are we simply not recognizing the new life this forum has found because we are used to seeing it in a previous incarnation?

Well boo. I kept meaning to add things there, and never having the energy to compile a post. Sometimes I think about how long it takes me to do a simple response post on RB and I am amazed that any of us were ever as prolific as we once were.

Hopefully the second. I like having this forum around; the community is nice, despite its flaws/failings, and there's a good variety of topics that get covered.

I definitely used to spend several hours/day just writing posts here, though I definitely also used to have that much free time (and more), so I'm not but so surprised. Of course, I suppose I still have that free time, I just now have other things I'd rather do with it.

--
ION: I'd forgotten how expensive food was up here, especially meat. 6 dollars/pound (or more) for chicken breast is just ridiculous. Sausage prices are a little better (though not much better), but I haven't even bothered trying to buy beef. If it gets much more expensive, it'd almost be cheaper to go out to eat every day.

[DataNinja]

Well, there were people such as you back then as well, but stick together enough yous and the combined mutation rate of a single topic will keep the discussion running for much longer. Plus, the more you banter along with other people, the more inclined you'll become to add some story of your own day to the thread.

...I don't think I want to be stuck together with more of me.
Not in the least because if you find more of me, it's probably a very bad sign.

This is "this worked the last five or ten times I tested it, but now it fails repeatedly" (whenever I encounter a bug, I run the same test again to see if it's repeatable), so worse.

Geez. Well, hopefully it all gets sorted out...

Most of the bugs I have to deal with require another test to already have run to trigger. Merely testing one part (unless you test trigger conditions for a known bug) is nothing but shooting yourself in the foot.

Ouch. I only have a small inkling of how that feels, but I expect to become more familiar with it.

That's concerning. And it also leads to the question: are we seeing the slow death of a forum, or are we simply not recognizing the new life this forum has found because we are used to seeing it in a previous incarnation?

I think, and, definitely take it with a grain of salt, because I haven't really been here for that long, that's it's probably more of a transformation. Because, If there's a shift away from the stuff like RB, people who come primarily for that stuff won't stay very long, and that sort of just becomes a death spiral for it. But, it doesn't affect those people who'd never really step out of the gaming subforums.

Honestly, part of me is expecting this upcoming course to feel easier than the Rome program. I was blessed with terrible roommates in a bad apartment, awful social dynamics, and personal misfortune throughout the last ten weeks, so I only have this next challenge to look forward to.

...sheesh. If that's a blessing for you, I'd hate to see what anything less is.

[Aedilred]

That's concerning. And it also leads to the question: are we seeing the slow death of a forum, or are we simply not recognizing the new life this forum has found because we are used to seeing it in a previous incarnation?

Well I think there's a tendency at the moment for things which were previously posted in here to be posted in their own thread or in different "random banter by another name" threads. Cases in point: every Bartmanhomer thread, especially Confessions.

The Friendly Banter board and this thread in particular has a reputation for cliqueyness. It might be that as long-term posters here have drifted away (as is inevitable) they just haven't been replaced because people find it hard to break into what seems an established group. Many community projects have foundered in the last couple of years - the pictures thread, the stick avatar thread (and associated competitions). Hard to tell if that's because of a general decline in activity or just a shift in interest by newer members.

It might be that we have fewer new members than we used to. The only real way to gauge the relative life of the forum accurately would be with figures of posts/day but we don't have those to hand and I cba trying to calculate any.

[Bartmanhomer]

Well I think there's a tendency at the moment for things which were previously posted in here to be posted in their own thread or in different "random banter by another name" threads. Cases in point: every Bartmanhomer thread, especially Confessions.

The Friendly Banter board and this thread in particular has a reputation for cliqueyness. It might be that as long-term posters here have drifted away (as is inevitable) they just haven't been replaced because people find it hard to break into what seems an established group. Many community projects have foundered in the last couple of years - the pictures thread, the stick avatar thread (and associated competitions). Hard to tell if that's because of a general decline in activity or just a shift in interest by newer members.

It might be that we have fewer new members than we used to. The only real way to gauge the relative life of the forum accurately would be with figures of posts/day but we don't have those to hand and I cba trying to calculate any.

Did somebody called my name?

[LaZodiac]

Did somebody called my name?

No you're just hearing things.

The Friendly Banter board and this thread in particular has a reputation for cliqueyness. It might be that as long-term posters here have drifted away (as is inevitable) they just haven't been replaced because people find it hard to break into what seems an established group. Many community projects have foundered in the last couple of years - the pictures thread, the stick avatar thread (and associated competitions). Hard to tell if that's because of a general decline in activity or just a shift in interest by newer members.

It might be that we have fewer new members than we used to. The only real way to gauge the relative life of the forum accurately would be with figures of posts/day but we don't have those to hand and I cba trying to calculate any.

Yeah, that's incredibly true. I know I wasn't really sure how to "get in" at first, and it was thanks to serendipity that MoonCat greeted me when the currenet RB thread was under her name so I thought I was being let in. It made it more comfortable to actually post about whatever and such.

I know in terms of activity, I've got a fairly stable following on the video game portion of the thread from people who enjoy my stuff there, though only two or three of em post regularly.

[FinnLassie]

I feel like I joined during some sort of a "cracking point"? I can't recall a better term to use...

Because back then, 4 years ago, some people were already wondering about how slowly the threads were moving compared to the past. Now four year laters the posting pace has slowed down quite a bit, but I don't really see anything bad about it.

I also don't think the forums are dying - it's just different now. I remember how 8+ years ago forums/oekaki boards (and oh boy is the latter dead as a medium) were pretty much the only type of social media me and my friends used, but there's so many more options nowadays. Posting pictures falls under this umbrella as well, added with the fact that many would rather keep their faces private when writing behind a nickname. Or just not really have their face on the internet at all, or just for a select few.


ION: My brain is mush, I don't want to pack, I have to pack, I don't want to eat, I forget to eat, and please Lord tell me there's chocolate somewhere near.

[Teddy]

I could likewise cite the essential death of the UK meetups.

Those too.

Then there's that factor of coming back and the thread is mostly people you only sort of got to know whom you vaguely remember...

I think that makes the oldtimers stick around a little longer, though. I know that if there would be no person I know around in RB any longer, I would drop out for good too. It's definitely a symptom of a lack of new blood, however...

That's concerning. And it also leads to the question: are we seeing the slow death of a forum, or are we simply not recognizing the new life this forum has found because we are used to seeing it in a previous incarnation?

I think the OotS and roleplaying games discussion subforums are still alive and kicking, but the social aspect seems to be waning...

Well boo. I kept meaning to add things there, and never having the energy to compile a post. Sometimes I think about how long it takes me to do a simple response post on RB and I am amazed that any of us were ever as prolific as we once were.

Yeah, I get that too. I think part of it, though, is that activity brings energy. When there's only a post or two a day, if any, you can procrastinate responding to something, because it won't move out of the main topic for a while. Eventually, though, what you were going to say will feel like it lost its relevancy. It's like there's an expiration timer on a potential post which stays the same regardless of the speed of thread.

Yeah... resting... I'm taking an intensive 0-to-grad-student-level Latin course in ten weeks... Teddy, why didn't you stop me???

Why didn't you tell me so I could stop you???

Honestly, part of me is expecting this upcoming course to feel easier than the Rome program. I was blessed with terrible roommates in a bad apartment, awful social dynamics, and personal misfortune throughout the last ten weeks, so I only have this next challenge to look forward to.

Yeah, but will it be fun?

What did you study in Rome, by the way?

ION:
Speaking of friends on the Forum, I've been thinking about my Tour the Friends and how almost three years have passed since it. I would like to do it again, but I don't know as many people on these bords as I used to, nowadays...

[DataNinja]

Yeah, that's incredibly true. I know I wasn't really sure how to "get in" at first, and it was thanks to serendipity that MoonCat greeted me when the currenet RB thread was under her name so I thought I was being let in. It made it more comfortable to actually post about whatever and such.

I know in terms of activity, I've got a fairly stable following on the video game portion of the thread from people who enjoy my stuff there, though only two or three of em post regularly.

I know the feeling. I peeked at the RB threads before, but, being a social introvert, never really wanted to say anything. I actually posted for the first time (not even a year ago, seems longer...) after seeing someone who I'd been in a game with, and knew somewhat-decently well, post, so I said hi to everyone, and them in particular. Kinda just snowballed from there. Once you actually get me talking, and I get comfortable with peopel, it can be hard to shut me up at times.

Seeing you post in the thread, Zodi, actually, really helped, too, since the only other thread I was a somewhat active poster in was your Sunshine LP.

[Aedilred]

I feel like I joined during some sort of a "cracking point"? I can't recall a better term to use...

Funny how you think that's a coincidence...

To be honest I expect there were people in the first half of 2005 lamenting that the forum was moving so much more slowly than it used to. People thinking things were better at some point in the past based on gut feeling is pretty common in almost all walks of life. And social phenomena always seem more "happening" when you're on the outside. There's a tendency I've noticed on almost all fora for people to revere the stuff that was popular at the time that or just before they arrived, when it comes to the best games/players/fanfic/members, etc. People hark back to a golden age of moderation under unimpeachable authority figures with great judgment; this current lot just aren't getting the job done in the same way. And so on.

So it's pretty hard to judge.

I do have to wonder whether forum activity or new membership has any correlation with the update frequency of the comic. Certainly I would never have joined the forum if I wasn't already reading it. Obviously that topic is verboten to discuss, though.

[LaZodiac]

I know the feeling. I peeked at the RB threads before, but, being a social introvert, never really wanted to say anything. I actually posted for the first time (not even a year ago, seems longer...) after seeing someone who I'd been in a game with, and knew somewhat-decently well, post, so I said hi to everyone, and them in particular. Kinda just snowballed from there. Once you actually get me talking, and I get comfortable with peopel, it can be hard to shut me up at times.

Seeing you post in the thread, Zodi, actually, really helped, too, since the only other thread I was a somewhat active poster in was your Sunshine LP.

And I'm glad I could help with that. It's important for everyone to feel comfortable and willing to participate in stuff. If I can make even a single person feel better about themselves and what they're doing, I think I've done a good job.

[TaiLiu]

Also hey I'm writing a book (more like editing so that I can send it off to publishers to look at it) and that's pretty cool.

Oo, what kind of book are you writing?

[2D8HP]

Hang on, the You! thread died too? I missed that one.

Yeah, in the end it was just Dire Moose, FinnLassie, Spanish_Paladin and I who posted in it. The bit where people come in and fawn over your pictures was almost gone, and eventually, three months passed. And then another three or four or five...ki.

...Many community projects have foundered in the last couple of years - the pictures thread, the stick avatar thread (and associated competitions).....

....Posting pictures falls under this umbrella as well, added with the fact that many would rather keep their faces private when writing behind a nickname. Or just not really have their face on the internet at all, or just for a select few....

I'd have liked to post to the "You"/pictures thread, but while I've figured out how to attach photos taken by my phone to e-mail's and text messages, I can't figure out how post then to this Forum.

---

....I'm registered to begin summer classes down in California literally the Monday after I get home. .

Welcome aboard!

There's lot's of Playgrounders here in California.

[Teddy]

It was an embedded systems class, so almost all of our tests were behavioural - we were nearly always looking at the output of the whole program and hardware combined. Things that worked perfectly for a week or more would suddenly fail in ways that indicated something much older and more fundamental (that had been extensively tested and was working all along) had some irreconcilable problem.

My embedded systems class had a compiler which compiled statements starting with "/ *", but that's a story already told. Did you ever figure out the problem?

That'll definitely do it. I'm very glad to not be working directly with hardware right now. I have nice, simple file I/O code that I can unit-test. And all of my problems will be a result of my own logical mistakes instead of having to account for hardware.

Well, it's not raw hardware, but instruments for signal/power generation and measurment, but still. I spent over a week trying to debug why a spectrum analyser suddenly would hang. After I'd read through the manual and finally contacted the company for support, I eventually reached such an understanding of every constituent of the problem that I could see that we simply didn't get an RF signal for it to detect. That's one of those moments when you can't decide whether to feel really smart or incredibly dumb.

Even more reasons for me to hate garbage collection. \shakes cane
(the obvious solution would be to leave an unused entry in every 32nd spot in your data structures)

#ObviousSolutions

ION: I'd forgotten how expensive food was up here, especially meat. 6 dollars/pound (or more) for chicken breast is just ridiculous. Sausage prices are a little better (though not much better), but I haven't even bothered trying to buy beef. If it gets much more expensive, it'd almost be cheaper to go out to eat every day.

Situations like those are what makes me go "maybe I should actually return a favour to Mother Nature and cut back on my meat eating for once".

...I don't think I want to be stuck together with more of me.
Not in the least because if you find more of me, it's probably a very bad sign.

Hehehe...

Geez. Well, hopefully it all gets sorted out...

It did (as far as I know, we'll see if I've caused the accidental destruction of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth in hardware when I get back in a week). The problems were debilitating for my build, but I already had such a great understanding of the code by now that the bugs themselves weren't very hard to find and deal with.

Ouch. I only have a small inkling of how that feels, but I expect to become more familiar with it.

You're studying programming, I take it? How far into it are you?

The Friendly Banter board and this thread in particular has a reputation for cliqueyness. It might be that as long-term posters here have drifted away (as is inevitable) they just haven't been replaced because people find it hard to break into what seems an established group. Many community projects have foundered in the last couple of years - the pictures thread, the stick avatar thread (and associated competitions). Hard to tell if that's because of a general decline in activity or just a shift in interest by newer members.

Yeah, I know I struggled with the feeling of not being part of the crowd when I started. Eventually, I realised I had to be part of the crowd since I'd been sticking around, and then Zodi came along and suddenly I had someone who responded to everything I wrote as well!

[2D8HP]

Well I think there's a tendency at the moment for things which were previously posted in here to be posted in their own thread or in different "random banter by another name" threads....

I've only been reading the Forum for about two and a half years, and posting for not much more than one year, but it's seemed to me as well that "random banter" goes on all over the Playground, not just at this thread, or even at this Sub-Forum.

[LaZodiac]

Oo, what kind of book are you writing?

It's a modern fantasy type of thing staring a girl. It's what my comic would of been (and might be in the future if I somehow get popular enough to warrant a comic adaptation!) in book form because I really wanted to write out the plot to get it "out there" and I've written it to the point where people have encouraged me to do the publishing thing.

[Aedilred]

Because I'm just that cool, I made a graph:



The figure for threads #170-189 is the mean average of all threads from #90-189, truncated here for space. Figures assume that all threads went to the maximum number of posts (i.e. 1500, except thread #200, when it was 3000). Figures for thread #216 are taken up to the end of 26th May BST.

While there was some fluctuation from thread to thread, it seems clrear that there has been a definite and almost continuous downward trend in thread activity since early 2014. Aside from the anomaly of thread #198 (August-September 2013), activity remained fairly consistently above 50 posts per day, and generally above 60. But then starting from thread #204 (January-March 2014) activity started to tail off quite sharply and has never recovered.

[FinnLassie]

So I guess it's proven that I joined around about a critical moment?

[Aedilred]

So I guess it's proven that I joined around about a critical moment?

About nine months before it (inasmuch as it was a "moment", I think).

[DataNinja]

You're studying programming, I take it? How far into it are you?

Second year university courses. So, mostly still fundamentals of C, Java, some Python. Algorithms and logic. Also assembly language (bleh). So, still not really that far into it.

Because I'm just that cool, I made a graph:

Huh. Interesting. (I mean, graphs generally are. I know I've made more than my fair share of unnecessary graphs charting things. ...Zodi can back me up on that. )

Yeah, there has been a fairly drastic decline. It would be interesting to figure out how much change in the post-per-day average of Friendly Banter has changed over time. And the rest of the forum. But, I think that's just a little too much work.