Welcome, Guest
You have to register before you can post on our site.

Username
  

Password
  





Search Forums

(Advanced Search)

Forum Statistics
» Members: 187
» Latest member: MorningDaylight
» Forum threads: 14,076
» Forum posts: 219,211

Full Statistics

Online Users
There are currently 368 online users.
» 2 Member(s) | 362 Guest(s)
Applebot, Bing, Google, Yandex, Acyl, Labster

Latest Threads
Fic Update: The 59-Thread...
Forum: Other People's Fanfiction
Last Post: Shepherd
3 hours ago
» Replies: 116
» Views: 7,415
The Imperial Presidency, ...
Forum: Politics and Other Fun
Last Post: Labster
3 hours ago
» Replies: 12
» Views: 940
Image-Dump Thread 30
Forum: General Chatter
Last Post: Norgarth
9 hours ago
» Replies: 247
» Views: 21,890
Writing Self-Insert Chara...
Forum: Other People's Fanfiction
Last Post: batzulger
Yesterday, 10:04 PM
» Replies: 12
» Views: 594
More Political Images thr...
Forum: Politics and Other Fun
Last Post: Norgarth
Yesterday, 04:05 PM
» Replies: 216
» Views: 25,872
Crossovers that should be...
Forum: Other People's Fanfiction
Last Post: Norgarth
Yesterday, 03:40 PM
» Replies: 181
» Views: 22,695
Crossovers That Should No...
Forum: Other People's Fanfiction
Last Post: Norgarth
Yesterday, 03:38 PM
» Replies: 246
» Views: 29,114
Oingo Boingo has a lot to...
Forum: Anime Music Videos
Last Post: robkelk
Yesterday, 02:10 PM
» Replies: 0
» Views: 112
Even more oddities spotte...
Forum: General Chatter
Last Post: Bob Schroeck
Yesterday, 07:01 AM
» Replies: 266
» Views: 39,920
Meanwhile, in Canada...
Forum: Politics and Other Fun
Last Post: robkelk
Yesterday, 06:42 AM
» Replies: 9
» Views: 952

 
  A thought about that wall
Posted by: robkelk - 01-23-2018, 09:04 AM - Forum: Politics and Other Fun - No Replies

Instead of getting Mexico to pay for the border wall, why not get PETA to pay for it? They want to advertise on it.

Funny how one needs to go into the Wayback Machine to get that blog post instead of going to PETA's "live" website, though...

Print this item

  Should We Apologize to the Netherlands?
Posted by: DHBirr - 01-18-2018, 02:02 PM - Forum: Politics and Other Fun - Replies (7)

A fellow using the handle "tom bruggem" made several comments, most of them acerbic and some very cleverly so, appended to this Washington Post article about the embarrassing ambassador we sent to the Netherlands.  My favorite was when Mijnheer Bruggem took exception to another commenter describing President Windrip as "the Orange Combover."  He responded testily, "As a Dutchman I would appreciate it if you stopped defaming our national color by using it to describe Donald Trump."

Print this item

  And the old images are back
Posted by: Bob Schroeck - 01-17-2018, 07:02 PM - Forum: Forums - Replies (2)

Well, most of them.  Here's a good example.

About 500 or so of the images Brent scraped from Yuku have finally been restored to the board.  That isn't all of them, by far, but I'm trying to track down via Crapatalk and the Wayback Machine anything that's missing and restoring it.  A missing image will look like this in the message text:

[Image: 1c336f841dd14f8daa0b0563ee820413be34454c.jpg]

but the text won't be highlightable or selectable.

Print this item

  Black Hole Sun (not the song)
Posted by: robkelk - 01-17-2018, 05:45 PM - Forum: General Chatter - No Replies

CBC News: Hidden black hole caught flinging star back and forth in distant cluster

First black hole discovered by direct observation of its gravitational effect on a nearby star.

Print this item

Question Looking for advice about headphones
Posted by: robkelk - 01-15-2018, 08:07 PM - Forum: General Chatter - Replies (5)

My Panasonic DJ120 headphones broke. The electronics are still good; it's the joints holding them to the headrest that broke (left side first, then the right side a week later). My first thought was "Well, they still work, but I have to hold them together. I've had then for a while - can I get parts to repair them?" A look online shows that the DJ120 is long out-of-production - even the "factory overstock" stores don't have any left. So, no chance of replacement parts.

Then I thought, "I'm not retired yet; maybe I should buy a good pair of cans." So I checked out what's available. I've never heard of most of the brands that show up in searches. (And the variation in prices is insane! At least two orders of magnitude between the cheap break-and-throw-away cans and the highest-end sets - part of those high-end prices has to be the sucker audiophile paying for a brand name.)

As far as my ears go, I can easily tell the difference between Sony and Koss, but I have to concentrate to distinguish between Koss and Denon. (Yeah, those three were the brands I recognized.) And as I implied above, I prefer the over-ear style ("cans"), not pads or buds.

What's good nowadays, what should I stay away from, what's "okay I guess"?

Print this item

  Any pilots in the forum readership?
Posted by: robkelk - 01-15-2018, 03:51 PM - Forum: General Chatter - No Replies

If yes, does anybody have an instructor's certificate and want to move to Ontario? At least in Ottawa and Kitchener-Waterloo, there's a shortage of instructors (according to this CBC story).

Print this item

  Federal Court Strikes Down "Unconstitutional" Gerrymandering in North Carolina
Posted by: Bob Schroeck - 01-09-2018, 08:02 PM - Forum: Politics and Other Fun - Replies (20)

Article here.  And hopefully it's just the first of many such rulings.

Print this item

  Fire temporarily shuts down Quebec City's ice hotel
Posted by: robkelk - 01-09-2018, 05:46 PM - Forum: General Chatter - Replies (1)

No, really.

Quote:"When I received the phone call they had to repeat twice that there was a fire in the ice hotel," said manager Jacques Desbois.
Nobody was injured, luckily.

Print this item

  I'll just leave this here...
Posted by: robkelk - 01-09-2018, 12:10 PM - Forum: Politics and Other Fun - Replies (5)

"If you want to write about whether more people rode the Washington, DC metro system on the day of Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration or on the day of Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration, ask the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which collects this data. If you prefer, take President Trump’s word for it—but then you are not a journalist, you are a sap. Trump has demonstrated repeatedly that he accepts figures that flatter him and refuses to acknowledge those that do not. Personal vanity is not a commonly accepted database."
– Michael Schudson, Here’s what non-fake news looks like, Columbia Journalism Review

Print this item

  Author Status
Posted by: Bob Schroeck - 01-09-2018, 12:01 PM - Forum: Other People's Fanfiction - Replies (10)

(04-19-2008, 08:07 PM)aeroprime Wrote: Say, what ever happened to Darien Steffler anyway?
I was doing some of my DB-level maintenance of the board (identifying and putting names to "Guest" posts) when I came across this question in a thread entitled "Seeking a fic" from almost ten years ago.  For our younger members, Darren Steffler was possibly better known as "Twister", and authored a highly influential self-insert fic series called Twisted Path back in the middle 1990s, and disappeared completely from the fanfic community around the turn of the century.  Drunkard's Walk was written because I read TP, as were more than a few other signficant works, like Bubblegum Zone, Oh! My Brother, Legion's Quest, and many many more.

Anyway I got curious and did a Google search, figuring that there might be a lot more information out there now than back then.  

There is.  Most of it has nothing to do with fanfiction, but there are more than a few real-world hits.

IIRC, Twister was Canadian and in his late teens in the middle 90s, so he'd be in his middle to late 30s, now... and that simple search brings up several hits which might all be him.  I kind of like the idea that he might be the head brewer at a brewery and a former IT person...  Given that he's fifteen or more years out from his writing, he like more than few other former fic authors probably doesn't want to be associated with his old work.  But it's still an interesting window into one of the early "names" of fanfiction.

Print this item