Make up games you can play on the blog, then play them. It’s simple and elegant.
Continued from Version 2010 (the original).
Patience, Please
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Make up games you can play on the blog, then play them. It’s simple and elegant.
Continued from Version 2010 (the original).
The Philosophy wikipedia game is today’s xkcd alt-text!
Interesting. But it can’t possibly be a universal law. I’ll test it with “cover band.”
Cover band
Musical ensemble
Classical music
Art music
Umbrella term
Subset
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
…11 steps. OK, I’ll try for something really obscure. Could have been a fluke.
Elephant & Castle railway station. That’ll fox them.
Elephant and Castle
Road intersection
Road transport
Transport
Cargo
Commerce
Business
Organization
Corporation
State (polity)
Social sciences
Umbrella term
Subset
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
…19 steps. Impressive. Let’s go with a classic.
Leaving computer now.
There are a few exceptions, when you get stuck in an infinite loop. Other than that, I think it holds true.
Back!
As I was saying, let’s try…
Muse magazine
Smithsonian Institution
Museum education
Museum
Preservation (library and archival science)
Library science
Interdisciplinarity
List of academic disciplines
Academia
Community
Group (disambiguation)
Group (mathematics)
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
17 steps. I’m beginning to believe.
I’ll hit Random Article now.
Dokaka
Beatboxing
Vocal percussion
Mouth
Human gastrointestinal tract
Stomach
Animal
Eukaryote
Organism
Biology
Natural science
Science
Knowledge
Fact
Information
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
21 steps. I think one could argue that one always passes through mathematics on one’s way to philosophy — at least on The Other Wiki.
Nope! ZNZ found another chain that lead to philosophy:
Psychological manipulation
Social influence
Conformity
Unconscious mind
German philosophy
Philosophy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Science Fiction Comedy
Genre
Literature
Fiction
Narrative
Proto-Indo-European Language
Linguistic Reconstruction
Internal Reconstruction
Comparative Method
Linguistics
Human
Taxonomy
Science
Knowledge
Facts
Information
Finite
Infinity
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
24.
Kokopelli and Company
Comic strip
Newspaper
Publication
Content (media)
Information
Finite
Infinity
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
And now, the TVtropes version!
(Rule: First non-quote link on a page.)
I hit the Random Button…
Side By Side Demonstration
Brand X
Product Placement
The Red Stapler
Real Life
Real Is Brown
The Nineties
Grunge
Alternative Rock
Pavement
Trope Makers
…which then links to itself.
…there is a reason I did not play the TVtropes version; it is because I actually to spend some of my life free. Did you resist the urge to read every single one of those pages? And if so, how?
SFTDP
Upon further experimentation, I have discovered that this game, when played on Tvtropes, seems to have no set destination. Also, you usually end up with an article that links to itself, for some reason.
Examples:
Civvie Spandex
The Cape
The Hero
The Captain
The Squad
Distressed Damsel
Neutral Female
Sword Fight
Implausible Fencing Powers
Spin to Deflect Stuff
Rule of Cool
Willing Suspension of Disbelief
Magic A Is Magic A
Science Fiction
that’s because it is impossible to pull order from the chaos that is tvtropes
Ha! I have found one that does not get to philosophy or get stuck in a loop! (though it probably should end up in a loop)
Dungeons and Dragons
Dungeons and Dragons (disambiguation)
Internal server error.
Ok. So maybe it’s just my computer or a problem on wiki, but it’s still funny.
Actually, no. The “If you meant to go to this article instead, here it is,” links are not supposed to be used, so the disambiguation doesn’t work.
Dungeons and Dragons
Fantasy
Genre
Literature
Fiction
Narrative
Latin
Italic languages
Indo-European languages
Language family
Language
Human
Extant taxon
Biology
Natural science
Science
Knowledge
Fact
Information
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
Okay, Internet Movie Database, Pikachu, and Pschitt (an extremely obscure French soda) all lead to Philosophy. Let’s try Phoenix Wright (character).
Japanese language
Language
Human
Taxonomy
Science
Fact
Information
Finite set
Mathematics (oh-oh)
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
Let’s try a different one…
Tardigrade
Phylum
IPA for English
English
West Germanic Languages
Germanic Languages
Indo-European Languages
Language Family
Languages
Human
Taxonomy
Science
Knowledge
Facts
Information
Finite
Infinity
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
Yup, does it in quite a few steps, but it does it eventually.
Together for Days
Clifton Davis
United States
Federalism
Politics
Group decision making
Individual
Statistics
Science
Knowledge
Facts
Information
Finite
Infinity
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
—-
Pokémon (video game series)
Video game
Electronic game
Game
Play (activity)
Ethology
Zoology
Biology
Natural science
Science
Knowledge
Facts
Information
Finite
Infinity
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
—-
Ooh, I found another way to get stuck- if you get an article without any links.
It doesn’t work in French.
1. New Zealand Building Trades Union
2. Trade union
3. working conditions
4. cross-disciplinary
5. academic disciplines
6. academic
7. community
8. interacting
9. causal
10. events
11. observable
12. physics
13. natural science
14. science
15. knowledge
16. facts
17. information
18. sequence
19. mathematics
20. quantity
21. property
22. modern philosophy
23. philosophy
Ah, man! And here I was hoping I wouldn’t have to go through math! But I like haing gone through facts. Bo knows!
I suppose everyone has noticed that at some point, most of these end in:
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
Nescafé
Instant coffee
Coffee bean
Coffea
Flowering plant
Embryophyte
Plant
Life
Physical body
Physics
Natural science
Science
Knowledge
Fact
Information
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
20 steps. Let’s try Revolution 9.
Revolution 9
The Beatles
Rock music
Popular music
Music genre
Genre
Literature
Fiction
Narrative
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
Yep, more mathematics. One more: Osprey Packs.
Osprey Packs
Backpack
Sack
Bag
Antistatic bag
Electronics
Science
Knowledge
Fact
Information
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
I’ve actually just been using C&P when it comes to mathematics. Thanks, Kittymine!
I saw the Corrupt a Wish game on the previous thread… So is there any way that could be played again? It looks really fun!
Okay!
I wish I could use telekinesis on myself or anything else.
Granted. It’s totally uncontrollable and you keep slamming yourself and other people into walls.
I wish I could have Chinese food tonight.
Granted. You will be able to eat nothing but Chinese food for the rest of your life.
I wish it wasn’t so humid outside.
Granted. You’re frozen.
I wish I could see the future.
Granted. You can now only see the future, not the present. You go crazy and are placed in an insane asylum.
(I just wished, I’m gonna let someone else take a turn….)
Granted. It’s so dry that all of your skin cracks and peels off. You die!
I wish that ice cream was healthy.
Granted. All of the flavor compounds in ice cream are deemed unhealthy, so now ice cream tastes like cardboard.
I wish I the vacation in California I have planned in the not-too-distant future was longer.
Granted. You, the vacation in California you have planned, are longer–but being a vacation rather than an organism who is alive, let alone sentient, are basically dead (except that if there’s an afterlife, you can’t experience it or even learn about it) and cannot control what you’re like. Thus, I suppose it isn’t really your fault that your family or whoever you wanted to go on vacation with you just happened to arrive exactly when California was taken over by evil monsters who tortured them and everyone else nearby into insanity–the Bellatrix kind so that they served them, not the harmless Longbottom kind, except that instead of taking pleasure in evil, they were also manically depressed and really just did evil things because that’s what was expected of them and they didn’t prefer anything else–kept them alive as long as possible so that they could endure plenty of pain, and forced them to die a very slow and even-more-painful-than-usual-life-now-is death just when it looked like they might be able to at least go peacefully of old age–and, since they turned so evil, they go to a very horrid afterlife. No, you certainly can’t be blamed, even though the place you live isn’t any worse off than it was before. But if you hadn’t made that wish, everything would have been different. You could have all gone on with your happy-or-at-least-not-as-miserable-as-they-could-be-depending-on-your-situation lives. And every night, when those who knew your family back when they were good, sane people try in vain to fall asleep, they curse that horrendous, tragic vacation for painfully ripping the lives from the people they once loved.
…Er, that was not what I intended. Fascinating. Oh, well!
*revises old wish* I wish the multiverse were permanently optimized as much as possible for as many beings as possible, especially me, Musers, Muserly people, squids, tardigrades, dolphins, parrots and parrot-like birds, apes, baboons, corvids, and the endangered species that really need some help, with a general preference of animals over plants but clearly with everyone’s best interests in mind.
I ha no idea I made that typo until I saw your post. You really capitalized on my typo there!
I really like your response.
Wish granted. The multiverse is SO optimized for animals that populations get out of control and there isn’t enough space for anyone. The government institutes rigid population-control laws to combat this, which works for a while, but people get sick of the rules and revolt, and the problem gets much much worse. Eventually, the animals resort to genocide within their respective species in order to keep their numbers down. Unfortunately, after enough time passes, they forget what they are killing each other for and start just killing to kill. Tardigrades somehow manage to wipe themselves out completely. Their disappearence sends waves through the food chain that end up wiping out all fish and cephalopods. Without fish, dolphins go extinct as well. The birds get into such fierce fighting that none of them are tending their nests, and that generation ends the race. Apes and monkeys fight in a sort of tournament to the death, until eventually only one member of each species is left alive. They die eventually. The only humans who do not fight each other to the death in a now-meaningless war are the Muserly people, who had come up with the idea of traveling back in time before the Wish was made. Unfortunately, they miscalculate severely and all get arrested as Ally spies and wiped out in the Holocaust. Back in the post-Wish present, the few animal species left alive are so horribly shaken by what has happened that they all go extinct from a mass-outbreak of terminal depression. Plants, bacteria, and viruses inherit the multiverse.
Granted. You are temporally displaced to China six months ago, eat the most delicious meal you’ve ever had, and are then promptly arrested for violating their Time Travel Ban.
Oh god, the time travel ban… China is like the second most insane nation ever.
What’s the first most insane?
North Korea.
What about the United States?
Well, I suppose we’re in the top ten, at least.
BECAUSE WE’RE THE HERO *shot*
Well, think about it. If time travel was invented, it could very well destroy the universe if used irresponsibly. Even if China doesn’t exist anymore by the time it’s invented, it’s not really unreasonable to ban people from going back there…
What about Singapore?
You misunderstand. They haven’t just banned actual time travel (which, on its own, seems reasonable)… they’ve banned the idea of time travel in fiction as being “disrespectful to history.” It would be illegal to air Doctor Who there, or to sell copies of The Collected Works of H. G. Wells. Although maybe “The Time Machine” might slip by since it only involves travel into the future…? I don’t know.
Bahahahahaha… wait, really?
Yes, really.
Let’s play that Useless Superpower Game from the previous thread. You give a useless superpower to the person who posts before you.
You have one way transparent eye lids (one side of them, you can see through.) But the transparent side is on the outside.
(essentially, whenever you close your eyes, it looks like your eyes are open)
You can exactly copy any Microsoft Word serif font when writing in pencil.
WOOO
THAT INCLUDES MY FAVORITE FONT
YEEEEAAAAAAH
(randomosity- I’ve always wanted to get hit by lightning…)
You can draw down lightning, but only so that it hits you.
You can predict what colour someone’s cat is before you’ve seen it.
That may not be useful, but it sounds like fun!
I just wrote one, so I’m going to wait before coming up with another one.
You can make capes flap around dramatically even if there is no wind, but they will always hit you in the face.
You know everything but can’t remember any of it.
Useless?! Can’t you imagine what could be accomplished with a post-mortem brain donation?
You invariably win a certain 5 million player luck game without trying, but you’re literally the only person in the world willing to play it.
You have laser vision. However, the lasers are only as strong as laser pointers, and having laser vision prevents you from being able to see
You have see through skin. *ahemXMENahem*
You can make grass grow slightly faster than average.
You can recharge batteries by touching them, but they lose their power again if you let go.
You have the power to turn any dark color slightly brighter over the course of an hour.
You can transform the hat you are wearing into any other kind of hat, but it can only be made of materials flimsy enough to not protect you from anything.
You can turn invisible, but only in the nonpresence of living things.
For 27 minutes each day, you may change one other person’s hair to be exactly the length of your hair.
Mika: Including micrscopic ones? Wow, that is useless. You wouldn’t even be eable to use your power just to prove to yourself that you could.
-Ambystoma: Do you mean that person’s hair stays the same length as yours for 27 minutes? Or that there are only 27 minutes in each day in which you are able to do this? Or that it takes 27 minutes to use this power and you can only use it once a day?
You can make an extremely delicious-smelling and looking pie out of thin air so that it materializes on your outsretched palm, but if it leaves your palm or is cut into (as in with a knife, with a fork, by being bitten into, et cetera) it turns back into air.
It would still be delicious to lick. Of course, the moment you took your tongue off, the taste would disappear, but oh, well.
Wait a moment… Smell is caused bya few stray molecules of something escaping into your nose, right? So you couldn’t smell the pie, which means you could barely taste it. Wow, an almost-tasteless pie that’s impossible to smell, eat, or throw… Well, it could be good for magic tricks…
Bibliophile, you can now boil pasta WITH YOUR MIND.
You have a regrowable middle finger.
Does anyone read One Piece? The most useless devil fruit ever : The fish fish fruit, zoan type. You can turn into a fish, but you can’t swim anywhere or do anything fishy, because the water cancels your powers.
Still, knowing what it’s like to have a fish’s brain? That could be a major contribution to comparative psychology! Not that they’d believe you, but if you did it in a very, very public place with as many respectable biologists/video cameras as possible RIGHT THERE, those individuals would sort of have to…
With a fish’s lung capacity, I think you would have to change back before you could significantly experience a fish’s brain. Unless you were a mangrove fish or a lungfish, that is. In that case, hmm…
Or a mudskipper. Can you choose what fish you turn into, ooba?
well, previous devil fruits that let you turn into animals (zoan type) only turn you into one animal, plus a hybrid form. (more with a rumble ball) I don’t think that they replace your brain with that of the animal.
Let’s unnest the superpower game
R101- You can officially use the spell “Alohomora”, but only on unlocked things.
But that would require a functioning wand! If you had a wand, you could still do other spell! Besides, magic is honed through practice, so if you don’t completely lack magical powers, you can get better at the spells you don’t know.
Once a day, you can create a microscopic, comma-shaped thing with no real purpose. Alternatively, you can turn yourself into an ugly kitchen counter when you need to hide, but you can’t turn back. Or you can run 9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 times faster than a peregrine falcon can fly for distances up to .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 half-micrometers, but after that, you get too tired to move.
Wait, but that’s faster than the speed of light!!!!!!!!! I would be able to leave my image behind me! What an amazing scientific discovery!
-Bibliophile: You come up with the craziest superpowers.
-Koko’s Apprentice: Is it bad that I have no idea what that is?
YES!
Reread all of the HP books. NOW!!!!!! Before it’s too late!
Normally, I’d agree, but she once said sher hated the HP books.
KA: For such a small distance, I don’t think anyone would notice, even you. Which is actually quite interesting… For all we know, we might be able to do it now without knowing it. Hm…
R101: Thanks! It’s from Harry Potter, and it opens locked doors. Normally I would consider it a bad thing, but since you hate Harry Potter for a presumably legitimate reason (By the way, what is it, out of curiosity?), I think it would be good in this case–it’s quite annoying to be surrounded by people who won’t stop talking about something you hate, and I consider it an accomplishment to know so little about a common pop culture thing that you happen to hate. *is a 12-year-old girl who isn’t even entirely sure who Justin Bieber is and doesn’t want to know, although she does have a very vague general idea, to say nothing of the fact that her father is quite obsessed with sports, while she is reknowned IRL for her ignorance in such matters*
I read the first book, but I could barely get through it. Don’t get me wrong, I can see the appeal, but to me it seems so… Not there. It’s the kind of book I might have liked reading when I was six. Maybe. It just doesn’t seem… enough to me. Does that make sense? I just really found it lacking. Also, I must confess that I probably would content myself to say I didn’t like it rather than saying I hate it, were it not for the considerable hype it has accumulated. I tend to dislike things more if EVERYBODY talks about them.
Thank you for the explanation.
You’re twelve? I’m shocked. I thought you were somewhere in the vicinity of my age (15). I guess it’s because you seem so smart and mature.
Back to the game.
You have the power to spontaneously combust. However, you can only use it in the total absence of tardigrades (and aren’t they everywhere?).
For some reason, this game reminds me of the They Might Be Giants song “Particle Man”
You have the power to grant people useless super powers.
18.1.1.1.1: Would the person have to be a particularly big fish, then? A human brain can’t fit inside, say, a minnow.
R101: Thanks!
My guess would be that they don’t get too hung up on physics. And I don’t think we should either, as several super powers we come up with also defy the laws of physics.
The laws of physics are overrated. Superpowers don’t need to worry about physics.
Like symmetry? (I find symmetry overrated. There is even video footage of me saying so on camera.)
R101, you have the power to turn into a stone statue, but only when people are looking.
They are. Have you actually read One Piece?
No, I just analyze things all the time.
Uzel Holding
Amsterdam
Capital of the Netherlands
Amsterdam
^INFINITE LOOP
—
Larry Gonick
Cartoonist
Cartoons
Visual arts
Art
Symbol
Information
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
Hurm, I guess I’ll try. This went a weird direction but got back to philosophy eventually.
Belphegor
Demonology
Demon
Religion
Cultural system
Culture
Alfred Kroeber
United States
Federalism
Politics
Group Decision Making
Individual
Person
Human
Extant Taxon
Biology
Natural Science
Science
Knowledge
Information
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property
Modern Philosophy
Philosophy
25 steps.
Fruits Basket
ShÅjo manga
Manga
Comics
Mass media (is the second link not in brackets or italicised, but the first actually went to a disambiguation page)
Media (communication)
Data storage device
Recording
Data
Variable (mathematics)
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
14 steps
And if you do it for Philosophy, it ends up in a big infinite loop.
The Life That I Have
Leo Marks
England
Country
Geography
Earth
Planet
Orbit
Physics
Natural Science
Science
Knowledge
Information
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property
Modern Philosophy
Philosophy
—
Karelian Hot Pot
Stew
Solid
State of Matter
Phase (matter)
Outline of physical science
Natural Science
Science
Knowledge
Information
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property
Modern Philosophy
Philosophy
Book quoting game! Guess who said:
“You’re Harry Potter.”
Luna Lovegood. (Why do I know this I don’t even …)
“You – are – a – fridge – with – wings.”
Is that from Maximum Ride, when Max was beating the cake out of Ari?
“Oh no! (character’s name that would give away too much) squished a cappertillar and now he’s gonna squish me.”
Actually, more correctly, it’s
“Ooh. Ooh, I’m gonna die, I’m gonna die, BLANK squished a capper-tiller and now he’s gonna squish me.”
Ender was the one who squished the capper-tiller – Peter said the sentence.
That book…
Ender’s Game, I think?
Harry Potter, to himself, in the mirror.
No, Rosebud was right. It was the only Harry Potter quotation I’d come up with that had given any difficulty to my other friends, so I thought I’d post it here and see what would happen.
What? What was I right about?
I think he meant Rainbow*Storm
Oh, yes, I did. Never mind; ignore my other post except the bit about the trivia competition. I’m a girl, by the way.
The quotation. It was Luna’s. Speaking of Harry Potter, if you enjoyed guessing the quote, you’ll really enjoy the rest of the Harry Potter trivia competition we started! I strongly advise getting back to it!
Jolly good idea.
This isn’t at all a sophisticated read, but…
“You’re gonna roll in heather until your underpants are DEAD?!”
Here’s a game I’d like to try out:
THE ALCHEMITER GAME
Essentially, player 1 choses 2 objects. Player 2 then combines the objects into something, preferably insanely awesome, writing an advertisement for them. Player 2 (who at that point becomes player 1) then presents another pair of objects for player 3 (who at that point becomes player 2).
Example:
A computer and glasses ->
Personal Corrective Lenses! The revolutionary new way to check email, play games, all hands free! You simply wear them on your head, and the lenses now function as screens when you need to use the computer! You may have a Mac, but this is a PCL!
My challenge:
Christmas tree and a refrigerator.
Why not buy a brand new YULEFRIDGE, the fridge that grows? This environmentally friendly refrigerator can be bought as a seed and planted in your kitchen floor, soon growing into a full-grown Yulefridge! Open it, and it’s always full of eggnog and raw Christmas cookie dough! (Fine print: YULEFRIDGE may take up to twelve years to grow to its full adulthood.)
My challenge: the complete Harry Potter series and a loaf of banana bread.
Now that all the movies have been made, where do we go from here? Well, we go to the DEATHLY BANANALLOWS!
We have first, the BALBIAN WAND. Made from only the purest banana wood, this wand has immense power. A simple flick will turn invading armies to a plantain plantation!
Next, there is the RIPENING STONE. This incredibly powerful stone will make any green banana perfectly yellow, and it will rejuvenate any brown bananas!
Finally, there is the BREADABILITY CLOAK. This incredibly device, allows you, when wearing it, to have any baked goods you desire!
(Fine print: Warning. Any of the mentioned items may induce a more powerful being to attempt and take them from you. User discretion is advised)
Challenge: a map of the Earth and a safe.
((Knowing the source material, alchemized objects might come out awesome, yes, but also useless, bizarre, and/or vaguely creepy.))
You create the SECURIGLOBE, a replica of an old-fashioned globe made of thick steel plating. You can set and enter the eight-digit combination by pressing the intersections of longitude and latitude lines. It is almost impossible to break into and makes a fetching conversation piece in the foyer or on the coffee table*.
*The manufacturer recommends selecting a sturdy coffee table, as SECURIGLOBE weighs in excess of one hundred pounds. Attempting to transport the SECURIGLOBE by hand is not advised.
Challenge: A modem and a wicker wastepaper basket.
(this sounds like something that would be in skymall and I would totally buy it. God, I would buy EVERYTHING in skymall. I was just having a conversation with Julia about how if I win the lottery I would just build a house to put everything from skymall in)
((The Duttle! Oh my god I will never sleep again.))
The WICKERNET! A wicker bowl beside your computer- anything you place in the bowl can be transported to anyone who has a their own WICKERNET. Communicate with friends through short notes, or send them all a slice of cake! (Or fried eggs!)
Challenge: a clock and a piano
The PIANONOME! This piano-clock hybrid not only acts as a built-in metronome as you play, but keeps track of practice hours! Buy your own PIANONOME, and you’ll never worry about keeping time ever again!
*Fine Print: Attempting to adjust the beat to anything other than 60 beats per minute will automatically void the warranty.
Challenge: An outdated calculus textbook and a tenor saxophone.
Congratulations! You’ve just invented the MUSIC MAKES MATH FUNâ„¢ COMPLETE TEACHING KIT FOR ADVANCED HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS! This tenor saxophone plays beautiful notes–math notes! You get to play the same tunes as usual, but they form words as they come out rather than the usual drab humming–fun calculus lyrics! It’s like singing, except you don’t have to use your voice!
“Learning math can be so fun!
Even if it’s not as simple as one plus one!”
Is it too late to participate?
If not, Challenge: An old coffee table and a puppy.
Escape from Raptors: Foil the previous person’s attempt to evade velociraptors, then make up your own. Kind of like the hill game on the last thread.
I barricade myself inside a concrete room with plenty of food and water, airholes punched in the ceiling, and a door that can only be opened from the inside.
I hire a construction worker to collapse the ceiling, then turn into my avatar and go eat some moss.
I use a strong acid to burn away at the concrete.
I then use more of that acid to create a moat around me, as well as numerous acid shooting guns for defence. (And lots of food, water, ect.)
The raptors become intelligent, build a bridge across the moat, and devour you.
I climb a tall building with smooth sides that the raptors can’t climb.
Since the raptors are intelligent, they build a catapult and bombard your building to pieces. Then eat you.
I fly away in a space shuttle, and colonize a planet inimical to velociraptorian life.
Mine was ignored, so let’s cooperate. I’m kidnapped by a wandering scientist and taken into space, and I eventually float onto your planet. There, now I have an even bigger chance of surviving, and since I can survive so much, whoever tries to make the velociraptors kill us next will have a much harder time than if it was just you.
Sort the characters from a book/anime/TV show/whatever into the four Hogwarts houses!
Okay, I’ll do MLP;FiM!
Twilight Sparkle: Ravenclaw
Fluttershy: Hufflepuff
Applejack: Gryffindor
Rainbow Dash: Gryffindor
Hmm, I’m not sure about Rarity and Pinkie Pie…
I’d say Rarity’s definitely Slytherin, and I’d probably put Pinkie in Hufflepuff, though I could see her in Gryffindor as well.
I’d put Applejack in Hufflepuff. She’s brave, yes, but she’s also extremely hard-working and loyal and tenacious. I agree with Piggy about Rarity, but I’m not so sure about Pinkie Pie. I’ve only seen the first 23 episodes so far, so I admit I don’t understand her completely, but I wouldn’t put her in Gryffindor. I have no idea how brave she is; thus far, it seems almost irrelevant. She finds creative ways to solve problems without having to take risks. But she doesn’t seem very hard-working, either, so I wouldn’t put her in Hufflepuff. Slytherin is out of the question; she isn’t at all cunning (Look at what her attempt at diplomacy accomplished in “Over a Barrel!”). That just leaves… Ravenclaw. And actually, I think it fits. She’s the only one who recognized Parasprites, and because she used their name, we can infer that this is because of prior knowledge rather than her “Pinkie Sense.” She’s also very observant, with a tendency to find just the right book when everyone else, including Twilight (who you’d expect to be good at that sort of thing), is at a loss. And according to Pottermore, Ravenclaw tends to be most accepting of Cloudcuckoolanders in general, in which case she’d be happy there—although I don’t see how that can possibly be true when you consider the bullying Luna received from her Housemates. However, I repeat that I have only seen the first 23 episodes. It’s entirely possible that, for instance, she gets into a situation in a later episode where even her originality can’t find a way out of a dangerous situation, and Gryffindor qualities are revealed in her. I wouldn’t know.
Incidentally, I did indeed misjudge Pinkie. Just because she likes to have fun doesn’t mean she’s lazy. It’s pretty obvious from “A Friend Indeed” (and confirmed by later episodes) that she will do whatever it takes to make everyone around her happy. She can actually be pretty ruthless about it, but no one with so few social skills could ever be in Slytherin (unless they were even more unworthy of all the other Houses, like Crabbe and Goyle, and she really isn’t), so I’m going to place her in Hufflepuff.
Strange, I could have sworn I did The Search for WondLa. Ah, well, I’ll redo it:
Otto the giant, telepathically singing tardigrade from outer space: Hufflepuff (which shows we’re awesome!)
Eva: Gryffindor
Muthr: She’s an intelligent robot programmed to care for a child. Hello? HUFFLEPUFF!
Rovender: Hufflepuff
The Queen: Slytherin
Besteel: Hmm… Gryffindor or Slytherin… Gryffindor, I think
Z–what’s his name? The anatomist?: Ravenclaw
Taxidermist: Mm… That’s hard. We know little about him… He’s… not Hufflepuff… He has Slytherin efficiency… but that may not be enough to go on… Oh, who knows?
The Avengers movie!verse!
Captain America: Gryffindor, because he is daring and nervy and chivalrous.
Iron Man: Ravenclaw, because he is a genius.
Thor: Gryffindor, because he is very, very into the whole daring and nervy thing.
Black Widow: Slytherin, because she is super-cunning.
Hulk: Ravenclaw as Bruce Banner because he’s very smart, ??? as Hulk
Hawkeye: Gryffindor?
Agent Coulson: Slytherin, becau
Nick Fury: This sounds odd but Hufflepuff, because he is very hard-working, and he managed to find all the Avengers.
Agh, didn’t preview. Agent Coulson is Slytherin because he is cunning and I feel like he’s more ambitious in SHIELD than loyal to it?
The Verse:
Malcolm Reynolds: Gryffindor, no question. Daring, principled, and unwilling to give up even in the face of impossible odds. A little bit of Slytherin ruthlessness showed up in Serenity, but even Harry was briefly considered for Slytherin, so I think we can let that pass.
Zoe Washburne: Brave and loyal in equal parts. She’s probably on the edge between Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, but I’d put her in Gryffindor.
Hoban Washburne (Wash): He’s a difficult one. He’s courageous, but it’s well tempered with caution; he’s loyal, but something of a slacker; and he hasn’t got an ambitious bone in his body. On balance, I’d put him in Ravenclaw. Not every Ravenclaw is an academic; he was top of his class in flight school (OK, he hacked the records, but that takes a certain amount of technical know-how) and he tends to be the voice of reason, or at least tries to.
Jayne Cobb: Slytherin. His main concern in any given situation is “What’s in it for me?” His occasional flashes of introspection and altruism aren’t enough to push him out of Salazar’s house.
Kaywinnit Lee Frye (Kaylee): Hufflepuff, obviously.
Simon Tam: Ravenclaw, equally obviously.
Shepherd Book: Gryffindor. He doesn’t try to solve problems with his fists like some Serenity crew members I could mention, but he never flinches from doing what he believes is right.
Inara Serra: I have to go with Hufflepuff for her. Patience and care for others are her defining traits.
River Tam: Your guess is as good as mine. Her genius seems to put her solidly in Ravenclaw, but the last ten minutes of Serenity are pure Gryffindor, and there are moments of manipulative malice that suggest Slytherin (although she usually puts these tendencies to good use, as in Objects in Space).
I think Wash is a Hufflepuff. He’s so self-effacing. Zoe is a definite Gryffindor.
Oh, yeah, Zoe would be in the same house as Mal, no question. Wash could have told you that.
I’m with you there. I didn’t factor in Wash’s humility when I wrote that up.
Doctor Who (I’ll do Series 6 to start with):
The Doctor: I have a feeling the Sorting Hat would remain silent for several years if placed on his head. Like a Gryffindor, he’s brave and spends most of his life trying to protect others. Like a Ravenclaw, he’s very, very smart, wants to learn more, and is curious about the world around him. He can also be extremely manipulative when he needs to, and definitely demonstrates occasional flashes of fierce pride and (over)confidence in his own abilities, like many Slytherins. He’s also loyal, although I guess his tendency to rush off and abandon people after saving them would bar him from being a Hufflepuff. This is also only based on how he’s currently acting; he’s changed a lot since the show’s beginning and changes a little with each regeneration.
The TARDIS: Not sure, for the same reasons as the Doctor. Maybe Hufflepuff. She is loyal and hardworking, but for the short time we get see her in a human body, she also exhibits traits of the other houses.
Amy Pond: Also not sure. Maybe Gryffindor?
Rory Williams: Hufflepuff
River Song: Probably Slytherin.
Madame Kovarian: Slytherin
Craig Owens: Hufflepuff
I’ll try some more later…
Rose: Gryffindor
Martha: Ravenclaw (she’s a medical student!) or maybe… hmm, Gryffindor would work too, I guess.
Donna: Hufflepuff (she’s AWESOME and very loyal)
Sorry, just had to do the companions.
Well it works out with all four houses if you do it this way :
Amy- Gryffindor
Rory- Hufflepuff
Dcotor- Ravenclaw
River- Slytherin
Guess what time it is?
That’s right! It’s alienate everyone who doesn’t read Homestuck time!
John: He’s nice and moral, which would put him in Gryffindor. But his derpiness is at such an extreme level where he’d be a Hufflpuff.
Rose: Although she has ambitions to rival those of Draco, her affinity for prose and history would certainly put her in Ravenclaw
Dave: He’s 2 kewl 4 skool. He’d certainly be in Slytherin.
Jade: She has pretty much the same dillemma as John, but her strange upbringing gives her an almost Luna Lovegood esque personality.
Karkat: He’s nasty enough that he would be in Slytherin, although he isn’t really ambitious enough to belong there, but nothing else suits him at all.
Aradia: Ravenclaw before she SPOILER HOMESTUCK SPOILER ACT 5 ACT 2 SPOILER SPOILER is brought back to life, and Gryffindor afterwards.
Tavros: Gryffindor, without a doubt.
Sollux: Slytherin half the time and Ravenclaw the other half (He’s bipolar in an inprecise sense.)
Nepeta: Hufflepuff.
Kanaya: Ravenclaw or Gryffindor, she’s intelligent, but also brave and loyal.
Terezi: Gryffindor (FOR GR34T JUST1C3!!!!)
Vriska: Slytherin. No doubt.
Equius: …He doesn’t belong at Hogwarts. He doesn’t belong anywhere (Janitorial staff)
Gamzee: Hufflepuff, unless he’s sober, in which case
SlytherinForbidden Forest.Eridan: Slytherin wanna be who winds up a Hufflepuff.
Feferi: Gryffindor.
I spent way too much time on this…
And Then There Were None!
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS POST IS CHOCK-FULL OF SPOILERS BECAUSE INFORMATION ABOUT THESE CHARACTERS THAT WE ONLY GET IN THE LATER CHAPTERS IS REALLY IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTANDING THEIR PERSONALITIES BUT ALSO GIVES AWAY THE PLOT. THANK YOU.
Vera: Slytherin.
Philip Lombard: Slytherin.
General MacArthur: Hufflepuff.
The judge (What was his name again?): He’s possibly the only real villain I can think of who I’d put in Hufflepuff. He’s determined and hard-working, and unlike a Slytherin, he’s really just and principled. I don’t agree with his principles, obviously, since I consider him a villain, but that’s really beside the point. As for loyalty, I suppose there’s no-one we know he’s really attached to, but loyalty to principles counts, I think.
Anthony Marston: Gryffindor.
Mrs. Rogers: Definitely not Hufflepuff or Slytherin–nowhere near determined enough. Her lack of a backbone would rule out Gryffindor as well. I have no clue how smart she is because we don’t get to see that much of her, but I’ll go with Ravenclaw for lack of a better option.
Emily Brent: Hufflepuff–I guess she’s another example of a Hufflepuff villain. Hm.
Armstrong: Slytherin.
Blore: Ehm… Not imaginative enough for Ravenclaw, probably not principled enough for Hufflepuff, and not brave enough for Gryffindor, so that leaves Slytherin. It fits the little we know of him, so I’ll go with it.
Mr. Rogers: Eh… We don’t really get to know him well enough. I highly doubt he’s a Hufflepuff, but that’s all I can state conclusively. I suppose I’ll tentatively put him in Slytherin.
The Looking Glass Wars!
Alyss: Mm, she’s intelligent and free-thinking and determined and hard-working and fair trustworthy and brave and cunning and ambitious and, frankly, a bit Sueish… I could see her in any House… Well, she isn’t exactly patient, so maybe not Hufflepuff… She’s not selfish, so maybe not Slytherin… I think maybe Gryffindor?
Redd: Definitely either Gryffindor or Slytherin. She’s extremely brave and cunning and ambitious and determined and selfish… I think she’d get a Hat Stall; anyway, it’s taking ME about 5 minutes. I think I’ll base it on whether she’s hot-tempered or warm or cold. Well, she’s hot-tempered… That’s more Gryffindor than Slytherin; Slytherins are cold and calculating… But if she could choose, she’d ask for Slytherin. Yay, a Gryffindor villain! Who is unbelievably awesome! Stress on the last bit, please. She more than makes up for everything wrong with any of the other characters, believe me. So does all the creativity and excitement, of course, but it’s mostly her. She’s one of my favorite villains ever.
Bibwit:Ravenclaw! The lack of a space was on purpose; that’s how quickly he’d be Sorted. It’s really that obvious.
Hatter: Mm… He’s a Stu, unfortunately… Everyone thinks he’s awesome, but that’s just because of his magical hat that turns into a weapon… Either Gryffindor or Hufflepuff… I’d say the latter…
Weaver: Hufflepuff
Molly: Gryffindor
Genevieve: Sparklypoo. Okay, maybe Hufflepuff. But still. She’s not a major character, though.
Arch: Slytherin!
Oh, and how could I have forgotten the non-Heart suit families? They’re all Slytherins. Dodge is Gryffindor (He starts out the principled type of Gryffindor and ends up the reckless type of Gryffindor, but he’s always Gryffindor somehow), Qui–What’s his name? The cheerful orphan? is Hufflepuff, and the Liddells are Hufflepuff.
Character Sorting and Corruptible Wishes follow.
Dune.
Paul: Eh… He basically personifies all the Houses.
Duke Leto: Gryffindor
Kynes: Ravenclaw
Harah: Hufflepuff
Alia: Ravenclaw
Chani: Mm… Huffledor. She’s really brave and loyal…. I suppose Gryffindor.
Stilgar: Hufflepuff (Yes, you heard correctly. That’s how I think of Hufflepuff.)
Gurney: GRYFFINDOR
Jamis: Gryffindor
Literally Everyone Else: SLYTHERIN
I’d like to add that if Jessica hadn’t been Bene Gesserit-trained, she’d definitely be Hufflepuff. It’s just… her nature. But she’s like a pureblood from a really old family–the Blacks, for instance–she was deliberately taught Slytherin skills from birth; how could she end up in any other House? Unless she rebelled against it all her life like Sirius, but that’s more of a Gryffindor thing, in my opinion.
Anyway, I wish that the universe was made to fit my version of perfection permanently but without stagnation and in the way that causes as little suffering as possible.
I also wish for permanent omniscience. Those can be corrupted separately or together; it doesn’t matter.
So, basically, you want to be the Kwisatz Haderach?
No, didn’t Princess Irulan write something mentioning how his prescience wasn’t perfect–it was like how we can see what’s right in front of us, but only in the light? I want more than that. I don’t want to be the Kwisach Haderach; I want omniscience.
Take any Muggle item that is admittably useful (a cell phone, for example) and think up a wizarding-world substitute for it.
Cell phones -> Patronuses, since you can send them-
Hole-punch.
Hole-punch –> Victor Krum.
(Don’t question it.)
Blender.
Cauldron plus wand. (Many of those combinations of ingredients would never liquify if you tried to brew them in real life).
But Patronuses take effort and skill to cast. Any child can use a cell phone in any situation. For example, having been abducted.
I wouldn’t consider Floo very portable, and I don’t think the two-way mirrors are extremely common.
Two-way mirrors–> Skype.
I imagine one can make even holes with one’s wand, although we haven’t seen anyone do it.
GPS —> Marauder’s Map
CD’s.
Alternate book house sorting:
I’ve always wondered what houses muggles from the series would be placed in if they were admitted.
Dudley: Erm, in the first few books I would place him in Hufflepuff if only because “she’ll take all the rest”. Later though, he takes on more Gryffindor-like qualities, though he remains closer to Hufflepuff for me.
Petunia: Another tough one… I would say Ravenclaw, because of her immense knowledge of pop culture and because the way her features are described reminds me of a raven.
Vernon: I’m going to have to go with Gryffindor for him, if only because of the brash and outgoing nature he has, and because he doesn’t seem one to back away from any challenge, and he is a natural born leader.
The Prime Minister: Ravenclaw, because of his willingness to do mental standoffs with political opponents.
Filch: He’s not really a muggle, but still… I would place him in Slytherin, because of his cunning in tracking down the wrongdoings of students.
I’m drawing a blank on other muggles right now, but I might post more later.
———————————————————————————————–
As for the Muggle/Wizard analogies, I would compare a patronus message to cell phones.
Spells replace a lot of muggle things, like microphones and power tools.
I’m not sure that “She’ll take all the rest,” still applies; I’ve always thought of it as a Founders-Era thing. It seems like the Sorting Hat Sorts not based on which Founder(s) would have wanted them as much as… well, either which Founder’s qualities they value most or which Founder they most resemble. Or both. Otherwise, Crabbe, Goyle, and Wormtail, would have been Hufflepuffs, and they weren’t.
Dudley… is complicated. At first, he would value the Slytherin qualities the most, but then he changed, of course. Unless he’s been secretly valuing Gryffindor qualities all along but too much of an insecure coward to try to act like a Gryffindor, in which case I guess I’d put him in Gryffindor, strange as it sounds.
And as for Petunia, I’d put her in Hufflepuff except for the fact that she isn’t just. At all. So Slytherin, I guess? But she’s not really ambitious; I mean, she just wants to be mundane. Which I guess isn’t really an easy feat for her, actually… But she isn’t ruthless enough for Slytherin. She just isn’t. And she’s a coward… And I’m pretty sure the only thing she values is normality and self-preservation and Dudley, except that there is a part of her that cares about other people… Argh. I’m going to pick Ravenclaw through process of elimination, like (AND THEN THERE WERE NONE SPOILERS AHEAD) I did with Mrs. Rogers.
Agree/disagree game: Post your random thoughts/opinions, and use pies and squids to agree/disagree with other people’s. These can be anything from “Waffles > Pancakes” to “It’s awkward when ___” to “(book/movie/anime/song) is awesome”. If your comment gets pinked, Well Done Son Guy.
Dear German teacher- I find your lessons incredibly stimulating. Seriously, I love them. Every single class, I’m reminded why I want to study either in England, America or France, or anywhere where I’ll never have to write or read anything in German ever again.
Pokémon is awesome!
I think I should explain here why I squidded this. I imagine Pokemon is really interesting and fun. However, I still wish it had never been invented. This is because children are really interested in taxonomy, and Pokemon fulfills that interest. Because of this, they are much less likely to go further and learn to identify animals that actually exist, even extinct ones like dinosaurs. The average 8-year-old knows more about Pokemon creatures than real creatures because Pokemon has advertising. (I am aware people much older than that enjoy Pokemon, and it’s plausible that I would if I tried it, but 8-year-olds have an interest in it, too, and that’s when I have a problem with it, because they could be getting the same pleasure out of biology at that age). This is why I’m reluctant to call Pokemon awesome; it’s not that I think it’s boring or annoying or anything.
I don’t know, I grew up with Pokemon, and could still classify dinosaurs into Ornithischia and Saurischia, at age 7, as well as marine mammals into Cetacea, Pinnipedia, and Sirenia. (Yes, I knew all of the names.)
And this was when Pokemon were still new and hugely popular, I think their popularity has decreased among… Post-Millennials? Whatever the generation after us is called.
(And I had to look up “Pinnipedia” to make sure I was spelling it correctly and subsequently spend half an hour reading various Wikipedia articles on animals, ending with the dwarf wooly mammoths of Wrangel Island. So I guess I still find taxonomy very fascinating.)
Schools should encourage the throwing of projectile pastries at unsuspecting math teachers on March 14th.
David Yates will ruin Doctor Who forever.
I’m going to be optimistic and hope he’s learned his lesson from the fan-backlash that followed the HP movies he made.
I’m not sure what lesson you think he would learn from record box-office sales and critical notices rating them as high or higher than the earlier movies. My guess is that the movie producers took away the message that David Yates sold more tickets by making the story accessible to those who hadn’t read the books.
You are not a true fan of Harry Potter unless you’ve read all of the books and enjoyed them more than the movies.
LARP (Live Action Role Playing) is entirely amazing.
Oh yes. That is completely true.
Gigantic chocolate bars should be manufactured in the shape of squids and made available in every store. (and they should come with all sorts of fillings! like caramel! chocolate sauce! peanut butter! etc!)
Even though I hate chocolate (yes, I hate chocolate. It tastes bad.), I have to agree that that idea is totally flammy.
It sucks when a giant evil goat-dragon hypnotizes your friends and creates chaos throughout Equestria.
If David Tennant, Matt Smith, or John Barrowman ever came on this site, they would be slightly creeped out.
Slightly?
<3 Ramen
This comment will never be pinked.
If you pink it, then you are directly responsible for the end of the world.
I mean, the moment that little pie counter hits 10 meteors will start raining down upon the world. No doubt about it.
And I am certainly not using reverse psychology here.
Wait. WHY DID I SQUID THIS
I could totally have uses this as part of (one of) my world domination plan(s)! All I had to do is sit and wait patiently for the moment the pies and squids cancel out to a total of 9 pies…
ALL I HAD TO DO WAS SIT AND WAIT
But now I have missed my chance and must FOREVER SIT HERE REGRETTING MY ONE FOOLISH ACTION
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
I WILL CRY FOREVER
*pinks*
*waits for meteors*
You could play with the Asteroids meanwhile.
Better than that old song about waiting for the UFOs.
Shapeshifters much have bizzare psychologies resulting from their ability. Especially if they come from a large group of shapeshifters and were raised among other shapeshifters.
Oh my goodness, yes.
Non-British people: If you had a British accent, you’d never shut up.
The Big Bang Theory’s theme song sounds like it could have been written by They Might Be Giants.
Actually, when I first heard it (My dad watches it; I listen sometimes), I got excited. It’s a good song in exactly the same way theirs are, and even the things I dislike about it are the same as the things I dislike about theirs.
it’s by barenaked ladies, so close enough
You hate it when you can’t use a toaster while standing in the shower.
Lately the supposed internet “war” between Harry Potter and Twilight is just HP fans curb-stomping Twilight fans. You never see Twilight fans arguing for their side anymore.
Think up a plot for a story/fanfiction for this quote. Try to take the less obvious answer…
“It’s a very intense feeling I have for them, because they have literally lived in my world…”
After an apocalypse, a young genius preserves the other handful of survivors in cryogenics, and builds a small, locked-in community for them to live in. In the community, the people have few rights and are discouraged from exploring the outside world, all to keep them safe. A few years in, one of the citizens leads a rebellion to find out what’s really in the outside world. The original builder, who controls the community through computer systems but is never actually seen, struggles to keep en’s people locked in, even though en has fallen in love with the leader of the rebellion.
QUICK EVERYONE: CTRL+V. Last thing you copypasta’d.
In an effort to top the EU’s ban on claiming water can cure dehydration, the US now declares mayonnaise is an instrument
So my computer’s clipboard is a bit sketchy, so it comes up with …nothing, I’m afraid, but if memory serves it was a picture of the TARDIS.
last thing was a de-linkified link courtesy of the Geeky TV Shows thread:
www. bbc.co.uk /doctorwho /dw/news /bulletin_111115_01 /Doctor_Who_Update
2
Reply
Rosebud2
in November 20th, 2011 @ 11:12
Ooh, shiny new picture!
I’m not looking forward to the nine-and-a-half hour motor home ride I have to take on Wednesday. >.<
2Â 0
(I have this habit of randomly highlighting things, and when you do it on iPod it's easy to hit "copy" by mistake. xD)
eeps my sherpa
…apparently this was the last thing i copy and pasted. Hmm.
An RPG about climbing Everest?
(Actually, that could be interesting.)
a bitter smile, and an air of recklessness.
Was that the compound object of a sentence? If so, the comma shouldn’t be there.
…Oops. I realize now that that might be from your NaNo. If so, sorry, I’m sure your Inner Editor is bad enough without an Outer one.
It was the end of a list, actually. I’m too lazy to look it up, but I believe that the other items included threadbare clothing and brass goggles; I was describing a character.
You’re fine, though. It was from my NaNo, but my IE is more on me about the quality of my writing/characters/plot/setting; en doesn’t care so much about commas.
Kindle has no CTRL thing. But I was probably copying Swalot’s emailed excerpts to me onto a Word Document last time I was on the desktop. Or an internet definition when trying to explain LGBTQ to a friend.
I raise my placard high into the air, vertically. It is a saggy piece of paperboard folded to make a long and skinny tent, with “Kuwait” neatly spelled out in blue lettering on the side. I glance around the small room, crammed with more than 100 international delegates seated on folding chairs. I indignantly flip through my position paper about oil prices and multinational corporations. I adjust my tie before hearing the chairperson say, “Kuwait?” I take a breath, then rise to speak.
This is one of my cherished memories from the Model United Nations (MUN) conference in Eugene, Oregon. It’s a student-run, three-day event that takes place annually to simulate the real deal. For me, the MUN process started last year during a lunch meeting at school. My friend Mariah heroically battled paperwork, dues collection, and the complex logistics of taking seven high-schoolers across the state for three days. We worked on weekends and holidays at local coffee shops or in someone’s kitchen (both have access to caffeine and Internet). Newcomers were initiated into researching and writing “position papers,” which are essays describing a country’s policies on a certain topic. We also practiced writing “resolutions,” enormous run-on sentences that describe a plan of action for the UN. When writing these documents, it is surprisingly hard to accomplish something other than just pointing out that there’s a problem.
After much hard (and last-minute) work, we were ready. Our entourage carpooled to Eugene, where the sidewalks were overflowing with youthful, dressed-up delegates.
The conference officially began with the opening ceremony, where all 2,000 of us piled into a dramatically darkened basketball arena with an enormous blue UN flag set behind a stage. The whole place resonated with a palpable urgency. After much gavel-banging and speech-giving, the delegates separated out into their own committees.
The committees, such as Health and Human Services, Environmental, Human Rights, Global Economics, and Global Security, mirror those in the real United Nations. The delegates in these committees, representing their assigned countries, debate topics and write resolutions. They send their finalized resolutions to a special committee called the General Assembly (GA), which has final say on all resolutions. It can either fail a resolution, killing seven hours of grueling compromise, or pass the resolution, lifting it to insurmountable glory–these resolutions are sent on to the actual UN for consideration. Depending on the outcome, the resolution’s author either receives bragging rights (“Did you hear? The GA passed on of my resolutions!”) or ragging rights (“The GA killed my resolution because they wanted to go to lunch!”).
My committee’s first topic for debate was national debt. The national debt is the amount of money a country’s government has borrowed from various sources. Borrowing money can help governments take on new projects, but it can also get a government stuck under a mountain of debt that it can’t repay. This is especially dangerous for lesser-developed countries. The delegates in my committee submitted resolutions to address this problem, either written beforehand or illegibly scrawled on transparencies to be displayed on an overhead projector. I submitted a resolution for a Highly Indebted Poor Countries Prevention Program (HIPCPP).
In the debate period, the real work starts. A resolution can be amended (changed) by the delegate who wrote it, or by a majority vote. These changes are negotiated during frequent caucuses (short breaks to work in groups). My resolution quickly became the favorite, so I was approached by several countries, including France and Iceland, wishing to tack on their own amendments. I accepted some of their changes, but rejected the ones I thought were too vague or not focused on the stated goals. After about seven hours, we exhaustedly finished up by voting, and my HIPCPP resolution was passed. Unfortunately, it failed in the General Assembly because there was a time crunch at the end of the meeting and the committee couldn’t give my resolution proper consideration.
Although the majority of the three days was spent hammering out compromises and amendments in committee, with breaks only for lunch, dinner, and sleeping (optional), it wasn’t all serious slog. Every year has its infamous joke resolutions. So far, you will be delighted to know, the Model United Nations has comprehensively eliminated all technology invented after the 18th century (to stop global warming, of course) and relocated the entire human race to Mars.
Time flew by and the last day came all too soon. It was time for forlorn goodbyes, a picture, and the closing ceremony. The final ritual took place back in the arena. All of us were again seated in front of the huge blue United Nations flag to observe the end of this foray into international politics.
I reflected on the good times I had enjoyed and the new friends I had made. However, my takeaway from MUN was more than that. The camaraderie, creativity, and productivity of the conference gave me a sense of optimism. I figure that if a bunch of high-school students can come together for three days and take up seemingly unsolvable problems, then there’s no need to feel pessimistic about what lies ahead. After the ceremonial banging of the gavel I did not feel remorse for what had passed but hope for the bright future; I was raring to go for next year.
I was seeing how many words that was.
I was going to paste a very long article I was studying for MUN on Negative Security Assurances, but seeing as it is several pages long I thought I’d spare the GAPA’s the heart attack of reading it through for innapropriate content, which would probably take several days. Here’s the first paragraph anyway:
A perennial subject of contention at review conferences of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), held every five years, has been the desire of the non-nuclear-weapon states-parties to the treaty to obtain “legally binding negative security assurances†from the five nuclear-weapon states-parties: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Least avoided! I was right where I wanted with godforsakenness, too–not the most in the region, but close, not in the world’s top 10%, but close. Perfect!
RainbowStorm, have you tried spending more on
Why women in their 20s rush into marriage
It was a news article I was trying to find.
Rule #1: Dinosaurs own the train tracks. The train will be removed by the giant alligators, and then the small alligators and dinosaurs shall walk the figure eight, for all figure eight train tracks were built upon an ancient dinosaur and alligator trail that must be walked every fortnight moon at midnight until the stone drops. Any violation of this rule shall result in spontaneous combustion, unless you are not a wizard of the moon, in which case you shouldn’t be reading this, but I suppose you already are, so continue reading this, for the dragons will sing of you every million years under the fire moon if you are unwise and dance upside-down underwater.
Rule #2: Don’t read this if you’re wearing a hat.
I don’t know why this rule is, it just is. Now take off your hat if you’re wearing one.
Rule #3: All alligators must behave in the ways described in Rule #1 if they are (a) extremely large or (b) smaller and fond of walking on figure eight train tracks with the dinosaurs, as ancient tradition dictates.
Alligators that do not live within 25,000,165,456 decimeters of a figure eight train track are exempt from this rule.
Rule #4: If someone asks you if you have eaten a burrito recently, you must answer in an untruthful manner, unless you are fond of pie and other edible objects. This rule is supposed to be confusing.
Rule #5: Don’t throw pants at other people. It isn’t nice.
Actually, that’s not really Rule #5, it’s just something to see if you’re still paying attention. Rule #5 is: You have to pay attention to this rule, even if you find it to be rather pointless. You never know…
Rule #6: Sing something before you read Rule #7.
Rule #7: You have to sing badly. If you didn’t sing badly after reading rule #6, then try again.
Rule #8: If you find a cat, you must meow at it until it either meows back or goes away. Meowing is very important, therefore, this rule is also important.
DO NOT BREAK THIS RULE AT MIDNIGHT ON A TUESDAY.
Rule #9: PINK FLUFFY UNICORNS DANCING ON RAINBOWS
(Actually, the rule is: If you are wearing tie-dye, then you must go poke something blue before reading Rule #10.
Rule #10: Within one day of reading this rule, you must find a shiny thing and call it a banana.
Why problem make when you no problem have you don’t want to make?
I was posting that one the Quotes thread, because I haven’t memorized it yet.
Richard Wagner
“cyber katrina event
…
What is this I don’t even?
“Leaf of a plant that receives a high intensity of sunlight”
You all probably know what it is I should be working on right now in the early, ungodly hours of the mornings.
My last thing was a link that I will post delinkified below. It is as far as I know Mostly Harmless, and if the link doesn’t get through is a recipe for sweet and sour tofu. It came out really well although I might try next time not coating the tofu in corn starch first and just frying it or something:
http ://www. everyday- vegetarian-recipes. com /sweet-and- sour- tofu. html
Insignificant Rant Game: Be really unreasonably angry about small annoyances. Try to out-overreact the person above you.
I SWEAR I WILL PUNCH A TWILIGHT FAN IF I HAVE TO WATCH ONE MORE OLD NAVY COMMERCIAL.
AAAAAaAaAAaaAAAAAAAaAaaAAAAAAAAASAaAAaAAAAAAAaAAAARRRRRRRRRRRrrRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!¡!!!!!!!!¡!
I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT GAME FREAK HAD THE PRESUMPTION, THE… THE… PRESUMPTUOUSNESS TO MAKE A NEW #000!!!!!!!!!! MISSINGNO. WILL ALWAYS BE THE REAL ONE!!!! IT’S SO AWESOME THAT ItS NuMBER SHOULD HAVE BEEN RETIRED!!!!! VICTINI IS AN EVIL USURPER AND DESERVES TO GET SAT UPON BY MISSINGNO.!!!!!!! GggggggGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGAAaAaaaaAAAHhhHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhHHHh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fvbbfwasdfgghjkl;dvbjgcvnkkkjhfxswercgyhnnkih!Â
THAT IS IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I AM SICK AND TIRED OF PEOPLE SAYING “EN AND I” WHEN IT WOULD ACTUALLY BE MORE CORRECT TO SAY “EN AND ME”!!! YES I KNOW YOUR CAKING ELEMENTARY SCHOOL ENGLISH TEACHER TOLD YOU TO CAKING SAY IT THAT CAKING WAY, BUT NOT ALL THE TIME!!!!!!!!!!! DO YOU NEVER PAY ATTENTION IN SCHOOL, YOU CAKING MORON?!?!?? IF THE SENTENCE IS CHANGED TO JUST BE ABOUT YOU AND IT MAKES MORE SENSE TO SAY “I” THEN SAY “EN AND I”! IF IT MAKES MORE SENSE TO SAY “ME” THEN SAY “EN AND ME”! IT’S NOT CAKING ROCKET SCIENCE, YOU PIECE OF GRAMMATICAL CAKE!
(Is this ranty enough?)
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
LOOK TROMBONE SECTION AND TUBA SECTION (THAT’S A TOTAL OF 3 PEOPLE BUT STILL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) YOU GUYS ARE KIND OF JERKS LIKE TUBA I KNOW YOU HAD A CRUSH ON ME IN SEVENTH GRADE BUT THAT DOES NOT GIVE YOU KNOW RIGHT TO KEEP HARPING ON ME LIKE THIS, OK? I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU! I’M TWO BEATS EARLY BECASUE I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND THE SIGNALS OF THE STUDENT BAND DIRECTOR. SO WHAT?? GET BACK TO YOUR TUBA PLAYING, YOU CAKEHEAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IF I HEAR YOU GO ‘CAUGHT YOU’ ONE MORE CAKING TIME, I SWEAR I WILL CHUCK THIS TROMBONE AT YOUR OVERINFLATED HEAD. DON’T THINK I DON’T MEAN THAT!!!!!!!!!!!! AND THAT GOES FOR YOU TOO, FIRST CHAIR TROMBONIST!!!!!!!! IF YOU DON’T STOP ASKING ME WHY I CAME IN TWO BEATS EARLY I MAY JUST [DELETED FOR VIOLENT CONTENT] AND THEN I’LL [DELETED FOR VIOLENT CONTENT] AND AFTER THAT YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO REGENERATE!!!!!!!! I MEAN IT!!! REALLY!!!!
Dear razor: YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUU WILLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! My knee has FIVE scratches on it! FIVE! You realise what this means? Do you? I’m going to go to school tomorrow without perfect legs! There’s no way anyone’s even going to look at me now! I’ll have to pull down my skirt to cover it and I’ll look like a NERD. People will remember it for the next two years! They never notice anything else about me ever again!
My life is RUUUUUUUUUUUUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED.
POTATOES?!??!!!!!!!!!? What is their problem?!?!?!HUh!?!?!?! HUH?????!?!!?!?!?!?!? WHAT’S UP WITH BZXMNB DH VYT8WHR3QOUWEing POTAOTES!!!!!!!!!!! I HATE THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I &!$^@$@*&!$^ing HATE THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! JUST WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I WANT TO KILL THEM ALL WITH FIRE AND…UH ACID AND….CUT THEM UP INTO LITTLE BITS AND….AND JUMP ON THEM!!!!!!!!!!! I’LL JUMP ON THE LITTLE BITS UNTIL I THINK OF SOMETHING EVEN MORE VIOLENT TO DO!!!!!!!!! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
YARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Note: This does not represent my actual views on potatoes, I just felt like writing this.)
When life gives you potatoes? Don’t make mashed potatoes. Get mad! I don’t want your caking potatoes, what am I supposed to do with these?! Make life take the potatoes BACK! Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Oobatooba potatoes! Do you know who I am? I’m the person who’s going to BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN! WITH THE POTATOES! I’m going to get my engineers to invent a combustible potato that BURNS YOUR HOUSE DOWN!
i HATE how much people rant about USELESS TOPICS
i mean, its not EVEN FUNNY AT ALL when people do stuff like this
iTS REALLY STUPID AND ANNOYING
ITS JUST A WASTE OF EVERYBODYS TIME AND MONEY
YES YOUR STUPID RANTS WASTE MONEY. THE GAPAS HAVE TO PAY FOR THE SERVERS, AND YOU ARE TAKING UP SERVER SPACE. I HATE HOW PEOPLE DONT SEEM TO REALIZE THIS
IN FACT, I HATE IT SO MUCH THAT I MIGHT JUST SUPERNOVA AND DESTROY EVERYTHING AND THEN THERE WOULD BE NO MORE STUPID RANTS LIKE THIS
I MUST BE THE CURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I HATE it when everyone has to turn everything into %$%&!@& SELF REFERENTIAL HUMOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY DOES EVERYONE HAVE TO TURN ALL SORTS OF SERIOUS STUFF LIKE RANTS INTO SOME DUMB META JOKE?!?!?!?!?!?!?! NO ONE ACTUALLY THINKS THAT STUFF IS FUNNY EXCEPT FOR YOU!!!! IT’S THE ABSOLUTE *(&(&^#(@@*!EST TYPE OF JOKE!!!!! NGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!! I HATE IT SO MUCH I WANT TO THROW XKCD AND OOTS AND TVTROPES AT A WALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! RAAAAGHHHHHAHAHAH!!!!!!!
(Please don’t be offended by this. I actually love meta everything, and xkcd and oots and TvTropes, but they were good examples of really meta things. Honestly, though, you can’t spell “meta” without “me”!)
“I’m So Meta, Even This Acronym”
– xkcd #917
I HATE it when you’re reading or drawing at a desk, and people decide to STAND AROUND YOU and HAVE A CONVERSATION. And they like don’t even NOTICE you’re THERE, they just like subconsciously group around a random desk. I mean, what is their PROBLEM. I am a PERSON who feels AWKWARD when you do that. Not some sort of, of, PIECE OF FURNITURE to be CONGREGATED AROUND. I mean SERIOUSLY people.
CONGREGATE AROUND ALL THE CONCENTRATING ,
PIECES OF FURNITUREPEOPLE!Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: Decide who would win in a fight between two characters, then pick a new opponent for the winner.
GLaDOS vs. the Master
The Master. I’m pretty sure he could outsmart a decaying AI in a facility full of death traps, especially if he had some Time Lord technology at hand.
Oh, man. The Master, I think. If I’m thinking of the right Master, anyway. GLaDOS had deadly neurotoxins and lots of tricks, but the Master had Generation I Super Mutants at his disposal. The Mariposa strain was very smart and strong and –
Wait, what’s that you say, POSOC? Time Lord? I’m thinking of the Master (Richard Moreau) from Fallout.
Yep, definitely the Master. I’m sure Time Lord technology could beat GLaDOS. New opponent: Voldemort.
Voldemort. Avada Kedavra works faster than Time Lord regeneration.
Voldemort vs. the Serenity crew
This is a tricky one. Ordinarily I’d say Voldemort, no contest. The Verse has no defense against magic. He could just Apparate on board the ship, set up some defensive charms to protect himself from mundane weapons, and kill the crew one by one.
However, River Tam’s a wildcard we can’t ignore. She’d probably know he was coming — she’s demonstrated some precognitive abilities as well as mind reading, and she’d probably pick up on such a powerful, evil mind in any case. Given the fact that he made the Horcruxes from objects with great significance to him, she might be able to pluck their identities from his brain, giving the Serenity crew some chance of going on the attack if they survive the initial encounter.
On the other hand, Voldemort’s an accomplished Legilimens and knows how to defend himself against mind reading. River could pull the same trick she did in “Objects in Space” and mess with his head — but once Voldemort recognized her as a major threat and located her, he could hit her with an Imperius Curse and the whole crew would be doomed.
Final verdict: River could give him a good fight if she was clever and resourceful enough, but it would just prolong the inevitable. Voldemort wins. (Wow, I depressed myself a little by typing this.)
New contest: Voldemort vs. Gandalf.
I’m leaning Gandalf. In terms of raw power, he is much, much stronger than Voldemort. But, then again, he doesn’t do many actual spells…
On the other hand, he beat the balrog.
I’m still thinking Gandalf.
Sorry, forgot to put a new one… Gandalf vs Darth Vader.
I’m going to go with Gandalf on this one, because Darth Vader has nothing on a Balrog, even though he dose have a lightsaber. And Gandalf is sort of like Obiwan, only with less actually being dead.
Next one: Gandalf vs. Tim the Enchanter.
Tim might be one of the Istari, for all we know. Maybe he’s one we haven’t heard of, or a senile Radagast.
Hmm. Tricky. Assuming the battle takes place after the fall of Souron and Gandalf was willing to use his full powers:
Gandalf is pretty used to not being killed right away (talking first, being locked up on top of towers, etc), whereas Voldemort is pretty loose with his Killing Curses. So in a first-time meet-up, Voldemort would win due to his just being a bad guy and impulsive, and Gandalf just not being ready for him.
So Voldemort would have to know Gandalf’s pretty big and important ahead of time for him to do his whole monologe-deal. Since he’s going to know, let’s assume Gandalf would as well, so he’d be more prepared. Voldemort would probably underestimate Gandalf’s power as a nontraditional (in the Harry Potter universe) wizard.
The duel would start with circling and a lot of trade-offs of curses flying back and forth. It’d escalate until one of two things happened:
1) Voldemort is disarmed. Gandalf gains the upper hand, and if he worked quickly could finish off Voldemort. Unless Voldemort surprises him with unarmed magic (in which case the duel would continue), Gandalf has the fight from here.
2) Gandalf is disarmed. Voldemort takes the chance to give another monolouge, during which Gandalf has ample time to use his own ring of power–Narya–to take Voldemort by surprise and end the fight.
So, if it’s a short encounter, Voldemort has it. Otherwise, his tendency to monologue gives Gandalf the advantage.
Next battle: Gandalf vs.
a BalrogCthulhuTricky, because they come from such different cosmologies and it’s hard to determine their relative power level. Both are servants or emissaries of far greater beings — the Valar and the Great Old Ones, respectively.
Gandalf is implied to know of beings similar to Cthulhu — the “Nameless Things” older than Sauron, beneath the earth. But Cthulhu is a lot more powerful than a Balrog, and a lot bigger. It took a steamboat to the face to slow him down. His waking disrupts the dreams of humankind. If they faced each other at the height of their powers, I think Gandalf would ultimately lose. But if Cthulhu was just emerging (as in the original story), and Gandalf had time to prepare, he could inflict enough damage to push his opponent back into the sunken city of R’lyeh for another million-year nap.
Next combat: Gandalf vs. Esme Weatherwax (Discworld), or Cthulhu vs. the Weaver (Perdido Street Station et al).
This really depends on the scenario. The Master’s definitely got enough knowledge, ingenuity and insane daring to track down and destroy the Horcruxes, given time and information. However, if they went toe-to-toe, mano-a-mano with no preparation, Voldemort could just drop Killing Curses on the Master until he ran out of regenerations.
With prep time and resources, the Master would win, but a straight-up arena battle would go to Voldemort.
Vancouver Island marmot
Vancouver Island
Island
Continent
Landmass
Ocean
Planet
Astronomical Object
Entity
Abstraction
Hierarchy
Ordinary
Western Christianity
Latin Church
Particular Church
Canon Law (Catholic Church)
Canon Law
Ecclesiastical jurisdiction
Jurisdiction
Latin
Italic languages
Indo-European languages
Language family
Language
Human
Extant taxon
Biology
Natural science
Science
Knowledge
Fact
Information
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
…Wow, that was long. It passed through earth science and astronomy and linguistics and even philosophy before finally reaching Philosophy.
Wikipedia
Free Content
Work of art
Aesthetics
American and British spelling differences (Yes, really–and the next link was to the philosophy article, if you’ll believe it!)
Here there’s a challenge. I was linked to the spelling differences article, but not just that, the section on ae and oe. Should I click the first link in that section or in that article? If I go with the first in that section, I get Aesthetics, which gives me an infinite loop. If I choose the first in that article, it’ll go like this:
American and British English Differences
British English
English language
West Germanic languages
Germanic languages
Indo-European languages
Language family
Language
Human
Extant taxon
Biology
Natural science
Science
Knowledge
Fact
Information
Sequence
Mathematics
Quantity
Property (philosophy)
Modern philosophy
Philosophy
Transcendental Études
List of compositions by Franz Liszt (S.1–S.350)
Franz Liszt
Richard Wagner
Germans
Germanic peoples
Indo-European languages
Language family
Language
Human
Species
Biology
Natural Science
Science
Knowledge
Fact
Proof (truth)
Argument
Philosophy
~
Katamari Damacy
Video Game
Electronic Game
Game
Play (activity)
Psychology
Mind
Panpsychism
Philosophy
(I did this solely for the purpose of “naaa na na na naaa na na naaa na Phi-i-i-ilosophy”)
Better names for everything:
Take an ordinary thing and give it a better name. Then offer up a challenge.
Examples
CD-ROMSound BagelConductor’s batonMusic Command WandChallenge:
Picture Frame
I literally just saw one of these threads on The Imageboard That Shall Not Be Named. I LOVE doing this.
Phone: Transdistance Vocal Transmitting Device
Picture frame: All-Encloser-Picture-Holder
Comptuer mouse: Handheld Sliding Slidey Pointer
iPod: Fidelity Enhancing Soundwave Blastifier
Bed: Homo Sapiens Recharging Station
Sandwich: Bread-Enclosed Organic Fuel Package
Are these right?
Megaphragma mymaripenne Wasp: Microscopic Mini-Vespiform Nerve-Reduced Insectoid
Computer: Enclosed Information/Entertaiment Life-Absorbing Unit
Television Remote: Laziness-Inducing Mindless Entertainment Control Device
Challenge: Fork
Fork: Metallic Substance Scooper/Sticker (Patent Pending)
Lamp: Radiation-giving canvas-enclosed glass bulb.
Fork: Cutlerial Tine-ed Utensil
Challenge:
Anything you want, but make the acronym of the longer version abbreviate to the normal version.
Saxophone
Conical-Bore
Wind instrument
Musical Instrument
Sound
Mechanical Wave
Wave
Physics
Natural Science
Science
Knowledge
Facts
Proven
Evidence
Truth
Fact
…drat. Infinite loop.
Giant rat
Coypu
Mapuche language
Language isolate
Natural language
Philosophy of language
Philosophy
‘Kay, let’s try this again.
Harry Potter
Fantasy Novels
Fantasy
Genre
Aristotle
Greek (just missed ‘philosopher’!
Nation
International Relations
States
State
Government
Legislators
Legislature
Deliberative Assembly
Organization
Social Group
Humans
Species
Biology
Natural Science
Science
Knowledge
Facts
Proven
Evidence
Truth
Fact
Drat! The same infinite loop! Why does this keep happening?…
Okay, no matter what I try this ‘truth’ infinite loop keeps getting me. Glargh.
What’s wrong with that? Why is a truth loop less desirable than a philosophical dead end?
(And why does “Truth Loop” make me think of a sweet Day-Glo breakfast cereal with a toucan on the box?)
(I reread some of my old posts here, which caused much laughing and a rediscovery of the time you tried to turn me into an angel.)
Back to the game! (I used the Random button.)
College of Science, Technology and Applied Arts of Trinidad and Tobago
Campus
College
Types of educational institutions
Early childhood education
Early childhood
Entertainment Software Rating Board
Self-regulatory organization
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
List of United States federal agencies
Government agency
Machinery of government
Government
Legislator
Legislature
Deliberative assembly
Organization
Social group
Social science
Academic discipline
Knowledge
Fact
Proof (truth)
Evidence
Legal burden of proof
Maxim (philosophy)
Yes! I was worried “Fact” would put me in an infinite loop.
Describe MuseBlog in TV Tropes!
Shout Out: “Life, the universe … ” and “Hitchhiker’s Guide to MuseBlog”.
Kindhearted Cat Lover: Many MBers and GAPAs seem to own cats.
Rule of Cool: The Pie War threads. A dessert-based free-for-all with tentative alliances, and every fictional technology MBers can invent or borrow from other fandoms.
Ascended Meme: The pie emoticons and sympathy-squid button.
Cute and Psycho: Hot pink bunnies.
Stylistic Suck: The “Worst Story Ever” RRR.
Butt Monkey: Mr. Joe, the pixelated punching bag who is apparently responsible for everything bad in the world, ever.
Noob Cave: Officially, the Welcome Neophytes thread, but there’s less of a negative connotation attached to it.
Fandom Rivalry: Chuck Norris vs. Watership Down.
Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Giant space squid!
Don’t forget Close-Knit Community and True Companions!
Anyway, I just want to mention that I tried the “Describe Yourself in TV Tropes” thing, fully intending to post the end result here, and I currently have ten pages. Ten. This is despite the fact that I’m only including the tropes that are played straight, not to mention the fact that I am not familiar with every trope in existence, and I might find more that describe me.
Needless to say, I’m not going to subject the GAPAs to ten pages of self-description, no matter how entertaining the format. It’s surprisingly fun to write, though.
Also Killer Rabbit, Hair-Raising Hare, Intergenerational Friendship, Pie in the Face, Take Over the World, What You Are in the Dark (the Illumiminati), and Everything’s Squishier With Cephalopods. The giant space squids would also qualify for Flying Seafood Special and Recycled IN SPACE. Also, the GAPAS are The Magnificent and Reasonable Authority Figures. And all of us would probably fit under Geek and Bookworm.
And Then There Were None
Detective fiction
Do non-parenthetical ‘for x, see y’ links count? If so, it goes to “Detective Story” and then back to “Detective fiction” in a loop. If not, continue reading.
Crime fiction
Literary genre
Literary technique
Do bits of info in boxes count? If so, read on. If not, skip to “Back-story.”
Wikipedia:Merging.
Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines
Category:Wikipedia procedural policies
Help:Category
MediaWiki
Do non-parenthetical ‘not to be confused with x’ links count? If so, it goes back to “MediaWiki” in a loop. If not… well, the first link is to the “edit” page, but I’m going to assume that doesn’t count. The talk page probably doesn’t, either. In that case…
Wikipedia:Neutral point of view
…I’m just going to assume the noticeboard doesn’t count.
Wikipedia:Policies and Guidelines.
What do you know, an infinite loop. Okay, now let’s assume that links in boxes don’t count (and neither do references, please) and go back to “Literary technique.” And no, tables do not count as boxes, because this entire article is almost all tables (and has only one link that I’m counting outside a table).
Back-story
Literary technique
…Another infinite loop. That’s… nice. Well, I’m done.
I came across something called meta flame wars a while ago, and I want to try them out here!
Don’t worry, despite their name, they’re quite harmless. It’s really more examining the structure of arguments on the internet than actual malicious intent. It would go something like this: In the third person, you describe what a hypothetical troll would write in response. So I’d write something like:
*link to article supporting controversial viewpoint and smug comment about how stupid those other people are for supporting it*
And you’d write:
*Six paragraphs contradicting opening poster on why the other side is not wrong. With footnotes.*
And someone else, or me would write:
*Ad hominem argument that relates one or both sides to Hitler. Godwin’s law has been invoked.*
And again: *Unrelated spambot post for lottery tickets in a different country*
*Futile attempt to bring the conversation back on topic that fails. User eventually leaves thread, declaring themselves to be done with you all, only to return later.*
And so on. Seem like something you’d want to try?
*All-caps rant about the utter stupidity of such games and the people who play them, followed by a description of a “scientific” study indicating that “pretending” to be malicious is actually a cover-up so that people assume that the so-called pretenders would never do such things in real life. No citation or information that could help someone to find the study is provided. This is followed by the statement, “Therefore, you are all idiots lying about lying. Your facade is merely a facade, which is to say, not a facade at all. SO GO ROOT IN TARTERIS CAKING CAKEHEASDED CAKERS,” [sic]*
((Can I do several in a row? Please?))
*Scathing reply asking just what, exactly, one should root for in Tartarus, as the place isn’t exactly known for its mushrooms*
*Assurance that obviously, one should root for Kerkyra, the best football team in Greece, duh*
*Polite “correction” stating that actually, Kerkyra plays soccer, not football (but that’s okay, everyone makes mistakes sometimes) (Also isn’t that the team that hasn’t won a single game so far this year?)*
*Manic paragraph from someone named “hadies” claiming, “U GUYS THINK i lET U WACH GAMES THERE? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHA YOU’RE IN FOR A BIG SURPRISE” [sic]*
*An exclamation from the original poster that it was “jqust a typoe; jeez cant u see i meant rott?!! dont b so judgemental!’ [sic]*
((In other words, I’m in.))
*original statement of opinion*
*angry lash-out at original poster, but without any facts or statements to back it up*
*reassurance that commenter needs to chill down and stop overreacting, and OP is entitled to ens opinion*
*restatement of counterargument, but this time in capslock and with six angry, expletive-filled paragraphs of evidence why en is correct and OP is a bigot*
Otherwise known as one of those conversations where you start out having no opinion on the subject, and end up changing your mind with each comment.
Otherwise known as I don’t even really like the parts of the Internet I hang out on because people are so angry all the time.
A: *Statement of moderate agreement with the initial viewpoint, but not with those reasons for it*
B: *Smug reminder about how no one can be sure, all opinions are validt, and the outcome doesn’t matter*
C: *Rejection on basis of atrocius speling also grammer*
B: *Correction of a correction*
C: *Dispute of correction of correction, along with suggestions about B’s general intelligence and the sorry state of that country’s education system*
D: *Links perceived problem with that country and the mentality that produced the original article*
B: *Denial of that nationality, statement of the correct one, complimentary [sic] speculation on C’s intelligence, accusations of extremism*
C: *Dismissal of that information as irrelevant and incorrect; assertion that if not for people spreading viewpoints such as en’s on the internet the world would long ago have fallen into chaos*
A: *Observation of hypocrisy on the part of C*
E: *Observation of the lack of aesthetic appeal of A’s profile picture*
*Is happily amused, thinking of all these games*
Can you turn “CATS” into “WING”?
Hmm…I’ll leave that one for Catwings herself, but how about CATS into MEOW?
CATS
MATS
MAWS
MEWS
MEWL
MEAL
MEAW – it’s “a dated form of meow”.
MEOW
Interestingly enough, mews, mewl, and meaw are all sounds cats make. There just aren’t a lot of other words that are close to MEOW.
Inspired by CATS and WING, I’m going to try MUSE and LOVE. At least one letter’s the same.
MUSE
MULE
MOLE
MOVE
LOVE
…well, that was quick.
Also:
MUSE
RUSE
ROSE
ROVE (or LOSE)
LOVE
I find that words with vowels and consonants in the same places are a lot easier.
Otherwise you have to find tricks like plurals or doubled letters to turn vowels into a consonants or vice-versa.
Now I can’t help but wonder if someone can turn DOCTOR into TARDIS. (My apologies if this has already been done.)
Is any word in English one letter away from TARDIS?
i got really excited about “tapis” but then i realized that doesn’t work
That reminds me of tapirs. But tapirs has too many letters.
I was thinking that in this case we may as well make an exception and allow other some other language to be used, but only minimally.
After all, it should translate anyway.no, but i can do this
DOC
DOO
WOO
WHO
DEEEEE OOOO WOOOO
DOOO DO DOOOOO
DOO DO DOOOO
(it is possible I’m not as over this show as I’d like to think)
One does not simply get over Doctor Who.
I’ll attempt my own name.
MATHS
MATES
MOTES
MOVES
MOVER
LOVER
Or:
MATHS
MOTHS
MOTES
MOVES
LOVES
LOVER
Can anyone here drive GAPAS CRAZY?
GAPAS
GALAS
GALLS (yeah it’s a stretch)
FALLS
FAILS
FAIRS
HAIRS
HEIRS
HEARS
FEARS
FEARE (do obsolete spellings count?)
FLARE
GLARE
GLAZE
GRAZE
CRAZE
CRAZY
wow this one is hard. to be continued if i can fix the two questionable transitions?
“Galls” is fine. “Gall” is a perfectly sound noun and verb. “Feare,” not so much, IMHO.
this has been bugging me all day but i can’t seem to get from FEARS to FLARE. the E -> L transition is killing me
Hm… FEARS FEATS FLATS FLAKS FLAKE FLARE would be one way.
aaah, FLATS is it. i got to FEATS and FLAKE but couldn’t think of the middle two
Does this fit? I’m not sure what the obscure word tolerance is.
GAPAS
GALAS
GALES
MALES
WALES*
WALLS
WAILS
PAILS
PAINS
PAINT
FAINT
FEINT
FEIST**
FEAST
BEAST
BLAST
BLASE
BLARE
GLARE
GLAZE
GRAZE
CRAZE
CRAZY
*Aside from the place name, “wale” is a kind of striping or planking, or a synonym for welt.
**This turns out to be more regional than I had known, but it’s a kind of dog.
Nice! “MALES” is redundant, however, and GALES PALES PALLS PAILS saves another step.
Good point about “MALES”! I had a page overgrown with possible word branches, and followed one home wrong. Ooh! “PALLS”, yesss!
Great Minds Think Alike
I found this game elsewhere on the Internet and thought it sounded like fun. Here are the rules:
1) Reply to this post with your answers to each prompt. Try to give the answer you think the most other people will also give, but…
2) DO NOT look at what anyone else has answered until after you have written your answers. (And no editing your answers after-the-fact if you have mod powers.)
3) At the end of two weeks, we’ll count up the most popular answers for each prompt and see if great minds really do think alike!
Theme: Fun and Games
Prompts:
1) Name a chess piece
2) Name a game played with a standard 52-deck of playing cards.
3) Name a game played with specialized cards (not a standard 52-deck).
4) Name a video game character.
5) Name a video game released in the 1980s.
6) Name a suspect from the board game Clue.
7) Name a city that has hosted the Summer Olympics.
8) Name a city that has hosted the Winter Olympics.
9) Name a sport played with a ball.
10) Name an extreme sport.
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER DON”T LOOK AT THIS DON’T SECRET ANSWERS HERE
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER DON”T LOOK AT THIS DON’T SECRET ANSWERS HERE
1) Queen.
2) Poker.
3) Pokemon.
4) Mario.
5) Pac-Man.
6) Colonel Mustard.
7) Sydney.
8) Vancouver.
9) Soccer.
10) Mountain climbing.
Errr, didn’t realize that the answers would all show up in Recent Comments. We should probably write SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER DON”T LOOK AT THIS DON’T SECRET ANSWERS HERE or something like that before our answers.
Too short. Better write it twice. *adds*
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER DONâ€T LOOK AT THIS DON’T SECRET ANSWERS HERE
SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER DONâ€T LOOK AT THIS DON’T SECRET ANSWERS HERE
Cutting it close there with pac-man (released in 1980). Our only common answer was soccer! I actually did originally mean soccer when I put football but then left it that way so it could mean two different sports muahaha
Without looking at Kai’s answers:
1. Pawn
2. Go Fish
3. Uno
4. GLaDOS
5. Pac-Man?
6. Colonel Mustard
7. London
8. Vancouver
9. Soccer
10. Skiing
1. Pawn
2. Solitaire
3. ???? Uno
4. Link
5. Nintendo Mario Bros (maybe? was that in the 80s? i wasn’t born yet)
6. Professor Plum
7. London
8. Sochi (omg i couldn’t remember the name…..)
9. Baseball (although i relaly wanted to say quidditch)
10. Quidditch (I had to say it)
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SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER DONâ€T LOOK AT THIS DON’T SECRET ANSWERS HERE
1) Knight
2) Go Fish
3) Apples to Apples
4) Link
5) Legend of Zelda (haha)
6) Professor Plum
7) London
8) Salt Lake City
9) Football
10) Skateboarding (I think this counts? If not, BMX)
SPOILERS ANSWER SPOILERS ANSWERS SPOILERS ANSWER SPOILERS ANSWERS SPOILERS ANSWER SPOILERS ANSWERS SPOILERS ANSWER SPOILERS ANSWERS SPOILERS ANSWER SPOILERS ANSWERS SPOILERS ANSWER SPOILERS ANSWERS
1) King
2) Euchre!
3) Set
4) Mario
5) Tetris? Not sure if that was released then.
6) Professor Plum
7) Athens
8) Salt Lake City
9) Soccer
10) skateboarding?
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SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER DONâ€T LOOK AT THIS DON’T SECRET ANSWERS HERE
1) Queen
2) Poker
3) Some versions of Hearts?
4) Zelda
5) ? No idea
6) Mrs Peacock
7) London
8) Sochi
9) Soccer
10) Hang gliding?
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS GAME SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS DON’T LOOOOOK SPOILERS
1) Queen
2) Solitaire
3) Fluxx is all that will come to mind, but I doubt that’ll be it
4) Link
5) Pac-man
6) Miss Scarlet
7) Beijing
8) Vancouver
9) Soccer
10) BMX
1) Knight
2) Poker
3) Cards Against Humanity (the only one I can think of)
4) Mario
5) oh man i have no clue
6) Professor Peach
7) Beijing
8) Sochi
9) Volleyball
10) Mountain climbing? (I’m not sure what counts as extreme, but mountain climbing certainly sounds like a bad idea to me.)
He was Professor Plum
1. Knight
2. Poker
3. Uno
4. Mario
5. Sonic? Uh. No clue what was released in the 80’s. Mario for that too, if he was released in the 80’s.
6. Colonel Mustard
7. Beijing
8. Sochi
9. Soccer/football
10. Skydiving? Does that count?
Two weeks was yesterday, so I’ll have the results up tomorrow.
The Answers:
Question 1) Most popular: Tie between Knight and Queen
Knight -3
Queen -3
Pawn -2
King -1
Question 2) Most popular: Poker
Poker -4
Go Fish -2
Solitaire -2
Euchre! -1
Question 3) Most popular: Uno
Uno -3
Cards Against Humanity -1
Fluxx -1
Some versions of Hearts -1
Set -1
Apples to Apples -1
Pokemon -1
Question 4) Most popular: Mario
Mario -4
Link -3
GLaDOS -1
Zelda -1
Question 5) Most popular: Pac-Man
Pac-Man (released 1980, as CPM pointed out)- 3
No answer -2
Sonic the Hedgehog (actually released in 1991) -1
Tetris (released 1984 in the USSR and 1988 in the US) -1
Legend of Zelda (released 1986) -1
Mario Bros (released 1983) -1
Question 6) Most popular: Tie between Professor Plum and Colonel Mustard, but see below.
Professor Plum -3 (4 if we count the vote for “Professor Peach”)
Colonel Mustard -3
Mrs. Peacock -1
Miss Scarlet -1
Question 7) Most popular: London
London -4
Beijing -3
Athens -1
Sydney -1
Question 8) Most popular: Sochi.
Sochi -4
Vancouver -3
Salt Lake City -2
Question 9) Most popular: Soccer. Most consensus in answers.
Soccer, soccer/football or “football” which the user clarified to mean soccer – 7
Volleyball -1
Baseball -1
Question 10) Most popular: Tie between Mountain Climbing and Skateboarding. Most variation in answers.
Mountain Climbing -2
Skateboarding -2
Skydiving -1
BMX -1
Hang Gliding -1
Quidditch -1
Skiing -1
Adapting the rules for game from the other site I found it on:
– Any answer given by only one person is worth zero points.
– Any answer given by two people is worth 50 points divided by the number of entrants, rounded to the nearest whole number. In this case, with 9 entrants, each answer given by two people is worth 6 points. (Rounded up from 5.556)
– Any answer given by more than two people is worth the two-point value multiplied by the number of people who answered. If three people gave the same answer, they each get 18 points, if four people gave the same answer, they each get 24, etc.
How did you do? I got 168.
Would you guys be interested in another round of Great Minds Think Alike if I posted another prompt?
Tell a crazy story from your life. The next poster has to turn it into a blockbuster movie and explain the stars, director, title, tagline, plot alterations, etc.
In first grade I ruined our class’ “Three Piggy Opera” play by talking too loudly backstage and had to be taken out of the theater.
Describe a famous person vaguely/badly to Google as if you didn’t remember their name. Can Google figure it out anyway?
“Lady who wrote wizard book” (J. K. Rowling)
First result: Wikipedia page for “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”
Second result: Wkipedia page for L. Frank Baum (not a lady!)
Failure.
“Astronaut who became senator”
First result: John Glenn’s Wikipedia page.
Success.
“French scuba diver”
First result: Biography.com page for Jacques Cousteau.
Success.
“Storm chaser robot guy”
First result: New article about Tim Samaras.
Success.
“That ocean explorer lady”
First result: Wikipedia page for Slyvia Earle.
Success.
“Turtleneck astronomer”
First result: Joke page about Carl Sagan.
Success.
“Ocean explorer blue baseball cap”
First result: Shopping site. The whole first page is shopping sites, an excerpt from a book, and an album page on Bandcamp. But the first image result is Robert Ballard.
Failure.
Google apparently has a fascination with Oz. I did “guy who played that wizard”, thinking Daniel Radcliffe. I thought I might also come up with Ian McKellan, or maybe one of Dumbledore’s actors, but no, Frank Morgan.
And “guy who played that wizard with glasses” comes up with the wikipedia page for “The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass”. Adding “and scar” gives Harry Potter, finally. A few of the results even have Daniel Radcliffe buried in the description.
Interestingly, “turtleneck iPhone guy” does not turn up Steve Jobs as a first result. Hilariously, though, “lady who ruined HP” does turn up Carly Fiorina.
“Turtleneck Apple guy” directly results in Steve Jobs’ Wikipedia page, though. Which is pretty funny too.
Were you expecting the second one to be people complaining about various female Harry Potter characters they hated?
Now you’ve got me thinking about Hewlett-Packard fanfiction.
To be honest, I don’t really know what I was expecting, but I think this was the best possible result.
I keep having to remind myself that Fiorina is not an actress from some show on Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel when I see her name. It just sounds like that kind of name.
when I researching a paper for my Black Freedom Struggle class I googled “NAACP women” and all the top results were about that white woman in Spokane who pretended she was black, that there was all that news about early this year. Google knows what’s important, I guess???
That’s why you should tailor your search results by “before this date”. Or you could have added a minus sign and then her name in quotation marks.
Yeah, that was the next thing I tried — though I ended up focusing on SNCC so it wasn’t important anyway.
Yup, the wonderful things my city gets on the news for…
I cringe every time I see us trending on social media sites because it’s usually nothing good. Except when we sued Monsanto, that also trended.
Sorry for the off-topic post.
I’m kinda derailing things here but heeyyyy I was in your city yesterday! (for the Pacific Northwest Writing Center Association conference which I was presenting at!)
recently my city’s been in the news mostly for children being shot (by police, at stop lights, in cars, in drive-bys, in homes)
That’s horrible.
My town is only in the news when it gets awards for best place to live. It’ll be interesting going out into the real world and living in places that aren’t blessed with a negative crime rate.
“wrestling guy who bit ear” = Mike Tyson (I would not normally google this but it came up in conversation with friends)
Lady who painted flowers and skulls (Georgia O’keefe)
First result was the official Georgia O’keefe page.
“Rapping nerd who wrote the freedom musical” brings up a bunch of stuff about Pharrell and Childish Gambino. Nope.
“70s Olympic swimmer guy”
Wikipedia page for Mark Spitz is the second result. Success.
“Short French Emperor”
Interestingly, the pages for “Emperor of the French” and “List of French Monarchs” come up before Napoleon. Google’s way of protesting the misconception that he was short?
“Star Wars and Indiana Jones guy”
I was thinking of George Lucas, but this could also very well describe Harrison Ford. But the first result about a person is… Julian Glover? (Who played Walter Donovan in “Last Crusade” and General Veers in “Empire”)
Lucas is the fourth result, but still, weird…
“Magician escape artist”
First the Wiki article on Escapology, then, of course, Harry Houdini. I guess that one was pretty hard to screw up.
“Grand Canyon guy one arm” returns a page of results all about John Wesley Powell. Good job, Google, success.
Would anyone else be interested in playing Botticelli?
Is that an ancient-greek-mythology-deity-painting contest?
No, it’s a game like 20 Questions or Akinator where people have to guess which famous person or fictional character the main player is thinking of. (The name comes from the rule that they can’t pick anyone more obscure than the painter Botticelli.)
I’ve never played this game myself, but I’ve seen other people play it online and the rules, as far as I can tell, are:
1) One player, the chooser, thinks of a character and posts their initials. (“My initials are JC”)
2) The other players think of people with those initials and ask the chooser Indirect Questions based on who they think it is. (“Did you write that all Gaul was divided into three parts?” rather than “Are you Julius Caesar”, because that would be a Direct Question.)
3) If the chooser isn’t sure who an Indirect Question is referring to, they say that they’re stumped (“No, and I don’t know who did.”) and allow the person who stumped them to ask a Direct Question, such as “Are you currently alive?” or “Are you real or fictional?”
4) After a Direct Question reveals something about the person, the other player can still ask Indirect Questions that contradict it in order to get more Direct Questions, as long as they are thinking of someone with the right initials who hasn’t been guessed yet. (Even if we’d established the person was real and not fictional, you could still ask “Do killer robots from the future often try to kill you?” and if the chooser didn’t know that you were talking about John Connor from the Terminator series, you would get a Direct Question.)
5) You can win by guessing the correct person either by Direct (“Are you Jacques Cousteau?”) or Indirect Question (“Did you sail on a ship called the ‘Calypso’?”).
6) The player who wins becomes the next chooser.
7) An important rule of Botticelli, especially when played on the Internet, is that no player should at any point look anything up. Every question and every answer must come from the players’ own memories, so if you’re the chooser, you should pick someone you know a lot about.
“no one more obscure than Botticelli” seems very subjective to me, given that I apparently had him confused with Bottesini, whom probably none of you have heard of…
I think it’s a pretty weird name too.
Subjective indeed! To me, the name Botticelli immediately makes me think of his paintings, whereas I bet my brother might have the same confusion you had or not know at all. I wonder who would make a better marker of obscurity? Maybe a couple names would work better than one.
Maybe “Who Am I?” would be a better title?
Ahem! I’ve heard of Bottesini. I even have a record.
I’ve heard of him. Even heard one of his pieces in concert just last night, funnily enough.
his bass concerto is one of the, like, four that the instrument has
The one I heard was the Grand Duo for violin and double bass.
Hope so. He’s cool.
“The Paganini of the double bass”, they called him.
https :// en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Giovanni_Bottesini
Describe a piece of media in as misleading but technically true a way as possible. Try to make it sound like a completely different genre if you can.
Easy starter example one: Guy gets dragged along on a road trip in a stolen vehicle with a drunk foreigner, two-faced politician, and a woman who rejected him at a party.
A man learns about a huge underground secret and leaves his old life behind to join his new friends and pursue the universe and destroy bugs.
(From the last movie I watched. Not sure if it’s too obvious or not)
It sounds like Men in Black, but that would be too straightforward, so it probably isn’t.
my first thought was Matrix
It actually was Men in Black. I’m not good at these
A diplomat and a warrior-in-training who knew each other as children fall in love while investigating a conspiracy involving the military-industrial complex. In the course of their investigations, they find themselves taken prisoner by an enemy power just as a war breaks out.
(Maybe that’s too straightforward, but it does disguise the genre, or at least make it adaptable to a few different ones.)
Erm… Star Wars?
Yup, Attack of the Clones in particular.
Interestingly, though I’m not super familiar with Star Wars, I actually had diplomat = Princess Leia and warrior-in-training = Luke in mind.
In this case it was diplomat = Padmé and warrior-in-training = Anakin, but I guess we’ve inadvertently found another way the two trilogies mirror each other!
A castaway messes with the minds of a bunch of other castaways because he wants grandkids.
(Too easy?)
If it helps, I have no idea.
The Tempest.
I can’t take credit for this one, but: Some people outsource an exterminator to kill the guy who ruined their party.
Okay, I have no clue, but I’m very curious what this one is!
Here’s a hint: you may have read it in AP Language and Literature.
I went on vacation with my horrible friends and it was horrible.
(Too generic? A hint is that I’ve summarized this book on MB once before.)
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the GalaxyLord of the FliesThat was hardly a vacation…
The Hobbit?
Everyone here is suggesting stories that involved TRIPS, but not VACATIONS.
Three Men in a Boat, maybe?
♥
Nope, should I tell people what it was?
I, for one, am curious.
It’s “The Sun Also Rises”.
Don’t traumatize your kids or they’ll destroy human civilization.
Greek mythology?
No, but I like that answer.
It’s “Cat’s Cradle”.
Ah, yes. “Babies with rabies.”
there are two answers for this one: A movie with Sebastian Stan in it, where everyone thought a guy was dead, but it turns out he’s not.
also two answers: Boy’s father offers him a job, but he rejects it while crying. He meets a girl but it later turns out they’re related and he’s probably not straight anyway.
One of the second is Return of the Jedi, I think.
The Martian! (I haven’t seen the film but I’ve read the book and I think the movie has sebstan in it?)
A polar expedition organized by an eccentric man of means meets with disaster.
I thought about “His Dark Materials,” but Lord Asriel’s story didn’t unfold quite like that. Hmm… Frankenstein?
Oh, believe me, it’s no story anywhere near that good. This summary makes it sound way better than it is.
Well, they’re supposed to be misleading, aren’t they? That’s the game.
Is it Surviving Antarctica: Reality TV 2083? I can’t remember if there’s an eccentric man of means in that one or not, but it’s definitely not a very good book.
I doubt it’s worse than this movie.
Should I reveal what movie it is?
It’s “Alien vs. Predator” and it is nowhere near as good as the summary implies.
*strikes “Alien vs. Predator” from Netflix queue*
“A boy goes on a scavenger hunt with his friends.”
(the best one from my friends playing this game at lunch today)
HP: Deathly Hallows?
Yes!
“Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”
(Not original, but too good not to repeat here.)
wizard of oz?
That was my thought.
Exactly!
Supernatural being invents democracy to solve family argument.
Here’s another with two answers: Two government workers are assigned to work together in the hopes that one will debunk the other’s department. They end up falling in love.
mmmm Parks and Rec?
It sounds like X-Files, but that’s too obvious, so it can’t be.
You’re both right! Kai you’re right, that was pretty obvious, but I was just too intrigued when I noticed the similarity between Parks n Rec and the X-files.
this one has two (really obvious) answers: It’s about friendship & infrastructure; Rob Lowe is there.
Parks and Rec (best show); The West Wing (which I’m watching right now).
yep, on both counts!
Idk if these are too obvious! but. A couple of my favorite things:
A cultist commits several murders because patriarchy.
A writer leaves London to go to the countryside with his only friend, a manic drug addict. (Two answers!)
ZNZ:
I suppose #1 could describe either of two Star Wars movies. Is that what you have in mind? And one of your answers for #2 must be “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
Star Wars, no. Baskervilles, absolutely.
Is the one about the cultist-murderer a Sherlock Holmes movie, too?
Nope! (& there is a movie, but the movie was an adaptation of the original and I haven’t seen it.)
It’s been long enough now that I suppose I ought to state here for the record that #1 was From Hell and #2 was—besides Baskervilles, which Robert guessed correctly—my very favorite movie, Withnail & I.
Man tries to use theater to solve problems, fails. Deaths ensue.
Hamlet?
As always. <3
A woman falls in love with her employer, but upon discovering he was already married, considers becoming a missionary.
Jane Eyre?
Okay, here are a few (mixed book and movies):
-Girl searches for disappeared dad, finds great career instead.
-Guy refuses to deal with his relationship issues. Meanwhile, his stalking ex tries to murder all his coworkers.
-Relatable protagonist in insane asylum turns out to be insane after all.
-Pilot litters in Africa. Hilarity ensues.
-Captain dies in mysterious accident. Crew decides to make up for it by planning to kill more people.
-Girl likes guy but doesn’t like like him despite their shared adventures in applied survivalism.
The littering one has got to be The Gods Must Be Crazy.
Correct!
Last one could be almost any YA novel…
Katniss and Gale maybe?
Funny, I was going to guess Katniss and Peeta.
well, it could easily be either. I am very much on train “Katniss doesn’t like-like anyone, she is ace/aro and worships Diane the huntress,” so. LEAVE ME ALONE AND LET ME KILL SMALL ANIMALS IN PEACE: the Katniss Everdeen story.
Same. I personally think it was a mistake to have Katniss develop genuine feelings for Peeta, I really liked the twist of a YA protagonist who doesn’t care for romantic stuff but is forced to play the lovestruck-teenage-girl part for the audiences.
Right! That’s what I loved so much about the first book: the actual driving emotional force was her love for Prim and Rue. The audience expected her to prioritize men and she DIDN’T, even a little bit!
I actually meant Katniss and Peeta… I would’ve like an ace/aro Katniss too. But between Gale and Peeta, I preferred Peeta for her based on the events of the last book.
Relatable protagonist– possibly Amadeus?
Nope sorry.
This one is a movie, if it helps.This one is for a movie based on a book. I haven’t read the book, but I presume the plot is similar.Hm… “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”? “King of Hearts”? “Silence of the Lambs”? “Marat/Sade”?
Nope. Think less classic and more thriller.
I don’t watch many thrillers, so other people here are likely to guess it before I do unless we switch to a Twenty Questions format.
Girl likes guy, and guy likes girl back, but she’s moving out of town because her dad is on the run from the law.
Les Misérables!
Fanmix game: Post like 3-5 song titles you would put on a fanmix for a fictional character, and everybody else has to guess the character.
Ones that seriously describe the character or jokey choices like putting every song called “Invisible” for Sue Storm?
Either is fine!
Regina Spektor- Machine
The Strumbrellas- Spirits
Tame Impala- Past Life
Downloaded into a machine and troubled by confusing memories of a past life. GLaDOS?
Fairly accurate analysis, wrong character. Hint: this one still has a corporeal form (or most of one).
Who the hell is Bucky?
ooh! here’s one, a fanmix I’ve got in progress. Two halves of an otp.
Side A: Sax Rohmer 1 (the Mountain Goats), Engine Driver (Decemberists), The Sea Must Have an Ending (Coope, Boyes & Simpson)
Side B: Astronaut (Amanda Palmer), At My Window Sad and Lonely (Billy Bragg & Wilco), Harbor (Vienna Teng)
A young child is forced into a world where he takes the disembodied faces of corpses and uses them to assume new identities.
((From the last game. I did not realize that a new game had begun until after I posted, sorry.))
We can play multiple games at once as long as we explain what the beginning of a post which game a post is intended for.
Connect two movies or TV shows through people involved with the productions of both in as few steps as possible! Basically like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, but you can use directors, composers, costume designers, producers, etc. as well as actors and Kevin Bacon doesn’t have to be involved.
Longest chain so far, between the last two movies me and my sisters watched for Halloween: R.I.P.D > Ryan Reynolds > X-Men Cinematic Universe > Sir Ian McKellen > Lord of the Rings > Orlando Bloom > Pirates of the Caribbean > Johnny Depp > Sweeney Todd > Tim Burton > The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Most impressively obscure chain, made by my friend: X-Men Apocalypse > Beethoven’s 7th from the soundtrack > also performed by Von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic > performers of the recording of all the Strauss in 2001: A Space Odyssey
You can also add “house rules” to make it harder like: no Marvel movies allowed, no Harry Potter allowed, you can only use female actresses and creators, no shared cinematic universes, etc.
Let’s start with Galaxy Quest and Firefly?
Corbin Bleu is in the cast list for Galaxy Quest on IMDB; Zac Efron played a young Simon on Firefly; they were both on High School Musical together.
Sorry — I think I was supposed to share the next link.
Firefly and Mad Men, without using Christina Hendricks?
Mad Men > Jon Hamm > Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt > Jane Krakowski > 30 Rock > Jack McBrayer > Wreck-It-Ralph > Alan Tudyk > Firefly!
Doctor Who and Rick and Morty?
Hmmm well… if we can include promos… but one must have been on the other’s show at some point:
Stephen Colbert (“The Ricks Must be Crazy”) > The Late Show > Promos with James Corden (The Late Late Show) > Doctor Who (“The Lodger” and “Closing Time”)
I’m not going to think too hard about this and just go off the top of my head. How about Tangled and Interstellar? Or does anyone else have any good ones?
Tangled -> Walt Disney Pictures -> National Treasure -> Sean Bean -> The Martian -> Matt Damon -> Interstellar