It's May, and that means it is National Pickle Month!


S A C R I F I C E S   T O   T H E   P I C K L E   D I E T I E S


O F F E R I N G S   T O   T H E   P I C K L E   D E I T I E S

  • Your Ed-Cooled node here...

Like little flowers, new noders will be popping up all over. Take the time to /msg them encouragement, offer suggestions and tips, and mow down the weeds. And yes, I spelled it "dieties" on purpose.

But all at once it dawned on me that this
Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme;
Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream
But a topsy-turvical coincidence,
Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.
Yes! It sufficed that I in life could find
Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind
Of correlated pattern in the game,
Plexed artistry, and something of the same
Pleasure in it as they who played it found.

John Francis Shade, Pale Fire, lines 806-815 (Canto III), ed. C. X. Kinbote

Ξ     Ξ     Ξ     Ξ     Ξ

    Crumbs left by TheNodeFairy
    This is a short list of persons/places/things/ideas that I have noticed are in need of a good writeup. If you take one of these on, drop me a /msg and let me know. If you're looking for something to node, maybe one of these is for you. (I might even get around to a couple of these myself, but they are very low on my list.)
    This month, we're starting with a recap of a few from previous months:
  • the contemporary beverage and eponymous luche libre wrestler Orange Crush
  • the short-lived softdrink with floaty-bits, Orbitz
  • a review of journalist Richard Rhodes' book Dark Sun, on the development of the H-bomb
  • convince us that Blue Star Ointment is a wonder-drug and give us some history besides
  • the guitarist Mick Rippon, but only if he is important, or interesting
  • NODED a treatment of the New Jersey Trilogy of five films by Kevin Smith NODED by BrooksMarlin!
  • NODED ClockworkGrue has given us a fine discussion of the quantitization of characteristics in role-playing games!
    That's quite enough, thanks
  • SOFTLOCKS
    Between you, me, the anal-retentive English teacher who has taken up residence on alternate thursdays in my forebrain, the highschool drop-out HTML-hack who has listened to too much TMBG, and our consultant from the Acronym Institute
  • added pipelinks to We Want a Rock
  • hardlinked a couple of phrases in Love Will Tear Us Apart
  • fixed a Windows apostrophe in our revered sensei's Chau Yep Ahn: Tea Eggs,
    also made a personal note to make tea eggs again soon
  • fixed typos in Webby's calomel
  • fixed typos and hardlinks in charms by NotMe
  • fixed a stray apostrophe and some hardlinked plurals in English seaside by mgriffithsuk
  • typos in hardlinks in acromegaly
  • typos in Wintersweet's review of the Japan Center restaurant Sapporo-Ya
  • typos in our sensei's shaved daikon and cucumber salad, a beautiful recipe

once & future

it's = "it is"

itsit's

This has been a message from the anal-retentive English teacher who lives in my forebrain, asking you to please, use apostrophes wisely.

In other news, cut and paste writeups will die.

Created

The Everything Editor's Job includes noding, so I'm going to be repeating last month's successful experiment of posting my creations here, in the hopes of shaming myself into writing more. My goal: five or more non-edlog writeups by the end of the month. Can I do it, ladies and gentlemen? Only time will tell. Update, 4 June 2003: Um, oops. I lose.

  • Added a few random fun facts to Moxie.
  • The Langoliers, because I just reread it and there wasn't a writeup yet.
  • Strength to Love, because I'm still reading up on nonviolence and I try to write something about every new book I finish. If nothing else, it's good practice. Hilariously, it appeared just after Down With Love in the New Writeups nodelet; thanks to Oolong for pointing this out to me.
  • attention, because there was nothing in that node yet about the topic as an area of psychology.

Deleted

I promise to sign my Klaproth messages and talk to users whenever possible (generally if someone's been away from e2 for three or more months, I start operating under the assumption that they're not going to get back to me in under a month). If you're terribly embarrassed about having your ex-writeups listed in this section, drop me a /msg and I'll remove the deletion record.

  • Steve Irwin (person) by modiorne because it was cut and paste from http://animal.discovery.com/fansites/crochunter/steve.html - user has not been seen on e2, period, so I performed a little fled user audit and all is well with the world.
  • Idoru (person) by mkb after I made some suggestions to it and the author asked me to remove it.
  • Meat By-Products and their Uses (idea) by lordsibn because typos are one thing but smartass comments about why you're not fixing your typos make the anal-retentive English teacher who lives in my forebrain see red. User has not been online in 2 years or I would've tried to discuss editing the writeup in question. As it is, a fled user audit may be in order.

Editor Cooled

  • Raising the bar, for being as nicely-written a little explication of some E2 history as I've ever encountered on this site. Also to commemorate the impending dissolution of The Content Rescue Team, who helped bring about the change in standards and goals alluded to in the node in question.

Corrected

Like it says on my homenode, I don't offer suggestions to writeups that aren't worth improving. Them I feed to Klaproth, and get on with my life. So if I suggest you remove a wayward apostrophe, it's nothing personal; I'm just trying to help. Honest. You don't have to /msg me your undying gratitude, but it's better to ignore me than to get snarky trying to defend your misspellings to my forehead English teacher. Just fix 'em and move on, okay?

In general, I prefer to /msg users about typos in their writeups, Typo Death Squad-style, rather than go in and fix them myself without asking or being asked to do so. There are exceptions to this rule --- a few trusting souls who've given me permission to fix whatever goofs I find in their work, and users who have not been on e2 in over 3 months. I don't always save a copy of my typo alert /msgs, so if you thank me for my hints, remind me where I should go deliver my upvotes (and possible C!s), Typo Death Squad-style. When I do save copies of /msgs to users, and I don't get a response within about a month, I follow up. I start by checking the relevant writeup. Usually it's been fixed, and all is right with the world. That's cool; I can vote it up and get on with my day. Sometimes the writeup hasn't been fixed, and it turns out the author hasn't been around to get my typo message. That's cool, too; at this point I'll generally go in and fix things myself, usually leaving a /msg to reflect what I've done. Occasionally I'll have been ignored entirely (i.e. a writeup by a recently active user will still have the typos in it). This makes me a little grumpy, but I try to be cool. Depending on my mood and how much I like the writeup in question, there's a few possible ways I'll react to this, ranging from repeating my "please fix this" request, maybe offering a C! as a bribe if the writeup's really excellent, to or fixing the writeup itself, and downvoting it out of spite. So that's how that works. Now you know.

Finally, I don't mind it when users point out the occasional typo in fled users' writeups, but please don't flood my Message Inbox with tons of correction requests all at once! One at a time is good, and only once in a while is better. Thanks for your understanding.

Other

  • Updated The Content Rescue Team : Nodes a few times. Lately my Typo Death Squad tendencies have been conflicting with my strong desire to prune the big CRT list; I want noders to correct their spelling and punctuation before updating the list to reflect their work. I think this might be silliness on my part, since CRT and TDS are separate entities, and nobody really reads the "recent rescues" list at the bottom of the CRT list anyway. Sigh.

"Wow -- these urinals are like new.
No one seems to have used them."

"That's because no one hits on target."

AIM WELL
Clean public toilets are possible.
Let's make them happen.


Ministry of the Environment, Singapore

Mopped-Up Puddles

Solid Content, But Forgot To Flush

Well-Aimed Hit On Target

It seems like I'm playing the bad guy this month. Sub-par mass-noding projects are meeting their doom at my fingertips.

As many of you know, I was the one that "pushed the button" on what was left of the Pokedex project. I brought it up during an editorial discussion and was told by a god that it had been slated to be wiped for some time, but just hadn't been done, so to go ahead and do it. So I did. There was a misunderstanding in the process. I thought all the nodes were to die, so I killed them all. There were some nodes, though, that weren't just copy/paste from the cards or the official Pokedex, and there were some hurt feelings those were nuked. They have been restored or are in the process of being restored, however. It then became clear to me that the policy was on mass-noded, information-light projects and/or copy/paste write-ups. Write-ups belonging to projects like that should be evaluated on an individual basis, not JUST because they were part of a project.

Some worries were raised by users that "all" mass projects were in danger, for example the everything hymnal or Project Gutenberg entries. I did all I could to put those fears to rest. The general thought among the majority, if not all, of the administrative body, is that projects with lasting power will stay. Dictionaries (useful, complete ones at least), literature, free-use books, hymn projects, things that can prove their staying power. And generally, things that are FINISHED when they are noded.

Projects like Magic cards and the pokedex are being removed because they are so, so temporary. Most of those nodes were less than 2 years old but horribly outdated by the time they were nuked. The projects themselves had failed to update and account for new additions to their universes and changes of rules in the game.

Scope is also an issue. Literature is generally wide-spread in a far different sense than, say, game rules. Among a fairly educated crowd, you mention Tolkien or C.S. Lewis or Beowulf or the Arthurian legends or Alice in Wonderland, and your audience has some idea what you're talking about, even if they've never picked up the book. If you want to know more, you can go to those nodes and get a general overview of the thing easily.

Things like gaming projects, though, are mostly relative to an internal audience. If you play the game, it's important to you and you understand the nodes--and you already know it, generally. If you don't play the game, they make almost no sense whatsoever. The scope is very narrow. The initiated can find what they need to reference--but they can find it elsewhere, and they can find it a lot better done. The Pokedex on the pokemon site is of much higher quality because it includes IMAGES and interactive text. Magic sites include scans of the cards and the cards related to them. Plain text fails to convey what it needs to. These projects are simply better off left elsewhere.

This brings me to what will most likely leave some with a poor taste in their mouths and make others happy. The Galactic Civilizations noding project. I have spent much time lately discussing it both on e2 and off of e2 with noders I am personally close to. I asked the general editor/god body about it on more than one occasion. I inquired as to what the official policy was, and never really received an answer, and it was really a fairly touchy issue. No one wanted to make the final call on it, and that pretty much tried my patience.

Having waited long enough and never been given an official answer, I took that to mean there was no policy on the issue and that it was a matter of editorial choice. I am now making that choice and am removing them from the database.

I was at first led to believe this project was different from Magic because it was a small project and once it was finished, it was done forever. However, from one of Kalons own nodes comes this line "There are 149 of them, and new ones in the BonusPak and being released all the time." This sounds exactly like the kind of problem the other nodes fell into. Most of the text is straight from stats easily available elsewhere. The flow charts--innovative--are available elsewhere. The "summary" text is unique, but is getting less descriptive and less informative as the project goes along, instead of improving as one would imagine. “Description: Got Evil? Get this. Your production will thank you, as will the Trade Good, that you should hoard for yourself. But hey, you're evil, you don't need me to tell you that ;-)” tells me very little about the concept of advanced slavery.

http://webpages.charter.net/trevorpowdrell/
This does the job much better, with images and interactivity, and a simple web search brings it among the top hits. Any player of the game can find it there. Let's keep it there from now on because it's not staying here any longer.

While I do feel for Kalon's loss of work, as is evident by conversations he's pasted into nodes and discussions others have relayed to me, he was warned from the start that this one day might happen. He chose to keep noding them anyways, instead of waiting for an official decision before continuing. This was his decision, and he stuck by it. Now I'm sticking by mine. I did identify myself to him via /msg as the bad guy, and I have been discussing the issue with him.

I notified the other editors and gods of my intent, because this was controversial and had been discussed, and I received no complaints about doing so.

Do keep this in mind if you feel the urge to node mass “pop culture” projects. General policy is that this sort of thing is frowned upon and will eventually be removed from the database. It’s also my personal policy that I really dislike this sort of thing when it’s badly done. If you do choose to do this sort of thing, read through Secret Projects in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri first. These are damn good nodes and shining examples of how this sort of project SHOULD be done if they are done at all. ALso note that these are the ONLY remaining nodes from the Alpha Centauri project. The others were nuked some time ago for the same reasons as the rest of this kind of stuff. Just a thought.

♫ A heart so true
our writeups will pull us through
you C!hing me and I'll C!hing you
No-dee-mo-on!
Gotta Node 'em All! ♫


Noder Interaction

MIRANDA: O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!
PROSPERO: 'Tis new to thee.

Even though I've been submitting writeups for a whole year now (yay!) and even though I'm a proud member of the Power Structure of Everything2 (yay me!) I'm still having new and different noding experiences.

I'm usually a self-contained noding machine. My job as a lawyer gives me ideas, and just living here in New Mexico has given me lots of ideas. Sometimes I see something in the news that interests me. Usually, however, I get my ideas for writeups from some source outside E2, and I research them offline and get the content from elsewhere. It isn't usually an interactive or collaborative process. But it can be.

I have, to be sure, interacted with other noders before. I've given people advice on legal topics and corrected more than a few typos. But noders have a lot to offer if you let them.

Here's what happened. I was reading anthropod's writeup on chocolate créme brûlèe and started musing about carmelizing and my days as a restaurant cook, and a broiling device we used to do that, called a salamander. I looked it up and found nothing on E2. I really couldn't find a lot about them on the net, but I wrote up what I could find and remember from work, and set my little paper boat afloat in New Writeups harbor.

Originally posted as salamander broiler in the late afternoon U.S. time, it got a handful of votes and disappeared. As I slept, however, our friends across the water woke up and logged onto E2. (How can people with such a notoriously bad national cuisine take such an interest in matters pertaining to food and cookery? I don't know, but clearly they do.) I woke up to several messages informing me that, in England, people do have salamanders in their home kitchens, and that the name applied to an entirely different, 19th Century device for accomplishing the same culinary tasks. I had corrections and even literary quotes to add to my writeup. (Thanks morven, tdent and wertperch!) Then anthropod, the same noder who had inspired me with her créme brûlèe msg'd me offering to do a title edit. Having pondered the node gel under "salamander" anthropod decided to do a writeup on the little beasties, which was mysteriously lacking in that node.

Then we all sat back and contemplated what we had worked on together, saw it was good, and gave each other C!hings.

Now I know there are those noders who think this place is awfully incestuous and cliqueish, and are now rolling your eyes and making wise cracks about circle jerks, but just hold on here a minute. Self-congratulatory? Sure. But this "clique" consists of noders from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Toronto, Canada and Nottingham, England. Just how "incestuous" can that be?


Noded

Nuked

Ed-Cooled

Other Tasks

  • My attempts to firmlink things (IHS to Jesus H. Christ) are once again vetoed.
    (Since this one was self-serving, I can hardly complain.)

I blame myself. I had long ago noted what a hideous mess People don't go to heaven when they die had become. It was a textbook example of Writeup does not mean reply, with the back-and-forth between the various writeup authors turning the entire node into an unreadable mishmash. (Or possibly a wimwam.) A late revision of the initial noder's entry indicated that he might revisit it and make some sense of the thing, so I left it and, well, forgot about it

Alas! Poor, innocent Wuukiee came across it this week and was reduced to tears by its incoherence. I offered to put the node in order, but wading through its contents I was convinced that I had to destroy the node in order to save it. So I did, and at Jerboa's urging I then deleted the shell.

I did other stuff, but that's the only thing worth mentioning really.

I need to retitle and add content to my Commandment nodes. Yes I do.

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