Is it just me, or has this feature vanished? It could just be me getting banned from it as a "problem user" since I actually make a point of reporting listings with fraudulent titles or images that don't match the product, which is probably bad for business since it means someone at least has to look at it, and possibly upset the sellers by pulling the item when it's actually bad. Like when it was a ... ahem ... personal massage wand ... listed under toys & games and sporting ad copy that it was a "great gift for kids!"

More commonly things like "War For Cybertron Masterpiece Movie Version Optimus Megatron Car Jet KO Robot" for a knockoff Combiner Wars Grimlock, making the only correct parts of the title "KO" and "Robot" since he turns into a tyrannosaur, or today  when I found some yutz trying to shill the Earthrise/Kingdom Arcee, still available around MSRP $20 since she's quite the shelf warmer, as MP-51 Masterpiece Arcee for over ten times that.

Oh, this is gonna be fun.

Take things you see in every day life.

And pair them up with the characters you KNOW are gonna be the most susceptible to them.

This is a good exercise because this can provide us with great little tidbits for character development.  You know, the things that will make a character jump right out of the screen and turn them into people.

I'll kick it off.

Monster Energy Wrote:There’s this theory that something as small and inconsequential as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can be the trigger that results in a hurricane.
 
Monster Papillon, named for the humble butterfly, has a light subtle flavor with hints of peach and nectarine.
 
You could say it’s delicate and not too overpowering, but get ready to experience your own “Butterfly Effect” as Papillon has a full load of the legendary Monster Energy blend.
 
Flavor Profile: Peach and Nectarine

Joni Mitchell's Blue at 50: Three Canadian musicians share covers from the iconic album

Links to the covers of "A Case of You", "River", and "All I Want" are buried in three places in the article.

RIP Sidney Poitier

It would appear the video card on my home tower system is dying.  It's already very difficult to read the screen and I don't expect it to last much longer.  While I have a replacement in hand it's currently useless because my machine's BIOS doesn't play well with it, as folks might remember.  (And my attempts to update the BIOS failed for reasons I am unsure about.)  So I'm going to see if I can find another of the same card, as old as it is, somewhere on the net.  (And if you or someone you know has a functional NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 they don't need, let's talk.)  Failing that, I might have to do something radical like replace the motherboard entirely... or even get a new machine outright.

Anyway, the point is that for the foreseeable future my access to the forums (among other things) will be limited to my work machine and the occasional session through my phone.  I'll be here, just not as often as usual.

CBC Analysis: American democracy had near-death experience a year ago. This year will test its vital signs

No tl;dr - there's too much in the article to be able to summarize it. There are some "common knowledge" busters in the text.

Previous thread.

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I spent some time yesterday clearing a few more of Iloveicecream's pending edits from the mod queue, and I am growing increasingly less enchanted with him. Of the pages I went through, all of them lacked proper link markup on work names, there were at least four where he dropped new examples randomly into the middle of their sections, and one (which I rejected) which completely lacked any indication what work it was for. He also still has MSWord punctuation issues. There were also a few problems we can't actually lay at his feet which were clearly caused by the brain-dead Visual Editor. (Can we kill that thing? Seriously.)

And I'm growing increasingly suspicious of how much better written his contributions are in direct contrast to how he writes messages in the various discussion threads he's participated in. I haven't caught any more TVT plagiarism (yet) in his backlogged contributions, but the difference in usage and grammar is worrisome.

Anyway, how many times now have we directed him to the Style Guide and other help pages -- pages he either is not reading or whose content he's deliberately ignoring, at that? Even if he doesn't plagiarize again, his steadfast refusal to actually do fairly minor things like mark up links is very definitely in "refusing to learn from mistakes" territory.

Thoughts, opinions?

They've celebrated in New Zealand, so it isn't too early to say "Happy New Year!"

According to the Chinese Zodiac, this is the year of the Taiga:




What?

"Year of the tiger"?

And the Lunar New Year doesn't start until February 1 this year?

Oh.

Never mind the Taiga, then... at least, not yet.


(Source)

I am now the owner of two monitors, and I want to be able to use them with both my personal and business-issued laptops. That means getting a KVM switch with dual monitor support (which I know exist). The thing is, each laptop has a single VGA port and a single HDMI port. All I can find in local stores are KVM switches with dual HDMI ports.

Are there any KVMs out there that support VGA and HDMI at the same time? Since the computers are laptops (and one of them is my employer's property), I can't change the number and type of output ports available to me.

(Lacking that, is USB 3 to HDMI a thing?)

Return of the Jedi was named to the National Film Registry this year - the third of the original Star Wars trilogy to get the nod.

Other genre pictures to get the nod this year include The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Wall-E.

The complete list is now on All The Tropes, copied from the official list.