Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

I like it.

The archives were read
The new answers too.
Here's my application
May I please join you?

Yes, I do compose poetry when trying to sleep. I don't actually mean this as a suggestion for a t-shirt. I just wanted to share it.

Nanti-SARRMM wrote:Well why not use the 127 main psuednyms then without worrying about listing the secondary nyms?

Because some writers were very prolific under more than one pseudonym, and it's not common knowledge that two or more of the top contributors were the same person.

Katya wrote:

Nanti-SARRMM wrote:Well why not use the 127 main psuednyms then without worrying about listing the secondary nyms?

Because some writers were very prolific under more than one pseudonym, and it's not common knowledge that two or more of the top contributors were the same person.

So then put a qualifier for the secondary nyms, so that the most prolific of the secondary nyms are listed but not all, that way there's not 300+ nymes on it.

Or after the writers who joined in 2009, put a heading of top 10 most prolific secondary nyms and list only the most active secondary nyms.


Another cool shirt to have would be a picture of 100 monkeys in front of type writers.

And in memory of CATS, a shirt that says, "All your questions are belong to us."-- 100 Hour Board

If you limit the list to aliases that were used to write, say, at least 100 responses, then you only get 133 aliases (which is much more manageable!). (I realized after my last post that number per writer doesn't really matter--it's per alias, since [as Katya pointed out] some writers have had more than one "main" alias.)

And I like the suggestion of forming them into a big 100. And bullets do make good spacers.

I am going to do the aliases-shaped-into-a-100 idea, and I'll probably even use bullets as spacers, but the years? Uffish didn't know how to determine the years without going through the archives and figuring out which names appeared when. I am not going to do that.

So...no years. Unless someone happens to have a handy list of aliases with the years they wrote.

krebscout wrote:I am going to do the aliases-shaped-into-a-100 idea, and I'll probably even use bullets as spacers, but the years? Uffish didn't know how to determine the years without going through the archives and figuring out which names appeared when. I am not going to do that.

So...no years. Unless someone happens to have a handy list of aliases with the years they wrote.

I could help with that. What number would you like to use as the number of minimum answers? (There'll be a little bit of manual work involved, so I'd rather not do all 378 aliases. Plus a lot of them were hardly used anyway.) Let me know and I can e-mail you the list.

EDIT: I was thinking that 100 would be good, but after looking at the list I realized that that would cut out a lot of the oldest, classic writers, like SSAM, Mr Phil, Oz, Brother Tom, and Knut the Great. So maybe 35? That leaves in all the oldies and leave us with 192 aliases. And the list could always be judiciously trimmed down further, too, if we want to leave them but cut out some of the other less-used aliases.

krebscout wrote:I am going to do the aliases-shaped-into-a-100 idea, and I'll probably even use bullets as spacers, but the years? Uffish didn't know how to determine the years without going through the archives and figuring out which names appeared when. I am not going to do that.

Do a keyword search on the alias, and scroll down to the answers at the very bottom. (The 2s, if memory serves.) The first and last "2" responses should be pretty accurate for starting and ending dates -- within a month or so. (Watch out for outliers, like a lone comment submitted before someone was accepted as a writer.)

Or wait for LJ to finish working on his spreadsheet.

Laser Jock wrote:

krebscout wrote:I am going to do the aliases-shaped-into-a-100 idea, and I'll probably even use bullets as spacers, but the years? Uffish didn't know how to determine the years without going through the archives and figuring out which names appeared when. I am not going to do that.

So...no years. Unless someone happens to have a handy list of aliases with the years they wrote.

I could help with that. What number would you like to use as the number of minimum answers? (There'll be a little bit of manual work involved, so I'd rather not do all 378 aliases. Plus a lot of them were hardly used anyway.) Let me know and I can e-mail you the list.

EDIT: I was thinking that 100 would be good, but after looking at the list I realized that that would cut out a lot of the oldest, classic writers, like SSAM, Mr Phil, Oz, Brother Tom, and Knut the Great. So maybe 35? That leaves in all the oldies and leave us with 192 aliases. And the list could always be judiciously trimmed down further, too, if we want to leave them but cut out some of the other less-used aliases.

It would be nice if you could somehow scale the responses to the number of questions submitted at any one time. That way you could include the people who were top writers for their time. Or you could "judiciously trim" the responses, to get the same effect.

Katya wrote:It would be nice if you could somehow scale the responses to the number of questions submitted at any one time. That way you could include the people who were top writers for their time. Or you could "judiciously trim" the responses, to get the same effect.

Interesting idea. I could certainly do something like that. Or perhaps just include all main aliases, and then apply a cutoff to secondary aliases? (And I already sent krebscout a preliminary list, but it's very subject to change. As it is, right now we only have about four writers on the list for the first couple of years, so it'd be nice to take care of that somehow. )

Another variant would be to do a word cloud (often used as a tag cloud, google it if not familiar) in the shape of a 100, with all the pseudonyms, their relative importance (and thus size) being determined by the number of questions answered (or proportional number answered). There are automated utilities that create these.

OptimusPrime wrote:Another variant would be to do a word cloud (often used as a tag cloud, google it if not familiar) in the shape of a 100, with all the pseudonyms, their relative importance (and thus size) being determined by the number of questions answered (or proportional number answered). There are automated utilities that create these.

Ooh, fun idea. That would make the main aliases stand out while still leaving in (most of) the side-aliases. And it would be fairly easy to do, too, given the right tool. This utility (from IBM) looks fairly flexible and even lets you use weighted word lists (which sounds like what we'd want to do). It doesn't look like you can have it make the cloud in an arbitrary shape, though. However, this was just the first one I saw that looked good; there are probably others too.

OptimusPrime wrote:with all the pseudonyms, their relative importance (and thus size) being determined by the number of questions answered[.]

Sweeeet. Together, Laser Jock and I can rule the galaxy!

Hm. I'm not sure how this would work with InDesign - it doesn't always accept text formatting from other places, and I'd need just a straight up list I could thread into the shapes. But it might be worth a try.

It says it outputs in a JPEG format. Or if not jpeg, it was some other picture. It wasn't actual word formatting.

This guy has a program that does exactly what we want (it's gorgeous, too), but I don't think it's publicly available. More's the pity. I did send him an e-mail, though, just in case...

Rating Pending's quotes, though particularly ill-suited to tee shirt form (unless we're going for an indie ironic "this shirt makes so little sense, that it speaks to the masses, man" tone), remind me why he is, in my opinion, the most quotable Board writer of all time. I think we could have a title bar of only Rating Pending.

With the comic book lovers among the ranks, I think an old-school illustration of a '50s-ish man or woman (think Urban Dictionary covers), with a word balloon along the lines of "Need an answer in a jiffy? We'll get that to you . . ." on the front, and ". . . in 100 hours!" (with a URL) on the back, could work.

In sum, I don't think random board writer quotations, as lovable as they may be, are well suited to the purpose of the shirts. Feel free to make them yourself (with written permission from the quoted, I suppose), but sports teams' shirts don't usually have just a random snippet of something funny a player said, that one time. I think at minimum, you need the name of the organization, a link, and a way to make it visually appealing.

...

Totally thought I'd dreamed this thread. However, it clearly exists and now I wonder: Are plans still being made for a new t-shirt?

Ah, the things you find with random clicking!

Ha. Yes.

In fact two new designs were unveiled at the Board Booth.

...I just haven't put them on the site yet.

WELL PUT THEM UP THEN.

I am very very much interested in getting Board shirts, and as I was in Florida during the Board booth, I still don't know what's being offered. And I am so very interested. I've been trying to convince myself that I have to get a job, and my reasons are as follows: 1. Mother won't let me go back to Florida unless I have $2000 saved, 2. I owe my parents money, 3. I'll finally be able to afford Board shirts!