StaggersAndJags

If you're looking for some logic in this mess, it's that we generally use metric for things regulated by the government and imperial for more informal things.

So road signs and food package sizes are mandated to be in metric, so we're forced to learn kilometers and grams there. But measurements of people and cooking temperatures are mostly used casually so we've stuck to old habits.

This leads to some ridiculous situations. For instance, we understand distances and fuel volumes in metric, but for a long long time we'd only talk about fuel economy in miles per gallon. Anyone who wanted to calculate fuel economy had to memorize the formulas to convert km to miles and litres to gallons.

Around me, this has finally changed in recent years and mostly it's just old timers still using MPG. (Which is good, not just because metric is easier in this case, but because measuring economy as a ratio of fuel over distance is just plain superior to the other way around.)

Thanks for making this. I've been reading it a ton during my "break" from reddit.

One thing I noticed is that multi-part replies aren't captured by the archive. Here's an example with part 2 of a comment missing: https://ask-historians-archive.netlify.app/posts/zpjnpi.html

Anything that can be done about that, such as detecting comment chains where a person replies to their own comment?

Other than that, this is really a superior way to browse askhistorians. There are no moderator comments to skip over, and no threads with 30+ replies that are just a sea of [deleted].

Are tech/privacy enthusiasts known for being super into Wednesdays?

I'd expect them to be... I don't know, complaining about Prime Day sales today. Or taking about something remotely interesting. And I bet they are, but Mastodon isn't finding it.

Processed cheese is highly meltable. To maintain the shape in the picture, wouldn't the middle of the cheese stack have to be cold?

It looks great, but I think it should give the names of the commenters on each comment for credit and transparency.

Probably imported, but that doesn't make them less real. The ease of transferring accounts will be a major advantage for this platform.

Is this working though? I turned that setting on a week or more ago and I've never received a notification despite getting comment replies. I thought maybe I just didn't know what notifications look like, but I got one when someone mentioned my username.

To what end? This was embarrassing for everyone involved.

Yeah, I wish people would stop spreading this lie, especially when the truth is no better: As reddit's admins, spez and the others explicitly oversaw, tolerated and defended r/jailbait and every subreddit like it on the site, for a period of multiple years.

This is probably the most realistic prediction of reddit's downfall I've read.

There was an article on here earlier that compared reddit to Digg, which I think is way off-base. Digg never had the mainstream userbase that reddit has, and the cause of the current migration from reddit is in no way comparable to what Digg did.

Here @JustinHanagan instead predicts reddit "dying" in the way that Facebook has. Which is kind of a surreal statement, as Facebook is still the largest and most popular social media platform in the world. But almost everyone agrees that Facebook is stagnant or in decline. The coolest and most creative people have left for other platforms. We only stay on there to hear about sales from La Senza and life updates from our racist uncle so we don't have to talk to him in person.

And that's a very plausible future for reddit. Think about all the unusual communities and concepts that make reddit what it is. Love these or hate these, it's the place that brought us AMAs, reddit secret Santa, AmITheAsshole, MildlyInteresting, BestofRedditorUpdates, AskHistorians, WallStreetBets, and so on. All of these were invented by users/moderators, not by reddit.

It's easy to imagine a future where those communities all continue in some fashion and reddit keeps its hundreds of millions of users, but the creatives and visionaries move on. Which means reddit's chances of being home to the next /r/PhotoshopBattles or /r/TodayILearned are hugely reduced.

A thought I've been having that might be more controversial: Star Trek isn't sci-fi.

It's basically a series of morality fables with magical premises. There's always a paper-thin sci-fi explanation, but for all that these matter to the story, they might as well just say "fairies did it."

(And many of Gene Roddenberry's "godlike being" characters, like Q, are almost literally fairies).

There's also its treatment of space. Just as Star Wars' combat was an excuse to do WWII fighter combat in space, Star Trek is an excuse to do WWII submarine combat in space. They're equally unrealistic in that regard.

Shared universes between franchises are a bad idea. I don't mean commercially. They're a great idea if you want to make a billion dollars. But they're bad for storytelling.

Reason 1 is that the story being told is always in service to some other story. By which I mean, the writer has to make decisions that aren't about making this story the best it can be, but about making it make sense in context with everything that's come before it. For example, Batman can't just be a story about a smart, athletic vigilante in a costume. He has to be the smartest, most athletic human being who has ever lived, because he has to compete with, and remain relevant amongst, actual superheroes and supervillains.

Reason 2 is that it undermines the impact of each story because, again, the stories have to be considered within a massive context. In Watchmen, we can imagine the awe and horror people felt about Dr. Manhattan because, like in our world, nothing like him had ever existed. If you put him in the same universe as Superman, he's just another superhero.

Obviously I'm talking about large comic-book style shared universes with multiple authors and largely independent stories. I have nothing against franchises that use other works to expand on previously introduced concepts and do it in a coherent way.