User talk:NateBumber

Welcome to my Talk Page! To save time, you can call me N8.

Please remember to sign with ~ so I can see who you are.

– N8  ( ☎ / 👁️ )

Forum post
No problem, but in the future, if someone has replied to or referenced your post, you must correct it in a new post, not in the original. This is to avoid confusion. Shambala108 ☎  00:46, October 17, 2019 (UTC)

Re: 10000
Hi, I'm not going to go over every point made in the original forum threads, but my main concern came from comments (or quotes) by the author regarding other people using his licensed characters. This was mostly mentioned in the original post, so we don't have a record for it, but that was my concern, that the freedom with this licensing would lead to later abuse. Since you've participated in many inclusion debates you will probably have noticed that there are users on this wiki who will vote yes for inclusion for pretty much anything that comes along. There was an earlier inclusion debate (and I spent a lot of time looking for it and still hope to find it) where User:CzechOut decided that the story in question was not worth including because of other issues it would cause (and, since I can't find it yet, I don't remember the details). Sometimes we have to vote against something because including it isn't worth the trouble it could/will cause.

And please don't nit-pick my words into claiming that this decision now means that Benny and Iris, two long-standing series on this wiki, should be declared invalid. They are not even remotely similar to this case.

As for your questions about Death's Head, I didn't close the one of those that allowed inclusion, but it was established long ago that most of the Marvel stuff is not valid, just because one or two stories are.

Basically what this one boiled down to is that three admins felt this work did not follow our requirements, and while I tried to address several points in my closing post (obviously not making myself very clear), it's the issues raised by these three admins that pointed me in the direction I took.

Hope this answers your questions. Shambala108 ☎  22:42, October 23, 2019 (UTC)

"The Minister of Chance"
I didn't know it at the time, but I certainly do now. Thank you nevertheless!

And indeed, I intended to restart the inclusion debate on it when I'm fully caught-up, although actually, you might do it, if you're more knowledgeable about it than ?

See — don't know if you're aware — there was a Minister of Chance inclusion debate, closed because… the author doesn't have the rights to the Time Lord species, and so this technically cannot be the same Minister of Chance. Which, I mean, is IMO an unbelievably weak sort of rationale given that by this same reasoning Iris Wildthyme and Faction Paradox should be invalidated en masse even though the decision in both these debates was that no, the character is still the character even if the story isn't specifically allowed to say they're a Time Lord. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎  15:21, December 13, 2019 (UTC)

Re: NPA
Hi, there are a couple of things I want to say about the post in question. I have noticed several times in the past that you have gone to great lengths to make sure someone isn't offended by something you've said. Hopefully you would appreciate having admin input to protect you from someone who might accuse you of personal attacks.
 * First of all, I was merely trying to restrain some of the crap that we had in the first two versions of this debate, where we had people constantly accusing each other of off-topic, personal attacks, etc. My main goal was to keep everyone else on track.
 * Second, while your reading of Tardis:No personal attacks makes theoretical sense, it has two practical flaws:
 * First, only admins can block people, so obviously admins have a say in the matter.
 * Second, many new users don't realize how strict we want to be about personal attacks. Many sites allow all kinds of rude crap out there, to the point that some people think that's the norm. That's why admins have to step in and define personal attacks for people who don't realize that we don't allow that.

Thanks for your attention. Shambala108 ☎  01:19, January 12, 2020 (UTC)


 * Yes and that balance is better than Universe C, where people get offended easily, even when one of their edits get reverted, and run to an admin complaining of personal attacks by users who never meant such a thing. Shambala108 ☎  03:27, January 14, 2020 (UTC)

It would have been impolite not to respond
Oh, Nate, the ever polite, ever sincere editor, who always tries to follow all wiki policies and the general rules set out in Wikipedia. At least, here on the wiki. Outside, you are free to say exactly the opposite (as I demonstrated with "nobody wants a free for all" on the wiki vs. "there is no gatekeeping" outside the wiki) example. You can even summarily criticise and condemn the whole wiki community, as if you are not a part of it. But, just like there is no explicit policy against self-publishers, no explicit policy against publications on blogs, there is no explicit policy against hypocrisy. In fact, there is a policy for hypocrisy. Help:Assume good faith prohibits anyone from even suggesting that the reason for the discrepancy between your behaviour here and your behaviour outside might be because of an ulterior motive, such as, for instance, "I'm working on a project that may or may not turn into a new Doctor Who spinoff. If it did, I'd obviously rather it be valid on the wiki than the opposite."

- NateBumber on his goals in inclusion debates

Nor am I allowed to treat your repeated attempts to get some personal information out of me (see, e.g., the second attempt to get me to do a podcast) as phishing. Asking once I could understand. But insisting after the first rejection? How does this comply with the FANDOM Terms of Use, specifically this part: "You agree not to use the Service to: Post or transmit any communication or solicitation designed or intended to obtain password, account, or private information from any Fandom user"

- ToU: No private information solicitation

A user was recently indefinitely blocked for exactly the same attempt (see the block message from CzechOut at User talk:Time Lord). Of course, a podcast is a much more fertile ground for extracting private details. But some form of external communication was clearly required to initiate the process. You would have gotten some personal data on me one way or another, were I to agree. Since I am not allowed to suggest foul play on your part, I guess, we will have to wait and see whether FANDOM cares about protecting my personal information from unwanted solicitation.

I truly admire how you and other authors learned to weaponise T:SPOIL against disclosing your conflicts of interests. If somebody is hiding their involvement with a particular person or publisher, as the claim goes, the wiki policy bars them from disclosing this, until at least the publication of the story. In the meantime, they are free to participate in the inclusion debates, edit relevant pages in preparation for the publication. On the other hand, if somebody calls them out on the apparent and provable conflict of interests, T:SPOIL is used to quash such complaints, even if the complaint provides absolutely no details of any stories. It is truly beautiful in its simplicity. Of course, you personally always claim to be a Wikipedian and follow their best practices. But their policies on disclosing conflicts of interest Conflict-of-interest editing on Wikipedia, which by the way relies in part on US federal law and, in this part, is not optional,---these policies you summarily ignore despite me repeatedly informing you about them. As I said before, this wiki has no policy against hypocrisy.

It is also beautiful to see how T:FORUM is used to disqualify any information critical of the author/publisher whose validity is being pushed. One is not allowed to compare the case under consideration with the past practices because they are supposed to be "off-topic". So, in cases when the only source of information is a blog fully controlled by the author, validity is almost guaranteed. Well, in case of initial sloppiness, it happens after the blog is cleaned up based on initial criticism.

Needless to say, none of these applications of our rules to cover up any negative information were envisioned when the rules were written. Firstly, because authors were not envisioned as an active party in these debates. Secondly, because it was hard to imagine an episode, or a printed book, or an interview printed in DWM modified in order to better fit our validity rules.

A case in point is a cover artist notified that his post is preventing the validity of the anthology and immediately removing the offending language. Of course, he added a hashtag "Oh no not dw fanart again", where he generally keeps fan art of TARDISes, the Thirteenth Doctor, etc. But I am sure that he will be quick to remove that too, after being notified of the lapse.

I congratulate you on pioneering the Credits for Edits scheme, a symbiotic relationship between editors here on the wiki and small-time publishers, whereby active defenders of the publisher are awarded with authorship and, who knows, maybe even editorship. As you explain your involvement with writing the Faction Paradox, "when I was lucky enough to be asked to write for [the Faction Paradox]"

- NateBumber on being invited to contribute

Assuming this was not similar to Russell T Davies inviting J. K. Rowling, to be asked to contribute... You are very clear in the interview that you had no writing credentials ("My main creative outlet is school! I do also have plenty of fiction and nonfiction writing projects in progress"). The only plausible explanation for the preferential treatment is that it was a reward for your FP advocacy here on the wiki. (Which, before you accuse me again, is not illegal or against the wiki rules.) Seeing your success, it appears that others are following in your stead. (I personally think that Borisashton has definitely earned at least one story.) This scheme benefits both editors and publishers. The only loser is the credibility and reputation of the wiki, if it tilts too much in favour of publishers represented by editors. But clearly this is what the community wants.

Another danger, which I keep returning to, is hypocrisy. During the last period of unpleasant inclusion debates, three years ago, multiple writers professed how closely related FP was to DW (see Thread:206566), how it was definitely the same universe. Funny how after CzechOut proposed a compromise, in the name of peace, suddenly FP authors started sounding differently "The Faction Paradox universe is all about breaking the familiar and the loved, the things we’re nostalgic over. We can argue and debate all day about how connected/disconnected FP should be/shouldn’t be from Doctor Who..."

- Another wiki editor/FP author on FP vs. DW

So it is a different universe now, with the explicit purpose of breaking things we love, like Doctor Who. You might say, this is just a speculation on my part. Alas, the next phrase is: "FP was always about breaking Doctor Who."

- Another wiki editor/FP author on FP vs. DW

You might say that breaking here was meant in some benign, possibly metaphorical way. It is explained: "Taking the comfy aspects and tropes and characters and just destroying them. Running them through meat grinders, tortuous paths through shadowed valleys."

- Another wiki editor/FP author on FP vs. DW

While people like me, who do not want our beloved franchise destroyed and run through a meat grinder,---we are called small people for not wanting it.

By the way, was this why you decided to co-opt Steven Moffat's character Amy Pond (The Girl Who Waited) in your own story? To destroy and run through a meat grinder? Or simply to subvert? I mean you called her Wade (A Farewell to Arms) and I'm sure no copyright infringement has occurred. And you did not even need to edit her in. There are always eager editors caring more about your authorial intent than that of Steven Moffat or Tom MacRae. If an FP writer wishes to subvert/destroy/grind a character from new Doctor Who, this wiki sure seems open for business.

But I would like to return to good faith and wiki rules. You recently created a page The Rise and Fall of Señor 105 (novel), supplying it with the note "The first five chapters of the novella are comprised of Blair Bidmead's 2012 novella By the Time I Get to Venus, or, Recuerda, which was the third release in the Señor 105 series." Now, as a true connoisseur and practically a PR representative of Obverse Books, as well as one of the participants of that old debate, you must have been aware that the community deemed this invalid in Thread:117545, based on an explicit statement by the author regarding this very 2012 novella. So might I ask why, against the existing community decision and explicit author's wishes, why did you create a page for this story as valid, without a community discussion? Must I continue assuming that this policy violation is not in any way influenced by your connections to Obverse Books? And would you show good faith by putting an invalid tag on the page, cleaning it up from in-universe pages and, if there is some new information not taken into account in the old debate, starting an inclusion debate?

Note that both Arcbeatle stories and this novel were basically smuggled onto the wiki bypassing inclusion debates. Are there more of these?

Secondly, there is one Faction Paradox creation whose validity directly contradicts our rules. "some reference works — will present "biographical" or "historical" information about characters and situations in the DWU in a non-narrative style. Maybe this will be information on the back of playing card or a an article that's a kind of "pseudo-history". None of this is allowed."

- Fictional information presented non-narratively

I am talking, of course, of The Book of the War (novel). Lawrence Miles' description of it perfectly fits the description above invalidating it (the following quotes are from Miles' interview):

"*it's not exactly a "collection". It's more a sort of guidebook
 * even if you record it as a straightforward history rather than as a novel
 * it's an encyclopaedia to the War Era universe
 * It's got a structure rather than a plot, the way history's got a structure or a Bible's got a structure.
 * it's fake-history rather than prose"

As the person assigned to be responsible for FP three years ago, would you show good faith by putting an invalid tag on The Book of the War, which is in clear violation of our validity rules, cleaning it up from in-universe pages and, if you think our validity rules should be changed, starting an inclusion debate? Because there is no inclusion debate that validated specifically The Book of War. Its appearance on the wiki, once again, was in circumvention of our rules.

Since you always care so much about the wiki rules, including the validity rules, I'm sure you would show good faith and prove your own impartiality with respect to both The Rise and Fall of Señor 105 (novel) and The Book of the War (novel). Because choosing otherwise would be tantamount to showing that you prefer to side with a publisher rather than with our wiki rules. Amorkuz ☎  01:21, January 19, 2020 (UTC)

Early life response
Hey, man. I just wanted to start my apologising by how I reacted to you edit. I don't know what came over me, but I just saw red and tried to revert it. I guess I was acting out because some pages I made got deleted with no reason given, aside from one editor asking what their purpose was, and I was probably taking some out that pent up anger out on a page I didn't see the point of. That was no way for me to behave, and I apologies for it. There's just been so much negativity on the wiki lately. Unregistereds labeling the Thirteenth Doctor as invalid, users lashing out at each other in talk pages about the Master's page, and an actual neo-Nazi spreading their hate on their talk page. It's just getting a bit much to take it, and I think my judgment got effected by it.

Anyway to get to the point, while I still disagree with a separate page just for the Doctor early life, I don't see the point of opposing it if it what the majority wants, so I'll abide by that, and I look forward to helping to work towards getting the stub tag removed by updating it the best I can, but I might not know what I'm doing most the time, but I'll try my best to be an asset.BananaClownMan ☎  22:57, February 24, 2020 (UTC)

'A Lady Doctor?'
Hi there. Apologies for the weird question, but on July 21, 2018 at 15:50, you edited the 'Thirteenth Doctor' page, referring to the Iris Wildthyme short story 'A Lady Doctor?'. I cannot find reference to this story anywhere else on the internet? Are you able to confirm that this story exists? Many thanks.


 * Thank you for this link - Been searching everywhere for it! All the best. Zzzzzaappp ☎  14:36, March 13, 2020 (UTC)

Article Expansion
Hi N8, you seem like a person who knows a lot about obscure Doctor Who spinoffs. Is there any LGBTQ+ characters from Faction Paradox or another series connected to the Whoniverse? Trying to boast the pages a little bit. Never Forget The Day The 456 Arrived ☎  01:28, March 28, 2020 (UTC)

Merge proposals
hi i saw you put merge signs in men with the bent nose and the doctor (tomorrow windows) we talk about that long ago with admnins fatal death and death comes to time not considered valid by this wiki thanks my friend

no problem my friend thanks

Check on
Hello, User:NateBumber. I just wanted to stop by and check how you were doing in these trying times of self-isolation?BananaClownMan ☎  09:53, April 16, 2020 (UTC)

Question about FP wiki
Hey, I was curious if the FP wiki would be interested in the differently formatted plot summary I did for Warring States. It's probably a bit too "cute" for this wiki, and it's very sensitive to the whitespace in the actual markup, but I think it fits the book better. I don't know what the FP wiki's rules are for things like this, or even if you really have plot summaries (I couldn't find any), so I figured I would ask. Najawin ☎  09:50, September 7, 2020 (UTC)
 * Just for future reference, the "preview" functionality has different margins than the actual site, which made it slightly a process of trial and error to get everything to line up. But it should be moved over now (even if it's every so slightly off due to how impossible it is to get whitespace to line up), so thanks for the go-ahead. Najawin  ☎  03:01, September 12, 2020 (UTC)
 * FYI after the migration to the new software the color scheme is completely messed up. Najawin ☎  07:57, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

The Book of the Enemy
So I've been working on summaries for most of the The Book of the Enemy short stories, and when I'm done with that I plan on doing a small amount of category re-organization. But something I noticed is that not all of the stories explicitly lay out who the enemy is supposed to be. Since you contributed, I figured I'd ask you. Were you required to give a suggestion for who the enemy was? First Draft is a beautiful story, for instance, and I can see the argument for the Stories becoming the enemy, but it just seems forced, and I don't want to force every story to have to have an explanation for the enemy when I go and re-organize things if they don't have to have one. Najawin ☎  09:16, September 19, 2020 (UTC)
 * Just clarifying if you ever decide to get back to this that this question was for me writing and wondering how to include First Draft (short story). In the end I did something different that I think is more helpful. Cheers. Najawin  ☎  18:50, October 2, 2020 (UTC)
 * Oh, the thing I did different is the note at the bottom. I was trying to figure out if every story had to have a reference to "The Enemy" so I could actually include the Piebald Man as one, or "the stories". Instead the note sorta does that for me, since the story is so ambiguous. (And it also solves the problem of Life-Cycle.) Najawin ☎  19:13, October 2, 2020 (UTC)

"The Doctor (Battlefield)" replay
It's how I interpreted the Shadow of a Doubt webcast, where he is mentioned to have "claimed he was the last". Plus, the "Merlin" Doctor is not depicted as having a death scene, while the "Relic" Doctor is nothing but a death scene. But, you would know more about this than I do, so I defer to your opinion on the matter.BananaClownMan ☎  20:36, September 28, 2020 (UTC)

Sandbox
Hey!

I've been going through your sandbox of stalled threads and closing them as I'm able — not only for general housekeeping, but to allow us to leave "Discussions" behind as cleanly as possible — if that is indeed what we decide to do as a community once the dust settles.

Ergo, do I have your go-ahead to take rows out of your table as I take care of them?

(Also… See Talk:Mark Seven for a much grimmer affair also concerning a sandbox of yours.)--Scrooge MacDuck ☎  19:11, October 2, 2020 (UTC)
 * Oh, definitely. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎  19:32, October 2, 2020 (UTC)

TWP
It's out in the UK, and while I'm not in the UK, that means that we in the US can order it as an ebook. If I were you I'd skip ahead to Paradox Moon. Najawin ☎  20:42, October 15, 2020 (UTC)
 * Definitely the last story in my copy. I think the idea is that most people who read the book will have no clue what's going on if they don't read The Paradox Moon first. Najawin ☎  20:44, October 15, 2020 (UTC)

Re:Speedy rename
Oh well, User:Doug86 beat me to the task. Nice to see that you've already moved the links though; I'll only tidy up the title, and then our job's done. OncomingStorm12th ☎  19:51, October 17, 2020 (UTC)

Apology
Hello, User:NateBumber. I wanted to apologies for taking information from your sandbox when merging information onto the Mark Seven page. It wasn't my best moment, and I feel bad about it. I guess the problem that caused it was that I don't mind it when people edit my own sandboxes that I was blind to how other users feel about their own sandboxes. Either way, I shouldn't try to excuse what I did. I just wanted to let you know that I'm sorry and if there's anyway to make it up to you if you're upset about it, just let me know and I'll try to do it.BananaClownMan ☎  22:42, November 2, 2020 (UTC)

Re: DWBIT Dalek Wars edit
Concerning the former point: very thoughtful of you! Will get to these as soon as I can. Concerning the latter point: phooey! Thanks for letting me know (if that includes e.g. your Discord account, I had sent you a DM or two there of late, I believe), and I hope you get that sorted out soon. --Scrooge MacDuck ☎  22:55, November 10, 2020 (UTC)

"Thinly-veiled Doctors"
I just looked though User:NateBumber/Sandbox3, and I'd like to suggest adding Dr Oho, El Jefe, and Paul Bowman (although the story he is from isn't currently covered by this Wiki. Epsilon  📯 📂 20:45, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
 * The erotica novel "The Stranger" is where Bowman is from. Najawin ☎  20:57, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
 * More specifically, the aforementioned novel was first published Virgin Books, written by Portia Da Costa. It featured "Paul Bowman" (the Eighth Doctor) and Claudia Marwood. The events of The Stranger were then briefly mentioned in Father Time and The Gallifrey Chronicles. Epsilon  📯 📂 21:07, 24 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Oh, and I found Pavo, which'll fit nicely in the "thinly-veiled Masters" section. Epsilon  📯 📂 14:10, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Then, for "thinly-veiled Doctors," there is also Doctor Moon… Scrooge MacDuck ☎  15:58, 20 January 2021 (UTC)
 * Also, life-spores are (really) thinly veiled Xenomorphs, so, worth adding. Epsilon  📯 📂 20:20, 6 February 2021 (UTC)

Astra
Thank you very much for the tip-off! I see it has already resulted in coverage of the crossover stories. Borisashton ☎  17:59, 10 December 2020 (UTC)

Re: signature stuff
Admittedly, in the creation of my signature, I had no guidance from a template, tutorial, or otherwise. It's an amalgamation of various other User's signatures, most of which from Community Central. The signature was the result of a process of mashing together other signatures to see if it worked (most times, it didn't).

Here's a breakdown of my current signature, if you want to see how it works, without going through the source code of a talk page:  Epsilon  📯 📂  

Thanks for the compliment, by the way! Epsilon  📯 📂 21:09, 19 December 2020 (UTC)

Merry Christmas
Hello, there. I just wanted to stop by and wish you the merriest of Christmases, and a Happy New Year. BananaClownMan ☎  14:16, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

Advanced Research Investigation
Hey Nate, no problem! I couldn't help myself. Unfortunately, I've literally never heard of the Advanced Research Department before, so I don't really know anything about it. Definitely interesting, and I'll keep my eyes peeled. The Department seems to be a Justin Richards creation (most thoroughly explored in ]), but I bet you could just ask Parkin about it; he's very approachable. :) [[User:TheChampionOfTime| CoT    ?  22:29, 12 January 2021 (UTC)

Re; Black Eye
Hey, sorry about creating the page already. I'd been under the impression that the Black Eye was a subject which wasn't going to get a page anytime soon, so I'd just figured I'd make it. The eye has a lot of names in Adventuress, so I had an overall look at how the Eye is named across novels and found that the phrase "great black eye" seemed the most common (with the phrase's use across The Gallifrey Chronicles being a key factor in my decision) and that stories such as The Domino Effect and Sometime Never... used the phrase "great eye". However, I definitely wouldn't be opposed to naming the page as you suggest, and I'd support that if you put a rename on the page. Cheers. CoT    ?  20:35, 19 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks, but it's not as spectacular as it'd be if I could make an image of the Shalka Master's eyes the Firstpic! There's also a bunch of typos which I'd fix right away if the new editing interface weren't so annoying... CoT     ?  20:55, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

TV21 edits
Please don't worry about stepping on my toes! Any help would be greatly appreciated.

There aren't any stories in particular that I haven't planned to create. There's little information on stories like Solar Danger already existing on the web, never mind ones like From Special Agent Peter Ayliffe. This has made forward planning basically impossible so I've just been going through the issues chronologically (I'm currently at #83) and creating any stories that deserve coverage plus adding The Daleks Stop Press info. I'm generally only creating pages for the stories themselves and the characters therein, however, so there are plenty of concepts with redlinks I don't plan to touch although I realise this sort of coverage might not necessarily be the most interesting. The same goes for most plot sections.

All that being said, if you want to do some stories, I'm happy to talk about it some more to try and find specific candidates. User:Scrooge MacDuck is working through the Fireball XL5 "Astra assassination" arc at the moment and I think there are a few sequential 21 stories coming up which feature Nikita Bandranaik. Borisashton ☎  18:52, 26 January 2021 (UTC)


 * If you want to do something more Anderson-based, the pages for International Rescue and the Thunderbird crafts will need expanding/creating at some point and there are also the "cover" stories that tie-in to Solar Danger to do. As long as there's a clear plan as to who does what, I'm fine with you doing pretty much anything. Borisashton ☎  04:01, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Forum machine broke
I still don't quite understand what's actually going on with the forums but there seems to have been some sort of massive irretrievable data loss and now a lot of your userpage is left without any context. Are you planning on clarifying this a bit more because I'm genuinely interested to see what you have to say but all I get are redlinks. NightmareofEden ☎  15:05, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Formatting
Oh, while it might be improper for me to do so, it's the only way I can edit long pages due to the sh*t-show that is the UCP. When there's a space between paragraphs, it messes up the text cursor so much. Epsilon  📯 📂 18:27, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Re Charity publication
These lines were deleted after I had already recorded the information and planned to add it in after reworking it into a sentence, but you beat me to it both times. RadMatter ☎  18:31, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Against Nature
I did a poll. I offered to do Romance. Nobody voted for it. So here we are. I have some background in South Western culture/history, though, like, I say that as someone who is still very very white, so I'm not going in completely blind. Just like 99% blind. Which should be fun. Part of the reason I've pointedly refused to summarize This Town is because I don't think I understand it on a structural, literal level to explain to people what's happening. Let's see if I feel like I can understand this. Najawin ☎  05:06, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Also re:Schattenfroh, Doctor Who/FP's relationship to physics has always been very interesting. The whole Eye of Harmony/Attack of Ignorance thing basically confirms Von Neumann Wigner as being the correct interpretation of QM, which is not really how it's treated elsewhere. (And also annoys me, because "Inconsistent Histories" is a great name for a hypertext book that literally changes while you read it.) Logopolis is sort of obviously heavily inspired by Vienna Circle adjacent work, even outside of Gödel, and it anticipated the development of Ontic Structural Realism. Also, you know, the sly references to string theory in, say, The Book of the Enemy that aren't particularly compatible with Cosmology of the Spiral Politic. So the physics here doesn't seem that out of place in terms of its weirdness or fringeness. But dear lord the rest of what that book is alleged to be doing from your link. And of course I'll be told "it's better in the original German" were I to try and get a translation. Najawin ☎  08:36, 3 February 2021 (UTC)


 * I check in from time to time. I'm the person who asked about formalist works in FP/suggested a story in a vector field. So, on QM, let me stress strongly that I, as someone who does know a fair bit about various QM interpretations, think the entire project is a waste of time due to other metaphysical and philosophical commitments I have (ie, I'm a structural realist), Pilot Wave Theory ain't dead yet. First and foremost, the proponents of Bohmian Mechanics have repeatedly stressed the oil droplets are at best metaphors for what they think happens and not even very good ones, as the pilot wave lives in an abstract configuration space, not real space (similar to normal QM). (This is why the theory is so nonlocal, it depends on every particle at once and then maps them to physical space.) Some have tried to get around this, but the standard formulation of BM is still the configuration space one. iirc Shelly Goldstein called it an interesting toy but nothing to take too seriously back when it was first making headlines during a conference. But even if we put all of this to the side, there was an experiment published in 2017 that showed you do get double slit behavior, it's just highly dependent on experimental setup. Unfortunately, nobody ever hears the rebuttal for something like this, they only ever hear about the killing blow to the heterodox theory.


 * I was unaware of the Glossary, and I'm sure parts of it will be helpful. As for Sandbox5, I'm not sure whether it's entirely appropriate to simply add in the information like so or create a page. Certainly there's no disagreement on most of the fictional authors, and none of the ones in Sandbox5. The author biography for Wilhelm Liebknecht being treated as a valid source is, quite frankly, causing real problems for everything else. If it wasn't, we could play it off as a joke, a pen name with a funny biography like the others. But treating that one in universe and the others out of universe (while also treating two of the Interlock authors as OOU and the rest as IU) is just causing problems. But that really needs to wait for the forums. Najawin ☎  19:08, 3 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Also, given your recent edit, when you have the time and inclination, Talk:Aztec calendar could use some input. Najawin ☎  17:09, 8 February 2021 (UTC)
 * While I don't want to use the wiki to talk about non DW stuff too much, there's actually a famous paper from the 70s that calculated the Bohmian trajectories for the Double Slit experiment and precisely recovered the experimental results. If you have access to a way to get a pdf of this - back some undisclosed number of years ago through an institution I was affiliated with in an undisclosed way they let me download a pdf that I still have - I recommend Quantum Physics Without Quantum Philosophy by Dürr, Goldstein, and Zanghì. Probably not worth buying, you know how textbook prices are. But if you want a comprehensive survey of BM literature as of a decade ago up until, say, late undergrad to early grad level, maybe a little past, it's a good work, and has great bibliographies for if you want to look further.


 * So actually I think we should wait on that one. I've come to the belief that a good deal of our problems as of late are the intersection of the real world production and the N-space production and churning out a slew of single target band-aids to those things doesn't, to me, seem efficient, when we can figure out larger scale policies on how to deal with this issue which the wiki sorely needs. Najawin ☎  17:58, 8 February 2021 (UTC)

Already my longest summary and I'm only 3/4 done. Who could have guessed that a story that's heavily metaphorical and semantically dense would be difficult to summarize? (I'm hoping I can trim it down in an edit, but for some of it, if I want to retain the structure of the book there's only so much I can do.) Najawin ☎  19:41, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Re: FP metafiction
Most fascinating! I'll be checking all of this information out now! Thank you! Epsilon</tt>  📯 📂 14:43, 3 February 2021 (UTC)

Re: Ulysses
All done now! Scrooge MacDuck ☎  18:03, 5 February 2021 (UTC)

Re: Twitter comments
Oh dear, do you really? Sorry, I'd lost track. Mind you, you should probably tell RadMatter that, unless you are asking me to post a further clarification on that Twitter thread. Scrooge MacDuck ☎  04:58, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

Re: TOSotW
So as I had mentioned on Scrooge's page, the summary of The Empty Days suggests that there is a version of TOSotW that might merit coverage in the same manner as Smoking Mirror. Whether or not this is the same version as what's on Lulu is a different question. Interestingly, this was published before Against Nature, so it's not entirely clear that he knew at the time that there would be a somewhat happy ending to this saga, which absolutely complicates the issue and means this might be us airing dirty laundry. (God we really need the forums) But, again, having not ordered either of them at this point, because I want a clear plan of action first, I don't think I'd ever support coverage of TOSotW past an unproduced page (and more for TOSotW in general than for the specific version we can find on Lulu). Najawin ☎  17:23, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I'll be honest, without reading TED I have no clue as to how different the final drafts of TOSotW for Random Static and the finished product of Against Nature were. Which seems to be the relevant issue, whether these are distinct books that bare the same fundamental DNA (twins, if you will, one of them stillborn), or one book that has undergone significant changes over its lifetime. Najawin ☎  18:08, 15 February 2021 (UTC)