@Chronos, you said that my comment did not belong in that thread. I very much disagree.
You see, I did live on a frontier. Sure a modern one, but very much like folks from 100s of years ago. And I treated strangers with the same caution as you would 100s of years ago. I had only myself to rely on.
A big reason we moved to a more urban area was there was no help where we lived, and we are getting older, retiring. Police closed at night, no officers on patrol, ambulance might make it to that house in the winter in about 1/2 hour, maybe. Same with the fire department.
IMO, that thread was extremely light on any references to the past - which clearly was the main thrust of my OP, with only a couple of references to any historic citations. Instead, the vast majority was current anecdotes. My impression is that such anecdata is generally not considered appropriate in GQ - at least until the factual question had been developed to some extent.
pjd, my OP was 4 paragraphs long. I suggest that in an FQ OP, 2 sentences at the end of the 2d of 4 paragraphs does not accurately reflect the overall intention of an OP. I think the current anecdata focussed on certain trees over a clearly outlined forest. But I am not a mod, and folk may differ.
I tried to restate my OP’s intention, yet it was largely ignored. In the past, I have experienced my OPs being taken in directions other than what I intended, and have largely learned that is just something that happens. But I thought FQ a little different. So I asked the mods, and Chronos posted a reminder. Yet people continued to report their current experiences/impressions - without relating them to the “frontier.”
Sorry you felt dissed, enipla. You know I greatly appreciate your input. But here, your responses were way more in the territory of IMHO than GQ.
“are” is present tense and would invite the views of enipla and all other modern frontierpersons. If you only wanted the hypothetical of “imagine you are that person on the frontier in olden times” then you need to use the conditional form
If you were such a person and you see someone coming on horseback.
Thank you Dinsdale, and I really don’t feel ‘dissed’. Just that I have factual observations from now that would even relate to the past. Real life experience.
I know what it’s like to be approached by a stranger when you live in a remote place. I doubt the human feeling has changed in the course of a few hundred years.
Depending on your make up, and previous experiences. The response is two heaping spoonful’s of caution.
How does that work? Aren’t there plenty of FQ threads asking what xyz was like, or how people behaved, in some historical period? Do all such threads invite respondents to discuss their weekend plans?
I was expecting persons (needscoffee has me questioning my use of the word “folk”) to provide examples of journals or history books they had read, describing personal interactions on the “frontier.” While “frontier” is open to definition, the one that came most readily to my mind, and for which I expected there to be the most sources of material, to be the American West, in the 2d half of the 19th century.
Your OP was full of your own opinion and speculation, so you poisoned your thread from the start.
Let’s say I wanted a thread asking what wireless carrier has the best speeds in most of rural Alaska. And I post in FQ hoping for a factual answer, with studies, statistics, charts showing coverage, etc. Yet I fill up my initial post with my opinions about various carriers and stories about what I’ve experienced in the past. What kind of responses would you expect? If I’m essentially hijacking my own thread with IMHO content in my first post, I should not expect to get FQ answers.
Yes, what Atamasama said. I was really surprised you had posted it in FQ, based on the text of the OP. And once i realized that, i stayed out of the thread, because i didn’t trust myself to stick to FQ answers.
(My early-ish post to the thread was responding to the OP, not to the forum. And after i posted it i felt it had been inappropriate for the forum. But honestly had no idea what would be appropriate.)
I thought I expressed few “opinions” other than my suspicion of a certain meme. What you characterize as speculation, I thought were simply discussion provoking questions.
Continually reveals a gap in my understanding that I so consistently misunderstand how the forums around here are supposed to work. I keep trying - but also keep getting it wrong.
We all make mistakes trying to figure out how to properly draft an OP. I certainly do. And a number of the conventions we have are not intuitive. FQ in particular can be tricky. I don’t blame you in the slightest.
If only more did the same. I checked a random thread:
and it’s filled with personal anecdotes and posts about what kind of milk posters like to drink. Given how much economic activity is tied up in the dairy industry, it should come as no surprise that there’s a robust body of literature on dairy shelf life. I haven’t waded through the muck of that thread far enough to tell if anyone knowledgeable about this research contributed or if anyone capable of rubbing together the few brain cells needed for a Google search was able to muster one.
We can certainly treat FQ as story time but it seems we already have other parts of the board for that. Inconsistent moderation (or mods actively contributing to story time) is going to invite more of these responses, and then complaints when someone occasionally does bother to try to stop them.
I think that question had been answered factually, before the chit chat took over. I’m sure there is tons of hard data on shelf life of various types of milk when held under commercial storage conditions, but that’s not how people generally interact with milk. And home storage varies a lot. The time i cared most about the shelf life of milk was when i was without a fridge during a Princeton summer.
