I specified forced air in that option to differentiate between other kinds of resistive electric heaters. E.g. baseboard heaters also use electrical resistance, but they don’t blow hot air. As do electric space heaters, which I didn’t include because I assumed no one uses space heaters as their primary heat source.
I rent and I know the wall controller temperature control does make the room warmer when I turn it on (generally it is off from March through November), but there are no air vents, no baseboard heaters, nothing that gets measurably hotter. I speculate that there is resistive heating in the ceiling or floor, but who knows, it could be heated by the Placebo Effect.
We have a space heater downstairs, and my sister has a space heater in her bedroom (for the dog). But I don’t have one in my bedroom – I have a down duvet (which keeps me too warm a lot of the time).
God I miss Jersey.
Just kidding. That was a nice perk, though.
I vote for the friend because when I was in high school running for Secretary of National Honor Society (sigh) my friend and I agreed to vote for each other but I 100% voted for myself. At the last minute, I objectively assessed that I was the right candidate for the job. Then I won by a single vote. I still feel guilty. I will always vote for my friends from now on, I promise.
Re: Santa.
I put for religious reasons, but that’s only kinda true. I consider myself a Buddhist in the sense that I believe the core tenets of Buddhism are true (The Four Noble Truths.) I’m not a purist. I don’t have to have a Buddhist kid or whatever. I celebrate secular Christmas.
I believed in Santa growing up and I wasn’t fussed when I found out he isn’t real. But for some reason it really bothers me to pretend Santa is a thing. For one thing I’m the worst liar you ever met. For another thing my son is young but he already has a very literal and concrete view of the world. Mentally I’m not sure he could take it (I’m already worried about the day he finds out dinosaurs don’t roam the earth.) He doesn’t even really understand stories relationally at this point. And we really wanted to de-emphasize gift giving at Christmas.
We’re not going to ruin it for other kids or try to explain anything. Santa can be that guy at the family Christmas party or whatever. He’s real in that sense. But he’s going to be a thing the way Spiderman is a thing.
Where’s the option for hot water baseboard heat? I chose “natural gas” because that’s how our boiler is heated, but it’s not steam heat or electric baseboard heat.
We have heating oil, and it runs our steam radiators. So, I don’t know.
Yeah, the poll mixed “energy source” and “way heat is delivered” in a confusing way.
I have oil-fired steam radiators. I chose heating oil. 
I did say:
I thought that made it clear that if you have steam radiators, you should choose that option, regardless of the fuel the boiler uses.
For me, MPSIMS has always been the heart of the Boards. It’s where I knew I could share joy, be comforted in sorrow, flirt without shame, be both meaningless and pointless, and just connect with people. I’ll admit to surprise to seeing breaking news in here when I started reading again, but that’s the only one that didn’t seem (to me) to fit. I think some of why the variety of topics hasn’t surprised me is that I rarely think of what the acronym means anymore. It’s just MPSIMS and MPSIMS is home.
Re: the question about hyperlinks to identify people in threads. I voted no, as I don’t need to follow outside links for every name. But I would definitely like a little description. “Phish Drummer Johnny Bravo” or “TV actor Michael Smith,” or “Former NJ Congressman Blaine Tisch.” Something like that would be appreciated. I end up goggling a lot of names people seem to think I should already be familiar with.
Isn’t 20 Questions strictly a yes/no game?
That’s what I thought.
I also thought that the classic categories were “animal, vegetable, or mineral.” Steve Buscemi sure isn’t a vegetable or a mineral.
I agree with both of you! I have seen it played where you get a special dispensation for the first question and are allowed to ask “Animal, vegetable, mineral, or other?” and get a non-yes/no response, but that’s not how I prefer to play it.
If you play original rules, yes.
I always found it boring that way, and tend to set up alternative rules with whoever I’m playing with, if they’ll let me. (Such as, you can also answer ‘sort of’, ‘not applicable’, and ‘not answerable in that form’; and the thing to be guessed can also be an abstract.) But that makes my answer to such questions rather dependent on who I’m playing with. And my answer to that one, under my rules, would depend on whether I thought the people I was playing with would get mad about “humans are animals, damn it!”
Under original rules, I think it’s got to be “animal”; because as others have said, the thing to be guessed has to be “animal, vegetable, or mineral”. I’m not sure what one’s supposed to do with fungi and viruses; not play them, maybe – I expect the game predates knowing that fungi aren’t really vegetable and probably predates even knowing that viruses exist. – yup. the game dates to at least 1823 and the discovery of even the existence of viruses to the 1890’'s.
Steam heat in our old house, and the energy largely comes, I know from annual reports from our utility company, the burning of coal.
Fair point. With that in mind, I wouldn’t mind seeing it renamed, even though the initials are pretty well-rooted in the Doper ethos by now.
In my, I think it was, four-grade class president election, I was running against some other boy. It wasn’t even a secret ballot, I think, but to be a nice guy I voted for him. I lost by… wait for it… a single vote. D’oh!
Exactly. He’s an animal, a mammal just like me.
Well, maybe not just like me…
Here you go:
I think that, after all these years, that problem at least may be finally solved.
I’m very happy with how fast this happened after all these years. I brought it up to the Modloop yesterday and got the go ahead to make the announcement today. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t even expecting it to be approved as I’ve seen changes shot down so often in the past.
Honestly, I shouldn’t be surprised, the willingness to change seems much higher since the move to Discourse. Tags got approved fairly fast. I know they’re not embraced by all, but I think they’ve helped a lot, especially the special tags like Breaking-News and Ukraine-Invasion. The GQ to FQ change happened pretty fast also.
I have no idea how to use a “tag.” Perhaps I could embrace them later. It sounds like something they do on Twitter.
Different tags have different uses, but they mostly act as sub-forums. Do you want to see all the Ukraine Invasion threads, click on that tag.
Need to check all the baseball threads, click tags, click baseball-mlb.
Breaking News defines a special category of MPSIMS.
etc.