Natter 35: 51 in Emperor penguin years.

Oh! I had a dream last night that my family was having tea on the lawn, when I noticed that there were king penguins that had somehow made it up to the roof of the ground floor, and were looking in the windows of the first floor. (I rushed up there, of course, to get a better view, accidentally letting in a group of fairy penguins in the process.) I recall being mildly disappointed that they weren't emperors.

Anyway, I vote for the penguin.

What is this? The "Medium" version of democracy?

"Son of No Name!"

I saw it in a vision.

Democracy? Who promised you democracy?

I like Penguin Years.

Gus, "bullshit consensus" as a handy phrase came about this way...

We used to just consense on minor administrativa. And if fifteen or so people all said "Yay" at roughly the same time it was so. Unfortunately, there are time zones, and people who didn't happen to be around during the consensus objected to this process. They grumpily called it a "bullshit consensus" which was one of the things which lead us down the road to voting on stuff.

So, technically "bullshit consensus" would be a consensus that doesn't represent everybody, but merely the folks who were around at the deciding. Since the deciding was not scheduled it wasn't really a true mandate.

However, during the long, arduous, constitutional congress of the Buffistas it just became the handy phrase for things decided by consensus. More or less acknowledging that (a) this isn't a true mandate but (b) it's such a minor thing that it's better to not vote on the tiny stuff.

Thanks for the straight answer, David. Understand, all, that I'm not challenging how Buffistas works. It does work. That puts it way ahead of a lot of things.

I'm curious, though. It seems like minor issues are not decided here by authoritarian means (by fiat) and I'm interested in what that process is.

I could easily just continue to observe.

Thread naming is now moving into fiat status. Development issues are mostly fiat. It really does vary.

I know this was discussed round about when I first showed up, last year, but how many "active" posters do we have? IIRC, there's about 1600 people registered, but I'm curious how many post regularly.

(If answering that requires anyone to do any research, plesae don't bother.)

Democracy? Who promised you democracy?

Yeah. We just guarantee the cracy part.

Roughly speaking, it's about a 10th of that, Stephanie (possibly a bit less). A long time ago, we had about 125 regular posters. Some names and faces have left, and some have come, but it's about the sameish size.

I had a program, now lost, that reflected that regular posters were some 40 in number per main thread, with some overlap between Natter and Bitches, and pronounced isolation in Lit, (show threads), and Music.

All of which is why "Son of Thread With No Name" rocks.

see what I did there?