'Serenity'
Having a party? Organizing a local F2F? Know something that we all really need to know? Announce it! Want to discuss anything posted here? Take it to Natter. Any natter here will be deleted.
Attention all yarn, floss, canvas, and fabric addicts in the Baltimore/DC area:
Three large craft stores near my house are having their annual Superbowl Sale this Sunday, February 1, from 1 to 5 pm. One store specializes in embroidery and needlepoint, another in quilting, and yet another in knitting and spinning. Discounts are usually around 15% or so.
If anyone is interested in going and possibly meeting up at my place before or after, please contact me at my profile addy.
Elena "The Quotable Buffy 2: Two Quotes Enter, One Quote Leaves." Jan 29, 2004 9:59:04 am PST
It's the end of Xander as we know it.
General favor, please: if you visit any site that has a list of items and allows you to select more than one of them and perform an action (like "purchase" or "delete"), please send a link to that site to me. I'm working on a web design standards project and need a lot of case examples!
Thanks in advance - profile addy is good.
Voting is now open for the following proposal:
Proposal: I (erinaceous) propose that the board agree to individual members allowing their posts to be added to the American National Corpus, in order to further language scholarship and research (and not incidentally make it easier to get "foamy" in the dictionary).
Information on the ANC is at http://americannationalcorpus.org.
How will it work?
First of all, only currently closed threads will be eligible for the ANC. Which ones, yet, are not determined, but most likely Natter, Music, and the Show/Spoiler Threads. Bitches will not be one of the threads (too much personal info). Unamericans/Canadians will not be included, either (supposed to be for American English). FanFiction and San Sacre will not be included (too hard to separate fiction from nonfiction).
Secondly, individual posters have to opt in filling out a form to be located on buffistas.org. Voting "yes" on this proposal does not opt you in! There will be a separate form for that purpose. The form will send me (erinaceous) an email, the text of which is below, giving permission. It will only be available to logged in users and will automagically include your screen name.
Text of Permission Opt-In Form: By submitting this form, I, <screen-name-inserted-here>, hereby grant to the American National Corpus Consortium (ANCC), a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reformat, reproduce, and distribute through the Linguistic Data Consortium of the University of Pennsylvania, in electronic form or any and all media hereinafter developed, my anonymized posts to the Phoenix Board/Buffistas.org as part of a collection of American English-language material. I agree to the terms of use (outlined here) and understand that the collection will be made available to others for the purposes of linguistic education, research, and development.
Thirdly, I (erinaceous) will be doing the stripping out of non-opt-in-ers, so no UnBuffista eyes will see the data until posts from people who don't want their posts included in the ANC have been removed.
Fourthly, the posts, once in the hands of the ANC, will be further anonymized: all screen names and personal names will be replaced by tags that say "SCREEN NAME" and "PERSONAL NAME", essentially.
The posts will be part of a 200 million word corpus of American English, used mainly by language researchers and lexicographers to figure out how people actually write and speak. It's difficult to get online material that is both reasonably good English (although of course I think the Buffistas are more than reasonably good writers of English!) and organized enough to be of value. Contributing your posts will help to advance language research in the U.S. a great deal.
Voting closes Monday at Noon (PST).
Speaking of voting...
I announce the start of the first ever Hellish Cup!
That's right, it's Dawn's turn to die.
Elena "The Quotable Buffy 2: Two Quotes Enter, One Quote Leaves." Jan 30, 2004 3:50:41 pm PST
Pictures from our Friday Night Blue Sun Party at Capricon are up. We're doing it again tonight at 10pm, and showing all the episodes of Firefly in order today. We're currently at the end of "Shindig". Again, any Chicago-area-istas are welcome to stop by. Room 1224. You don't need to register for the Con to attend the party.
Still Dawn.
Elena "The Quotable Buffy 2: Two Quotes Enter, One Quote Leaves." Jan 31, 2004 2:24:17 pm PST
If you have already voted on erinaceous' proposal, well, we messed up and need for you to vote again. The voting period has been extended until Wednesday at noon.
Sorry 'bout that. New server and all.
Dawn's still alive - but for how long?
Elena "The Quotable Buffy 2: Two Quotes Enter, One Quote Leaves." Feb 1, 2004 2:41:41 pm PST
WHY WON'T SHE DIE - still Dawn.
Elena "The Quotable Buffy 2: Two Quotes Enter, One Quote Leaves." Feb 2, 2004 3:30:26 pm PST