Posts by celtschk
I just looked up what Borland wrote in their user manual of the Turbo Pascal UI back when using a mouse was optional and the UI could be operated also by keyboard (you don't click on the keyboard e...
I just noticed that when you go to the users page and select the age tab, the start of the list is dominated by user names that are obvious spam. While they are not very effective because few peop...
That he has no ambitions to heroism or adventure doesn't mean he has no ambitions at all. It just means that his ambitions are of a different type. Maybe he has the ambition to learn everything he ...
In the hot questions, it is not clear what are actual questions and what are Meta questions (well, if the title starts with Suggestion, it probably is meta). It would be nice if Meta questions woul...
You've already gotten quite a few good answers, but there's one important point that I didn't see in any of them: You can easily omit visual and aural details. If you don't want to tell the age o...
I tried to upvote this answer but my vote doesn't seem to register. Maybe it is because it is owned by System, but then, there are other answers owned by System that already have upvotes. Note that...
Will upvotes on imported posts be included in the authors reputation when that user joins? Or does it make sense to wait with upvoting until the user actually joined?
Your problem could be summarized as follows: If your protagonist's life is really totally perfect in any way, he has no reason to change anything. End of story. So if you want to have a story, ...
One way to make the leaving of that secondary antagonist satisfying could be if it gives a problem for the protagonist. Now how could an antagonist leaving be a problem? Well, it is a problem if th...
As far as I can tell, there is no way to explain the edit you do. There is no field to enter one. Also, in my latest edit, I tried to supply one as HTML comment in my post, but in the edit histor...
I just noticed that some of my old meta questions here are marked as imported on my profile page, although they clearly weren't (they were meta questions about this site; there's no reason why I wo...
I just got caught by something I consider a bug: I wanted to link to a web site, and used the link button above the entry box to do so. After I finished entering (or rather, pasting) the link into ...
I've been away for some time (for personal reasons), and noticed that we now have a category “writing challenges”. Now there are some old challenges in Meta which predate that category, but IMHO wo...
I just noticed a small problem: When editing a comment, you get a miniscule comment box. Fortunately it can be resized.
The Earth was not at its place. That was of course impossible. But Alice had checked all the data several times, and the space ship definitely was at the place where the Earth should be. Except t...
It took me quite a while to discover how to see what was changed in an edit. Some visual clue on how to get it would be a good idea, I think.
One thing I would think about is: Are those things the other person says really unnecessary? They actually might give the reader valuable background information about what the other person already ...
I think there are two important aspects that you should make clear: That you indeed do care about the issue. Your letter is not just a rant, you sincerely are concerned about the damage the issue...
Usually the narrator knows about the thoughts. And the narrator will know that the thoughts are illogical, and thus can distance himself/herself from the thoughts. Of course that only works if the ...
One thing they could do is to ask questions about his home worlds with the intention to find inconsistencies that prove he's making things up. That would as a side effect also make the reader famil...
One additional thought: Maybe the way you give time should depend on whether it is done by the narrator or by one of the protagonists. The narrator is telling the story to a present-day reader, so...
Maybe you could write about the problem of coming up with ideas? Write a story about someone who has troubles coming up with ideas. Think about which solutions he might try, and how those solutions...
TVTropes calls such a character The Watson: The Watson is the character whose job it is to ask the same questions the audience must be asking and let other characters explain what's going on. ...
As others wrote, you cannot make sure the reader interprets your novel the way you want it to be interpreted. However, you still can influence it. You might read your draft and explicitly look for...
Software numbering There are lots of schemes in use, and sometimes software vendors even switched between schemes. The most important feature of numbered schemes (as opposed to pure naming scheme...