Fhaolan

Best laid plans of ponies and fishies. This is going to be... an interesting event.

I have to admit to being a bit puzzled about the question... I don't see why 3D art wouldn't go under the Visual Fan Art category? Unless I'm missing something?

That... wouldn't surprise me, to be honest. It's amazing how fragile these web-browser programs are.

Ha! As if anyone will remember that one, @Jeric!

That's not a hint, that's a neon sign...

There's a bit of a history behind the 'Banished' rank, but the current incarnation of it came about because I was working towards fixing a feature that was removed during the last big forum software upgrade. Basically, originally when someone was banned their profile got locked so that non-staff couldn't access it. This meant that staff could ban someone and they didn't need to clean up whatever might be publicly objectionable on that profile. For reasons I don't quite understand, that feature was removed by IP.B during that big software upgrade. So I created this special rank, re-using some assets that were left behind by a previous admin, with the intent of putting into the profile template code something along the lines of "If rank=Banished, display 'Nothing to see here, move along'" but I was having difficulty figuring out the templates and other higher-priority stuff was piling up. The same thing happened to the character database displays, as the templates just weren't behaving in a reasonable way to me. Before I figured it all out, I retired from staff.

Character vs Usage categories is a hard choice, as different people will have different criteria for choosing emotes. Personally, I would rather go with Usage categories, but coming up with those categories in the first place is going to be a challenge.

How about this?

Just as a possibility, but not a certainty, there was a legal privacy thing in Europe that just went into official effect called GDPR. A lot of software got updates to deal with it just ahead of the deadline that didn't get the QA testing they really needed (I know this because I was working for Microsoft until recently, and got a front row seat to their GDPR efforts). Not that the software companies weren't aware of the issue and didn't have the time to properly test the changes if they had started work right away, but that they were hoping it would get cancelled before they were forced to deal with it and ran out of time. So if there are a lot of login issues all at the same time in a variety of completely unconnected environments, I'm suspicious a lot of them link back to that.

I had a default avatar of buffy made up for implementation: But I think it fell through the cracks. It's not something the regular admins can do, as it's not part of the admin control panel. A tech admin has to actually upload the file into the backend.

For a second, I was thinking that link was going to go to one of my wife's knitting/crochet/weaving sites... @Jeric

Yes, and I've also driven some old cars that were *fully* manual, with non-synchronized transmissions, manual chokes, and even one that had to be cranked to start it, which was something of a challenge. I have *not* driven any of the 8+ gear transmissions used in bigger commercial/military vehicles, oddly enough. My dad was a trucker for awhile, so I'm aware of the *concepts* of running a rig like that, but it's just something that hasn't come up for myself. I think about going and getting certified on that class of vehicle occasionally, just for the experience.

Airplanes would probably still be invented, in fact it might have been earlier than it was for us. Since it would be known that a flying creature could carry the weight of people, most of the resistance to the *idea* of airplanes would be gone, and it would be mostly a 'can we make an engine light enough' problem to overcome. In addition, if dragons were real, that means physics would be slightly different to allow for such a big flying animal, and mechanical flight would have been easier to achieve. In the same way tractors replaced draft animals, cars replaced carriages, airplanes would still replace dragons. Unfortunately. So in the modern era there would be people breeding and using dragons for sport and entertainment, just as they do with horses now.

They've been trying to reboot a lot of stuff that I grew up with, probably because the people with money to sink into these projects are about my age, but ... not doing so well with it, in my opinion. Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica were the odd-one-out of the 'recent' ones, becoming popular on their own, but those are exceptions. They tried to reboot Bionic Woman, Knight Rider, Charlies' Angles, the A-Team, Avengers (the other one), the Prisoner, Get Smart, Land of the Lost, etc. Some of those reached as high as 'okay' in my mind but that's about it. Mainly a lot of these shows are products of their time, and what made them popular/good are things that don't seem to resonate with current audiences. Or at least, the producers of the remakes don't believe they do, so leave that stuff out. From the 60's to the 80's, most of the shows were short story driven, meaning the important thing was the situations the writers/producers wanted to put on the screen. From the 90's on, stuff is far more character driven, where the story is a long drawn-out arc and honestly isn't that important. It's how the characters react to it, and each other, that is the primary focus of the show. The characters in the old shows, when looked closely at, were actually rather flat. Any interest in them was either from the fact the characters went through a lot of story throughout the series and accumulated interest from that, or the actors themselves had enough charisma to insert into them. Old shows rebooted tend to miss the idea of the short stories, and attempt to backstory the characters to death in order to create a pre-existing interest. And they overload on exposition trying to shove all that backstory in as fast as possible. The best ones in my opinion, are the ones that the writers/producers/actors really, really want to do, not because they want to rehash the original series, but because they have something to say using parts of the original to springboard off of. Without an idea of what you want to *do* with it, leads you to the bland and uninteresting Knight Rider reboot and things like it. So I wouldn't really wish that on anything, unless I personally had an idea of what to do with it, what stories to tell. I have some *ideas* around some Space 1999 stories, but to be honest they make *no* sense in a modern context.