User talk:Opabinia regalis: Difference between revisions

As we age, it’s no longer ‘’as slow as’’ Christmas...

Christmas tree worm, (Spirobranchus gigantic) Atsme📞📧 13:33, 17 December 2017 (UTC)
	Time To Spread A Little Happy Holiday Cheer!!
	I decorated a special kind of Christmas tree in the spirit of the season. What's especially nice about this digitized version: *it doesn't need water *won't catch fire *and batteries aren't required.
	Enjoy the Holidays and have a prosperous New Year!! 🍸🎁 🎉

Now that's my kind of tree! Real ones are pretty but such a hassle. I hadn't thought about this in a long time, but when I was a kid dawdling about something and my parents were trying to hurry things along, I'd say "I'm coming!" and they'd say "So's Christmas!" When did it turn into "Holy shit it's almost Christmas already??" Opabinia regalis (talk) 03:38, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Opa - way too cute to resist!

Earlier today I tried to take a holiday picture with cats in Santa hats. It went... about as you'd expect from that video :) Opabinia regalis (talk) 04:49, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Need Love's Labour's Lost cat

We didn't find a cat for ignore, but here's the next wish. DYK ... that Nicholas Nabokov composed an opera Love's Labour's Lost, setting the same play by Shakespeare as the fictional hero of Mann's Doctor Faustus, "in a spirit of the most artificial mockery"? - for when you give up, but smiling. Any cat with that expression? - Cantata of the week: Ärgre dich, o Seele, nicht, as in Mensch ärgere dich nicht. Good any day. - I just made my new year's resolution: to start 2018 with a friendly vision. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 11:38, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

That's a tough one, I'm not quite sure what "artificial mockery" would look like! (I'm probably hopelessly uncultured, I've never read the play, or seen it performed, or seen any adaptation of it.) From the last few posts here I think you should get Iridescent's cats to do a custom-order job ;) Opabinia regalis (talk) 17:43, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

How about this one?

I can do you "surly irritation" or "crazed staring", but as with OR I'm not sure what "artificial mockery" would look like. (I also have never seen or read the play; in my experience, "Elizabethan comedy", let alone "Shakespeare comedy", are automatic oxymorons as most of the reference points are meaningless to modern audiences, and linguistic drift means that the nuances and puns on which the jokes rely are all lost; it's like reading a stand-up routine in machine translation. Even in 19th-century works—from a culture much closer to our own—the comedic elements which rely on immediate familiarity with the situations described all need to be thought through to understand them, breaking the immediate instinctive recognition on which comedy relies; without adaptation The Diary of an Nobody or Die Fledermaus are as alien to modern audiences as kabuki.) This character looks appropriately supercilious. ‑ Iridescent 18:10, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Thank you, both. The Thomas Mann is a long novel, and I also never saw the play, nor the opera, but liked that a real composer set Shakespeare's play in the mood another writer had described. I love the cat's expression, and the word "supercilious". I hope I won't need it ;) - "it is enough" more or less says the same, but I feel that people might need even more cultural background to understand how outrageous, almost screaming, that melody is. - Did you know this cat in a box? --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:40, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Superciliousness? On Wikipedia?? No way! ;)

As for available cat expressions, right now I've got one "fuck you human, why'd you wake me up?" and one "the minute you take your eyes off me I'm going to eat the Christmas lights". Opabinia regalis (talk) 04:47, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

I can do you "I don't like this unexplained change of routine so I'm going to hide in the cupboard" if that's any help. ‑ Iridescent 19:54, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

Well, the expression I mean is rather: I give up, not ready to waste more time here, so look at it from the elevated level of mockery. Yes, admit, there's something supercilious about it. - Missing the right cat, I used my green heart. A cat would be better. Christmastide goes to 2 February ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 10:58, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

How about him?

This one seems to have an appropriate attitude of bored sneering. ‑ Iridescent 19:54, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

He's not bad ;) - I need to write a bit more, or we'll destroy the nice arrangement below. I just imagine him as a answer to this, but so far decided that the only possible answer was to really ignore. O du fröhliche ... - If I planned a conspiracy I would remember to keep it secret and NOT send thank-you-clicks, but now I don't, - I have enough to do writing articles. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:47, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

done --Gerda Arendt (talk) 20:57, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

Oh, I like him. But I have a soft spot for old-man orange tabbies who are sick of everybody's shit. One of my favorite childhood cats was like that.

I've been out of town visiting family, so right now the cats are alternating between "Yaaaaay you're back!" and "OMG YOU ABANDONED US". Hey, guys, I was spying on you by webcam the whole time and I know damn well you spent all day sleeping. Opabinia regalis (talk) 04:25, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

Season's Greetings

Hello Opabinia regalis: Enjoy the holiday season, and thanks for your work to maintain, improve and expand Wikipedia. Cheers, -- ψλ ● ✉ ✓ 16:53, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Spread the WikiLove; use {{subst:Season's Greetings1}} to send this message

Thanks Winkelvi, happy holidays to you too! Opabinia regalis (talk) 17:44, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Happy New Year, Opabinia regalis!

Happy New Year!

Opabinia regalis,
Have a prosperous, productive and enjoyable New Year, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia.
-- ψλ ● ✉ ✓ 23:15, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

   Send New Year cheer by adding {{subst:Happy New Year fireworks}} to user talk pages.

Disgorging

File:The messy eater.jpg

Did somebody say lunch?

Regarding disgorging, I was the subject of the original comment (at Wikipedia talk:Administrators/Archive 15#Proposed change - No paid editing for admins). The context was even more hardline than "if a friend offers to buy me lunch for bringing the article lunch to FA, and we both follow through", since in that case at least there would nominally have been offer, acceptance and consideration. What the antis were trying to push through there was something that would have redefined "hey, I really liked that lunch article you wrote five years ago, let me buy you a beer" as paid editing (If you got a more significant "thank you" after the fact and it was at all feasible for you to disgorge yourself of it, I would expect you to do so). Never underestimate just how hardline the anti-paid-editing stance of the free culture puritans is. ‑ Iridescent 07:53, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Never. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 08:23, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Thing is, I'm kind of a free-culture puritan myself, in the "information wants to be free" sense, but the attitude toward free beer tends to be more on the gorging side of things... :) Opabinia regalis (talk) 04:57, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Notability

Hi, Opabinia, is Skinnera independently notable enough? And, best wishes for 2018:)Winged Blades^Godric 12:43, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Species and widely accepted taxonomic groups are usually notable. In this case I might ask if this genus is mentioned in independent sources. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:09, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

@Winged Blades of Godric: My username is deceiving; I'm not actually very knowledgeable about fossils. (I should've named myself after my favorite protein. But there are so many cool ones!) But as JJE says, most accepted taxa will be notable, and I don't see any reason this one wouldn't be. It can be found in the expected places (e.g. the Paleobiology Database) and is discussed and referenced in subsequent literature on Ediacaran fauna. I don't have time to really read any of the references, but it seems the three-fold symmetry has attracted some interest, with some debate over whether Precambrian medusoids should be considered cnidarians or not. The only thing that jumps out about that article is that the sentence "Wade (1969) described Skinnera as a medusa, though, other sources classify it as a Trilobozoa." is sourced only to Wade's original paper, which can't be right. (A modern classification as a Triradialomorph can be found in this paper.) Opabinia regalis (talk) 04:42, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

Hydroxyproline question

Do you by any chance remember what paper you ended up reading when we were discussing hydroxyproline here? I'd like to pass the reference along to my archaeologist brother-in-law who is doing related research, but my reference in the article is a book by Bowman, who doesn't give further references. Presumably you found some relevant paper? Anything you can remember would be great. Thanks -- Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:45, 3 January 2018 (UTC)

You're banned until you give your cats more treats

By order of arbcom. Arbitration Committee (talk) 18:19, 4 January 2018 (UTC)

per Special:Diff/818629656, this account needs to make a dummy edit in order to re-enable email. might as well make it a good one! --Opabinia