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I came across a wooden word watch on kickstarter. I like the concept and the approach this chap took (see also Imgur post on building this watch).
I have little more to add except that it felt like the kind of thing I'd love to see on SN, so here you go. I am not involved with this in any way and am (currently) not even backing this. But I just thought it was a cool story about engineering, and I figured it'd be appreciated. I am also kind of hoping some of the reactions will point out similarly cool small tech projects, so please do respond in the comments with your own SoyVertisements of cool, independent projects!
[Ed Note: We occasionally receive self-promoting story submissions. These are quickly noted as 'bin spam' and unceremoniously passed over for use on the site. (You can well imagine what would happen to the submissions queue were we to do otherwise!) This submission does not seem to fall into that category, but it does nudge up against it. The tipping point for my accepting this story is based on three factors. The submitter has been with the site since nearly its inception. (Submissions from ACs and newly-created-accounts just for submitting a self-promoting story will continue to be looked at very askance.) Another factor is the submitter receives no remuneration or benefit from the submission. Lastly, the item in question does look interesting to me and I think it would be of interest to the community. So, if you do [not] want to see more stories like this, on occasion, please indicate so in the comments. Also, any suggestions as to factors to use to assess these kinds of submissions for acceptance are also appreciated. --martyb]
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday August 24 2017, @03:06AM (9 children)
I'm the king of classy self-promotion. But the editors turn down a lot, a lot of my submissions. The stories about myself. They loved a story about the Japs. And one about the Chinese. So I was thinking, it's because they're Dems. Because the Dems run a lot of these sites. Secretly, they run them. But I saw -- did you see? -- the editor says he doesn't like self-promotion. Does NOT like it. Which is crazy, that's the biggest reason to go on these sites. On the social media. Self-promotion is the key to success. You get your name out there, you make some money. The bigger your name, the bigger the money. I like to say, show me someone without an ego, and I'll show you a LOSER. Having a healthy ego, or high opinion of yourself, is a real positive in life! And self-promotion is a huge part of that. Of keeping your ego healthy. Every day, I stroke my ego. Sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours. Great for the health, great for the wallet. #MAGA 🇺🇸
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Thursday August 24 2017, @02:55PM (1 child)
Is Donald Trump Actually Just a Really Mean Teenage Girl?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4xdSr7x8yI [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Friday August 25 2017, @05:55AM
No, he lacks the maturity of a mean teenage girl.......
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday August 25 2017, @08:29AM (6 children)
Before you blame the editors - of which I am one - why not look at the quality of your submissions?
Firstly, the idea of a submission is to generate an intelligent debate regarding some topic of interest to the majority of our members. A political diatribe written from a obviously biased point of view hardly meets that requirement. We are not here as your own personal publicity machine so let me know when your attempts to gain sufficient publicity here to generate real financial income come to fruition. If you submit something based on a topic of interest, intelligently researched and well written, you have a very good chance of having your stories accepted. You might see your submissions and comments as humour - unfortunately, that is not a view point that is widely shared.
As an aside, if we look at the number of 'good' political submissions i.e. those generating a good discussion with a large proportion of intelligent debate, you will find that they can usually be counted on the fingers of one foot! You are not the only person that believes that 'us' versus 'them' equates to a good discussion - we have several submitters who fall into the same trap. Their submissions also tend to go the same way as some of yours have. I personally believe that having a 'political' nexus has led to a discernible dumbing down of this site and the loss of some of our community who have gone elsewhere to find intelligent discussion.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Friday August 25 2017, @04:53PM (5 children)
I didn't blame the editors. I do blame the editors. Who don't want to be my personal publicity machine. But love to help Cafebabe make money. Because any submission that goes to her site SAILS through. Submissions that say "something about your browser made us think you were a bot." For those who don't know, anything that goes to Science Daily. The latest being the cartilage story. Which went through yesterday. And has three tweets on it. THREE. All of which say nobody cares about the story. LITERALLY saying nobody cares. But the editors did a favor for Cafebabe. Yet again. Not the only time yesterday, the story that says good cholesterol is bad goes to her site too. And on Wednesday, there was the story about the mosquito candy. For which the submission also says, you were a bot. Rubber stamped by the editors to give Cafebabe more traffic. Which is OK, that's their right. I don't expect any better. And stories that advance the Dem agenda also SAIL through. There's one up right now. The Daniel Kammen story. A disgruntled employee writes "impeach" and it's news. Apple promises to build a plant in the USA, not news. Rejected! Everywhere else it's news. It's OK, I'm used to it. I'm the ultimate outsider. But I'm winning. It's very hard to get my message out directly. But when the #fakenews industry puts out the hit pieces -- hit piece after hit piece -- it gets my name out there. It gets me publicity. Builds my brand, tremendously. More and more people hear my name. And more and more respect it. 🇺🇸
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday August 25 2017, @05:35PM (4 children)
So, if I understand your complaint, you are objecting to stories that have been published on Science Daily regardless of content?
The connection with Cafebabe is puzzling to me. She did not submit the story, it was submitted by somebody else direct from IRC. It is a science story - the very basis for this site. We are supposed to covering science and technology stories predominantly. The fact that only 2 ACs and yourself bothered to comment might simply be because it was informative yet not posing any facts that warrant further discussion. That happens. You don't have to like every story. Simply move on. I found it interesting (although I was not involved in editing this story) but there is nothing intelligent that I wish to comment on the topic. If you don't like science stories, don't read them.
Furthermore, as 2 of the comments are discussing 'cartridge' as a poor attempt at humour, shows the level of intelligence of some of the more recent arrivals to our site. Funny that they always want to post as AC, rather than risk having their comments directly attributable to them. At least you were moderated up as 'Funny'.
The reason that your input is suspected of being a bot is probably because you are operating through a VPN. Use of a VPN is considered by many sites to be one of the possible indicators of activity that is undesirable to them. If you don't like it then either drop your usage of a VPN or accept that not everyone on the internet believes in the same degree of anonymity as you or I might do. All we can do is accept that. I have absolutely no problem in accessing that site with my genuine IP, but get the same problem when I attempt to view it using a VPN.
Now, returning to Cafebabe. If you think that we actually decide on the merit of submissions by who is connected to the company publishing them then you are just wrong. That is not how it works - indeed, I am not aware of any direct link between Cafebabe and Science Daily, so it is not something that I could have taken into account, is it? Submissions are graded entirely on content, and we try to pick a wide cross-section of topics so as not to repeat our stories more than already happens with inadvertent dupes. To bring it back closer to your own current predilection for stories, if we had something political that wasn't relating to AltRight/free speech/Nazis then it might stand a better chance of being picked, because we have covered that topic rather a lot recently.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Friday August 25 2017, @10:02PM (3 children)
I didn't tweet on the cartilage story. You keep saying it was me. It wasn't me. It was Aristarchus and the ACs. And it wasn't a debate. It was supposed to generate a debate? It shows up here, it raises the PageRank of Science Daily. If no one looks at it, it helps out Science Daily. Which is Cafebabe's site. According to what she wrote here. Which I read, but you, who have been here much, much longer didn't read? OK. You say you don't know that, what can I say? I can't tell you what you know. You're busy, you can't read everything. I take your word for it. But she said it's her site. And I doubt, I doubt I'm the only one who read her tweet saying so. She didn't submit those stories. Neither did I. You say it was my input, it wasn't. The submissions say "we think you're a bot," no story in them. Full of garbage, you call it content. The cartilage one, the one about the mosquito poison, many others. The editors fix them up. Totally replacing the contents. The content. And they sail right through. Rubber stamped. You say it isn't so Cafebabe can make money. You say it's because they're science and technology. LG Electronics is technology. They're opening a factory in Michigan. I send in my submission. On Tuesday, I sent it. Friday afternoon, it's still waiting. Not hard to fix, the editors don't like the fact that it's bringing lots of jobs, they can take that out. But it sits. Apple is technology. The biggest technology company ever. As far as money. They promised to build 3 plants in the USA. I send in the link, I say it's beautiful. In the department, which the editors ignore, I say it's beautiful. But the story, it's an interview of me. By the WSJ. Rejected. OK, not everybody can afford the WSJ. Not yet. But it was big news about technology. Which happened to make me look terrific. Rejected, why I don't know. The WSJ asks for money up front. Science Daily doesn't. They still make money. Which isn't a bad thing. We all need to make money. Cafebabe included. Nothing wrong with that. Honestly, she probably needs it more than I do. I'd love to make a lot more money, but I don't need it. I love it when people talk about me. And some will remember my name, and when they're at a bookstore they'll pick up some of my books. When they go to vote they'll look for my name. Because they talked about me. And I didn't ask for stories about the Nazi movement. I didn't submit stories about Nazis. Because they would be very slanted. After the editing they'd be slanted. And every day I work with Nazis. And Jews. Most everyone in the White House is a Nazi or a Jew. There are fine people on both sides. Very talented. Can you imagine if a story came up with my name on it, slanted to favor one over the other? Half my staff would quit. If they caught wind of it. Right now they get along, I like it that way. Believe me, more chaos in the White House is the last thing I want. Thank you. #MAGA 🇺🇸
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday August 26 2017, @07:02AM (2 children)
Apologies for the mis-attribution. We don't tweet on this site - we make comments. I think that you are looking at the wrong site. We do not have a 140-odd character limit, in fact we encourage more intelligent discourse than that favoured by many Americans and others elsewhere today.
The submissions appear prefectly normally to me - there is a story and it is the one that we have published. The fact that you can't see them suggests that the problem lies at your end and not with the site in question, however, I cannot explain why this should be so.
Personally, I don't give a damn who owns the site. We publish stories based on their content and not on who is connected to the site.
We are editors - we are meant to edit the stories to make them suitable for publication. The alternative is that we just don't publish them, but you seem to object to that as well. If you want more of your stories to be published please allow me to give you a few hints (although I don't think that you actually need them, you are just stirring things). Take out the bias from your submissions. Look at the problem from both sides and ask the questions without getting too emotionally involved with either side. Don't keep banging on at the same topic. Once we have discussed it let it rest for a while before putting another similar submission into the queue. And finally, just because it involves the USA doesn't mean that everyone on our site wants to know about it. We have a very broad community from all around the world. We have heard and discussed the problems relating to the right/left wing disputes. The USA needs to sort it out. Period. But you know all of this because your record shows that you can make very good submissions.
One factory being opened in the US doesn't make it a story worthy of worldwide attention. Furthermore, it isn't time critical and might still be picked up when we are running short of stories. The editors don't even think about how many jobs it might or might not bring to the region. We couldn't care less about how much money it makes for the site providing the original story. We judge them on how much interest we believe there is in that particular story, and whether it is original and likely therefore to generate some community interest.
And now we get to the nub of the complaint. You are not being published as much as you would like. Please remember this is not your personal web site, nor Cafebabe's.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday August 26 2017, @02:12PM (1 child)
You looked at the submission about the cartilage and the submission about the mosquito poison. You're saying they look normal to you. They're not normal. I see them and they're not normal. They're normal because they were edited heavily. I look at them, I don't leave this site, they say something about being a bot. I look at other submissions, they don't say that. Original submissions. The Science Daily ones say that. A lot of them say it. I'm not published as much I'd like. I'm published more than I expected. For a Dem site, much more than I expected. Very happy that the story about #HurricaneHarvey went through. Getting the word out! Which saved thousands of lives. Very important and they didn't sit on it. I thank them for that. And I love going past 140 characters. Don't have to use the dots. One time I had to use the dots. Tremendous! 🇺🇸
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Saturday August 26 2017, @06:46PM
Ah, I think I understand your point, but you do know that Arthur T Knackerbracket is a bot don't you?
It is continually scanning numerous RSS feeds to provide source material. But if you go to the link provided in that original submission then the page displays correctly. We have to use a bot to gather more material when there are insufficient stories worth publishing or to enable people to submit things directly from IRC. Whenever I run the bot on my computer at home, I collect over 300 potential stories per day, and after sorting I can usually identify over 100 that would make the front page. The majority of them are parse perfectly well by the bot, but there are a handful that do not because they play naughty with javascript or prevent viewing by some other means etc. We still look at the link that the bot has provided though, because more often than not they can lead to very good stories. The clue that the submission has been at least partially automated by a bot is when the submission is by 'exec', or the story attribution is to Arthur.
All submissions go through exactly the same editing process; automated submissions are not favoured over those from the community, in fact the opposite is true. We prefer to use stories provided by the community.
The output of the bot is available to all to use. Whenever people say that they cannot find stories worth reporting then we can direct them to a whole pile of possible stories that just need the minimum of effort on their behalf to sort them out.