SFLIS Minutes - March 24, 2004

- We start by discussing whether Home Improvement had an overall plot.
  Then we move on to continuity errors in 80s cartoons like GI Joe.
  Then we talk about McGuyver, Highlander with rock stars for actors, Airwolf,
  and Knight Rider.
  And we wonder - why haven't they made an A-Team movie yet?
- Supposedly, there's going to be a new Disney cartoon series about a poodle
  and a rabbit stuck in the Amazon rain forest.
- We speak briefly about the Anime Festival at the University of Iowa (AFUI),
  otherwise known as Marty Gras, but don't come up with any new ideas or news.
- Anime Detour, the new anime con in Minneapolis, is this weekend.  Judging
  from the hotel info, it looks like the hotel has room for about 400 people.
  Considering that there are almost that many from Minnesota who come to
  AnimeIowa, they'll probably have quite a few more than that.
- Is ICON going to be dry this year?  That's just one of the ideas that's been
  suggested for reducing costs, but it doesn't seem likely that it will be
  seriously considered.  The idea of giving a certain number of drink vouchers
  with each registration and having people pay for their own if they drink
  more than that is a lot more likely.  Or there could be any number of other
  things too.  There's nobody here from the concom to ask, so all of this is
  just pure speculation.
  Still, If ICON were to go dry, how many people would stop coming.  It
  wouldn't bother any of the people here at the meeting very much.
  The problem with alcohol is, due to liability problems, hotels have become
  more strict about the way it's handled, so it costs a lot more than it use
  to.
- Now the discussion moves on to remakes and sequels of movies.  Sequels to
  Indiana Jones.  Seed of Chucky - another sequel to Child's Play.
  What if someone decides to do a sequel to The Passion of Christ?
- Aligned weapons for roleplaying games.
  And then we discuss midieval weapons and what dice throws they would be
  equivalent to in a role playing game.
  And what's an NVN human?  Not Very Normal?
- People had the opportunity to play the Samba de Amiga video game during the
  dinner break at the anime showing, but didn't really get into it.  But
  maybe they would have if there'd been more time, if they watched a few
  other people play it first.
- French keyboards have a couple extra keys.
  For English keyboards, Dvorak is much easier to learn and use, but since
  everything's been Qwerty for so long, it's too late to change now.
- In DOS, at least in older versions, if you hold down the ALT key and type
  a couple numbers on the numeric keypad, it sends the ASCII equivalent.  For
  example, if you hold down ALT and type 13, it sends a carriage return.
  Double Bucky.  What's a double bucky?  CTRL-ALT-DEL is a double bucky (hold
  down two keys before hitting DEL).  There's a triple bucky too.
- Latin is a dead language that's starting to catch on again.
  What's your favorite Latin phrase?
  What's the pyramid for on the back of the dollar bill?  Is it just to provide
  material for conspiracy theorists?
  What do "Annuit Coeptis" and "Novus Ordo Seclorium" mean?
  The Gamers movie has an option for Latin subtitles.
  In Latin, you decline nouns as well as verbs, and once that's done, the
  word order isn't important.  English use to be like that, but it's a lot
  simpler now.  English places more importance on word order than a lot of
  other languages.
  French has a committee for linguistic purity to manage loan words and assign
  gender.  And who came up with the idea of assigning gender to nouns, anyway?
  It seems like a completely useless complication.
  And sometimes words can take on a new meaning unrelated to the old one, which
  eventually supercedes it.  "Wow!  They named this canned meat product after
  bad email!"
  Quote of the week:  "Dictionaries - who cares?"
- After all this talk about languages, we move on to the "paraphrase" question
  from last week.
  And then a couple more words:
  Inflammable - people thought it meant the thing won't burn, which is logical,
  since it follows the pattern of other words (inconvenient, insensitive,
--MORE--(94%) 
              
  etc.).  Unfortunately, 'inflammable' is an exception to the rule and means
  that the thing DOES burn. So  they had to invent the word 'flammable.'
  How is "ciao" pronounced?
- Now people start getting up to leave.  Looks like the meeting's over.