Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza

Lots of Riddles threads up and running already!

Hello @Moriel – happy to have something to be “back” to

Just seeing @geordie's, @Dorwiniondil's and @Saranna's signatures put quite a bit of joy back in my life despite the current ... difficulties ... it's a right 1636, this!

@Mojo I'm waiting for someone to solve mine in Riddles in the Dark :smiley8:

I took a shot, good riddle! We're encouraging the Fangorn riddle thread to be LOTR-related only

hi, everybody! It's really good to be back. Hope all is well with everyone.

Things are pretty much the same for us at geordie towers, despite the lockdown. I'm still taking Spot the dragon out for his daily exercise, and atm mrs geordie is cleaning out the mummerkill shed, where Binky has just gone in for the night.

I shall soon be repairing to the geordie library, taking care to maintain a social distance from the thesaurus which wanders the stacks.
Take care, all.

I never frequented lore (in fact, I hid from it, intimidated)-- lurked a bit, mayhap.

But I add a hearty welcome, because it feels wonderful to see these returning names, and it certainly wouldn't be the same without all the brilliant lorists frequenting these halls. Err, pages.

Some days I'm not entirely sure I am who I think I am. But on the old plazza I was smials (but leaving under a cloud I decided to leave that name behind - which is a pity because I rather liked that name).

@Dorwiniondil is here?? Since the first mad rush of people settled in, each familiar name feels like another piece of a puzzle slotting into place. Welcome back! <3

I am finding myself to be as intimidated by Lore as ever, if not more so , but watching it grow makes this whole thing feel more permanent.

Thankee! My life has changed over the past six years or so, and the space formerly occupied by the Plaza has been colonised by other concerns (not just you-know-what), but I'm gradually easing the Plaza back in. And yes, it is good to be back!

Hello all you wonderful beings of Middle-earth - good to be back here with you - even though I've still been in touch with some of you out in what they call the real world; this is special.

simon wrote: ↑Mon May 18, 2020 10:42 amSome days I'm not entirely sure I am who I think I am. But on the old plazza I was smials (but leaving under a cloud I decided to leave that name behind - which is a pity because I rather liked that name).

Glad you decided to come back! I think a lot of us can relate to leaving forums (temporarily or otherwise) under such circumstances.

I see @Lord of the Rings is here too!

I was in the lore forums a lot when I arrived pre-kingdoms, then got distracted by RPing so I didn't participate as much, not to mention that there were so many that knew so much more than me it was intimidating to do anything but read and lurck. Now I'm quite sure I've forgotten most of my Tolkien lore so I'm barely better than a newb.

@Frost I think I lot of us can attest to that. I poked about in the lore forums back in the day (but I too was quite intimidated by the smartness in there), but think I ended up hanging out in the guided RP games primarily. And yeah, I think most of my lore knowledge has gone out of the window by this point too.

It will be interesting/embarrassing to see how much I remember if the Knowledge Halls are able to make a come back

Wheeee, Lorists!

I'm already bemoaning my lack of LOTR lore. It's rather embarrassing. I'll settle on a good reread of everything once I get rid of my stacks and stacks of 'bought-but-not-read yet' books, of which there are many dozens.

The last ME related book I read was 'The Fellowship: The literary lives of the Inklings.' It was interesting, and taught me more about the members who weren't named Tolkien and Lewis. *g*

So good to see the lorists back! I never posted much, but lurked and read a *lot* - Advanced Lore was one of the absolute highlights of the old Plaza for me.

Hot diggity, the Plaza is back!

Hot duggity so is Turin

Turin! Welcome back.

It has been, thanks! Posted in a ... uh ... other thread with the short-short version: Finished grad school, moved states, met girl, moved states to be professor, married girl (same girl), moved states, rejoined Plaza, but the new-and-improved "Narvza."

By the way, I don't recognize your name ... unless I had really misjudged someone from the before time. Was that your old plaza name?

Ahhh, yes, that's the name I was thinking was familiar. I do indeed remember you from the before time. Great to see (read?) you again!

Ahhh ... Turin, you're a wizard again! :)

Indeed! A hat appeared in front of me, and it seemed like a god fit.

Also, forgot - great to see you again as well @Boromir88!

Túrin wrote: ↑Mon Jun 01, 2020 2:18 am It has been, thanks! Posted in a ... uh ... other thread with the short-short version: Finished grad school, moved states, met girl, moved states to be professor, married girl (same girl), moved states, rejoined Plaza, but the new-and-improved "Narvza."

By the way, I don't recognize your name ... unless I had really misjudged someone from the before time. Was that your old plaza name?

Totally raising this thread from the dead but that's awesome to hear @Túrin I seem to recall talking to you at some point before or during my PhD in stats (that's your field too right?) about grad school. I ended up going into industry rather than pursuing academia (partly because of all that state hopping you just mentioned). Glad to hear you're doing well

@Romeran - I just popped on and perused that "What is lore" thread and saw you mentioned statistics. You are indeed correct that I'm a statistician. No longer in academia. The last "moved states" was transitioning out of academia and into sort-of industry.

I vaguely recall talking to one or two people about statistics. Glad to hear your degree went well, and I hope you're enjoying your choice of career! I've been getting into the area of uncertainty quantification, and dabbled in Dempster-Dhafer Belief and Plausibility. One of my current projects is rewriting some analysis code to scale up since we had a problem that was crashing the existing codes that had been written. Long story short it would have eventually required a dataset of in the hundreds of billions or trillions of rows to be stored in memory. Neither Python nor R were quite up to that challenge!

@Túrin I probably went by Indo Rómeran at the time, but our paths crossed only a little during Old Plaza (some PMs about Statistics and some IK debate) so I don’t expect you to have remembered.

I’m very much enjoying my career. I work mostly in decision theory and causal inference now although my PhD research was on manifold learning. I also have worked and written a lot of scalable (generally out of memory) solutions for similar reasons. Our data sets at work are often far too large to fit in memory for most machines (even some of the large clusters!) so lots of tricks with sufficient statistics and the like. Good to see you around and I’m glad to hear you’re doing well!