What is a Zombie? Why are Code Reviewers so violent and talking about killing Zombies all the time? And what ammo are they talking about? What is a TS? What does RSA mean?
And what other Code Review-specific memes are there?
(As the number of memes grows and grows, and Malachi's wish to vote for the memes more than once, this really ought to have its own meta-question)
Please provide only one, or just a few tightly-coupled, memes per answer.
Meme: Zombies
Originator: Mathieu Guindon (aka retailcoder, lol.upvote, ... and/or Mat's Mug)
Cultural Height: During The Mission
Background: In a (successful) attempt to motivate the community in reducing the number of unanswered questions, a Call of Duty was made in which every unanswered question (no upvoted answers) is to be regarded as a Zombie. Every new question is to be regarded as an incoming Zombie.
Meme: Jamalized
Originator: Jamal ♦ (actually, apparently me)
Cultural Height: All over CR (see this chat transcript search)
Background: Jamal being a frantic editor. And he's fast. So fast, we're all waiting for the day he will edit a bad question title before it's even posted. You never know, maybe mods will have the power to edit post drafts one day.
And he knows:
I don't even pay attention to dates. I just edit like Dr. House takes Vicodin. http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/12505099#12505099
And so "Jamalized" was coined, vaguely meaning "edited". Applicable to any IEditable<T>.
Meme: Java vs. JAVA
Originator: Jamal(?) (to be determined)
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor (as usual), but also in various comments scattered across meta.
Background: Question with the word JAVA (instead of Java) in the title or body, is often an indication that the poster is a beginner and/or that it's a low-quality question. This has led to the separation of JAVA from Java. They are now, at least among the regulars in The 2nd Monitor on Code Review, treated as two entirely different languages.
Examples:
@skiwi Java? No, we're hiring JAVA people. Sorry.
Just don't learn JAVA @Jamal.
Never mind, I realised that you're talking about JAVA, which is not a language I know.
(@rolfl in chat) (@rolfl is among the top Java users here, but he does not know JAVA apparently)
Meme: "Thanks, Santa!"
Originator: Jamal ♦
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: Votes are anonymous. So whenever someone upvotes a post of yours, and you think the voter might be in the chatroom, just say "Thanks, Santa!", the voter(s) will know that was for them.
Meme: TS | RSA
Originator: SimonAndréForsberg (TS), rolfl (RSA)
Cultural Height: star-power
Background: The 2nd Monitor is quite a star-happy chatroom. How many of you know that there's only a number of times you can "star" a chat post - a star cap (like the rep cap and the vote cap, a star cap). And just when you run out of stars to sprinkle, someone posts a comment and you're dying to "star" it - no worries, you can put a theoretical star TS, and then it's possible someone applies a real one (RSA: "real star applied").
Meme: Monking
Originator: Morwenn
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: A morning greeting to the Monkey doing his monkey-business, in other words: monking
Examples: A small chat search
Variations: Monkernoon, Monkevening, Monknight, and the reversed gniknoM sometimes used when one leaves... Important is only that it begins with Monk... ;)
Also sometimes known as Nibjubg in case your fingers are not where they are supposed to be.
Name: Overly long acronyms
Originator: Simon André Forsberg with this message
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: IWNPFETTOLAI (I will not provide further explanation than this overly long acronym itself)
Meme: LOL - AutoStar
Originator: Mat's Mug / Jamal
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: "lol" somehow got targeted at this point here (the first starred lol):
retailcoder: lol (darn, again)
Followed shortly by:
Jamal: lol (don't star that)
And then the tradition was cemented with:
Meme: Yet another linked-list (also nooooooooo)
Originator: skiwi
Cultural Height: The apparent popularity of linked list implementations
Background: The site has received a lot of linked list questions with more coming in over time. It has also led to many duplicate titles and even some duplicate information in answers. Some users even (jokingly?) posted linked list implementations on April Fools Day for review (or just for teh lulz). This was proposed in CR on April 1 by skiwi
Other forms: Yet another fizz-buzz
Meme: [TTQW | TTGH] | TTGTB
Originator: [attributed to] Simon André Forsberg (first TTQW here)
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: leaving the chatroom and/or going AFK isn't something we do often. These funky acronyms efficiently communicate that it's either time to quit work (or time to get home), or time to go to bed.
Related: stack-and-drive (don't do that!)
Meme: Exploding bear traps
Originator: Grace Note
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor, Website Graduation
Background: During the endless talk about Code Review graduation, some were wondering whether Code Review could even graduate some day or was doomed and would close. The answer was as follows:
There really isn't an axe over your heads even now. You'd have to, like, torch everyone on the site and then set exploding bear traps for new visitors in order to drop things low enough to get you guys in any sort of danger zone.
Examples:
ChrisW: exploding bear traps would reduce the number of new users ...
Also:
Mat's Mug: note: torching everyone on the site wouldn't be enough. We'd have to also set exploding bear traps for new visitors!
Or even:
rolfl: That immature side of me really feels that some of the new questions deserve exploding bear-traps...
Simon André Forsberg: @rolfl when in doubt, use exploding bear traps?link
Generally speaking, torching everyone on the site is less used but has the same meaning. But that does not sound half as fun as exploding bear traps.
Meme: Smoking The Documentation / STM
Originator: Simon, in response to a question by rolfl
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: "The documentation." is now a common response to rhetorical question like "What was I smoking when I wrote this?". This is often followed by "STM again?" (Smoking the manual again?).
Meme: Pimping my answer
Originator: rolfl
Cultural Height: Lack of voting on answers
Background: In an effort to increase exposure to under-voted answers, users on The 2nd Monitor started "pimping their answers" for more attention. It can be used for your own answer, answers from others, or even entire questions with good answers.
During the mission this was also referred to as: "killcam"
This meme has been retired by community decision on Nov 25 2014. It is thus considered a veteran meme. Usages may still occur, but the meme has largely vanished from our site.
Meme: We could really use your ammo
Originator: syb0rg
Cultural Height: Side-effects of The Mission?
Related: out-of-ammo and DVLR (daily vote limit reached)
Background: Activity on CR has recently taken a hell of a spike. 40 votes/day isn't enough ammunition to shoot at all the good answers that are thrown at all incoming zombies. Increased activity is awesome.
But basically:
It's a matter of life vs death. We could really use your ammo is serious business.
The bottom line is: we (you & us all) own this site. Let's give it the lovin' it deserves, and make it run on a healthy economy of votes and reputation points, with people putting bounties on good unanswered questions zombies they stumble upon, people coming here on meta and asking questions about the site, where CR is, where it's headed and where it should be. Be Code Review!.
Name: wtf-is-this-shit
Originator: Jamal
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: Often used to point out that, even though some code technically works, it is so bad that it deserves a weapons-grade facepalm. It can also be used to describe a "feature" of a language or program that's just a PITA.
It was popularized by Jamal, skiwi, Mat'sMug, ckuhn203 and yours truly. Its origin is linked to the JAVA meme.
Jamal: @Mat'sMug brb synonymizing [JAVA] and wtf-is-this-shit - Jun 30 8:35 PM
Meme: hello / hi / hey there
Originator: Code Reviewers
Cultural height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: Code Reviewers like to greet each other in chat, and most of the time it's just a casual "Hello" then "Hi @someone". But on days of high activity, some unusual things can happen...
Or...
Or even...
This meme has been retired by community decision on Nov 25 2014. It is thus considered a veteran meme. Usages may still occur, but the meme has largely vanished from our site.
Meme: napalmd
Originator: Mat's Mug (/retailcoder /lol.upvote)
Cultural Height: During The Mission
Background: War against zombies sometimes needs more than a single bullet. When CR forces unite to take down a zombie with multiple answers, the term napalmd indicates, in The 2nd Monitor, that all answers (and the question) have been upvoted.
Of course that only happens when all answers deserve a vote!
Meme: For some values of X
Originator: Probably Phrancis
Cultural Height: The 2nd monitor
Background: It all seems to have started with this message by Phrancis:
I'm a web dev, for some values of web dev. Not many.
Followed 2 days later by Mat's Mug's:
well that works.. for some values of "works"
In the VBA Rubberducking room, followed by a rather explosive usage around the election time, see also the chat search
Meme: JDQ
Originator: rolfl
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: JavaDeveloper is one of the users who has posted the most questions on Code Review1. A JDQ is of course, a JavaDeveloper Question. JavaDeveloper is the first one, and currently the only one, who have received the newly invented Socratic golden badge.
According to a rough SEDE query, at least a total of 9540 reputation has been created on the site thanks to answers to the questions posted by JavaDeveloper.
Meme: phpoop
Originator: Mat's Mug
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: php is frequently used (see "related tags") along with oop. The contraction of the two gave birth to phpoop... only in the chatroom (don't you dare actually create that tag!).
Related: phpoop-security
Meme: German Overengineering™
Originator: Vogel612
Cultural Height: Various questions, answers, and chat messages involving @Vogel612
Background:
Programmers like to abstract and engineer things. Sometimes, it just becomes too much.
German Overengineering™ is exactly what it sounds like, a case of when something has become overly-engineered.
Meme: Friday
Originators: rolfl, SimonForsberg & Jamal
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: On Jan 10 2014, the following remark was made in the chat room:
Simon André Forsberg: It's Friday, Friday. Gotta write code on Friday. singing
And then this happened:
Since then, it has been customary for Simon to tease on Friday:
hey @Malachi... you know what day it is?
Shortly followed by the YouTube video, and shortly afterwards by OMG, nooooooooo or noooooo or even "You monster." from others present in the chat room.
Since this meme has begun, some users in the 2nd Monitor have rebelled and begun posting this The Cure video instead.
Meme: @CaptainObvious (the bot formerly known as @StackExchange)
Originator: Unknown/CR chat community
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: @CaptainObvious is the ever-vigilant bot/feed of Code Review, faithfully posting new questions, good and bad, to The 2nd Monitor. It is often interjected @CaptainObvious with a comment about the latest question, such as...
Jamal May 5 6:44 PM | @CaptainObvious Could use a better title. This one is kinda useless.
rolfl May 1 3:16 PM | @CaptainObvious Code is obviously broke, Captain Obvious.
skiwi May 1 8:37 PM | @CaptainObvious Strange... replacing a standard utility with his/her own invented implementation and then complaining that the performance is too low.
Simon André Forsberg May 4 4:54 PM | @CaptainObvious Holy mother of over-engineering!
Phrancis Aug 1 6:59 PM | @CaptainObvious Optimizing the title of my question
RubberDuck Jul 28 4:45 AM | lol. Looks like it. Poor @CaptainObvious must get lonely when we're not around.
@CaptainObvious has even been witnessed, some say, to drop by and say Hi! on rare occasions...
Meme: Stargree, Stargreed
Originator: Skiwi
Cultural Height: A conversation about a duck
Background: Stars shine in CR chat quite fluently, and it sort of means that we either find it funny or that we agree, if this were Facebook they would be Likes
Meme: Malachi'd
Originator: Malachi
Cultural Height: Whenever there is something that is amusing or entertaining and it hasn't been starred yet.
Background: Starring everything that is amusing or entertaining.
Alternate Meaning: Randomly posting a picture or video in chat to break up the monotony of the daily grind at work.
Meme: HOLY CARP
Originator: Malachi
Cultural height: Mostly The 2nd Monitor
Background: Dec 2013
It may or may not have been a typo, but as recorded in The 2nd Monitor originally:
Malachi Dec 11 '13 11:10 PM 105.1k close votes needed on Stackoverflow. holy carp
It has since been used fairly frequently, often in SHOUT CASE, to express surprise or astonishment.
PS: It is also occasionally accompanied by other references to fish like "mackerel" and such.
Meme: Using puns in the titles of burninate-request questions on Meta.
Originator: @Jamal
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor & Meta
Background: Meta is often a seriously fun place, so any kind of humorous jokes we can slip in here and there go a long way.
@Simon: A burninate-request without a pun? How is that even possible?
Examples:
I don't think this tag [functions] quite well
Is [methodology]'s methodology worthy of burnination?
set [null] = null? (or "Burninate [null]?")
action = ([ternary-operator] == bad_tag ? "burninate" : "keep")
Meme: BTW
Originator: [attributed to] Malachi, Mat's Mug and Others
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor
Background: The many ways of backronymizing btw led to the introduction of the BTW enum:
public enum BTW{
Bananas,
Bring,
Normal,
Waffles,
Wall,
Web,
Win,
Woods,
Work
}
This list does not claim completeness. New interpretations may happen any time
Also somewhat related: TTQW
Meme: s/old message/new message/
Originator: Unknown
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor.
Background:
Often in chat, a user will type something like this:
s/funny/annoying/
In response to what another user said as a "joke edit". Occasionally it is actually used to correct spelling.
The meme comes from GNU's SED.
This meme has been retired by both community decision and Simon's decision on the 1/11/2015. It is thus considered a veteran meme. Usages may still occur, but the meme has largely vanished from our site.
Meme: "INTERRUPT"
Originator: Possibly @EthanBierlein
Cultural Height: The 2nd Monitor.
Background:
Whenever Duga posts the message:
RELOAD!
in chat, a user might say:
INTERRUPT!
@Mat'sMug: it's a race-duga-to-chat thing