Oh well - I hope I at least got my point across the Stream of Communication... poor little thing can't swim ;P.
It's fascinating how extensively we are able to salvage broken/incomplete/incorrect pieces of information and reconstruct them using context. There's this trivial yet illuminating example of one man telling another "Hey - look at that girl drinking red wine" while making a vague gesture... and his companion immediately understanding that the lady mentioned was the blonde drinking strawberry juice, not the brunette sitting further back and REALLY drinking red wine...

Anyway - I have kept thinking about an adequate parallel and it keeps eluding me. Is there anyone or anything that truly requires a ridiculous degree of consistency ? I keep coming up with "compiler" but that's only syntactic...

One thing that struck me recently (and that seems somewhat relevant) is that (some) movie villains tend to be cripplingly "consistent". One moment of saying "Uh, no - this is all wrong. I'm out of this insanity" and they would've been on a path to redemption, though in order to make that first step they would need to admit that their previous decisions were wrong.
I guess "consistent" people would make poor poker player...

Yeah, they are the spice of Internet messages: they don't change what the content is but accentuate it one way or another ^^. Accordingly - one should find the right type, place, time and amount so as not to spoil the entire meal.
I'm glad you realize that. I've seen people here who seem to dismiss them as childish, redundant or something along these lines... To me that's as absurd as claiming that body language (including stuff like tone of voice, etc - nonverbal elements of verbal communication) is completely unnecessary/meaningless/childish...

Testing - if you've ever worked with software testers you'd know. Consistency is everything to them, a bug must be reproduceable, test cases must be consistent such that the same thing happens every time. They actually get very angry if they can't make the same thing happen twice, it encourages me to add an element of randomness to my code, were it not jam packed full of race conditions anyway.
I actually use them now because I've found people mis-interpret my posts as aggressive, when I'm really not trying to be. Words on their own are actually very blunt, and in a forum where we've got a lot of people with different native languages it's very easy to mistakenly think someone is picking on you.

Actually, blame various movie critics for that kind of consistency, or just general critique of any story whatsoever: The moment any given character says something contary to what he said a hundred pages before, any matter of character development in between is automatically ignored and the new piece of information becomed inconsistent, wrong, evil, untrue to the character and all kinds of bullshit. Well unless the development is spelled out to the consumers of the story.

It's like sex, you know? All is well when you're having it, but when the supply runs dry, you will notice.

It's not that ironic if you asume people uprepped that post exactly because gameon said that.

That would make it not funny but my experience is that posts like that actually do tend to get up-repped and Vestin's posts get repped up or down pretty often.

A great philosopher actually described the inverse as:

"When there's biscuits in the tin, where's the fun in biscuits".

"No matter where you go, there you are."
-Buckaroo Banzai

Jesus, how bored am I? Hijacking threads with Peter Weller references!