User talk:Rezalon/Sandbox2

Bring Your Daughter to Work Day vs Bring You Cat to Work Day and the problematic placement

This concerns an event marked as "Several days before May 16" on the timeline (both the current version the the rewrite one). The original paragraph mentioning either of them was posted on aperturescience.com and was later expanded two times, once for gameinformer article and once for Portal 2: Collector's Edition Guide. Each of them moved the B-Y-Daughter-T-W day event originally from Several Years Later (after 1996) to being set in 1998 to being set in 2000s, as this is the final state this event is treated on the timeline currently. However both Lab Rat comics (in the most way) and Portal 2 (in the minor one) put a doubt to that placement with the introduction of B-Y-Cat-T-W day. Below I've listed I'm pretty sure all the sources anyhow referencing these two days:

Source	Content	Event
aperturescience.com 2007	Several Years Later - The untested AI is activated for the first time as one of the planned activities on Aperture's first annual bring-your-daughter-to-work day. In many ways, the initial test goes well...	Bring Your Daughter To Work Day
gameinformer Aperture Science: A History 2010	1998 - The untested AI is activated for the first time as one of the planned activities on Aperture's first annual bring-your-daughter-to-work day. In many ways, the initial test goes well: Within one picosecond of being switched on, GLaDOS becomes self-aware. The "going well" phase lasts for two more picoseconds, at which point GLaDOS takes control of the facility, locks everyone inside, and begins a permanent cycle of testing. Her goal: beat the hated Black Mesa in the race to develop a functioning portal technology. Days later, the race is lost when Black Mesa sucessfully deploys an interdimensional gate through wihch an alien race emerges and effectively ends the outside world.	Bring Your Daughter To Work Day
Portal 2: Collector's Edition Guide April 1, 2011	2000-???? The GLaDOS AI is activated for the first time as one of the planned activities on Aperture's first annual Bring Your Daughter To Work Day. Immediately after being switched on, GLaDOS becomes self-aware and takes control of the facility and locks it down, trapping everyone inside. She then deploys a deadly neurotoxin which kills the majority of the scientists within the facility. A few survivors manage to install a Morality Core into GLaDOS which prohibits her from using the neurotoxin again. With the Morality Core in place, GLaDOS turns her attention back to the facility and begins testing. Days later, the Black Mesa Incident occurs which leads to the Combine taking over the world, and all survivors within Aperture Science are forgotten.	Bring Your Daughter To Work Day
Portal 2: Lab Rat April 8, 2011	Before GLaDOS takeover, multiple attempts to turn GLaDOS on were made, each time it takes sixteenth of a picosecond for her to try to kill the scientists, forcing them to hit the kill switch. The latest attempt extended this time to tenth of the picosecond. Page 10 Morality Core was developed to prevent GLaDOS from those attempts. Page 13 Morality Core was installed on GLaDOS, she claimed to have lost interest in killing since and proposed to perform an experiment involving neurotoxin during "Bring Your Car To Work Day", to which she is permitted. Page 22 GLaDOS kills scientists with neurotoxin, claiming that Doug Rattmann is the only left alive, avoiding being captured for weeks since the killing. Page 19	Bring Your Cat To Work Day
Portal 2 April 11	Wheatley: "Bring your daughter to work day. That did not end well. And... forty potato batteries. Embarrassing. I realize they’re children. Still: low hanging fruit. Barely science, really." Chapter 5: The Escape An entry made by a child named "Chell" was present during Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. Chapter 5: The Escape GLaDOS: "The engineers tried everything to make me... behave. To slow me down." Chapter 5: The Escape GLaDOS: "Once, they even attached an Intelligence Dampening Sphere on me. It clung to my brain like a tumor, generating an endless stream of terrible ideas." Chapter 5: The Escape GLaDOS: "He's not just a regular moron. He's the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived. And you just put him in charge of the entire facility." Chapter 6: The Fall GLaDOS: "The scientists were always hanging cores on me to regulate my behavior. I've heard voices all my life. But now I hear the voice of a conscience, and it's terrifying, because for the first time it's my voice." Chapter 9: The Part Where He Kills You	Bring Your Daughter To Work Day

Clearly B-Y-Cat-T-W day collides with B-Y-Daughter-T-W day and we won't get otherwise a concrete answer from any official source, to reduce any cases of "speculations" or something that could brought under a "headcanon", I propose looking at the Lab Rat and Portal 2 and see what do they retcon (assuming they have more power over Collector's Guide, which to me such seems outdated with the new information in relation to the comic and the game).

The final version of the original paragraph establishes that:

• The event happened in 200-, days before BM incident.
• GLaDOS has been activated for the first time on that day and haven't been tested before that (the latter could be considered retconned by Collector's Guide).
• This particular B-Y-Daughter-T-W day was the first of the annually organised ones.
• GLaDOS becomes self-aware within one picosecond and after two more takes control of the facility, traps everyone and then, still within the same day, kills majority of people with neurotoxin.
• Morality Core hadn't been installed before GLaDOS had deployed neurotoxin.
• There were few survivors that after the event, installen that core which prevents GLaDOS from using the neurotoxin, the survivors that were still alive when BM incident happened.

Lab Rat (+ Portal 2) however retcons that:

• GLaDOS been active for some time now (been being activated and it's not the first time she is), when clearly the Aperture Science was to continue to function normally.
• Multiple attempts had been made to stop GLaDOS from trying to kill everyone, including attachment of Wheatley at some point and multiple other cores. Clearly this period of trials and errors took more than withinicity of only one day as stated originally.
• Morality Core was developed before GLaDOS killed everyone (or majority as stated originally) and was successfully installed and was preventing GLaDOS from killing everyone for some more unspecified time.
• In advance, GLaDOS proposed an experiment that would grant her access to neurotoxin on the upcoming B-Y-Cat-T-W day.
• On that B-Y-Cat-T-W day, GLaDOS used the neurotoxin to kill scientists, claiming herself that Rattmann is the last survivor, instead of there being a few as stated originally (however this particular line might be considered a manipulation on her part, so this doesn't particularly retcons that there were more survivors).
• This one is minor and might don't have any value, but Chell was present at one of the B-Y-Daughter-T-W days. This whole area also confirms that the day itself - the B-Y-Daughter-T-W day - hasn't been retconned and replaced by B-Y-Cat-T-W day, but the two are a separate days.
• The first B-Y-Daughter-T-W day didn't end well according to Wheatley.

So the original B-Y-Daughter-T-W day is left with the fact it was indeed the first day of the annual ones, that it was the first time GLaDOS been activated, that this day didn't end well (can be interpreted as GLaDOS' attempts to kill were what made the day not ending well, so I say that there's not contradictions here) and that perhaps it's still possible that this day took place in 200-, however the "days before BM incident" is now owned by B-Y-Cat-T-W day.

So to conclude, it seems logically to me to split the whole event into two parts (similarly as the original paragraph on the aperturescience.com was), the newer event still happening in 200-, now being the B-Y-Cat-T-W (as the definite day GLaDOS killed scientists and took control, days before the BM incident), and the unspecified event set before, now the B-Y-Daughter-T-W day (as the definite day GLaDOS has been activated for the first time). Now this part is problematic because B-Y-Daughter-T-W day is without a set date (year), it could be allocated to either 1998 or the "Several Years Later (after 1996)", as the original entry had stated before it's been clarified by Laidlaw and updated in the Collector's Guide, but I'm afraid that goes too much into "headcanon"... (however Laidlaw's clarification was only to ensure that 1998 wasn't the year of the incident and therefore the day GLaDOS killed everyone). Nextej (talk) 03:12, 17 September 2023 (MSK)

The Terminal's first issue

I should point out that it was previously deemed to not be known with certainty if the volume number is enough to calculate for how long The Terminal has been publishing. Even if 228 is the exact number of years it's been in print, I don't see how it can give 1771 to 1781, as surely that last volume could not have been printed before the events of HL took place, and that took place after 1999. (then, the question of how a presumably pre-war newspaper issue survived on the street for years in the climate of Eastern Europe, is a hopeless one. It wouldn't have lasted at all, but it's in the game, because they wanted it.) Is it even important to the timeline of events? (same applies to The Times, actually). Cvoxalury (talk) 23:55, 21 October 2024 (MSK)

The whole point of the article is to collect all established dates in the franchise. Any given should be added to the article, regardless of how important to the overall narrative. --Rezalon (talk) 07:33, 22 October 2024 (MSK)

In regards to the article's goal, the year of inception of The Terminal is not explicitly an "established date". Now some inferences have to be made here since there's no explicit statements otherwise, and said inferences are usually perfectly reasonable. For The Times, we can infer a date regarding the 127th year from, presumably, its inception through a straightforward calculation using said explicitly stated years. (We do have to assume somewhat its final year to start the calculation, but I'll digress for the moment.) For The Terminal, the same can almost be said except it goes by "volumes" rather than "years". Now, in my experience, "volumes" for such publications almost always refers to years, but it's not an absolute guarantee. What would be fair to state in its own article is that, based on its "volume" number of CCXXVIII (or 228), The Terminal was likely in its 228th year of operation. However, the slight chance of ambiguity was not conveyed in the reversion I previously made, and I just happened to not have reworded that statement at the time. It'd be reasonable to restore that statement without the full surety.

With that in mind, we have a likely number of years for The Terminal which could then be used to infer the date of its first publication. This is one extra step removed from an "established date" than I believe is desirable for an article of this nature. Since this article is still a work in progress, I won't make any edits just yet, but I'd sooner omit both of these newspaper dates given that, unlike a person's simple birthday, "*th year" poses unnecessary ambiguity that isn't worth bogging down a timeline over. Marphy (talk) 23:41, 22 October 2024 (MSK)

Structure and size of the WIP

I've been paying casual attention to the WIP article, not trying to mess with it or police it. I feel it my duty as a fellow editor to point out that it's gotten quite big by wiki comparison: nearly half a megabyte in page size with 2 megabytes of attached media.

Besides the number of subjects included in the article, one source of this size comes from covering in-game events right after linking to main articles on such events, which somewhat defeats the point. The article is retelling those events in sometimes generous detail, when it could work more like an indexing list of those events.

For example,

Night

• Barney Calhoun and Rosenberg make their way to the abandoned Section A-17 Prototype Labs, where a disused teleportation system is being reassembled by doctors Simmons and Walter Bennet. In order for the :teleporter to operate accurately, Calhoun is forced to travel to a ruined Black Mesa research camp on Xen and activate a focuser.
• As Gordon Freeman rides the monorail through the Materials Transport system, he's told by a security guard that he must head up to the High Altitude Launch Center to launch the satellite the Lambda Team can use to reverse the effects of the Resonance Cascade. Now actively being hunted by the HECU, Freeman makes his way back up to the surface and to the launch site. He succeeds in launching the rocket into orbit, but is once again forced to travel back underground.
• Gina Cross, Colette Green, and Richard Keller head to the Gamma Labs on the surface to raise the prototype displacement beacon for activation. Keller is able to reach the main lab, but cannot raise the beacon remotely because of an obstruction. Accessing the lower levels of the labs via the drainage canals, Cross and Green reach the beacon, clear the obstruction blocking it from ascending, and raise it successfully.
• Cross and Green return to Keller in the lab control area, where he gives them the task of activating the beam matrix system that provides the power required for the displacement beacon. After navigating through the Alien Quarantine Labs, they reach the beam matrix and attempt to activate it while simultaneously defending it from alien slaves and grunts rapidly teleporting in. The beam matrix is activated, and the two doctors return to Keller, who makes final preparations for the resonance reversal.
• Cross and Green are forced to defend the displacement beacon against the attacking Xen forces, including an alien craft. In the midst of the battle, both of them are caught in a harmonic reflux. Cross and Green return safely and Keller congratulates them on their success.
• The Black Mesa Hazard Course decathlon was to commence at 19:00 PM in the Level 3 Facility, but this never occurs because of the Resonance Cascade.

This is retelling the game. Here's what I think it could look like:

Night

• Barney Calhoun and Rosenberg arrive at the Section A-17 Prototype Labs, meeting Simmons and Walter Bennet. Calhoun travels to Xen to activate a focuser device.
• Gordon Freeman travels through the Materials Transport system, eventually arriving at the High Altitude Launch Center. There, he launches the satellite delivery rocket.
• Gina Cross, Colette Green, and Richard Keller head to the Gamma Labs; Cross and Green clear raise and activate the prototype displacement beacon. After its activation, the two doctors fight off the attacking Xen forces, including an alien craft.
• The Black Mesa Hazard Course decathlon was to commence at 19:00 PM in the Level 3 Facility, but this never occurs because of the Resonance Cascade.

What I aimed at here:

• tried to keep it down to 1, 2 lines/sentences at most;
• ignored the trivia of how things happened and most of why - only what happened; no inclusions of trivial detail like what exactly happened on the map, where stuff is situated exactly (it is described in the linked articles after all. For example, why describe exactly where Prototype Labs or the Gamma labs are, in this article? what's the importance that a particular guard directed Freeman to the rocket? All that's important here is that Freeman went through the rail system and launched it)
• condensed the events to key points, such as not needing to include parts about clearing debris or walking through some drainage canals
• minimising the "water" (for example, "launching the rocket into orbit" is excessive - satellite rockets always go into orbit)
• the goal is to fixate the key events.

The same can be done to other paragraphs that deal with game events. I suggest trying it to keep the page from becoming too large.

I can help with that if you want me to (and if it can wait several days). Cvoxalury (talk) 01:48, 23 November 2024 (MSK)

As you've probably seen by occasionally watching how this sandbox evolves, we have been attempting to trim down as much unnecessary info as we can, but also trying to not leave too much unexplained (ie: how much should we trim before all that's left is, for example, "The events of Half-Life: Blue Shift occur"?). A lot of "flavour" text has already been cut out to make these synopsis more concise and to the point, and whilst I do agree with most of what you've posted, I think it's still important to include the "how" and "why" of things so as to not leave a reader without necessary context. You're more than welcome to contribute to the sandbox as you see fit; we are still trying to cut out the fat where need be, and as you have suggested are trying to get these synopsis down to 1-2 lines (sentences preferably), and any help would be greatly appreciated. If willing, we can create a group chat on Discord between the current contributors for easier communication. --Rezalon (talk) 07:39, 23 November 2024 (MSK)