[captainmuon]

They say questions should be "about real problems people face" but that's not quite true.

- You can post questions out of simple curiosity. - You can post rhetoric questions where you already now the answer ( http://stackoverflow.com/help/self-answer ).

It shouldn't matter whether the question was based on a real situation, or if the story was just made up for "motivating" the question [1]. I often (> 50% of the time) make up or change the backstory for my SO posts, to prevent people from asking "But what is your real problem", "What have you tried", and so on, and because I want just a simple answer to my question goddamnit.

([1] Even if it is a hoax, or a joke, the question has merit. Just close as duplicate without getting all worked up about it.)