The Reading Room

RPG.SE occasionally gets game designers in the Stack, and more often game designers respond to questions users ask them on Twitter or G+ or the like.

It... doesn't always help, but it's nice to get their version of things.

@Emrakul @BESW I've already been learning from our chat last night, while answering this question :-)

We even once had an author say "Wow, that game text says the opposite of what we meant it to."

A lot of the comments have been deleted, but you can probably get the gist of my discussion with Valorum from the remaining comments and the revision history of his answer.

@BESW link please?

12:02 AM

@b_jonas It'll take a while to dig up; the context is more confusing than I'm representing it.

@BESW Sure, because many RPG questions are about what the best way is to play the game, and RPG game designers aren't the authority on that.

@b_jonas And authors aren't the authority on how to read their books.

@BESW Yeah.

But again, there are plenty of folks who want to take both authors and designers as gospel for their works.

@BESW Even when they say contradictory things about their works.

12:04 AM

RPG.SE has hosted some interesting debates on the authority of designer statements on Twitter vs published errata, for example.

Like in scifi.stackexchange.com/q/114974/4918

But as you say, the endgame of an RPG question is an actionable solution for a particular group to play out.

Literary criticism can be a lot more... ethereal, unfortunately.

So we get back to critical lenses, which play a large role in choosing how much weight to give an author's statements or their life experience.

@Emrakul @HDE @Riker Yay, we can review suggested edits again!

After all, the Baker Street Irregulars would have no interest in Doyle's opinions on anything he's written.

Hmm wait.

12:09 AM

@Beastly Sorry, I rejected your edits because Through the Looking Glass is a different work from Alice in Wonderland.

(I nearly typoed that as "Alive in Wonderland" ...)

Q: Did Thomas Wolfe ever express regret for his detail in "Look Homeward, Angel"?

0

In Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe, Wolfe describes in intimate detail some very intimate parts of his life and other people around Asheville to the point of him receiving death threats. Is there any evidence whether he ever regretted the amount of detail, which he put into Look Homeward, An...

Napoleon Wilson

?_?

I'm not sure I see the logic in the Too Broad close vote on literature.stackexchange.com/q/727/71.

The Baker Street Irregulars are devotees of Sherlockania who adhere to the conceit that the Sherlock text is a collection of diegetic artifacts: they were actually penned by Doctor Watson and Doyle acted only as an intermediary with the press. As part of this conceit the Irregulars ignore or justify whatever would challenge it. It's deeply Thermian.

@HDE226868 That's because people hate the concept of "the hero's journey", and rightly so, so they use any exclose to close questions about it.

Good night.

12:23 AM

@BESW They are not authority (and good ones openly acknowledge that) but their opinion is still meaningful

@DVK-in-Florida Often, yes. But it's easy (especially for SFF folks) to over-emphasize that meaning. And depending on the lens being applied and the kind of question being asked, sometimes the author's statements aren't useful at all.

@BESW Well, SFF is largely meant to be in-universe lense, explicitly. (by default, unless the question says otherwise)

More like, SFF fetishises the idea of a creator-supervised canon, which literature doesn't tend to care about much.

> I am not a whole-souled admirer of womankind, as you are aware, Watson, but my experience of life has taught me that there are few wives, having any regard for their husbands, who would let any man’s spoken word stand between them and that husband’s dead body. Should I ever marry, Watson, I should hope to inspire my wife with some feeling which would prevent her from being walked off by a housekeeper when my corpse was lying within a few yards of her.

The "death of the author" is an extreme example, but a great deal of modern literary theory is more interested in the text than the author.

12:27 AM

This might be worth adding to my Holmes/Watson answer ...

@BESW Doesn't that presuppose an extreme hubris, in a way? "I know better than the author what the work was meant to say"?

@DVK-in-Florida No. It's a different way of thinking entirely.

It stops caring about what the work was "meant" to say and is interested in what the work does or can say.

Which is, of course, an unavoidable pitfall of post-modernist thinking in general, but that's getting too far into philosophy.

@DVK-in-Florida As I understand it, it's not so much "I know better than the author" as "there are various ways of reading the text, and my interpretation might be as valid as the author's".

It deals with the text as something (more or less) independent of the author.

12:32 AM

@Randal'Thor The problem with that then becomes the circular "why is your interpretation any more valid than that of people diametrally disagreeing with you?". Except in certain narrow cases where the text directly supports the interpretation unambiguously, which it rarely does.

@DVK-in-Florida That's a false dichotomy.

Interpretations don't need to be more or less valid than each other.

They need to be supportable within the chosen lens of text/author/culture/etc.

@BESW The issue is, that there's still an "interpreter" added to the text. You simply replace the author with the person doing the interpretation. It's still not "100% text".

Two contradicting but equally supportable interpretations are totally awesome.

@DVK-in-Florida Yes, and?

Nobody's saying the text stays on its own.

user61230

Either way, understanding the interpreter of a work (especially when that interpreter is you) can be as important as understanding the work itself from any given lens.

Aye.

user61230

12:35 AM

"How does my experience affect the way I'm reading this?" is a very important question, all on its own.

@Randal'Thor Half of me now thinks that Doyle himself may have messed up the dates and years.

@BESW At some point you arrive at a level of subjectivity that makes SE posting unworkable.

The text is interpreted by the reader, necessarily. We can't reasonably pretend to be blank slates or objective non-quantum observers.

@DVK-in-Florida Nah, it's just a matter of establishing the frame of support an answer is using.

@Emrakul Indubitably, but then your answer is not really a good fit for SE.

@HDE226868 New question: "Is Arthur Conan Doyle bad at maths?"

12:37 AM

@Randal'Thor Is ACD really JKR with a Time-Turner?

user61230

@DVK-in-Florida That's the nest of thorns we get into by trying to launch a Literature.SE at all.

This is where experts come into play.

You know, people who (unlike me) have actually read La mort de l'auteur and not just read about it.

@Randal'Thor Heh, maybe. It's always a little odd how Holmes' stories were usually (save this one) set a couple years before Doyle published them.

@DVK-in-Florida I would argue that many of the answers we're seeing here are the very definition of "Good Subjective" as defined by SE. Lengthy, substantiated, and clearly explaining why a certain conclusion can be drawn from the text.

4

Decontructionists, New Criticism, author function and influence theory--you name something "literature.stackexchange.com" and you're gonna have to face these things.

@Randal'Thor Yes. A good answer here is one which supports itself well. That includes explaining why its chosen modes of support are valid--just the same as scifi.se is going to want explanation for why some rando's tumblr is being cited in support of Dumbledore being a time-travelled Ron Weasley.

12:41 AM

@Randal'Thor I haven't ran into any answers that were purely subjective yet. But none of them fit the model of "I'll pick a random arbitrary interpretation and tenuously misinterpret the text to support it", which is what I am concerned about.

@DVK-in-Florida If it's arbitrary and tenuous, downvote it or improve it.

If I tried to get my interpretation of Long John Silver as the serpent in the Garden of Eden taken seriously, I'd expected to be laughed at because it's only tenuously supportable and there's a lot of evidence against it.

@DVK-in-Florida Who was talking about random, arbitrary, tenuous, or misinterpretation?

Oh OK, that's what you're concerned might happen.

Well, like BESW says, I would hope the voting would take care of that.

@Randal'Thor Yep.

But I could make a reasonable argument for Lord of the Rings as an allegory for countryside industrialisation--despite Tolkien insisting it's not.

And just because Tolkien insists he didn't mean to do it, I'd hope people wouldn't downvote me for pointing out that it's there nonetheless.

Voting taking care of things should work better for this than it does on SFF. A random non-canonical guess on SFF might get lots of upvotes from passersby if it sounds plausible, but Long John Silver as the serpent in the Garden of Eden probably wouldn't.

12:44 AM

@Randal'Thor What's your argument for why things will work better here?

@BESW That depends on how supportable it is based on the text, I suppose. My usual example for crappy interpretation is (and it WILL likely arise here at some point) "Starship Troopers" and whether it's a fascist society. People without absolutely any clue about the text argue it is, and get tons of upvotes just because it's a popular view (see SFF).

@Randal'Thor He's very good at persuading people to do things against their own interests, he doesn't walk on two legs, and there's a scene where he kills someone by springing like a snake while hissing and stabbing them twice with a dagger leaving fang-like marks. That's it, and the rest of the story doesn't hold together under that allegory so the evidence for it isn't sufficient.

@DVK-in-Florida That's exactly my point: supportability is key, but what people think of as valid kinds of support is entirely subjective.

@HDE226868 The whole issue of 'canon' doesn't always make sense to the average viewer. There are plenty of answers on SFF which have a lot of upvotes despite being based only on crappy Wikias. But the concept of "explanations which make sense" is something everyone can get their heads around, so the Long John Silver / serpent thing isn't going to get drive-by upvotes unless it's really well-supported (and if it's really well-supported, then hell, it's probably genuinely worth upvoting).

@BESW Yeah, that last bit is where I'm really worried.

There must be some kind of internally consistent argument with reasonable support. What that looks like will and must vary.

@DVK-in-Florida Hence my talk of critical lenses. They're the tool critics use to codify support for a given analysis.

12:48 AM

@Randal'Thor SFF has lots of bikeshedding, unfortunately.

To Literature's credit, Valorum's answer to the "why is a raven like a writing desk?" question shot from +4 to -2 after I posted my answer, and then went up again to +2 after he made some substantial edits to it.

A critical lens is a kind of mini-manifesto saying "This is the kind of evidence we'd need to support such a claim."

And then you show whether or not that evidence exists.

user61230

I think that's just Literature realizing that any opinion is hard to substantively support. Which is a good step to take.

Then people can challenge the evidence or the lens without confusing the two.

user61230

Stack Exchange has a very default cut-and-dry, quick-answer approach to things. It's culturally ingrained. But it won't work well on Literature, where answers need to acknowledge both what works and what doesn't, what specific evidence there is, both for and against, etc.

12:50 AM

A lot of answers here skip straight to the evidence, assuming everyone will have the same opinions about what kind of evidence is necessary or sufficient.

(On a side note: yay! @DVK isn't the only one who's been doing more on meta than main in some ways.)

user61230

I faced this problem in droves when answering doppelgreener's question about whether Hyperion the book is based on the same plot points as Hyperion the book. What counts as proof? It's hard to say.

user61230

That answer ended up being an unfortunate 1,300 words, because there are a lot of reasons to believe they're related, and a lot of reasons to be skeptical of that link. And I still didn't do it the justice it deserved.

Is there sexual tension between Prince Caspian and any of the Pevensie twins in The Chronicles of Narna?

Would that be a fine shipping-esque question.

@Benjamin Bleurgh.

That feels like sullying a beautiful piece of literature.

12:57 AM

[amused] The depiction of Islam as literal devil-worship didn't do it for ya?

Well ...

I was young enough when I first read it not to be interested in all the symbolism and correspondences to real-world religions, but just to take it for a nice story.

We ~~can~~ should really like things and still face their flaws head-on.

> For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted.

This still resonates with me.

Narnia's got some great bits, but it's also got some horrific implications even within its own universe.

And that reminds me of another question I'd like to ask. Wow, they're just mounting up now.

Q: Did the events of The Last of the Light Brigade actually occur?

1:13 AM

0

According to the Wikipedia article about The Last of the Light Brigade, Some sources treat the poem as an account of a real event, but other commentators class the destitute old soldiers as allegorical, with the visit invented by Kipling to draw attention to the poverty in which the real surv...

alfred-tennyson last-of-the-light-brigade rudyard-kipling

@Benjamin You might want to space out your questions a bit, for variety's sake.

@Emrakul Ping as promised: literature.stackexchange.com/q/736/17

@HDE226868 I have a number of books, I plan to read so I am asking them as they come.

@DVK Thoughts on this?

I really wich people would start explaining their downvotes.

@Randal'Thor I have proposed an edit based on current usage and your answer.

1:38 AM

hola

@HDE I didn't get the chance to comment on your "realism" meta answer before it was deleted ... you said you don't think realism questions would be a good fit here, but what about something like this? IMO this is a useful question because it helps to increase appreciation of the work, even though it's answered by real-world research instead of literary analysis.

In cases of authors with pseudonyms, is it better for the tag to be the pseudonym or the real name?

@kristan Depends which is better known. Definitely tag with mark-twain instead of samuel-clemens or whatever his real name is, but just as definitely jk-rowling instead of whatever pseudonym she used for some non-HP book.

@Randal'Thor I wouldn't call that a "realism" question so much as a background question - finding more information, via real-world sources, about what the character's standing must have been like.

user61230

@kristan Synonyms are the solution, when we get them. Synonymize alternate names into the more widely known name.

1:42 AM

*tries to remember Lewis Carroll's real name...

@kristan See also:

16

A: Author name formats

I've been trying to set some consistent standards for author tag names, e.g. ensuring that we never use just a single name for the tag: thus william-shakespeare instead of shakespeare. However, to your question about initials versus full first name, I don't think we actually need to be consisten...

@kristan Charles Dodgson.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, if memory serves.

lol thanks

Hence Lewis Carroll, from his first two names.

I remember Dr. Seuss's name, but not how to spell it.

Dr. Seuss books count as literature, right? :-P

literature.stackexchange.com/questions/734/… What do you think here?

@kristan ¿Cómo estás?

Q: Are campaign research questions on topic, part two?

1:50 AM

@Benjamin It's the literature.se equivalent of an issue we identified on RPG.SE:

20

There is a category of questions on this site that seriously pollutes our scope. Taking these questions to their logical maximum (which I see us continually approaching) everything under the sun has become on topic. This category is campaign research. Appending historical-settings, campaign-de...

discussion faq on-topic research

We deal with worlds which have geography, or physics, or animals, and people would ask us to analyse real-world boat speeds, what real-world animals do and their biology and behaviour, or how real-world geography or plate tectonics or so on work, without any relevance to any sort of RPG knowledge.

@doppelgreener Okay, do we have a consensus on that here yet?

@doppelgreener Yeah, I play a used to play a lot of D&D.

@Benjamin No, and I do not think we need one for me to act on an individual case. (that's a link)

It somewhat relates to this (currently rather vague) meta question:

That's basically my argument against realism questions.

Q: Are question about realism on-topic?

0

Are questions about realism in stories on-topic? We have to be careful maybe as some question could be disguised bad critisism which are not accepted in SE.

discussion scope

1:52 AM

@doppelgreener No, I agree, we just may want to address it on meta.

@Benjamin Sure. We do not have consensus. I am acting on a single case, and I don't think it needs to be handled on meta yet.

At this point I still need 4 other people to agree with me before it gets closed.

@doppelgreener Okay, well if you change your mind we could take this to meta.

@doppelgreener I don't necessarily disagree with you, I haven't thought about it yet and I by no means think you should change your vote.

On the issue we identified on RPG.SE, essentially we agreed it was taking this shape: All things appear in RPGs. But, RPG.SE cannot provide expertise on all topics that may have some relevance to RPGs. So, we drew the line at "this fundamentally question draws on actual RPG expertise at any point." I see Literature may take a similar path -- all things appear in literature! -- and see this as an example.

I see the same fundamental issue occurring here, hence my close vote.

@Benjamin I think it'd be worth taking to meta if it occurs a few more times, because we'll have good examples of this thing that happens and understand where it goes right or wrong.

and if the issue is "they're not drawing on literature expertise" as I suspect, we can confirm that through consistent examples of that being a problem.

bother. accidentally changed my page view from mobile to desktop, and can't get it back again!

on the bottom of the page, click full site

1:57 AM

@kristan In the footer there's a link saying "full site"

jinx :D

or mobile view

@doppelgreener Okay.

and the desktop site didn't work, so I had to switch browsers! >_<

On a related note, it's great how Literature is drawing expertise from so many other SE sites! We have people from SFF, RPG, M&TV, ... all sharing our experiences from different sites and putting them together to form something wholly new.

ouch

1:58 AM

I guess this is what every private beta is like, but it's fun to see it working so well.

ye

@Randal'Thor is it just me or does the main site still say 3 more edit reviews

it's stuck on that for me

@Riker That's a bug on all SE sites.

ah kk

The brown number doesn't just mean edit reviews now; it means all reviews.

@Randal'Thor I agree! :D

1:59 AM

Yeah, Esperanto.se was really awesome in private beta and the early days of public beta... those were the days...

@Randal'Thor no it's all empty

And it still shows a number even when you've reviewed everything you can - possibly the number of reviews which are left reviewable even if not by you, though there also seems to be a lower bound of 3.

A: Why's the review notification still showing up when I've reviewed everything?

6

The review queue notification isn't actually specific to you. It's a sum total of the number reviews waiting across the site for anyone. It will appear on RPG.SE anytime there's at least 3 total reviews currently in the queues. Anyone over 10k sees it, which also means it bugs every 10k user to ...

yeah, it shows the count of all reviews sitewide

ah okay

fi12

I just got some shiny new moderation tools, I think I'm part of the 1k+ club now!

2:01 AM

it used to only show suggested edits, but it got updated to show all reviews instead

@fi12 congrats!

fi12

@doppelgreener thanks!

@fi12 Yay! Congrats :-D

That makes ... eight of us?

No, that would be 750+.

@Randal'Thor I want to get there by Tuesday.

@Randal'Thor I plan to reach that by the end of the day, only 110 rep.

Correction: 93

@Randal'Thor fyi it doing that is a feature, not a bug. although it's a feature that everyone misinterprets... because all the other notifications that look just like it are an only-you thing. UX Stack Exchange is probably full of people with very strong opinions about how it should be done differently to not be so weird and buggy-seeming.

Goodbye!

2:03 AM

oh. bye!

Night @Benjamin!

night ben

@Himarm Any chance of an accept on this? :-)

@Randal'Thor hahaha, buggy feature. i love it.

or feature not a bug.

[saves]

I think of it as "calling a bug a feature".

2:09 AM

@Randal'Thor that was fast

There's a lurking Himarm on the prowl!

Q: How does one write a good question about influences?

ve! "new tags can't be created from the mobile site. the tag dr-seuss is new."

blasted mobile site!

now I'll have to go find a computer, just to ask profound literary questions about Horton Hears a Who! >_<

Bookworm

4

One of the fun parts of analyzing creative works (at least, for me) is to trace the influences prior works and especially ideas have on later creators and creations. How does one write a good question about influences in a way that would be a good question, good fit for SE format, and unquestion...

discussion scope question-quality

@Bookworm You need to be a bit quicker with those meta posts, or else you'll be late - as in, "the late Bookworm".

the "mobile" link does nothing :-(

2:20 AM

I'm worse than Slarty at threats.

Napoleon Wilson

Seriously, this Bookworm thing is significantly slower than other meta bots.

@HDE226868 The early bird catches the late bookworm?

in other news, I finished A Tale of Two Cities today. I had heard it read aloud years ago, and had forgotten a lot of the details; just remembered that it was a good story with a tediously obscure beginning XD

user61230

Whoever decided to name it "worm" probably didn't realize that worms don't move very quickly.

So I finally found it on free Kindle book, and wasn't disappointed! :-)

what's all this about a bookworm?

user61230

2:26 AM

@kristan I'm glad! :D I agree, honestly.

user61230

And, Bookworm is the bot that's (supposed to) post new questions from meta in here (in a timely way).

ah, I see :-)

@Emrakul A Tale of Two Cities is my favorite of Dickens's novels (of the ones I've read so far); great reading after the first couple chapters.

@Randal'Thor I'm 90% sure I fully expressed my thoughts about "russian" tag on SFF Meta at some point. Short version: in ideal situation, it should be what your answer says. In reality, there's usefuleness in allowing it to be used as umbrella tag for works wrtten in Russian, for practical reasons (it lets people who are experts in Russian literature to filter/search); whether that practical usefulness outweigh the theoretical meta tag issues is subjective.

user61230

I haven't read as much of Dickens' work, unfortunately :]

I've read that one, A Christmas Carol, and Oliver Twist; I should get around to reading more of them

Sadly, I didn't come up with any profound literary questions while I was reading

Q: Is the author's personal experience as it relates to a book on-topic?

4:50 AM

chat dies at 9pm PST/5am UTC cool

Bookworm

5:13 AM

0

The question, Did the events of The Last of the Light Brigade actually occur? was voted to be closed. It was specifically asking about the experiences of the authors as it may relate to an event, though in this case it was specifically asking if an event occurred, as reported by the authors. It ...

discussion scope

user61230

5:39 AM

Eeeesh. How are we going to tag books like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values?

user15026

Do like we do on Arqade, cut out non essential words, keeping what would show up in a Google search as keywords

user15026

Although that one in particular is extra tricky because it has a bunch of long words

user61230

Even zen-art-motorcycle-maintenance is too long...

user61230

zamm is an accepted abbreviation, but it's not particularly useful or readily searchable...

user15026

If you take out the word art, is it short enough?

user61230

5:44 AM

...it's. one. character. too. long.

user61230

zen-motorcycle-maintenanc

zataomm-aiiv?

user61230

Zataomm'aiiv sounds like a city where dwarves and elves try really hard to live in harmony and fail horribly.

> The Rule of Fantasy Apostrophes: All apostrophes in the middle of fantasy names are now to be pronounced "boing."

user61230

That just makes it better, honestly.

6:35 AM

lol

za-ta-om-boing-ive?

Quick question: do we keep leading articles in tag names? Is it the-lord-of-the-rings or lord-of-the-rings? a-song-of-ice-and-fire or song-of-ice-and-fire

if it's the title then yes

but if the tag is too long then strip some unneeded stuff

like [rime-of-ancient-mariner]

I created the-lord-of-the-rings, saw the other tag was more popular, switched to it and later created song-of-ice-and-fire and now I see there's a-song-of-ice-and-fire. Should I move to the other one?

rename all applicable to include in the leading articles

if you don't have 500 rep I can approve some of the edits

I do

6:40 AM

cool

@Randal'Thor hey so 1000 rep comes with deleted post view-ness? cool

I can see a deleted answer by mith now

actually hey @muru maybe make a meta post regarding synonym-ing "the-lord-of-the-rings" and "lord-of-the-rings"?

that's going ot be a pain later

it's not that big of a deal now with only 4 questions but still

@Riker the-lord-of-the-rings is gone, I removed it yesterday or the day before and the system cleaned it up. If it comes back, I'll make a meta post

To synonimize, the tag has to exist, so I'd have to edit it back to some post :(

@Riker I see, you created it :D

7:02 AM

Ye

I think retagging would nice but a synonym even better

7:24 AM

Hrm. Anybody got street cred with The Crucible?

I've got a contract to design a poster for a local production, and it's been about fifteen years since I read it.

Trying to remember recurring visuals or symbols, and the Sparknotes style sites aren't helpful because they have no clue what a symbol or motif is.

@BESW L'il bit. Whaddya need?

I mean, it's a script. Visuals are generally up to the production.

Recurring themes and motifs?

Often a prop will become a repeated focal point, or the script will use a metaphor over and over but give it a slightly different context each time. A colour might be recurring.

When I designed a poster for Fences, I centred the visuals around a refrigerator, trash can, and baseball bat.

For God of Carnage, blood-spattered tulips.

Our Crucible flier was a noose. It was... effective. :)

Tartuffe was a puppeteer done in the style of Byzantine hagiography, because I wanted to show off.

WANTS SEE

That sounds really cool :)

7:31 AM

To be fair, they didn't give me the time or money to fully render Byzantine style, so it's--sketchy.

[rummages for links]

Someday I'll get my portfolio site up and running.

Well, the huge element of the play is pressuring innocent people into confessing, from fear of being judged guilty and being punished even worse.

The play ends with John Proctor agreeing to confess, but balking at a written document and signing his name to it.

So, some ominous lines of confession with a blank line might be pretty cool.

Or, too cluttered with text :P

Yeah, that's gonna be hard to translate to the university's Jumbotron.

@Standback Here's the posters I've done for the University of Guam theatre.

@BESW Very cool :)

So, the noose works.

I won't know what the producer/director's vision is until later in the week, but I like to show up to the first meeting with some sketches.

I've looked at previous posters for Crucible, and they do really like their nooses.

The other thing that springs to mind is, the whole frenzy is stoked on by a bevy of bored girls. So... innocent girls + flames?

7:39 AM

I think my favourite is this one.

NOICE.

Oh wow that's good.

re: Nooses, yes, they do tend to stand out, and they fit well.

(And Proctor's hanged, so.)

I'm also remembering the forest being a recurring symbol/location.

The forest? Mentioned, I guess. I don't remember it having a strong presence.

The play takes place in the Proctors' house, and a lot in the courtroom.

If the prop or costume departments move fast, I like to incorporate physical material from the production into my design. The goal is always to create a poster for that performance rather than a poster which could be used for any production of the play.

I'm hoping they can get me the doll.

Yeah, definitely. You want to know what the director wants -- which you said you will, soon :)

Oh, the doll would be cool.

7:43 AM

(You'll notice in my posters, I use a lot of textiles and silhouettes; that's because those are often the parts of the production that are available before the poster deadline.)

Although in some productions, it's really nothing special. It's not big, it's just a poppet.

Here's a poppet poster.

Hmmm. Interesting. That's creepy, but... lonelier than I'd associate for Crucible.

@Riker I have a few

The Crucible is a play of flames :)

7:47 AM

And then there's The Cructble.

@BESW: LOL

8:32 AM

@Standback ...I just realised why I can't use the noose. The guys who turn posters into jumbotron animations have a tendency to get... cute... with graphic elements.

I'm not gonna give them a noose to play with.

Bebs

8:48 AM

Hi all

I have a question about downvotes

why some questions are accepted like this one, literature.stackexchange.com/questions/99/who-does-the-cat-represent-in-animal-f‌arm or this one literature.stackexchange.com/questions/91/what-do-the-other-farmers-symbolize-in‌-animal-farm

but some other similar like literature.stackexchange.com/questions/688/… or literature.stackexchange.com/questions/367/… are disliked?

9:35 AM

@Bebs Perhaps it is the feckless and fickle nature of the human spirit.

Or "One time is clever; two times is cute; thee times a spanking." :P

A: In what order should Rick Riordan's mythological series be read to make the most sense, and what is the chronological order?

Oww... Now my fingers hurt. I just added over 3500 characters to an answer...

0

A reminder: Percy Jackson and the Olympians deals with the Greek gods. +The Heroes of Olympus* deals with the Greek and Roman gods. The Kane Chronicles deals with the Egyptian gods. Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard deals with the Norse gods. The Trials of Apollo has Greek so far, and might hav...

@DrRDizzle you joined too

@Mithrandir I have very less idea about the context but looks good

Thanks, that took forever.

better then those comments under the question

Q: Tag synonym request: lord-of-the-rings -> the-lord-of-the-rings

:P

Oh, that reminds me.

@Benjamin you can re-upvote, haven't hit the cap today.

Dr R Dizzle

9:45 AM

@AnkitSharma I did, but I don't know why because I'm very unlikely to be of use here.

Bookworm

10:01 AM

5

Can we please have the-lord-of-the-rings and lord-of-the-rings as synonyms? In SFF, the latter is popular and in Movies.SE, the former. I think both are likely to be used here. (I personally prefer the former as the master, but either would do.)

support tag-synonyms synonym-request

There, Valorum did a 180 :)

@DrRDizzle okay

@Bookworm your are slower then a snail

10:20 AM

@AnkitSharma There's a reason it's named bookworm.

@Mithrandir I did named it bookworm but never had idea that it will act this slow

I'm still waiting for those exemplary story-id questions.

So ask one!

bleh

I'm waiting for an accept from him.

10:30 AM

I will ignore all kind of ID

10:44 AM

Do we really need tags like retag-request and synonym-request

To me support + tags is sufficient in both cases

Do talking about tag summons you automatically @DrRDizzle ;)

10:58 AM

They should be synonyms, those that you mentioned

But we should have the tag

Do we really need that much tags?

Quantity of tag is not a plus if they don't have any distinct value of there own

44 rep away.

11:14 AM

@AnkitSharma Should we have a main site bot? Questions are coming up fairly regularly now

@Gallifreyan I think we should. @Randal'Thor

It'd be nice to have another bot to direct sarcastic snarks to

@Gallifreyan Mostly we avoid it due to early high count, we should wait a bit more for a stable daily count

Dr R Dizzle

@AnkitSharma Haha, yeah, I've got tag radar.

@DrRDizzle :D

11:17 AM

@AnkitSharma Looking at the front page, I count ~3 questions per hour

Would a question about pronunciation be on-topic?

j-r-r-tolkien constructed-language

11

Q: How to read é, ä, û?

If I want to read Tolkien's text aloud, or appreciate the rhythm and rhyme in his poems, I find it distracting not to know how names including these characters (and similar ones) were meant to be pronounced. Unfortunately I only have the main books in e-book format; if this is answered in some ba...

Pretty well-received

pronunciation seems more fit for ELL/ELU

@AnkitSharma But it is a solely literary word, Houyhnhnms.

What is Houyhnhnms O.o

11:23 AM

@AnkitSharma It is a type of horse from Gulliver's Travels.

@AnkitSharma If it's important for a work of literature, why not have it here? Besides, words are not necessarily English

@Gallifreyan @Benjamin I though you guys were talking about pronunciation of normal words

@AnkitSharma what are we, pre-school?!

@Gallifreyan are we even humans for sure O.o

Q: How do you pronounce Houyhnhnm?

0

In Gulliver's Travels by Johnathon Swift, Gulliver travels to a land of Houyhnhnms. When I read, I like to hear the names in my head because it helps me to get into the story. However, I do not know how to pronounce Houyhnhnm. Do we have any guidance from Swift, the word's origins, or other sourc...

gullivers-travels jonathan-swift

11:26 AM

@Gallifreyan and people say I have trust issues

@AnkitSharma we should have a captcha that asks to complete a sentence with correct grammar and punctuation, for first posts and late answers

goes to main meta with a [feature-request] tag

@Gallifreyan then I will be kicked out of all SE sites

11:34 AM

@AnkitSharma you're not a new user, though I think this applies to @Himarm more :D

Looks like you have not seen enough of me ask @NapoleonWilson @AJ

Q: Did Jonathon Swift ever sail?

0

In Gulliver's Travels by Jonathon Swift, Swift describes Gulliver, a ship's doctor sailing and getting ship wrecked in various locations by various means. However, he does not go into as much detail in the actual description of sailing as he does other actions. This led me to wonder whether Jonat...

authors gullivers-travels jonathan-swift

@AnkitSharma What books could I ask about that you could answer?

@Benjamin sorry, not a book/novel reader. More of a curious user here

I am more into films and TV series

11:49 AM

@AnkitSharma Well, would you like to ask any questions about books or poems?