There are a number of ways to say, "Gosh it's quiet around here. Anybody wanna chat about something?" without being accusative or implying that a chat room should be active every hour of every day. It's healthy for a chat to metaphorically wrap betelnut every now and then.
@Riker In many Oceanic cultures silence is a natural part of conversation. On some islands, preparing betelnut is something you do during those thoughtful pauses.
No.
The text isn't even real latin; it's been edited to make no sense. It's literally nonsense text.
The lorem ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, i...
What
My strong recommendation is to always, if possible, include both.
If you have access to it, include original text.
Always include English translation, if nothing else, from Google Translate.
However, no matter what your translation source (professional published translation, your own tra...
Yes.
We see several times that he considered her attractive:
She lifted her arms above her head, running her fingers through the hair and spreading it out as though to hasten drying. Her arms were slim and graceful. Very attractive, Baley thought.
-chapter 4
...
She looked up, her fa...
@Mithrandir that's a truly great answer (addresses my question, at the very least), but I'll wait for a day or two in case someone else pops in. Don't worry, you rep hoarder, you have your upvote and will probably have your accept
Whenever I ask a friend about the symbolism of the Raven from The Raven, they always seem to say death.
Is that the only thing the Raven is meant to symbolize?
One of Gilbert's more controversial librettos is Princess Ida, a story making fun of woman's education. However, over the course of his works, two of his main female roles (Yum-Yum and Ida).
The fact that the Fairy Queen is mistaken for a woman from a ladies seminary is quite an important plot ...
One of Gilbert's more controversial librettos is Princess Ida, a story making fun of woman's education. However, over the course of his works, two of his main female roles (Yum-Yum and Ida).
The fact that the Fairy Queen is mistaken for a woman from a ladies seminary is quite an important plot ...
The poetry tag seems like it won't be a good fit here. It currently seems to be used on all questions about poems. This seems not good to me - it's like having a books tag.
Should we burninate poetry?
@Gilles The points you're trying to make have value, but please try to be a little more level-headed and calm/neutral when presenting them. I'm getting a little... tired of the constant hostility towards ideas that you believe are wrong.
@Gilles I know there's the disagreements on tagging, but what stands out as being hostile? and no, I'm not trying to demean you, I'm actually concerned if that's the vibe we give off
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user61230
If you're getting the feeling that the site itself is hostile, then that could be a worthwhile thing to post on meta, with examples of where you think we could be doing better.
@DForck42 Apologies, I shouldn't have said “this site”. Specifically, it's the meta. I haven't seen anything wrong on the main site itself.
(apart from a certain drive towards mass appeal over specialist interest, but that's a pretty general problem on SE, pretty much unavoidable given how voting works)
The poetry tag seems like it won't be a good fit here. It currently seems to be used on all questions about poems. This seems not good to me - it's like having a books tag.
Should we burninate poetry?
If you haven't already heard, Literature is moving on to public beta! We've built a great community here, avoided the mistakes of the last Literature site, and sparked useful discussions about the scope of our site. Thank you to everyone who contributed time and effort to help build our site, and...
meta predominantly glorifies a certain vision of the site which is about a bunch of readers' fan club put together. Anybody who doesn't fit in that vision gets dismissed out of hand. See the threads about literary analysis, about tagging, etc.
@BESW we also have a bunch of other SE sites' experience
@BESW Bear in mind that many of the people here have come from SFF, which has had tag debates ad nauseam on meta in the last couple of years. Not every site shares RPG's "emergent folksonomy" philosophy of tagging.
@Randal'Thor Frankly, I think lit.se would be a lot healthier if it had a smaller proportion of citizens whose primary Stack experience is in scifi.se. It's superficially just enough like lit that it leads to a lot of unstated assumptions.
The Beat writer Jack Kerouac is noted for his "stream of consciousness" writing style exemplified in his 1957 novel, On the Road, but there seems to be conflicting evidence on how "stream of consciousness" this book was.
He famously wrote the book on a modified typewriter with a scroll of paper ...
Emergent folksonomy is the backbone of how the tagging system is built. It's built that way so that what seems intuitive to one person is likely going to be intuitive to the next.
user61230
11:04 PM
While small corrections need to be applied now and again, running against that design is rowing upstream against a system designed for emergence.
@Gilles RPG.SE is somewhat unique, partly because some of its active early citizenry brought the learning from christianity.se's early days. And yeah, the tagging folksonomy requires semi-regular education and reminding on meta, but it'd be silly to expect anything which relies on community culture to need no upkeep.
With a few exceptions, no, we shouldn't use book title as tags. These are far too specific. Stack Overflow has tags like [c#] and [html], not tags for every single C# method and HTML tag attribute. Science Fiction & Fantasy started off with tags for individual authors, but not for individual book...
@Emrakul Primarily, body of literature and themes. Think of a literature professor. They might have written a thesis on a particular author, or on a theme and body of literature (e.g. naval exploration in 11th century Kyrgyz literature). But usually their area of expertise is something like “medieval Kyrgyz literature” — kyrgyzmedieval, not sorry-i-don-t-know-any-kyrgyz-writer. Just like History has tags like [19th-century] and [economy], not names of individual finance ministers. — GillesJan 30 at 22:18
@Nathaniel I have quite a bit of experience of SE's tagging philosophy and I agree with you. [mexican-literature] and such are exactly what tags would be useful for. — GillesJan 30 at 21:26
plus voting, which you can't see
@Randal'Thor No. Unix & Linux is not just about Linux.
@Emrakul With the site as it's shaping up, yes. Which is a pity, because I would be interested in a site about literature.
But only as a marginal user, so I don't want to spend too much time on it, and I'm already regretting the time I've spent so far.
Which this discussion only makes worse.
user61230
11:16 PM
That's okay. You don't have to spend any more time on it, if you don't find it rewarding.
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user61230
I'm sorry you're not enjoying the site.
user61230
I think this is a point that would be much better heard on meta, but if that's not something you want to do, then that's alright. I think people aren't dismissing the idea out of hand, though; it looks like many people considered it, and just disagreed.
I'm still not seeing where the problem of finding questions that interest Gilles is explicitly expressed. That seems like it would be better received as a question rather than an answer.
Literature SE has just entered public beta - yay! - which means a lot of the reputation thresholds for site privileges have changed. Specifically, the one whose threshold has changed the most is the ability to vote to close and reopen other people's posts.
Up until this point, everyone has been ...
@DVK-on-Ahch-To Thanks, looks good! I'll award the bounty now since it's running out, but could you possibly add chapter numbers for those quotes? C&P is a big book and some of them are hard to find.