The Reading Room

Rand al'Thor

12:27 AM

Bounty expires in one day! Any Dostoevsky fans around? @DVK @Gallifreyan

Benjamin

2:00 AM

Killed the chat @Randal'Thor?

Riker

can you stop saying that

chat dies naturally because nobody is talking

3

it's not even death

it's just a break

saying "so-and-so killed (the) chat" is really getting annoying

6

</rant>

Benjamin

Oh about, you made chat comatose.

Riker

.....

seriously not funny

BESW

2:32 AM

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.

4

Riker

5:06 AM

"wrap betelnut" that's a new one

and I'm glad I got such a positive response, it was just really pissing me off

BESW

@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.

Riker

oh

googles betelnut

BESW

5:24 AM

How to make a Betel Nut chew.mpg

►

I can't really recommend it on health grounds, but paan has an interesting role in dialogue and community for several of the cultures around here.

Mithrandir

8:35 AM

@BESW ...fascinating.

BESW

@Mithrandir Hm?

Mithrandir

9:07 AM

@BESW Nothing

Rand al'Thor

10:27 AM

One more reopen vote needed on this: meta.literature.stackexchange.com/q/180/17

Mithrandir

Already did

Rand al'Thor

I know.

Mithrandir

How?

AH, the review history.

Rand al'Thor

Seekrit skillz.

muru

@Randal'Thor done

Mithrandir

10:43 AM

Noooo.

BESW

Minisode - How Much Power Does "The Author" Have?

►

DForck42

1:56 PM

mornin

Mithrandir

@DForck42 afternoon

6

A: Has Lorem ipsum ever been analyzed as a poem by literary critics or scholars?

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...

^4 more votes for lit's first gold AFAIK

I figured that was worth mentioning it here :P

Oh wait. It's fourteen more. Whoops.

DForck42

2:25 PM

@Mithrandir how goes it?

Mithrandir

Feb 1 at 14:11, by Mithrandir

It is a giant immobile brain

DForck42

@Mithrandir lol

what is the giant immobile brain from?

Mithrandir

Feb 1 at 14:16, by Mithrandir

@DForck42 a wrinkle in time

DForck42

@Mithrandir that's right

Mithrandir

We've had this conversation before :P

DForck42

2:33 PM

@Mithrandir yup

Mithrandir

Somebody remind me to rename lord of the Flies tomorrow

Wait no

That is the real name

DForck42

@Mithrandir lord of the files?

DVK-on-Ahch-To

@Randal'Thor I'm an opposite of a fan (I hate Dostoyevsky) but out of respect for you I posted an answer since I happen to know what it is.

Mithrandir

Haha

@DVK-on-Ahch-To however...

14

A: Quoting from non-English literature

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...

Mithrandir

5:19 PM

There. Finished that answer.

DForck42

@Mithrandir oh?

Mithrandir

@DForck42 ?

DForck42

@Mithrandir what was the answer about?

Mithrandir

2

A: What evidence was there in "The Naked Sun" to suggest that Bailey had feelings for Gladia?

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...

Asimov.

I had to skim ~300 pages for that answer.

DForck42

@Mithrandir nice

Mithrandir

5:26 PM

Thanks!

Mithrandir

5:43 PM

So @Gallifreyan do I get an accept?

:P

Gallifreyan

6:00 PM

@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

Mithrandir

@Gallifreyan guilty as charged.

@Gallifreyan I actually can't tell if you are kidding there about me being a rep hoarder...

Gallifreyan

@Mithrandir who knows....

Mithrandir

@Gallifreyan you enigmatic-puzzle...

Gallifreyan

@Randal'Thor never even read any of his works <guilty> you can count the Russian classics (or any classics) I read using the fingers of one hand

Gallifreyan

6:51 PM

the answer by DVK now has translations, you're free to upvote/accept/award bounties

3

Bookworm

7:33 PM

2

Q: What does the raven symbolize (besides death)?

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?

Bookworm

7:45 PM

0

Q: What was W. S. Gilbert's opinion on woman's education?

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 ...

gilbert-and-sullivan

Beastly Gerbil

8:37 PM

Found some scary evidence for the pied piper of hamelin

Mithrandir

@BeastlyGerbil that's... Freaky.

Beastly Gerbil

Yeah. The most convincing out of the lot though

Mithrandir

*eyes new flute player in town*

Beastly Gerbil

:P

Mithrandir

I need to raise that custom flag about serial voting.

Or maybe just ping some Cms.

Like tell JNat,who's the only cm to be pingable atm.

Beastly Gerbil

8:43 PM

new verb from mith: 'pingable'

SevenSidedDie

@Mithrandir If there's serial voting, the daily scripts should catch it. Is there some that looks to be flying under the radar?

Mithrandir

@SevenSidedDie yes

It's happened on several days

Beastly Gerbil

@SevenSidedDie its when there is only a little bit when the scripts don't catch it

Mithrandir

Just today was the worst/most votes

Beastly Gerbil

why are you complaining ;)

Mithrandir

8:45 PM

Because it's illegal :P

SevenSidedDie

@BeastlyGerbil Yeah. It takes human eyes to tell whether its serial or normal when it's that low-level.

Mithrandir

I don't want to raise the flag now because I'm going to provide links on my flag and I'm on mobile

Beastly Gerbil

Uh. Mobile.

Mithrandir

For the past week or so I've been receiving votes on answers in the morning that haven't been active.

Beastly Gerbil

person not post

Mithrandir

8:47 PM

@BeastlyGerbil yes. Evil mobile

@BeastlyGerbil ?

Beastly Gerbil

'upvote the post, not the person'

don't tell me you haven't heard that before

SevenSidedDie

@Mithrandir And it looks more personally-focused than just someone browsing existing questions and voting as they go?

Mithrandir

@SevenSidedDie yes. It's the same time every day

SevenSidedDie

@Mithrandir That does sound suspicious!

Mithrandir

There. I raised it even though I am on mobile.

Beastly Gerbil

8:55 PM

thats some feat

Mithrandir

Yes. It is. Especially with adding links to the answers.

@BeastlyGerbil the problem is that you said person not post, when it is post not person.

Beastly Gerbil

yeah i meant the serial upvoter

Mithrandir

I like this free tag wiki editing. Unfortunately, it's vanishing soon. I'll need another 2k before I can do it again :/

Beastly Gerbil

I... don't think I have that priveledge

Mithrandir

It's at 2k atm

Beastly Gerbil

9:08 PM

oh. well i'll miss that one then

I've been taking it day on, day off on literature - thats clear from my rep graph on my profile

Mithrandir

Hurry, :P

Beastly Gerbil

One more upvote till that shiny silver badge...

Mithrandir

I gave you one a while ago

Beastly Gerbil

Wait was I the ninth user on his site?

Mithrandir

I said as much in my nomination

Beastly Gerbil

9:12 PM

Actually I was second. The first 7 are mods which get automatically added

8 was yannis

Mithrandir

I'm adding usage guidance to our tags...

Beastly Gerbil

K i'll review later.

gtg now

See ya later!

Mithrandir

@BeastlyGerbil don't need reviews anymore

@BeastlyGerbil Adios

7 mins ago, by Mithrandir

I like this free tag wiki editing. Unfortunately, it's vanishing soon. I'll need another 2k before I can do it again :/

DForck42

9:53 PM

1

Q: What was W. S. Gilbert's opinion on woman's education?

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 ...

gilbert-and-sullivan

that is off-topic per the meta

Mithrandir

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is asking about the author in a way not related to his works. — Mithrandir 35 secs ago

DForck42

@Mithrandir yup

@Mithrandir cantillation marks are the little bits around the main parts of the symbols, right?

Mithrandir

@DForck42 basically

Most are the vowels.

Anyone who knows Hebrew will recognize the vowels; the rest of the marks are the cantillation marks.

DForck42

k

that algebra question was a bit weird, tbh

Mithrandir

Why?

It's a continuous story through the whole math series.

DForck42

10:03 PM

@Mithrandir cause drafting a 5 year old is weird

Mithrandir

@DForck42 exactly

Hence the question

DForck42

lol

which math book was it?

Mithrandir

Life of Fred: Beginning Algebra.

DForck42

@Mithrandir so, it's a text book wrapped around a story, interesting

it's definitely on the line between textbook and literature

probably why the vtc's

Mithrandir

It teaches through the story. I sit down and read it as a book occasionally.

Nuu. Librarian is slow.

0

Q: Is [poetry] a metatag?

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?

discussion tags burninate-request

BESW

10:28 PM

Never Out of Date: The Past as Fantasy, and Our Fantasies of the Past

Gilles

@Mithrandir WTF is the problem? You're complaining that poetry is not a good fit because it's used on questions about poetry?

What is it with this site rejecting tags on the basis that they're used to indicate what the question is about?

Riker

PUBLIC BETA

@mods pin pls ^

or

Public Beta for Literature has been announced!

5

anybody get mod emails?

Matrim Cauthon

Welcome to Public Beta everybody!

DForck42

10:43 PM

neat

Rand al'Thor

Yay, 49 Beta badges awarded.

DForck42

@Riker nope

Riker

hm then not sent yet prolly

DForck42

@Riker that or they didnt' make me a mod ;-)

Riker

i think they prolly did

Gilles

10:46 PM

@Riker it's too early for that

Riker

@Randal'Thor can you pin my public beta message?

@Gilles ah ok

user61230

@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.

4

Gilles

@Emrakul you know... I find this site pretty hostile. So maybe we should all try to deescalate.

DForck42

@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

2

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.

Gilles

10:56 PM

@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)

Librarian

0

Q: Is [poetry] a metatag?

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?

discussion tags burninate-request

5

Q: Congratulations Literature.SE!

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...

discussion

BESW

I'm confused about all the tagging curation discussion that has just one or two examples to draw experience from, myself.

@Hamlet [wave]

Gilles

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

Hamlet

@BESW hey, sorry about my inactivity, this weekend was super hecktic

BESW

@Hamlet No worries.

@Gilles That has the seeds of a good meta post, I suspect.

Rand al'Thor

10:59 PM

@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.

user61230

@Gilles This would be much better as a meta post.

Gilles

@BESW I'm really, really tired of Lit meta

Rand al'Thor

@Gilles Where do you see this "dismissed out of hand"? That's quite a strong statement.

Broklynite

"Congrats, literature is out of beta!"

Riker

already posted in here

Broklynite

11:00 PM

/me goes to vote

Riker

@Riker seriously can a mod pin this

Broklynite

"Sorry you can't do that, still in public beta"

Sigh

BESW

@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.

2

Rand al'Thor

@Riker status-completed by the ever-obliging Loong.

Gilles

@Randal'Thor There's a site where “emergent folksonomy” works?

Riker

11:01 PM

thanks loong?

Loong

@Riker You are welcome.

Gilles

I'm active on quite a lot of sites and I haven't seen one where it works without some serious reining in through action concerted on meta (+ chat)

Rand al'Thor

@Gilles Apparently it does on RPG. I'm just going by hearsay though; ask BESW or doppelgreener.

@BESW Not every immigrant from SFF is making all those unstated assumptions. Just saying :-)

Bookworm

2

Q: How ‘stream of consciousness’ was On the Road? Was it planned or edited?

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 ...

on-the-road jack-kerouac

user61230

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.

BESW

@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.

Gilles

@Emrakul the thing is, if you follow that philosophy, on many sites, you end up with totally useless tagging

Stack Overflow gets something decent if every post gets tagged with the programming language and that's it

language sites get 90% of the posts tagged [grammar]

BESW

The key is to wait until a problem happens, and then act on the problem we see.

Gilles

Unix & Linux gets 90% of the posts tagged [linux]

user61230

@Gilles That's where small corrections come in now and again.

BESW

11:06 PM

It's not about leaving the whole thing alone, it's about not jumping the gun.

Gilles

@BESW I have a problem, but my problem's been deemed a non-problem. So bingo, there's no problem!

(For those who haven't been following, my problem is finding questions that interest me. On every other site, this is done through tagging.)

BESW

@Gilles That's why it's good to wait until there's a demonstrable problem.

We can't act on something that we can't see, even if it's really there.

Gilles

@BESW What makes a problem demonstrable?

BESW

Depends on the problem, and it does require a modicum of good-faith assumption on the part of the meta community.

Gilles

@BESW ok, then there's no hope, and I should just go away

BESW

11:08 PM

Generally, "I tried to do [reasonable thing for the Stack to support] and [thing] happened instead" is pretty good.

Gilles

'night

BESW

@Gilles I didn't know this was your problem, because I looked and couldn't find where you've said so. Where has the community rejected your problem as a non-problem?

Rand al'Thor

@Gilles Surely that's an intrinsic enough tag to be automatically blacklisted?

user61230

@Gilles Alright. Sorry to hear you came to that conclusion, but if it's the one you'd prefer, that's alright.

Gilles

oh for fuck's sake can't get rid of the pings

-5

A: Should we be tagging questions with the names of specific books?

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” — kyrgyz medieval, 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. — Gilles Jan 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. — Gilles Jan 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.

2

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.

BESW

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.

Librarian

0

Q: A reminder to those with 500+ reputation: please remember your close/reopen votes!

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 ...

discussion close-votes reopen-votes

Rand al'Thor

@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.

BESW

11:28 PM

@Hamlet Was your hectic weekend at least enjoyable?

Hamlet

@BESW no, it was just a ton of work

the superbowl was entertaining, but I couldn't even watch the whole thing :(

BESW

Aw. I understand the ballsport is important to people.

Gilles

@BESW would be a duplicate of meta.literature.stackexchange.com/questions/291/…

which no longer has a near-consensus in favor of Robert's answer, nice

Oh well, I'll see. If french-literature ever becomes a way to filter questions about French literature, I'll give this site another try.

Transcript for