If we're going to have multiple questions asking "what is the best/most useful X" and multiple answers explaining: "the question is objectively unanswerable," we should perhaps be closing the questions with guidance to the askers saying "look at these two previously closed questions to see why we close such questions."
I'm inclined to see the wisdom of @GarethRees's oft-stated injunction that having fine distinctions among tags and expecting users to abide by them is futile, so maybe we should just have authorship and make the other two tags cinnamons thereof
If I were a giant I wonder if I / could stand on my tiptoes and paint the sky. I'd fashion paintbrushes from branches of trees / and paint all the clouds as they float on the breeze.
> Albert Robida illustration from Octave Uzanne’s “The End of Books” (1894), the French bibliophile's story imagining how printed text might disappear in the face of rapid advances in phonographic technology
gaah I have SO FREAKING MANY meta hares to start. This one, the one about influence, the one about not turning answers supplied by authors into comments ....
Let me thank all of you, especially @Tsundoku, for helping me figure out the meaning of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore's poem Dans l'été. This enabled me to translate it without horribly distorting the meaning.
I NEVER rear'd a young gazelle, (Because, you see, I never tried;) But, had it known and loved me well, No doubt the creature would have died. My rich and aged uncle John Has known me long and loves me well, But still persists in living on— I would he were a young gazelle.
Note that using generative-AI tools to rewrite your posts is also a violation of the policy against unreferenced AI usage; Grammarly and other spell-check tools are fine, but not tools that substantially rewrite your post.
I think every surviving copy of Shakespeare's First Folio is unique. When they discovered a typesetting error, they corrected it without throwing away the sheets that had already been printed. So both facsimiles and reprints of that first edition are based on a set of copies without corresponding to any specific one.
Multi-level barrage of US book bans is ‘unprecedented’, says PEN America. Censorship at local to federal level recalls past authoritarian regimes ‘but this has never all happened at once’.
@verbose I am indeed; this semester I'm finishing Historical Background to Literature (aka Western Literary Classics), Intro to Poetry, and Academic Writing
I put in a lot of work into my answers for this site. It's demotivating for me to do all that work if my answers have to fight for space alongside machine generated bullshit.
@Tsundoku My book collection exceeded my shelf capacity long ago. Visitors have to pick their way between stacks of books on the floor - the "librarinth"
We have a number of meta questions on tagging that have not made progress for some time, e.g. narrator and point of view, authorship and writing process. It would be nice if people could take a few minutes to have a look and vote (or answer).
@Tsundoku I hate spoiler markup as much as the next guy, but I find the framing of that answer (and its upvotes, let alone the entire discussion) as "ableist" and "discriminating against people with disabilities" everything but constructive.
