The Reading Room - 2017-05-14

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1:57 AM

These Were The First Female Astronauts In Science Fiction http://io9.gizmodo.com/who-were-the-first-female-astronauts-in-science-fiction-1538556884?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=io9_twitter via @io9

Tweeted by feliciafm on May 13, 2017 at 3:37 PM

2:54 AM

While I was away, SFO Terminal 2 put in a (typically) amazing exhibit of typewriters. Here's Ray Bradbury's. https://t.co/kVAhVhyktC

Tweeted by harrymccracken on May 13, 2017 at 5:43 AM

3:06 AM

0

Q: Can anyone remind me who wrote this essay? (Mark Twain, maybe?

It might be Mark Twain or O.Henry. It discusses the shortcomings of that era's novels and short stories. Specifically, it parodies authors' remarks qualifying dialogue. The author of the essay claims that those remarks have become so mindless and mechanical that no one, neither authors no reader...

short-stories mark-twain literary-device

3:55 AM

Check out the Retro-Future in Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom.

1 hour later…

5:14 AM

Shakespeare in Love - Shakespeare Month 2017

4 hours later…

8:46 AM

user image

> Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

...that applies to the site as well :P

8:59 AM

@Mithrandir :D Indeed.

2 hours later…

10:44 AM

0

Q: If war is romanticised does that mean it is not a valuable text?

I was wondering about this idea, because feelings and emotions might be biased to a certain cause/group/ideology, effectively changing the general perception of said 'idea'. What are your thoughts?

inspiration war-and-peace

3 hours later…

1:16 PM

My all-time favorite example of syntactic ambiguity comes from Wikipedia: 'Charlotte's Web is a children's novel by American author E. B. White, about a pig named Wilbur who is saved from being slaughtered by an intelligent spider named Charlotte.'

2 hours later…

3:30 PM

0

Q: Symbolism of Occam's death in Straight Man?

In Richard Russo's novel Straight Man, the protagonist Hank claims to be a philosophical disciple of William of Occam, and applies Occam's razor to his approach to deduction many times. As I recall, the use of Occam's razor was the only way in which Hank considered himself a disciple of this Wil...

richard-russo straight-man

4:21 PM

0

Q: "spacer" means "astronaut"?

I recently have had a huge big discussion about the word "spacer". Between friends (all non-native English speakers) we had this big discussion that if the word "spacer" officially exist in English language with the meaning of "astronaut", or the person who does space excursions. Can any langua...

5:11 PM

@Bookworm Don't close this one, guys. It's a bad question, but it is on topic.

@b_jonas It's in no way related to a work of literature.

It's asking if it's a real word in the wider English language.

Ok, then migrate it to sci-fi, which was ok with word meaning questions like scifi.stackexchange.com/q/157801/4918

It could be made on-topic by adding a work of literature as a context (e.g. in Asimov's works "spacer" != "astronaut"), but right now it's off-topic.

@Gallifreyan It doesn't need the context. That's almost the only place where that word can come from. Asimov's works are so well-known that the terms had come into public consciousness. People talk about robot laws and neurowhips and stuff.

Um, nerve whips. They have a different name in every context.

Neural stunners, phaser on stun setting, stun gun, zamorgian phaser on stun setting, but it's nerve whip in Asimov's books.

5:15 PM

Right now it's more like "settle a bet?". If OP responds and changes the question to be about Asimov's spacers, I'll reopen and answer.

@Gallifreyan Ok, let's hope the OP clarifies.

The question is asking if the word 'spacer' means 'astronaut' in regular English, from what I can tell.

Ok, I tried to ask OP to clarify.

(Mind you, I think a spacer is a piece of packaging that keeps elements of the product from touching each other or knocking to each other, but my big dictionary doesn't support that.)

I'm also wondering why they deleted it on ELU...

I had checked with the ELU people and sent it over and then it came back.

@Mithrandir I'd guess because he got downvotes.

5:24 PM

@Mithrandir I just thought I need to post a new post there.... So I posted again, before you transferred it! To avoid duplicated posts, I deleted one.... — Morty 3 mins ago

Ah yes, here's some evidence that it does mean what I thought it means: woodgears.ca/dovetail/using.html

Despite that my dictionary doesn't tell that.

Henry WH Hack v2.0

I have returned!

You know I never read a book in a long time.

As with almost anyone with a smart device in these days.

5:44 PM

@HenryWHHackv2.0 What? You can still read books on smart devices. You just get the smell of plastic and grease instead of the smell of old paper and dust and fungus, and you might strain your eyes more, but the experience of a good book is essentially the same.

Henry WH Hack v2.0

Oh yeah EBooks.

@b_jonas Humans just watch more YouTube videos than read books now. (I think.)

@Mithrandir Hi! o/ :)

@HenryWHHackv2.0 o/

Henry WH Hack v2.0

Reading is good.

@HenryWHHackv2.0 Yeah yeah yeah xkcd.com/1227 and xkcd.com/1601 and all those stereotypical complaints. I don't care.

Henry WH Hack v2.0

Ok

5:53 PM

must... not... click... xkcd... link...

Nobody tells me what to enjoy or what counts as real art or real books. If I want to read webcomics or youtube videos or TV series, as well as books, I will, because those are the ones I can talk about to other people with similar interests on the internet, which is something we didn't have in my childhood when all I had is a big library of nice book but nobody to talk to them about.,

Henry WH Hack v2.0

A good book is a good art.

I still have to finish American Gods.

@b_jonas . . . After which you can come to out spoiler-ridden American Gods room :D

Meanwhile, I was in the library on Saturday, and got some pages of Szegő György's translation of Verne's Indes Noires photocopied. That book is sadly only available in Széchényi. (I had talked about some Verne books I'm chasing in chat, which would give some context, but the discussion got deleted because of tomato plague.)

6:07 PM

@b_jonas You can still access the room, you know?

@Gallifreyan No, it's deleted. Not just locked, but deleted. Last I've seen anywa.

Only chat moderators can access it.

@b_jonas Users with +10k rep can see deleted rooms

Henry WH Hack v2.0

Wait What?

@Gallifreyan wtf... really? No way. I think I can access only deleted posts on Sci Fi.

Hmm, you are right.

I can access it for some reason (I can't tell if it's the 10k thing).

Doesn't really change what I said though.

user image

user image

6:12 PM

@Gallifreyan You don't need that menuing. It's an old room, everyone knows it's room number 198.

@Gallifreyan heh, they haven't renamed meta.mos yet?

These days rooms have like five digit room numbers.

@Mithrandir Yeah, SFF mods are scarce these days.

But I think the name "Restaurant" will stick.

Though we're going to have to find a suitable acronym for it.

@Gallifreyan it might be time to give Thaddeus's diamond to someone else, much as it pains me to say it

scifi.stackexchange.com/q/146186/4918 There's a good name that could be used for a chat room, but no, they went with the boring HHGG one.

6:17 PM

@b_jonas I proposed "Lux", Lucifer's piano bar in LA, but no one listened :(

@Mods Looks like the challenge announcement got automatically unpinned - care to write a new one?

Good thing there's no film made of Indes Noires, unlike how there are films of many other Jules Verne novels. Such films are always worse than the book.

This month's topic challenge is Icelandic Sagas! View the list of asked questions, and perhaps even ask your own!

2

...that look good?

Looks good ;)

Also, my father said today that if I like the Jules Verne books for its boring description sections, I should read Jókai. Eww.

6:32 PM

Now why isn't anyone asking questions? I seem to remember the "we should have challenges" post having a great number of upvotes - where is everyone?

This statement is annoying because I can't clearly counter it. What if Jókai is one of those authors that I hate only because I had to read it in school, and his books aren't good for schoolchildren?

Seriously. I might have to try, as much as I hate it.

@Gallifreyan Rand is on vacation, I think, and I.... erm.... haven't gotten around to reading them yet, and I'm not sure where everyone else is.

There must be some reason why his books are so ridiculously popular. He's like the number one most printed author in Hungary, and he's legendary from having been able to earn a living from writing books, as opposed to having to work in journalism like almost all other writers.

So maybe his books are good, just not suitable for children.

(Someone also recommended me to read Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude with a similar reasoning.)

@b_jonas I couldn't get through the first 30 pages of that one.

@Gallifreyan Right, but someone recommended it to me personally. As in, they know me.

6:46 PM

sigh

@Gallifreyan ?

I have 2 questions I want to ask but I'm stuck doing some boring stuff that I have to get off my hands.

The site will still be here later, don't worry :)

But what if I forget them?

opens the notepad

Write down the basic premise

6:53 PM

@Mithrandir Yeah. Except when the mods worry about tomato blight and delete the whole thing.

2 hours later…

8:32 PM

@b_jonas that's really not going to happen, if for no other reason that SE gets a ton of traffic from that SFF.

@Hamlet That was a reference to the gigantic disaster that happened on SFF...

(hyperbole, but whatever)

I wouldn't call it a disaster, but it was certainly spotlighted as such.

8:52 PM

2

Q: What was restored in the American Gods "tenth anniversary" edition?

The tenth anniversary edition of American Gods is Gaiman's "preferred text" version of the book. In the forward, he claims to have restored about 12,000 words that were edited out of the original for various reasons. I assume that many of those edits are scattered across the book in small parts,...

@Hamlet You optimistic young one. Websites never disappear. There's no need to download useful databases from the internet because they're there forever. Whoever is hosting the website will keep the use for the world at large in mind and will keep hosting even if it's no longer advantageous to him and has moved over to the next step of his life. You are completely safe to trust the big companies to guard all your important photos and other data for you.

While the big companiesa could ban your account even without a good reason, because it's easier to keep the health and reputation of the whole service alive by banning some users than to investigate the actual claims and keep pages online even if they're controversial, they are ethical companies and never do such a thing.

@b_jonas you can literally download a data dump of all of the content of every Stack Exchange site

All that useful info in geocities and my opera and google square pages is still out there and if you can't access it, it's just a problem with your computer setup.

@Hamlet Yeah. Except for the chat and the deleted pages and the …

And it's updated only once every three months.

@b_jonas I'm 90% sure you can see deleted pages in the archive

(And yes, I have a lot of them downloaded a year or two ago. I have lots of stuff downloaded.)

(But there's even more stuff on the internet that I should download but haven't had time for it yet.)

(And some that I have downloaded and should republish, but haven't had time for that either.)

8:59 PM

But you're being a little bit ridiculous here. Stack Exchange the company isn't going to close the main SFF site, because they're getting a lot of traffic from it. Traffic means add revenue or the potential for add revenue.

@Hamlet Of course! Not SFF, and not now. Don't worry.

...or Lit, for that matter.

They might delete some of it, but aren't likely to close the whole thing any time soon,.

And yes, I do apreciate them making dumps of the main sites (not of chat) on archive.org , and a half-sane API. Way better than some other websites do.

I don't want to sound ungrateful.

If they started closing sites for inactivity again, I think the first to go would be Community Building...

Not closing for inactivity, sure. Just deleting some large chunks of posts or something.

9:02 PM

@Mithrandir That would be ironic.

(captain obvious here)

Or developing the website interface and incidentally making it harder to access, like some sites do.

@b_jonas I find it extremely unlikely that SE will go deleting large chunks of anything in the near future.

All in the name of web 2.0 or something.

It's great because they can still claim the data is out there, it's just so difficult to access that people won't bother.

It's plausibly deniable.

Sorry, I'm just a bit bitter. It's not specifically about SE.

10:00 PM

0

Q: History of Spoilers

I live in the USA, where people react poorly if you spoiler a move or a book for them. However, the question What is the benefit in the Prologue "spoiling" the play in Romeo + Juliet? raises the interesting point that beliefs about spoilers vary according to location, time period, and culture. I...

history-of-literature

user15026

@Bookworm I really don't see this being a literature thing.

10:19 PM

@Ash It would be interesting to see how this developen in literature though.

user15026

I... Guess?

As written, I suspect it's far too big for a Stack answer to encompass.

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May '1714

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