The Reading Room

Q: "the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits" in Frankenstein

6:16 AM

@Bookworm Our 50th j-r-r-tolkien question. c-s-lewis just behind on 49.

After them I'm guessing greek-literature and spanish-literature as the next Taxonomist-eligible tags.

2 hours later…

Bookworm

7:59 AM

The following is an extract from Frankenstein. What does the "habits" in "returned to my old habits" mean? It does not seem to refer to habits like drinking, staying up late, etc. If it refers to something else, how would you express the idea in current English? Who shall conceive the horrors of...

1 hour later…

9:19 AM

I think Guy de Maupassant is our most successful topic challenge so far, in terms of number of questions.

9:37 AM

The Narayan challenge generated 16 questions. The Maupassant challenge reached 18 questions (or 19, depending how you look at the first Richepin question). And it pushed the french-literature tag into tag badge eligibility.

The next "language" for a tag badge would be russian-literature but that one has not received a lot of questions lately.

9:49 AM

Anyone not too lazy to fix this?

@NapoleonWilson Actually, it's the OP's job to fix it. That's what I've told them.

@Tsundoku Even leaving aside the issue of blind users (which is important but a lot of people don't bother themselves about it), posting images of text is bad for site searchability too.

Not to mention copy-paste-ability if anyone wants to use that passage/information anywhere else later.

@Tsundoku Oh.

Site searchability is not a human rights issue.

There is a UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Until AI takes over the world, I don't think there will be a UN convention on the rights of search engines :-P

10:07 AM

@NapoleonWilson Me.

I'm pretty used to typing out passages from Google Books by hand.

10:46 AM

I'd still hesitate to make improving answers a UN mandate.

We've overtaken the 8-year-old Windows Phone and Bricks sites in the list by question count, but still just behind the slightly newer sites of DevOps and Interpersonal Skills.

Also, it's not the right of the search engines, rather than the right of the human employing the search engine. The computer doesn't (or oughtn't) profit from searchability rather than the people searching.

@NapoleonWilson Lack of searchability is an inconvenience for everyone, regardless of disability, while inaccessibility is a human rights issue for people with disabilities. That's a rather important distinction. Searchability has been used as an argument for alt-text for ages, but only legal requirements can really enforce anything.

Q: Meaning of Bilbo's “Song of Eärendil” in “The Lord of the Rings”

@Tsundoku Sure, and it's a much better distinction than posing one as profiting humans and the other as an empty technicality.

4 hours later…

Bookworm

3:15 PM

This poem is taken from The Fellowship of the Ring, book II, chapter 1 (page 263): Eärendil was a mariner that tarried in Arvernien; He built a boat of timber felled In Nimbrethil to journey in; Her sails he wove of silver fair, Of silver were her lanterns made, Her prow was fashioned like a swa...

meaning j-r-r-tolkien the-lord-of-the-rings

2 hours later…

4:57 PM

@Bookworm Hmpf.

1 hour later…

6:11 PM

Hmpf indeed.

Should we close the previous one as a duplicate now or what?

Oh.

Or the new one as too broad? I dunno.

It feels a bit too much to just dump a long poem and ask us to "retell" it.

I...was afraid to say.

I'm certainly not going to close either of them at this point, just throwing possibilities out.

3 hours later…