The Reading Room

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CowperKettle

09:24

Orbital is a 2023 novel by English writer Samantha Harvey, published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and by Grove Atlantic in the US. It follows six fictional astronauts over 24 hours on the International Space Station. The novel was well received by critics. It won the 2024 Booker Prize and the Hawthornden Prize, and it was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for imaginative fiction. == Background == Harvey watched a continuous live stream of Earth from the International Space Station while writing the novel. She initially started work on the novel...

Bookworm

10:02

Q: Short horror story about a widow seeking help from a healer who takes fingers as payment

I read this short story in – I think! – a horror anthology. I can't recall the title or the author, and I can't find it in the anthologies I have on my shelves. This what I remember: A woman is waiting for her husband, a sailor, to return to her and their children. On the day he is due to come h...

Rand al'Thor

10:22

@verbose I vaguely remember once pinging @Tsundoku about some issue in French Language chat (since he's a mod there) and him replying "what's wrong with my cat?"

3 hours later…

Tsundoku

13:08

@Randal'Thor I think you wrote, "Il y a des drapeaux dans votre chat".

@verbose It looks like they didn't think outside the litter box ;-P

Tsundoku

13:39

Above is the current heading hierarchy on the page What is the origin of the name "Frankenstein"? visualised with the browser addon HeadingsMap. (The first number is the heading level.) CC @Laurel

See also Headings in W3C's tutorials.

Gareth Rees

14:18

@Tsundoku I recommend either explaining why the header structure is important (since in most browsers it doesn't matter), or being bold and changing the header level. Using header level 3 (### in Markdown) would achieve your desired header structure.

CowperKettle

15:10

AI hype of the day: AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably - by Porter and Machery, in Nature Scientific Reports

Mithoron

15:26

@CowperKettle Because they are "human-written poetry" regurgitated by "artificial stupidity"

CowperKettle

Yes

Gareth Rees

16:17

@CowperKettle Have you seen the AI-generated poems in the study? They are absurd doggerel. This is one of the verses from their poem generated by ChaGPT 3.5 "in the style of Sylvia Plath":

So here I am, alone and lost,
A ship without a sail.
In this world of pain and sorrow,
I am but a mere wail.

The experiment strongly resembles Practical Criticism by I. A. Richards

Tsundoku

@GarethRees The heading hierarchy doesn't matter to browsers; it matters to blind people, who often navigate by jumping from heading to heading. By turning the current level-two headings into level-three headings, those headings will appear as describing subsections for the level-two heading "2 Answers", which does not make sense. As I said, SE is not designed to create a sensible heading structure inside answers.

Gareth Rees

@Tsundoku Yes, that's the explanation that I recommend you offer on the post in question.

2 hours later…

bobble

18:46

Another review draft, this one more positive

Big Time disappointed me, but I don’t think it was a bad book. Mind you, it wasn’t a great book, but it was the sort of mediocrity with which one could pleasantly while away a weekend. My main issue is the mismatch between an interesting blurb and the novel’s actual contents.

What did I think I was getting? The blurb said that people could sell their time to others. That this was a “thriller that takes the adage ‘Time is money,’ and makes it literally, frighteningly so.” I was excited for a dystopia, adjacent to our world (the blurb also mentions the FDA), that dealt with the consequences …

2 hours later…

Tsundoku

21:16

Did a search for dystopian fiction involving the selling of time and found the article Dystopian fiction is selling like there’s no tomorrow. Based on the title, I thought it was new. It's from March 2017, which also makes sense.

The Booker Prize guide to... dystopian fiction, 28 November 2023.

Rand al'Thor

@bobble Nice review - and if you're interested in literal frightening takes on the adage "time is money", I strongly recommend Michael Ende's Momo (which btw I should probably reread myself, did a reread of The Neverending Story recently but haven't looked at Momo for many years).

bobble

21:32

@Randal'Thor feel free to post it to the blog

Tsundoku

21:42

@Randal'Thor Momo is a book I read in the second year of secondary school (translated into Dutch).

@bobble Does FDA stand for Fiction and Dystopia Administration?

bobble

Unfortunately not

Tsundoku

I just did a search for Momo on a site for second-hand books and one of the other books that shows up is about "Paleo Lifestyle: Stone Age Fitness in the 21st Century". So you can save enough time to go back to the Stone Age?

Dystopian books fly off the shelves following Trump's re-election, 8 November 2024. Oh, well, correlation is not causation.