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Bookworm
Bookworm
02:29
1
Q: Please Help! looking for a book i once read about a dragon and the mc had her Caretaker possessed

Lilith AbyssBasically, back a long time ago i read a book i can now barely remember. In basic summary from what i remember, the story involved a baby dragon that get's sent from a fantasy world into the real world and gets found by the mc, and in the mc's world there just so happened to be a card collecting ...

identification-request
verbose
verbose
03:15
@Bookworm heiße Netzwerkfrage. This went HNQ thanks to @henryflower's very quick, spot-on answer. I thought it was truly impressive that he identified the quote so quickly.
For reasons best known to herself, our favorite commentator did feel the need to (mis)direct the OP to a different SE site several hours after OP had accepted the answer....
@cmw That's super interesting. So if I peel apples some hours before I actually put them into a fruit salad, I'm pre-paring them?
cmw
cmw
04:03
@verbose ba-dum tish!
 
3 hours later…
b_jonas
b_jonas
07:30
@Bookworm OP gives some additional info in comment. Not very useful in itself, but shows that they might answer other questions.
verbose
verbose
07:43
@b_jonas I'm not sure I'd agree that there's little interest in them. We have generally been getting 4–10 questions on each of the topic challenges. There have been some bombs (Bibutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Mohammed Iqbal) for reasons that I found entirely predictable (lack of availability of translations being one). But otherwise even for something like Uyghur Literature, which is rather niche, we got around 8 questions IIRC.
@Tsundoku so you should feel free to do so now in your post-mod era too, I guess?
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
08:25
@ClaraDíazSanchez Congratulations! Hope you have time to celebrate and that you have a good position lined up for afterwards :-)
@verbose Often, thanks to EJoshuaS's prodigious asking capabilities.
Tsundoku
Tsundoku
09:06
@verbose I never figured out what came after post-modernism.
@b_jonas Interest has always been variable. And the number of people who participate by reading is larger than the number asking questions. For me, that is a good enough reason to keep the topic challenges going.
 
2 hours later…
Clara Díaz Sanchez
Clara Díaz Sanchez
11:03
@Randal'Thor Or one person taking the lead asking questions, like EJoshuaS or Charo (or indeed me)
 
1 hour later…
Clara Díaz Sanchez
Clara Díaz Sanchez
12:03
Hmm, just noticed something odd (or so I think). I'm coming up for a bronze tag badge for "poetry": I have 20 answers and a score of 90. The score seems pretty low - am I averaging less than 5 points per answer?
Mithical
Mithical
@ClaraDíazSanchez Yes. You have an average score of 4.5 per answer, with 8 scored 5 or above and 12 scored between 2-4.
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
12:20
@ClaraDíazSanchez On a small site like Lit, it's common to get the 20 answers before getting the 100 score for bronze tag badges. (On a larger site like SFF, the opposite is more common, as there's more people and they vote more.)
Clara Díaz Sanchez
Clara Díaz Sanchez
Ahhh, and it's up-votes, rather than rep gained. I should probably have known that...
Tsundoku
Tsundoku
12:56
@ClaraDíazSanchez Historical side note: we once had a user who posted 95 questions in a single day (well, partially during the night also).
Clara Díaz Sanchez
Clara Díaz Sanchez
13:47
@Tsundoku First reaction, "Wow". Second reaction, "Were the questions any good?"
Gareth Rees
Gareth Rees
14:10
@ClaraDíazSanchez poetry is just a low-scoring tag, I think. Perhaps it's because everyone reads prose, but only a minority reads poetry. My poetry answers average 5.25 up-votes each.
Bookworm
Bookworm
0
Q: Quote identification: Schindler war ein kleiner Rabe

Christoph MarkJohn Rabe is known for his humanitarian actions during the Nanjing massacre, cf. link to the German Wikipedia. I remember well, but might be mistaken, that in one version of the very same German Wikipedia page in 2019/20, roughly, there was a quote by Chinese scholars written in German translatio...

identification-request quote-source textual-history chinese-language
Tsundoku
Tsundoku
14:23
@ClaraDíazSanchez Well, what I call "the deluge" started on 13 February 2021, so you can check the questions that came in through the feed. Many of those questions were fairly straightforward (I think I managed answering at least 10 of them on a single day) but a number of them were closed rather quickly.
Gareth Rees
Gareth Rees
14:35
I seem to recall that some of the questions were not original to the user, but were taken from other sites like Reddit and Quora.
A few were down-voted I think out of annoyance at the flood rather than because the question deserved it per se. For example, this question on Shelley's 'Skylark' was deleted by the community user due to having a negative score. I think it's a reasonable question (if very basic) and could potentially be undeleted.
Clara Díaz Sanchez
Clara Díaz Sanchez
15:06
Some are more profound than others, but I wouldn't say any were trivial.
 
4 hours later…
verbose
verbose
18:45
@GarethRees I'm not sure I agree with that assessment. Under what circumstances can one imagine that "sweetest songs ... saddest thought" was inadvertent?
Gareth Rees
Gareth Rees
19:06
@verbose In order to explain that the paradox is deliberate an answer would also need to explain how to interpret it, which would be the interesting bit.
verbose
verbose
ah
Gareth Rees
Gareth Rees
I was listening to some skylarks today, they always make me think of the poem
 
1 hour later…
verbose
verbose
20:31
Interesting, they remind me of Mrs Dalloway: "What a lark! What a plunge!"
Bookworm
Bookworm
0
Q: How to understand Doña Vera's decision to flee Austria for Mexico?

verboseOne of the major characters in Anita Desai's The Zigzag Way is Doña Vera, the Austrian widow of a Mexican silver baron. The couple had met and married in Vienna just prior to the outbreak of World War II. Before her marriage, Vera and her family lived in a Viennese slum. Her work as a chorus danc...

character-analysis historical-context anita-desai the-zigzag-way
 
2 hours later…
Bookworm
Bookworm
22:33
1
Q: Why does Eric claim his visit to the Sierra Madre Highlands is personal?

verboseThe protagonist of Anita Desai's The Zigzag Way, Eric, is an academic struggling with his research project. He has been given a grant to write a book on immigration, but feels uninspired. His girlfriend, Em, is traveling to Mexico as a research scientist. Telling himself (and her) that he might f...

anita-desai the-zigzag-way
Bookworm
Bookworm
22:55
0
Q: Why does Eric's talking to Em about his grandfather lead to a tense situation?

verboseThe protagonist of Anita Desai's The Zigzag Way, Eric, has accompanied his scientist girlfriend, Em, on a research field trip to Mexico. Eric realizes that his grandfather David had been a Cornish miner in Mexico, and that his grandmother Betty had died there after giving birth to his father, Pau...

anita-desai the-zigzag-way

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