@Hamlet The problem with HNQ isn't the community members' votes. It's the drive-by-non-expert-visiting-masses' votes (mostly, i guess, from SO, simply due to the sheer difference in scale).
Personally, I often refrain from voting on HNQ content I visit, especially when I know i'm not informed enough to know correctness. Even on the sites I generally am a community member, like Cooking. Or even often SFF (I wouldn't vote on WoT HNQ posts, for example)
I've seen some god-awful answers getting several upvotes even without the HNQ effect. Like the HP one I just linked, or the bottom two answers to this which are just plain wrong and yet have 4-5 upvotes, or this answer from someone who evidently has zero idea what that scene is all about.
(Sorry if I'm being harsh here. But we do want to have some proper quality standards, right from this early stage, and identifying bad answers is part of that as well as rewarding good ones.)
Well, sure, you always want to improve the site you're invested in and protect it against detrimental influences, often under the risk of coming across harsh.
The April 2017 topic challenge is Hard to Be a God by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Please consider joining in by asking and answering questions about the book! It's legally available here in PDF form.
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@NapoleonWilson We can't graduate for another few days at least :-P
Which? Keeping a known harasser on their concom, belittling and dismissing reports and concerns about him, publicising private email correspondence from a concerned party, issuing a public statement saying that their "inclusive" policy means harassers are welcome?
In The Tell-tale Heart, we see the madman does kill the old man:
But for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not bother me. I knew it would not be heard through the wall. Finally the beating stopped. The old man was dead.
I moved the mattress away and ex...
The Manhattan Projects uses red and blue in clearly representational ways, but I can't quite figure out what they represent.
At first they're used to designate between the Oppenheimer twins, and later between alternate realities where things go right or wrong, so I thought they might be simple c...
@b_jonas Well, yes. On the up side, it's become a thing people actually talk about, and more and more people are able to choose which conventions they attend (as participants and as guests) based on how well the concoms handle this stuff--until relatively recently there wasn't much choice between bad options.
Question about the site which might not fit well on meta: is it harder to answer questions about stories you haven't read (a.k.a. do a Rand al'Thor) here than on SFF?
I mean, I've done it a few times here (The Great Gatsby, Pechorin, Lermontov), but nowhere near as much as I used to do it on SFF, and it is generally harder here - as @BeastlyGerbil discovered ;-)
When people try to talk about stuff they haven't read here, it usually shows more clearly and weakens the answer more obviously.
It's also often more important here to know what other people say about the work; see the several times people do a quick Google and think Philosophy of Composition is a sufficient citation.
IME, there's an important difference between plot questions and "out of universe" questions. If you want to know how Star Trek combadges were attached to the actors' clothing, someone who's never seen ST can research that almost as easily as someone who has. If you want to know why [character] did [thing], or what [object] symbolises in the context of a story, it's much harder if you haven't read the story.
@Mithrandir Oh, thanks for reminding me! I meant to answer that one.
@Mithrandir Might be better to turn that link into hyperlink text, so that people can see what it is before they click it.
@BESW I had to look up that word, but (if I'm understanding the definition correctly) I would rather say it's the other way round. SFF has plenty of "behind the scenes" questions which can be answered by interviews with authors or directors - which is how I managed to get so many star-wars answers; I could never touch in-universe questions on that - but Lit has more questions which can't be answered without knowing all the in-universe context.
And @Mithrandir, you poor soul. Abridged versions of books can be terrible.
Retellings can be fine, but abridged means they literally take the same text and cut out great chunks of it.
Mhm. It's 4 Poe stories stuffed into one volume meant for kids (sorta). I wish I had the full version, but I am not the one buying books at this stage...
As a child, I once read an abridged version of Nicholas Nickleby. I vividly remember one of the very last chapters, in which Nicholas (?) was talking to some other guy. There were actually some important plot revelations in that chapter (about Smyke?), but I had no idea who the other guy was, or what they were talking about, or what the hell was going on. I got really upset.
This is what I've got.
Also, I imagine Poe's stories are old enough to be legally available online.
Hmm, I guess I can try that. Might find some more stuff for the meta :)
@Randal'Thor I suppose I should read that by now. I have it, it's just been sitting downstairs waiting for me to stop rereading stuff to find questions for Lit...
When playing Civilization the Gandhi AI seems very aggressive in its use of nuclear weapons.
Real live Gandhi has a reputation of not being aggressive at all, is there a reason why the creators of Civilization made him so aggressive in the game?
Although the answer why does Gandhi want to nuk...
I may be flamed out of here for saying this, but I've found screen adaptations a much better way to appreciate Dickens's stories than actually reading the books in full.
> Joseph Oppenheimer, an American physicist with multiple personalities; Robert Oppenheimer's evil twin brother Albert Einstein, a German physicist and barbarian Albrecht Einstein, a German physicist and alcoholic from an alternate reality Richard Feynman, an American physicist and wormholer Enrico Fermi, an extraterrestrial disguised as an Italian physicist
@BESW The Manhattan Projects sounds wacky already, and I've only read the character list.
@Randal'Thor Some stories adapt better to other mediums. Often there's been some kind of cultural shift about how mediums are used, so the themes or visuals of an old novel are now closer to what we'd expect from a film,or the like.
....which makes it so weird that nobody's ever managed to make a really good faithful adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans, since it's already written as if describing a film being watched.
You can use it as a prompt to see how you might improve the question, but a certain inevitable amount of individual contrariness and grumpitude means that if you're not getting singular downvotes sometimes you may not be doing much.
If you're starting to see a pattern, though, that's when it's time to sit up and take notice.
@Mithrandir I downvoted the Tell-Tale Heart question, after some thought, because I honestly think the answer is obvious just from the whole theme of the story and the narrator's insanity.
Which is rare: I don't normally both downvote and answer a question.
@Mithrandir The dismemberment wouldn't be enough on its own, IMO. Some of Poe's stories are crazy enough that a man's heart still beating after his head and limbs had been cut off isn't too inconceivable.
By the way, I'd still welcome more answers on this. Don't be afraid to provide a new answer just because it's already got one; there's no guarantee that that answer will get the bounty.
If some of his questions get single downvotes just because someone doesn't like him or whatever, then meh. It's the "legitimate" downvotes that can actually teach him something.
It could be a sort of reverse HNQ effect: people think it's got more upvotes than it deserves in comparison to other questions, so they compensate by downvoting.
On this day, renowned children's book author Beverly Cleary was born in 1916. She turns 101!
Image source:… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/852144788690403330
@Mithrandir I didn't downvote the question (and I think it's fine). I downvoted both answers because they were just authorial intent answers on a question that demanded a lot more than authorial intent. (I should have left comments, but I guess I was busy or something?)
To clarify, there are times when I upvote authorial intent answers. For example, I upvoted this:
It’s noted in The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth (which I highly recommend to any fan- it's a really lovely book) published by Knopf/Random House in 2011; on page 106, annotation 10 reads:
“I’m Alec Bings”
According to the author, this character’s curious name has no special significance ap...
I would have expanded it, but I don't know enough about analysis to write a good answer like that. I knew that answer, but I would also like the other kind of answer.
Yep, I was just hoping for some wise advice from the people who hang out here :)
And I'm not so sure how my next couple questions will go over.
Say, I wondered this before I even heard about SE: "Why was"'In English?' translated directly into 'באנגלית' instead of into 'בעברית' ('in Hebrew') in the translation of--- - - - - - - - - - - - -?"
While I don't know developers motivation behind this choice, I always thought they took the following quote from Ghandi to the next level:
There was a time when people listened to me because I showed them how
to give fight to the British without arms when they had no arms and
the British...
@b_jonas It makes more sense in some contexts than others, I'll admit.
But I can't see any easy way of distinguishing between where it does make sense and where it doesn't, except by making some sort of notability criterion, which is almost certainly a bad idea.
@Randal'Thor Tags aren't supposed to replace search... you can search by tag and term... seems like the easy solution is to search by author name tag and keyword "1984"...
If I'm not mistaken, I was the one who originally created the 1984 tag, which has now been applied to more than a few questions. However, I'm wondering if I made a mistake, as I just realized the actual title of Orwell's novel is Nineteen Eighty-Four, spelled out. Personally, I don't think this i...
@Randal'Thor don't know about the hype, but they are interesting reads, at least for the sake of historical anecdotes.
The first is more like recollections of life events, and the second is almost a detective story, except he's investigating the shuttle disaster, and a ot of the story is about him getting the people to listen to him and believe him.
To be fair, it plagues native speakers as well. Say, a lot of people say "ихний" instead of "их", for "their". Needless to say, the former is an abomination, but still very common, even among educated people.
The cat is out of the bag. Northern Frights available now!
Paperback: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0998691224
Kindle:… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/852180969578795009
@Randal'Thor He's a british writer who published in America, written Lassie Come-Home which is quite famous, and The Flying Yorkshireman which is less famous, both about men and dogs.
eg, there are a LOT of Edenic parallels if you go looking for them, and cherry-picking those can make it sound very reasonable... but it's inconsistent with the text as a whole, and so unsupportable.
(I wrote a short paper positing that Long John Silver is an amalgam of the serpent in the Garden of Eden and of Judas Iscariot. It was a lot of fun, and there's a ton of evidence for it. But it's also complete nonsense.)
@Randal'Thor On the topic of authors who wrote awesome books better remembered for their very different but also good screen adaptations, with disappointing sequel novels, Robert C. O'Brien.
We're also missing Chris Van Allsburg and William Steig.
@Randal'Thor As for more classics. We have barely any questions about Rudyard Kipling (who's famous for the Jungle Book), he's only mentioned passingly in questions about other authors. Same about Oscar Wilde. I hear Frances Hodgson Burnett's The secret garden is famous, though I haven't read it. I think we have exactly one question about J. F. Cooper, and one about Jane Austen.
Now, you know what'd be hilarious is a question about critical opinion of the Brontë sisters based on Stella Gibbons' portrayal of literary criticism in Cold Comfort Farm.
And of course nobody asks anything about the Peabody sisters.
...heh. When we visited Concord, the woman in the tourist information house started giving us the monotone speech about all the battle locations and the gun museum. When we said, "Actually, we're interested in the writers," she lit up, swept all the military pamphlets off the table, leaned forward and said "Well then! Surely you're here for Sophia!"
@BESW I dunno, here in the eastern bloc I haven't really met Dr Seuss and all those american children's book illustrators. We had Richard Scarry for some reason, and I now have Matilda with Quentin Blake's original illustrations, which I quite enjoy, but that's not a common book here. Instead,
we have our own Réber with his unique style and some other talented Hungarian illustrators, the soviet illustrator Szutyejev whose children's books (some written by Plackovszkij) are highly circulated here, and of course Kästner's books come with Horst Lemke's drawings.
Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novel Treasure Island opens somewhere in Britain, at and around the Admiral Benbow inn. Where exactly is this meant to be?
It seems to be relatively near to Bristol, so I'd guess somewhere in the West Country of England. I've also heard it said that it's meant to ...