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Hamlet
Hamlet
12:53 AM
@Randal'Thor while I don't know anything about Scandinavia history, it's much more likely that an area the size of Scandinavia was more culturally diverse in the past than it is today.
with every valley having a different dialect, etc.
 
DVK-on-Ahch-To
DVK-on-Ahch-To
1:20 AM
 
BESW
BESW
Kids these days https://t.co/JxP2YpLCxq
Tweeted by sezzy_harris on April 19, 2017 at 12:16 AM
 
DVK-on-Ahch-To
DVK-on-Ahch-To
And for Timothy Zahn fans:
 
user15026
2:04 AM
@Randal'Thor I'd be more inclined to say they were different even more so previously.
 
user15026
Also, I don't see a problem with the narrower tags. But I come from gaming, where each game gets a tag, so....
 
user15026
but it's not like we're gonna run out :)
 
Bookworm
Bookworm
3:09 AM
0
Q: Is the story of Tales in the Sand (or its form) faithful to traditional African stories?

ShokhetIn the prologue to The Doll's House (The Sandman #9 "Tales in the Sand"), Gaiman tells the story of Queen Nada. Neil Gaiman is not African, nor (as far as I could tell) were any of the people who worked with him. Therefore, I wonder if the story of Queen Nada has a parallel in traditional African...

comics neil-gaiman the-sandman oral-tradition
0
Q: Looking for a short story about a small-town mob who goes after a man who had accidentally killed another man

Adam Guzikfolks! The story I'm looking for is one I read only once over a decade ago for class. The story is set in a small town in the U.S., sometime around the 1950s, 60s, akin to "Monsters are Due on Maple Street." In this story, the town is planning and then gathers as a mob to evict a man and his f...

short-stories
 
Shokhet
Shokhet
3:46 AM
@Gallifreyan ...does the number 50 have to be precise? What if it's a round number?
@Gallifreyan I don't understand what the mistake is. The use of the word "magnet" instead of "vortex"?
 
Bookworm
Bookworm
0
Q: What word was used in the original for "anisotropic"?

ShokhetIn the beginning of Hard to Be a God, there is the matter of the skeleton chained to a machine gun. "An anisotropic road," Anton explained. Anka stood with her back to him. "Traffic can move only in one direction." This is also remembered by the characters later in the book: “Anka,” P...

russian-literature strugatsky-brothers translation hard-to-be-a-god
 
 
2 hours later…
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
5:22 AM
@Shokhet No, that's just an interpretation I had not considered. It says Rose acted as a magnet to dreams, and thus Morpheus was able to find all the runaways in her proximity (Brute and Glob, Corinthian, Fiddler's Green). The mistake I mentioned is different: the companion says that Dream is talking to his captor, Roderick Burgess, after he escapes. But Roderick has been dead for ~40 years, and Dream is talking to his son, Alex.
It's an important character-defining point that Dream takes his revenge on the son, rather than his immediate captor, meaning that he doesn't care about justice, but revenge.
 
Bookworm
Bookworm
5:52 AM
-1
Q: Poem about a young man who dies

Kevin LongThere was a poem I read years ago that I can't remember the name of. The setting is rural, possibly set in 19th or 20th century United States. A young man, possibly even a teenager, suddenly has some major medical problem. His sister calls for the doctor, who gives the young man some ether and tr...

poetry story-identification
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
6:07 AM
@Shokhet It'd have to be rounded to 60 then - 57 rounds up.
@Shokhet Writing those two answers at once, I was like
 
humn
humn
6:52 AM
(from an appreciative lurker)
Dear @Rand al'Thor, thank you for the Thurber reminders! (selective quote:)
in The Sphinx's Lair, yesterday, by Rand al'Thor
@humn How's my Thurberism coming along?
On my favorite days, your polyphony rejoices (archaic sense, according to a dictionary) what my Comp Lit friend and I saw in each other.
She saw her inner systematist. I saw my inner perceptualist.
See?
 
Mithrandir
Mithrandir
@humn ...What? O_O
 
humn
humn
Rand will understand, I tried to type by during a quiet moment.
Nonetheless, @Mithrandir, you challenged me to ask a Roman-a-clef question here about Phantom Tollbooth, and I am working up to it.
I could swear that an article led me to that book in the first place.
So I read the book as if it were Alice's Adventures ....
And enjoyed it more, to be honest.
(now trying to show my inner literatteur as positively as possible:)
... much like Gulliver's Travels
But I haven't found any remnant online hint of specific targeting in Phantom Tollbooth.
Then again, how'd this be for a Q: "What Roman-a-clef cast calls have lasting significance long after the specified characters are forgotten?"
(specified = unstated)
(what = which ?)
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
7:34 AM
@Shokhet Tweeted Neil Gaiman about that chronology issue regarding Unity. Hope he doesn't blacklist me or anything.
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
7:58 AM
Gaiman seems to answer questions on Twitter, maybe I'll be lucky for a change.
 
 
3 hours later…
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
11:18 AM
@Hamlet @Ash It's still true that every valley has a different dialect, and the language variants spoken by, say, northern Norwegians and northern Swedes from near the border are probably more similar to each other than either is to Oslo or Stockholm dialects. But we're not going to have tags for oslo-literature and trondheim-literature and bodo-literature and random-valley-in-the-middle-of-the-norwegian-tundra-literature.
The differences between the Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish languages are almost negligible - the only reason they're considered separate languages and the in-country dialects aren't is basically politics.
I'm not sure how much separate literary traditions there are in the three countries - certainly Norway is proud of Alf Prøysen, and Sweden of Astrid Lindgren, but when you go back into the mists of time, there was probably less difference between "Norway" and "Sweden" and "Denmark" (if those countries even existed) than there was between one valley in Norway and another.
@humn I understand little and comprehend less. Polyphony, systematist, perceptualist - methinks you speak of deeper linguistic and philosophical concepts than my tiny mind has yet grasped.
 
humn
humn
11:38 AM
@Randal'Thor , your mind is not tiny enough to wrap tightly enough around my thoughts.
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
11:54 AM
Someone is sabotaging this month's challenge:
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
Wut?
grabs flags
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
What did I do to deserve this :'(
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
Apr 12 at 13:30, by BESW
A single downvote can usually be treated as white noise that means the system's working.
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
@Randal'Thor curls in a ball and cries
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
@Gallifreyan Cheer up. I think I've just upvoted two of your answers, while going through the recently updated posts on the site.
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
12:04 PM
@Randal'Thor Cheers! :) Maybe I'll finally be able to topple @Emrakul from top answerers of the-sandman
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
@Gallifreyan I assumed you were already top by far :-o
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
@Randal'Thor Not according to the tag page; but then, I think it only updates once a day or so.
 
user61230
12:21 PM
@Gallifreyan Ha! In your drea--wait a second.
 
Bookworm
Bookworm
0
Q: How do the Silmarils Solve the puzzle of the Sampo?

Matt ThrowerIt is well established that Tolkien used his fiction as a means of filling gaps and solving riddles in the extant studies of mythology and linguistics. Most of the time, he chose to do this by supplying a definitive answer to a problem. His work, as a whole, was supposed to represent the lost b...

j-r-r-tolkien myths the-silmarillion
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
Ooh. That reminds me: I know there's supposed to be some sort of connection between CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength and Tolkien's legendarium, but I'm not sure exactly what it is. That would make a great intertextuality question, but I'd want to read That Hideous Strength first in case the answer is obvious :-/
 
 
2 hours later…
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
2:00 PM
Got a cool Sandman question: "Why is Dream so different from other Endless?". Reading the Wikipedia article, which claims that Dream is the only Endless to populate his realm with speaking characters (i.e. distribute responsibilities he could as well do himself). Gaiman also said Dream created them because he was lonely.
But why? Why aren't other Endless lonely?
 
Bookworm
Bookworm
0
Q: Meaning of this tanka

AyeronWhat is the meaning of the following tanka by Saigo Hoshi which I came to read today? Now indeed I know That when we said "remember" and we swore it so, it was in "we will forget" that our thoughts truly met.

poetry japanese-literature saigo-hoshi
 
Shokhet
Shokhet
2:13 PM
@Gallifreyan Cool! Let me know if he answers
Do you have a link to the tweet?
Did you link to my question/your answer?
@Gallifreyan Right. That makes sense.
@Gallifreyan Well, maybe. It still might be justice -- Alex was a necessary part of the original team that captured Dream, and was planning on keeping him in that fishbowl forever and/or until he was able to get something out of it. Alex certainly slighted Dream (although perhaps not as much as his father did)
(Although I think the punishment was maybe somewhat overly harsh)
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
@Shokhet No characters were left :( Twitter sucks.
 
Shokhet
Shokhet
@Gallifreyan "Dream magnet" makes sense. I thought it was a little convenient for the plot that everyone ends up in the same place or two -- now there's a reason for it.
@Gallifreyan :/ ....reply to your own tweet, then?
 
Shokhet
Shokhet
2:31 PM
@Gallifreyan I haven't yet read enough of the other Endless to attempt an answer, but I'll keep this question in mind as I move along. I've seen Desire, though -- it doesn't really seem to care about others all that much, except perhaps in a way that it can derive pleasure from them. So it seems natural that its realm is just a huge statue of itself, with Desire living alone in the statue's heart. (Or so it seems to me)
@Gallifreyan I'm within two points of being the top asker. Right now, you're at 22, and I'm at 20.
 
Shokhet
Shokhet
2:44 PM
@Emrakul :)
 
Bookworm
Bookworm
3:43 PM
0
Q: Why is "Ode on Melancholy" and Ode?

AirdishWhat features of Keats's "Ode on Melancholy" make it an ode? This is a question that seems to be important in our english class, yet I don't have a comprehensive answer...The most I can say is that he praises melancholy but there's definitely more than that if it's an important question...

poetry meaning john-keats
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
4:04 PM
@Shokhet You've probably already passed me, but the stats haven't updated - just check it tomorrow.
 
Bookworm
Bookworm
4:29 PM
0
Q: Does C. S. Lewis support annihilationism in The Last Battle?

EJoshuaSC. S. Lewis's The Last Battle includes a scene of what amounts to the Last Judgment (I don't recall the exact chapter, but it's toward the end of the book): The creatures came rushing on, their eyes brighter and brighter as they drew nearer and nearer to the standing Stars. But as they came r...

c-s-lewis the-chronicles-of-narnia the-last-battle
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
@Shokhet How do you add nice oneboxed links to tweets?
Ah, figured it out, Just append ?stw=2 to the end of the short share link.
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
4:50 PM
o_0 Sony will adapt Wheel of Time cc @Randal'Thor
 
Bookworm
Bookworm
5:28 PM
-1
Q: looking for a book discussing post modern issues

RadekI am looking for a book published in between 1950-2000 by an US or UK author. Some one who is trying to address urging issue(s) of our post modern era ... There must be list of resources from books trying to achieve the same. Thanks for any suggestions

american-literature
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
5:40 PM
OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG NEIL GAIMAN REPLIED OMG OMG YES I CAN DIE IN PEACE NOW
@Gallifr56789197 I think Morpheus is approximating. And probably should have rounded up, not down. But he was in a… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/855106252963061761
Tweeted by neilhimself on April 20, 2017 at 5:09 PM in reply to Gallifr56789197
2
@Shokhet ^^^
 
DForck42
DForck42
6:08 PM
@Gallifreyan nice!
 
Shokhet
Shokhet
@Gallifreyan Very nice! Thanks for the ping! :-)
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
6:34 PM
0_o
Someone was removed
 
Mithrandir
Mithrandir
O_O
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
What?
 
Mithrandir
Mithrandir
It's all over
Lots of sites
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
Ah. By the way, you might want to unprotect this.
 
Hamlet
Hamlet
7:07 PM
@Gallifreyan wow!
Also, I just noticed this, but Morpheus looks exactly like Neil Gaman. Coincidence?
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
@Hamlet Gaiman was one of the models for Morpheus. Can't find a precise citation now, but the resemblance is obvious.
 
Hamlet
Hamlet
@Gallifreyan is there a reason why that is the case?
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
@Hamlet Why not? :) Gaiman was readily available at the moment. But the face on some covers was also inspired by Peter Murphy, as per Gaiman's own request.
 
 
1 hour later…
Shokhet
Shokhet
8:17 PM
@Gallifreyan Yeah. I got a lot of those today. twitter.com/MTL613/status/855121029227839488
 
Gallifreyan
Gallifreyan
@Shokhet Wyrd stuff. Was it just one user, or several users? Was it a ring, or just one deviant? We will never know...
 
Shokhet
Shokhet
@Gallifreyan That is correct lol
It hit me in two waves, so maybe more than one? ...it doesn't feel like the numbers I would expect from serial voting, so I assume the user just quit
 
BESW
BESW
9:04 PM
I'm sobbing. Twitter is an amazing place where you can talk to your heroes. 😭❤️ http://ift.tt/2oMSxIo https://t.co/hkgldhCqcs
Tweeted by BlairImani on April 20, 2017 at 2:07 AM
 
doppelgreener
doppelgreener
@BESW I first read this as "Twitter is an amazing place where you can talk to your horses" and was very confused for a minute.
 
Mithrandir
Mithrandir
O_o
 
BESW
BESW
@doppelgreener You're not wrong.
 
doppelgreener
doppelgreener
@BESW there doesn't appear to be an Infinite Scream: Horse Neighing And Winnying And Clopping Edition .......
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
9:38 PM
@Gallifreyan I don't care who makes a WoT television series - I'll boycott it anyway.
@doppelgreener I hear we may be seeing your name in blue soon? :-)
 
doppelgreener
doppelgreener
@Randal'Thor There's a chance of that! RPG.SE's got a moderator election going and there's several very upstanding citizens nominated including myself.
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
@doppelgreener I saw! You're the only one I've actually met, but it looks like there are quite a few great candidates and may be tough competition. Good luck!
 
doppelgreener
doppelgreener
@Randal'Thor Thank you! :D
I'd very much like to be the successful nominee, but I think whatever way it shakes out I'll be pretty happy with the outcome.
 
 
1 hour later…
Bookworm
Bookworm
11:18 PM
0
Q: When did the Rupert Bear stories start repeating themselves?

Rand al'ThorSome years ago I used to collect Rupert Bear annuals. I had a huge collection going all the way back to the 1940s, with some gaps which I slowly filled in over the years, and every time I got a new book, it meant reading several new Rupert stories. So I was rather disappointed when at some point ...

rupert-bear
 
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
11:35 PM
@Gall @DVK I'm in the middle of Chapter 5 of Hard to Be a God, and currently have zero idea what's going on. I think I'll give it at least till the end of the chapter before starting to post "what the heck is this all about?" questions.
 

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