The Reading Room

DVK-on-Ahch-To

12:29 AM

@Randal'Thor OK :)

My current challenge: think up a good question about "Goodnight Moon"

Shokhet

@DVK-on-Ahch-To Good luck.

You should check out en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodnight_Moon#Allusions_and_references and following sections.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

OMFG This is so bloody cool!!!!

goodnightdune.com

2

Someone please star and pin that link!

Rand al'Thor

I don't get any of the references, but stars are free.

Hamlet

12:48 AM

Am I the only person who (1) loved God Emperor of Dune but (2) hated every single other Dune book?

Shokhet

It'll be a while before I can read Frank Herbert's Dune, but whenever it comes up here or on SFF, I think of this book that my fifth grade teacher kept in the classroom. I'm pretty sure that it's not it, but I can't find evidence on Wikipedia or elsewhere of another fantasy series called "Dune."

I'm probably misremembering the title, but it bugs me every time it comes up

(I briefly considered a story-id question, but I don't recall enough plot details to ask a good one, IMO)

Hey! I remember thinking it was similar to a different book I read in that classroom, and after Googling "children's fantasy book magic staircase," I found The Secrets of Droon. That's probably it :p

BESW

1:37 AM

Sigh. I should probably re-read Swiss Family Robinson, just so I can rage about it on Twitter.

Tweeted by UrsulaV on April 21, 2017 at 12:52 AM in reply to UrsulaV

@Hamlet I just found them all kind of insufferable.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

@BESW Um. Sorry. If someone is unclear on Dune plots, that's not a reflection on Herbert. Just sayin'

@Shokhet There were also Doom novelizations. I think Richard and I were the only two people who read them :)

BESW

Mm, I mostly linked it for the first line.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

@Randal'Thor You should go read Dune! As soon as possible.

@Hamlet Dune books were a bit uneven; Dune itself is certainly my favorite. I also liked the Anderson/Herbert Jr. prequels more than most people (ok ok stop tarring and feathering me)

user15026

1:56 AM

I've never read Dune. Well, I've tried a few times, but I've never made it more than a few pages in.

DVK-on-Ahch-To

So, "Interpersonal Skills" Area51 proposal has at least 6 moderators on board (might be more, I was too lazy to check all users).

1. Will they beat Literature for the record of moderators-per-site-as-users (outside trilogy)?

2. The competition for being site mods will be an exercise in site topic. Meta meta!

Hamlet

3:06 AM

@DVK-on-Ahch-To I couldn't stand the first book. I had to stop at the talking baby.

Librarian

3:49 AM

0

Q: How much quoting is too much quoting?

Let's review Stack Exchange's official guidelines for citing sources: When you find a useful resource that can help answer a question (from another site or in an answer on Literature Stack Exchange) make sure you do all of the following: Provide a link to the original page or answer ...

Hamlet

And I thought all of the philosophy was incredibly pretentious as well as poorly thought out.

Hamlet

5:19 AM

@Shokhet my personal rule about quotes is: quote when the exact wording is necessary, paraphrase when the exact wording isn't important.

Gallifreyan

@DVK-on-Ahch-To Cool indeed! (Says the guy who only watched the film.)

Hamlet

@Shokhet I think with your question here(literature.stackexchange.com/q/2360/111), the quoting is fine because it allows someone familiar with oral literature but not The Sandman to answer the question

Gallifreyan

5:40 AM

@Randal'Thor The actual "huh?!" chapters are yet to come. I thought it was all ordered rather well in preceding chapters.

BESW

9:04 AM

[ahem] My question about Lust Over Pendle got the author to make an account here.

5

Mithrandir

@BESW congratulations!

@Shokhet that series got annoying after the 50th book or so (I may be recalling incorrectly though)

Rand al'Thor

11:39 AM

@BESW Wow. NICE. And a really good answer too - I doubt even the most anti-authorial-intentist would downvote it.

Did you contact her about the question, or did she just come across it naturally?

BESW

I did nothing!

(This, by the way, is one way to get site traffic: ask questions that will bring authors.)

Title: Reichenbach Falls or Moriarty Meets His Doom by Cornelius Murdock takes 4th place in Eurobricks Lego buildin… https://twitter.com/i/web/status/855356800958427138

Tweeted by HowardOstrom on April 21, 2017 at 9:45 AM

Rand al'Thor

1:46 PM

I'm thinking about starting a community-run Twitter account. Maybe I'll write up a separate meta thread to ask for other people to help run it, and then maybe to select posts to tweet. (That list of top posts for Q1 2017 looks tempting) — Shokhet 13 mins ago

@Shokhet I'm not familiar with how Twitter works, but is it possible both to 'broadcast' a tweet to anyone who's interested/following and to direct it to notify a particular person?

Our Q1 highlights would be a good way to advertise the site in general, but we could also let particular Twitter-active authors know about any questions about their books.

Shokhet

2:00 PM

@DVK-on-Ahch-To These? ...I'm not familiar with them.

@Hamlet Makes sense.

@Hamlet Thank you. I was thinking about some of my comics posts -- they will often feel like there's a lot of quoted material, because pictures take up a lot of room.

Mithrandir

2 days ago, by Mithrandir

adds to todo list: create a Lit.SE curated Twitter account

Shokhet

@BESW Nice!

Mithrandir

@Shokhet ^

Rand al'Thor

@Mithrandir What a twit :-P

Gallifreyan

@Randal'Thor I think those are collected under different tabs now. What you address to someone does not show up in your followers' feed. They'd have to go to your account and open the "Tweets & Replies" tab.

Shokhet

2:02 PM

@Mithrandir Hah. Maybe we can share -- the curated MY account has more than one person running it

Mithrandir

2 days ago, by Mithrandir

Sure, I'll ping you. Might give some volunteers access, along with the mods... *thinks*

Rand al'Thor

@Shokhet YOUR account has more than one person running it? :-P

Shokhet

Want to start that now? I know we can't use twitter.com/stacklit -- that one's been dead since the other Literature site died. (I've been meaning to ask on Literature Meta about starting the auto one again)

@Randal'Thor *eyeroll*

Rand al'Thor

@Shokhet Ooh. I wonder if you could bug a CM about reactivating that one or giving you access to it.

Shokhet

5

Q: @mi_yodeya is people!

Mi Yodeya icon http://sstatic.net/judaism/img/apple-touch-icon.png The Twitter feed @mi_yodeya is now entirely human-run. We want to use it to promote Mi Yodeya content to a wider audience, using our God-given human intelligence to pick out material that's likely to be of people's interest now. ...

discussion site-promotion twitter

Rand al'Thor

2:04 PM

(cc @Mithrandir whose blueness gives him better access to CMs)

Mithrandir

On mobile, late Friday afternoon... Sure, what's the problem?

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor Those accounts never have people -- they're all automatic. Sort of like HNQ, but for the most popular question on a single site every ~3 hours

Rand al'Thor

@Shokhet I know that's the norm, but wouldn't it be possible to give humans access to them if they wanted to run one differently?

In fact, isn't that what happened with the Mi Yodeya twitter account? Or how did that come to be human-run?

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor Yes -- you can ping someone with their @username, and you can use hashtags to bring it to the attention of people who don't follow you. I imagine we'll be using #Literature a lot :p

@Randal'Thor There are two accounts:

7

Q: What is the difference between twitter accounts?

What is the difference between http://twitter.com/#!/StackJudaism/ and http://twitter.com/#!/mi_yodeya?

discussion site-promotion twitter

Rand al'Thor

Ahhh. Confusing.

Gallifreyan

2:10 PM

@Shokhet @Randal'Thor Funnily enough the links in tweets lead to existing questions on our iteration of Lit :)

Rand al'Thor

@Gallifreyan Naturally. Just like the links on the migration banners on questions salvaged from Lit.1 led to completely different questions on Lit.2.

Or the links from oneboxes in this chatroom from 2012 lead to completely different questions on Lit.2.

Shokhet

@Gallifreyan I know. The only thing in the tweet that matters is the domain, and the post ID. All the other characters are ignored -- now we have that domain back, and posts with those former post IDs. (We should probably nuke that account and/or delete all the tweets, to prevent confusion)

@Randal'Thor Really? ...I assumed this room was started for the new proposal. This room has been around since 2012? Neat.

Rand al'Thor

@Shokhet Yup, that's why the room has such a low number (1037).

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor Cool.

Rand al'Thor

Jan 11 at 23:14, by Rand al'Thor

Wow, this room still exists?

^ from a week before Lit.2 was created

Shokhet

2:13 PM

(The main Mi Yodeya chatroom is 468...but that site has been around a loooong time. Since Stack Exchange 1.0)

Rand al'Thor

For some reason it never got frozen either.

Shokhet

Aug 9 '11 at 19:26, by Stack Exchange

Welcome to chat for: Literature

Rand al'Thor

Aug 9 '11 at 19:26, by Stack Exchange

and remember; please read the FAQ ;p)

Apparently the bot knows emoticons.

Shokhet

Cute :)

DVK-on-Ahch-To

@Shokhet Yup

Mithrandir

2:28 PM

looks for salvageable questions from Lit 1

Shokhet

@Mithrandir Hey, that's not a bad idea! CMs, please don't kill that Twitter account just yet!

Mithrandir

I'd also like to go through the old chat transcript and see if there are any users who are still on SE but not participating (like maybe this guy )

Rand al'Thor

There's a chap called Matthew Read who was apparently one of the top users on Lit.1, and he has a diamond somewhere or other, so he's presumably still active on SE.

Mithrandir

@Randal'Thor Android

Rand al'Thor

@Mithrandir Who are you calling an android, you cyborg?

:-P

Mithrandir

2:35 PM

That's not me, that's my sock! :P

Shokhet

@Shokhet ...although Twitter isn't necessary for that. There should be a data dump somewhere (but Twitter is probably more accessible) cc @Mithrandir

Rand al'Thor

@Mithrandir Btw, did you see the Star Trek movie night voting thread on SFF meta?

Mithrandir

Affirmative

Shokhet

...apparently, @Emrakul is the reason Literature failed:

Why did Literature fail? http://meta.literature.stackexchange.com/questions/354/why-did-literature-fail?atw=1

Tweeted by StackLit on April 27, 2012 at 2:11 PM

Mithrandir

@Shokhet rofl

Rand al'Thor

2:42 PM

Dammit Emrak :-P

Shokhet

@Gallifreyan ...what I think is even weirder is that some of those post links go to tag wikis. Eg twitter.com/StackLit/status/192253044501655552

Curiouser and curiouser, sometimes different post IDs lead to the same tag wikis:

Rand al'Thor

@Shokhet Excerpt vs full wiki?

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor They resolve to the same page when I click on them. ...what would it mean, anyway, to link only to the wiki excerpt? AFAIK there's no way to link to one and not the other.

Rand al'Thor

Speaking of which ... @Riker does "curiouser" deserve a place in this answer?

Riker

@Randal'Thor TIL that's a word, yes it does

Rand al'Thor

2:48 PM

@Shokhet Links to the wiki/excerpt themselves both go to the same page, but they have separate revision histories (and the link to the revision history includes a 'post' ID which is therefore different for the two).

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor I see. No, it just links to literature.stackexchange.com/tags/history-of-literature/info, not the revision history.

...but mystery solved! The revision history "post ID" number is a match!

Rand al'Thor

@Shokhet The wiki and excerpt have 'post' IDs 1601 and 1602 - were they the post IDs of the Lit.1 questions linked from those tweets?

@Shokhet :-D

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor Yes

:D

Some of the questions in the Twitter feed would really go over well on this version of Lit /sarcasm

Who is the most smug character in literary fiction? http://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1429/who-is-the-most-smug-character-in-literary-fiction?atw=1 #bookrecommendations

Tweeted by StackLit on March 18, 2012 at 11:36 PM

A book which has a witty, smart and analytical character such as Sherlock Holmes or Dr House http://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1515/a-book-which-has-a-witty-smart-and-analytical-character-such-as-sherlock-holmes?atw=1 #bookrecommendations

Tweeted by StackLit on March 16, 2012 at 2:36 PM

...to be fair, most of them are not obviously "primarily opinion based," but there are a choice few.

Rand al'Thor

@Shokhet Oh yeah, Lit.1 was full of recommendation questions.

That's why I was so quick to get recommendation questions declared off-topic ASAP on this version.

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor This is worse than a regular recommendation, IMO -- "Who is the most smug character in literary fiction?" I mean, c'mon.

@Randal'Thor You did well, I think.

Perhaps too well -- I think requests for specific resources should usually be okay, and I know that some think them off topic without much consideration. (I know it's been discussed on meta; I don't remember how that discussion went)

Mithrandir

2:58 PM

On the very first day of Lit 1 Shog was already complaining about the recommendations.

Rand al'Thor

@Shokhet I think there was a "resource requests" meta post with a conclusion that such questions can be OK if they're specific/well-scoped enough.

Shokhet

IIRC there were some users who were just like "resource requests are recommendations, bye," but I think they deserved a chance.

Rand al'Thor

Hamlet linked me to it the other day.

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor Okay. I can get behind that.

@Mithrandir Probably a part of why Lit 1 didn't make it. We'll never know, because apparently the death of Lit 1 was all Emrakul's fault :p

Rand al'Thor

5

A: What are the rules for resource requests?

I'll take a stab at this based on the comments. "Bad" resource requests tend to be excessively subjective. See, for example, this question, which gives some examples of purely opinion-based resource requests ("if I like Jane Austen, who else might I like?"). Purely opinion-based questions are of...

Shokhet

3:00 PM

@Randal'Thor Beat me to it. I was just about to drop that link in here

Rand al'Thor

For the record, I downvoted Hamlet's answer there because I believe some resource request questions can be useful without being turned into literary analysis questions.

Shokhet

Yes, I think I did the same.

Ooh, here's a good one:

Which character in literature suffers most from excessive pride? http://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/1478/which-character-in-literature-suffers-most-from-excessive-pride #fiction

Tweeted by StackLit on March 6, 2012 at 11:36 AM

Rand al'Thor

@Shokhet The answer is ... Devdas?

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor Lol

Shokhet

3:17 PM

Topic of the week seemed to work on Lit 1. There were a lot of Stieg Larsson questions on the old Twitter.

Where's the data dump for Lit 1? I found a question that's related to one of ours. There may be useful material there.

Mithrandir

@Shokhet on Area 51 somewhere

Shokhet

@Mithrandir Got it. Thanks :)

Rand al'Thor

Perhaps you could use a clearer title (or one more in line with the body of your question). I imagine at least some of the downvotes this post suffered were due to the overly broad and hard to quantify scope in the title of your question. Consider editing that to something like "How many standard(ish) words were coined by Lewis Carroll?" — Shokhet 12 mins ago

@Shokhet Hmm, I dunno. I was trying to make the title reflect the spirit of what I really wanted to know, with the question body being a quantification of the underlying query.

Shokhet

@Shokhet Oh, that's annoying. Doesn't look like that question is in the data dump. Grrr.

@Randal'Thor Okay.

At least now I have the data dump ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Rand al'Thor

3:33 PM

@Shokhet I found the data dump really hard to navigate. Do you have some program that renders it nicely?

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor Nope. I used Notepad++, and just searched for the post ID (1152). When it didn't show up, I found 1151, which was immediately followed by 1157.

Searching "zombies" found exactly one hit, on an unrelated post.

Rand al'Thor

Deleted question maybe?

Shokhet

There should be some sort of program that renders it nicely. Maybe I'll look around in MSE and/or Software Recs to see if there's something

@Randal'Thor Probably.

Hang on. I found something in posthistory.xml

Never mind. Just a tag edit.

....still weird. I don't know how this works, but I can't find a record where PostHistoryTypeId =12 (question deleted) and Id=1152. Does that mean it wasn't deleted?

Bookworm

4:16 PM

4

Q: I want to identify a strip / comic that featured a young childs teddy bear being ripped open for a CD

I can hardly remember any of it, but it has been bugging me for days that I cannot seem to identify this strip. I know one fact for sure. The beginning of a volume started on a boat, in which 'invaders / evil guys' infiltrated the hut to search for a CD. On the deck, they question a father of a ...

story-identification comics

Shokhet

5:23 PM

1

A: Does part four of Doll's House add to the narrative of the volume?

While discussing this question in chat, Gallifreyan mentioned that he had wondered about the significance of Hob Gadling, arguably the protagonist of "Men of Good Fortune." We both mentioned our pet theories (Gallifreyan's: as a foil to Morpheus; mine: to show how Dream's relationship with humani...

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor @Shokhet I agree, I said "90% of the time"

> The thing about resource requests is that 90% of the time, they can be rewritten into more interesting, non-resource-request questions.

Gallifreyan

@Shokhet Already read and upvoted. Solid reasoning!

Shokhet

@Hamlet Okay. I guess I was misremembering the chat discussions at the time.

@Gallifreyan *bows* Thank you!

Hamlet

@BESW @Randal'Thor @Mithrandir @Shokhet @Gallifreyan can't we just create a new twitter account ourselves and use that?

Gallifreyan

@Hamlet Sure, if you curate it.

Hamlet

5:32 PM

I don't think autoposting questions would get us much attention.

Kill The Automated Messages Before They Kill Your Online Community

Gallifreyan

It boils down to "who's gonna spend their time?"

Hamlet

@Gallifreyan we could make a shared account? Some people already use twitter, etc.

Gallifreyan

@Hamlet I think that's more about newsletters and such, but I agree with you about automation.

@Hamlet Then it's "what are we gonna post?"

Hamlet

@Gallifreyan whatever anyone finds interesting

No need to overthink it

It just needs to be run by actual humans

If someone posts a cool link in the chat room we could post that

content that we like, etc.

Gallifreyan

Hmm. I bet someone could rig a bot that could control the twitter account from this chatroom. A-la Gideon from Mos Eisley.

Hamlet

5:38 PM

@Gallifreyan that would be perfect

Gallifreyan

@Hamlet >_> @Riker

Hamlet

@Gallifreyan ?

Gallifreyan

@Hamlet I'm just pushing the work to him, because he had the misfortune to make the impression that he was tech-savvy.

Hamlet

5:50 PM

0

Q: Could we have the ability to control a site's twitter feed from a chat room?

I'm a moderator for the Literature Stack Exchange, and we've been trying to promote the site. We've gotten a lot of engagement on twitter (sometimes from famous authors), and we want to use twitter to promote the site. I know that Stack Exchange has automated twitter accounts, but automated acco...

feature-request chat twitter site-promotion

Gallifreyan

@Hamlet Hm. Well, you have my support.

@Hamlet There should already be some community-made bots, so at the very least you'll get an answer that offers the source code.

rene

Don't get too exited, you'll need to build some authorization ... none of the open source SE chat bots I know of offer that feature out of the box

@Gallifreyan on Stack Apps you'll find some chatbots: stackapps.com/search?q=chatbot

Gallifreyan

@rene Hm. Someone would need to tinker with Twitter API then.

> RebolBot is a chat bot with a natural English dialect interface, specifically targeting the StackOverflow chat rooms. Yet it has a modular design, can post tweets to Twitter, and could be modified with only a little effort to work with other chat systems.

@Hamlet @rene ^^^

Looks like our problem is almost solved.

rene

6:07 PM

That could be your choice but you need to host it and you need an account that can chat ...

Gallifreyan

We could come up with some ideas for hosting; account is laughably easy; we'd need to get the bot to format the links to make them Twitter-shareable (i.e. append ?atw=1 or whatever)

Rand al'Thor

6:26 PM

2

A: Could we have the ability to control a site's twitter feed from a chat room?

We no longer create Twitter accounts for new Stack Exchange sites at all: We stopped creating them for all public beta sites by default because a) Twitter sees very little engagement for us; b) Twitter-the-company started blocking new accounts for us (probably because it thinks we're bots?) ...

Not sure if she's misunderstood what you're asking, @Hamlet - it seems like she's tagged it status-declined because this isn't something SE the company is going to do, but we the community could still have a Lit.SE twitter feed and link it to chat somehow.

Gallifreyan

@Randal'Thor I had the impression that was exactly what @Hamlet was asking for - was I wrong?

Hamlet

> Someone could even cook up a way to manage it from a chat room like you're suggesting here. It's a cool idea - just not one that fits into our plans, since Twitter integration has been deprecated.

@Randal'Thor I read hairboat's answer as saying that they weren't going to make a chat bot, period, although we were free to create our own.

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet Yes. But were you asking for SE to make a chatbot, or were you more asking for help on making our own?

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor I was asking for SE to make a chatbot, but if we had to make our own chat bot, then IDK, I guess if someone is interested in doing it...

Rand al'Thor

I think Mith and Gall have already expressed an interest in doing it.

Shokhet

6:36 PM

@Hamlet That was the plan

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor @Mithrandir @Gallifreyan the way to create a chat bot would be to use this python library (it's how Smoke Detector does it):

github.com/Manishearth/ChatExchange

Gallifreyan

@Hamlet Now the easy part - make someone do this for us.

Hamlet

We would need to get someone to host it (what does SmokeDetector do for hosting?), and we would need to figure out how to authenticate using twitter

@Gallifreyan I'm tempted to do it myself

Rand al'Thor

What exactly are you trying to accomplish with a chatbot?

Hamlet

seeing as I want to teach myself Python

Gallifreyan

6:40 PM

@Hamlet The bot I linked already has Twitter authentification

Rand al'Thor

I mean, once there's an existing Twitter account, it'd be easy to set it up via the feeds to pump tweets into this chatroom.

Gallifreyan

34 mins ago, by Gallifreyan

> RebolBot is a chat bot with a natural English dialect interface, specifically targeting the StackOverflow chat rooms. Yet it has a modular design, can post tweets to Twitter, and could be modified with only a little effort to work with other chat systems.

@Randal'Thor We want to do the reverse.

Shokhet

Stack Literature

@StackLiterature

0 tweets, 0 followers, following 0 users

Hamlet

@Randal'Thor I want to be able to send the bot a message such as @chatbot tweet "blah blah blah" and have the bot post the message

Rand al'Thor

@Gallifreyan Ah, you mean someone could say %%tweet <link> in here and it would tweet that question?

Hamlet

6:41 PM

@Randal'Thor it would also be cool if the chatbot could post to people's personal accounts

Gallifreyan

@Randal'Thor Exactly

Hamlet

And it should probably post in the chat room if someone replies to one of our messages

Gallifreyan

@Hamlet That's what the fancy "share" button is there for.

Rand al'Thor

> If you want the SE name on it, just make sure it's credited to "the Literature Stack Exchange community". This is to make it clear that it's community-owned and not operated by SE Inc. It's probably best to steer clear of the @Stack[Subj] type handle to avoid that confusion, too.

-- hairboat

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor Done. Thanks :)

I can change the @username. Do you think I should?

Literature Tweet suggestions

Suggest questions or answers for the community Twitter account...

Rand al'Thor

6:46 PM

@Shokhet Probably a good idea, when a CM has already advised it.

Shokhet

Oh! I missed that this was a Q/A asked just now for Literature. I thought it was a general advice. Let me fix that now.

Anyone have a better idea for a name?

Rand al'Thor

LiteratureSE ?

Shokhet

Okay. That could work

LiteratureSE is taken. Any other ideas?

Rand al'Thor

@Hamlet If you're still here, can you rename as-byatt to a-s-byatt? I can't change the name without mod powers, since they're too similar.

Bookworm

0

Q: Is the character of Roland Ash based on any particular Victorian poet?

The novel Possession contains some spot-on mimicry of several different writing styles, including lengthy poems by two fictional Victorian poets. The character of Roland Ash in particular feels as if there is some model, or models, for him. He has a very distinct style and a distinct set of inter...

inspiration victorian-literature as-byatt possession

Rand al'Thor

6:55 PM

@Shokhet I guess LitSE is also taken?

ReadingRoomLiterature? ... hmm, maybe not

Shokhet

@Randal'Thor Yes. Lit_SE and Literature_SE were also taken

@Randal'Thor Too long

Lit_Community also taken

Rand al'Thor

Make a meta post and call for suggestions?

Shokhet

CommunityOfLit isn't taken, but it's ugly

@Randal'Thor I started writing one announcing the account and directing recommendations to chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/57497/literature-tweet-suggestions