The Reading Room

bobble

00:13

And posted an answer I was meaning to a while back.

Hopefully the double-checking on the Redwall death answer will be done by my tonight.

bobble

00:50

Are link only answers considered NAA here?

Tsundoku

01:55

@bobble They are low-quality answers; see When is an answer not an answer?.

Why did the chicken cross the road?
To avoid sacrifice. :-P

bobble

03:45

Does Romsca count as 'one of the "good" characters, either one of the main protagonists or one of their sidekicks/confidant(e)s/close friends'? @Randal'Thor, I guess, but you're asleep.

bobble

05:06

two more books to double-check, then a quick jaunt through all the characters will be my last make-sure-I-didn't-mess-up before posting

hopefully before school tomorrow morning

Bookworm

05:27

0

Q: A public domain book

I am looking for a book in public domain (published before 1925) the fits the following criteria: First person narrative and the narrator is a girl (teen or younger) Book should be about moving to or growing up in a foreign country. Would appreciate any leads

Rand al'Thor

06:07

@bobble Eh, kinda sorta. She's one of the greyest characters I can think of in Redwall books. As I remember, she's a vermin leader who takes part in kidnapping the Abbot, but she ends up protecting him from the lizards and even dying for him at the end.

Bookworm

06:18

1

Q: When and why did "No man is an island" start being regarded as a poem?

John Donne's "Meditation XVII" from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) includes the following well-known passage: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promo...

poetry history-of-literature essays john-donne devotions-upon-emergent-occasions

verbose

@Randal'Thor A vermin leader? Is she in cahoots with Vermin Supreme?

Vermin Supreme

Vermin Love Supreme (born 1960 or 1961) is an American performance artist, politician, and activist who has run as a candidate in various local, state, and national elections in the United States. He currently serves as a member of the Libertarian Party's judicial committee. Supreme is known for wearing a boot as a hat and carrying a large toothbrush, and has said that if elected President of the United States, he will pass a law requiring people to brush their teeth. He has campaigned on a platform of zombie apocalypse awareness and time travel research, and promised a free pony for every American...

@Bookworm finally asked about that "no mayonnaise in Ireland" thingy

Rand al'Thor

Interesting question.

Once again I have half of all Socratic badges.

The closest people to joining the Socratic club seem to be Gallifreyan and Ahmed Samir, but @Gallifreyan hasn't posted a question here since 2018.

verbose

@Randal'Thor thanks! I came across one such presentation of it as poetry some time within the last year and was horrified. I poked around some and was even more horrified to learn that it's apparently a thing.

@Randal'Thor Congratulations!

Rand al'Thor

@verbose Yeah, to me it seems a nice piece of prose but a subpar poem.

verbose

@Randal'Thor Indeed. 'Twould've been a nice question for the Elizabethan Prose challenge

> @verbose Yes, but the passage I've quoted here says "Hook was not his true name". – Rand al'Thor

> the great tragedy of Science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact (Thomas Huxley)

Rand al'Thor

06:40

:-D

Actually I think he might have taken the name Hook after becoming a pirate but before losing his hand, in which case it is nominative determinism.

More by choice than by chance, though, as he could have replaced his missing hand by anything but chose the hook to match his name.

That might be worth another question, actually: "when did he take the name Hook?"

verbose

"I don't believe in nominative determinism!" insists Rand, as he slowly metamorphizes into a South African gold coin

Rand al'Thor

ROFL

When I'm in a room with verbose and Tsundoku, it's hard not to believe in nominative determinism.

verbose

@Randal'Thor touché

verbose

06:57

question, how is it possible for a user to have zero rep? I thought the floor was one. But looking at the list of voters I see two with zero rep.

Rand al'Thor

@verbose You're looking at the monthly leagues, not overall. It means they voted a lot but didn't earn any rep this month.

The floor is indeed 1, even for suspended users who can't do anything on the site.

verbose

Ah, that makes sense.

Also, do only sites that have fully grown up get their own custom icons? Like, cooking SE has a cute l'lle chef's hat or money SE has a fetching piggy bank

Rand al'Thor

Yep.

If we want to have one, we need the site to graduate. (Unfortunately the row-of-books icon is already taken.)

Graduation criteria have changed a lot over the years. A few years ago they decided on "get at least 10 questions per day" as a clear criterion, then last year they graduated a whole bunch of sites just for being more than 7 years old.

That's why Tsundoku is suggesting to get some people together promising to post at least one question a day for some time, to put the QPD stats above 10 ;-)

verbose

@Randal'Thor I've been wondering though because one of the things Area 51 says is important is % answered, and we're well below the 90% they say we need. Asking more questions might improve one stat while driving down the other. No?

Mithical

Whatever Area 51 says can largely be safely ignored.

The criteria listed there haven't changed in a decade and the actual requirements aren't reflected there anymore.

verbose

07:10

@Mithical ah

verbose

07:24

Do closed questions count toward the 10 per day floor? I mean questions that are closed for being off topic or duplicates, not questions that are booted off for being spam

Rand al'Thor

I think they do as long as they aren't deleted.

verbose

08:34

@bobble do you know this Thurber cartoon?

verbose

13:17

> CAESAR The ides of March are come.
SOOTHSAYER Ay, Caesar, but not gone. [III.i.1–2]

Tsundoku

13:38

@verbose Even graduated sites don't automatically get their own icons and stylesheet. Philosophy SE graduated several years before the mass rites of passage event and still looks like a beta site. The only difference now is the removal of the epitheton ornans "Beta".

@verbose So the answer to the "why" part is: due to the introduction of mayonnaise in Ireland?

@Randal'Thor Here I am wondering why Randal'Thor's username isn't inquisitive. Or Grand Inquisitor ;-)

bobble

14:06

@Randal'Thor that page should probably say "eight of this badge has been earned" instead of "eight users earned this badge"

Rand al'Thor

@Tsundoku High Inquisitor of the Children of the Light?

Tsundoku

@Randal'Thor Or Hogwarts High Inquisitor?

Rand al'Thor

Neither of them are very pleasant characters. I think I prefer the Dragon Reborn.

Or a South African gold coin, as verbose would have it.

Tsundoku

Do dragons ask many questions?

@Bookworm This question is now a Hot Mayonnaise Question or HMQ.

bobble

@verbose no, nor did I know of Thurber cartoons before today. Though it occurs to me this question may not be meant to be answered as such.

verbose

14:14

@Tsundoku I don’t think it’ll remain there long

Tsundoku

@bobble The reason for the current wording is probably the same as why you can't track your progress towards a new Socratic badge after you've already earned one. It's as if it was originally not meant to be awarded more than once but a bug still allows you to get new ones.

@verbose Obviously, mayonnaise is not meant to be consumed hot.

Rand al'Thor

@verbose It might. Both Q and A got a surprising amount of votes even before going HNQ, maybe enough to start snowballing.

bobble

14:27

Is this answer NAA for talking about Wikipedia articles in different languages, instead of translations of the work itself?

verbose

@Randal'Thor oh. I assumed it was too obscure to attract much attention and only got on HNQ because Gareth gave a good answer quickly. (I was hoping Gareth would take a stab at the question, it’s his sort of thing)

Tsundoku

@bobble It's an answer that gets a lot wrong. That makes it a low-quality answer rather than falling into the not-an-answer category.

bobble

It seems to be answering a different question than the one asked

verbose

@bobble I agree

verbose

14:56

@Randal'Thor but The Gondoliers is such fun

bobble

list of deaths before my final check-though of the characters. finished double-checking by book.

bobble

15:26

Should inkheart be inkheart-trilogy?

Tsundoku

@bobble A fourth volume, »Tintenwelt – Die Farbe der Rache«, has been announced.

bobble

inkheart-series?

Tsundoku

wheel-of-time doesn't have 'series', so we haven't been consistent. Is it important to include that?

bobble

I just noticed redwall-series has "series"

probably to make it clear the tag isn't just for the book Redwall, but for the whole series

Tsundoku

And for Le Guin's Earth See stories, we have the-earthsea-cycle.

Yes, some tags have 'series' and some don't.

the-hunger-games doesn't have it either.

Bookworm

18:10

0

Q: Identify a children's story about a little girl who collected items, had a monster in the basement, and solved a dog-napping mystery!

I read this children's book about 5 years ago, it was a small, charming little book. It probably was published in the past 10 years. It was in Afrikaans, but I'm fairly certain it was a translation from English. I got it from a library in South Africa (I've asked the library about it and dug thro...

identification-request

Bookworm

19:26

0

Q: What does asking how to write songs with millions of views have to do with the rest of the song in "אלוף האולם"?

The last verse in Hanan Ben Ari's "אלוף האולם" (Aluf HaOlam / Champion of the World) goes like this: אני אלוף העולם בלפצות להתנצל ולרצות לחטוא, להתנקות לחשוף, להתכסות תגידי, איך כותבים שירים עם אלף ציפיות מיליוני צפיות I'm the champion of the world in reconciling Apologizing and placating Sinnin...

song-lyrics hebrew-literature hanan-ben-ari

Rand al'Thor

22:11

Any unanswered leftovers from the 95 Question Day are now eligible for Revival badges.

bobble

Darn it, so I answered a question a day too early!

Not that I expect that answer to get many upvotes, 'specially given Tsundoku's recent edit spree

bobble

22:28

Is this question quote-source or identification-request?

Tsundoku

Currently 50 unanswered questions from Knight.

bobble

43 non-closed ones

Tsundoku

@bobble Strictly speaking, neither. It does not ask to hunt down a specific quote, nor does the OP have a specific work in mind that he wants us to identify.

And for a revival badge from the 95, you need two upvotes without expecting an upvote from the OP.

bobble

Well, looks like I got two upvotes. I still think I missed the time cut-off

verbose

23:40

@Tsundoku the OP has been known to accept answers in the past, so I presume he might upvote?

bobble

I think I managed to annoy them with edits.

Should the "act"-s and "scene"-s be capitalized when citing Macbeth?

Transcript for