The Reading Room

2:52 AM

Oh - didn't say this in here before - a question about a sign language poem has been scrapped since I'd rather not the single sign-language-literature question on the site be about how a poem is about Deafness

@Randal'Thor what was your rationale for creating indiana-jones? Do we make character tags for movie characters?

bobble

3:04 AM

Does sunstone deserve its own tag, apart from comics, or should both be used?

bobble

5:00 AM

> Questions about the webcomic series "Sunstone" (launched 2011), written and illustrated by Stjepan Šejić. It is an erotic romantic comedy about a group of friends who are mutually interested in BDSM. Use with [comics]

the excerpt I had drafted, but not sure about the last bit so will wait for further guidance

Rand al'Thor

5:39 AM

@bobble No, but we create series tags for franchises which include books.

Rand al'Thor

5:51 AM

I've never quite been sure about comics tagging, so @Gallifreyan is better to advise on your other question.

Rand al'Thor

6:02 AM

@Bookworm Dancing to the HNQ list.

verbose

@Randal'Thor fair point

@Tsundoku whoa. I had no idea

@Tsundoku okay, noted, Strobbe hates the Portuguese for their martial prowess and their Christianity 😈 j/k. Aren't all epics between Homer and Milton (not inclusive) by definition nationalistic in that way, though? The Aeneid has long stretches on the history of Rome and a long passage lauding Augustus; The Faerie Queene is all about Queen Elizabeth as Gloriana, the queen of Fairyland, which is England, etc.

@Tsundoku He did re-ask as two separate questions, so great! Interesting that one day after @GarethRees said we have no examples of OPs revising questions based on comments, we had two examples: this one + the one about the gaiety of Klipspringer in The Great Gaytsbe. 😬 Maybe those OPs are just 🧦🧦 I created to spite Gareth.

I kid, I kid.

Bookworm

6:39 AM

0

Q: What was Briest implying with his "Very true, very true"?

In Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest, which I'm reading online, an exchange between Effi and her mother in Chapter IV seems to betray Effi's lack of love for her fiance Innstetten. Later, in Chapter V, after the wedding is over, Effi's parents are discussing the same incident that we saw in Chapter I...

verbose

The meta question about retagging narrator to point-of-view has not sparked much discussion and has gotten only two upvotes. Does that mean that the retagging isn't going to happen? If people don't think it's worth doing, an answer explaining why would be useful.

On another topic altogether, it used to be that in the best of quarter posts people would also highlight questions or answers of their own of which they were proud. Well, folks don't do that any more, so I guess I'll mention here that I was chuffed that the detective work I put in to figure out whether Cortázar's poem "Encargo" had been translated into English paid off.

Rand al'Thor

7:26 AM

@verbose You posted it during a weekend on a relatively quiet meta site, just two days ago. Have patience :-)

Huh, the last time anyone mentioned a post of their own in the quarterly best-of was me in 2020 Q2. I hadn't noticed a reduction of self-promotion; I'd guess it's coincidence rather than a trend.

Also, Gaytsbe, heh, I just noticed that.

verbose

@Randal'Thor I guess. @Spagirl's excellent meta q about list based questions was posted later and has seen more upvotes, so I was wondering. I'll wait.

sits in corner and sucks thumb to pacify himself

Rand al'Thor

@verbose Spagirl's question went "hot" and got displayed in the sidebar of the main site, probably because the answer also got upvoted.

verbose

@Randal'Thor oic. I didn't even know meta questions went to HNQ. For a "hot" q & a, those are very low upvotes ... unsurprisingly

oh not the site-wide HNQ? Just displayed in the sidebar of the main Lit SE site? I see

Rand al'Thor

Not HNQ, just site-specific "Hot Meta Posts".

verbose

hah, beat you to it

Rand al'Thor

7:35 AM

I think the algorithm used to determine "hotness" is the same, though of course there's a much lower threshold to count as one of the "hottest" questions on a site-specific meta.

Meanwhile, the only answer to your question is an alternative proposal which nobody's voted on yet.

(I haven't read it properly yet, but I like your original proposal in the question, so I might end up downvoting the answer.)

verbose

Interesting that you say that posting on a weekend is related to low engagement. I'd've thought that more people would be reading the site on a weekend. Or is Lit SE the site people visit when they're bored at work? Whereas during the weekend everybody is busy playing cricket on the village green?

A weekend isn't long enough for a game of cricket, now that I think about it. Maybe limited-overs.

Rand al'Thor

8:30 AM

@verbose Most SE sites that I'm familiar with (which is the more "fun" and less work-oriented ones) are quieter and less active on weekends.

Rand al'Thor

8:45 AM

@verbose I put it for promotion on the Lit.SE Twitter account.

Can do that with some of the best-of nominations too. The Twitter promotion room has been silent for too long.

Welp, I just saw @Mithical requested access to that room, maybe long ago. Mith, I forgot that you'd lose access to that room along with your diamond - just made you an owner now.

Mithical

8:59 AM

*thumbsup*

Although I have direct access to the account so it's not that big of a deal

verbose

@Randal'Thor oh thanks!

How does that work? Does somebody write something in that room, and then the twitter owner (bot? human?) reposts it to the bird app?

Rand al'Thor

There's a bot which takes every starred message in the room and posts it as a birdy thing.

verbose

ah. and who has access to the room? Mods? Plus people who request access to it?

like our pal mith

Rand al'Thor

I delete all the auto-messages like "Rand al'Thor has unfrozen this room" just in case someone stars them by mistake.

@verbose Yep: it's a gallery room, so everyone can see it, but the only people who can write there are mods plus anyone who's granted explicit write access. Want me to do that for you?

verbose

@Randal'Thor oh sure, that would be great, though I'll probably lurk rather than write anything

thanks!

Rand al'Thor

9:09 AM

Done.

verbose

Sweet! I say, what's the difference between a star that's filled in and one that's just an outline? Like in the sidebar here the star next to the topic challenge one is an outline while the others are filled. In the twitter room the star next to your latest message is an outline while others are filled.

Rand al'Thor

9:27 AM

The hollow stars are pinned, so they stick to the top of the starboard. Only mods and room owners can pin/unpin stuff.

Pins can also be used as a workaround for mods and room owners to star their own messages - for example, the pinned topic challenge post here was starred/pinned by me even though I posted it.

Pins expire to become normal stars after something like 14 days. Almost everything in the Twitter room was originally pinned, usually by the same person who posted it, but only the latest one still has an active pin.

verbose

9:46 AM

@Randal'Thor ah. thanks!

Tsundoku

10:13 AM

@verbose I tried that once and got a downvote so I won't be doing that again. But more recently, I got around that by simply not writing any great answers.

verbose

@Tsundoku LOL! Just yesterday I upvoted your answer to Randolph's question about dances in Fontane, so I know your second sentence is not true. And since it went HNQ, I'm sure it has several more upvotes by now

Tsundoku

@verbose At least in the Iliad the Trojans aren't presented as bad people; the same "Greek" gods can support either side and even switch sides. I can't remember much from the Aeneid; Latin class is more than two decades ago now ...

> Arma virumque cano ...

Gallifreyan

10:37 AM

@bobble makes sense to me

Fundamentally, so far it seems it's been helpful to tag comics-related questions with the medium tag as well as the work title

Rand al'Thor

11:20 AM

@Tsundoku Weren't the Trojans somewhat ethnically/culturally "Greek" (e.g. having the same language and same gods, even if obviously not part of the Greek alliance)? Or is that editorialising by Greek storytellers who wanted to make all characters Greek?

Tsundoku

I don't know. I thought all non-Greeks were simply barbarians. Any Greeks in this chatroom?

Rand al'Thor

4

Q: On what occasion did Shelley say "Keats was a Greek"?

Once Shelley said, "Keats was a Greek." What was the context? Whom did he say this to?

quote-source john-keats percy-bysshe-shelley

verbose

11:49 AM

@Randal'Thor Little-known fact is that John Keats was a pseudonym. His name at birth was Giánnis Katechis.

verbose

12:01 PM

@Randal'Thor well, in the nominations for the 2021 Q1 I did mention two questions and said I liked them because I liked working on the answers. Not all that different from what you did in 2020 Q2's nominations, I guess? Though I went into no detail about my answers, and you did touch upon what you had to do to answer the question asked.

Rand al'Thor

1:03 PM

@verbose Oh I missed that, sorry. Although in 2020 Q2 I also mentioned a couple of my own questions (albeit focusing more on the answers).

So yeah, mentioning one's own posts is by no means out of vogue or poor taste.

bobble

1:40 PM

@Randal'Thor nope, it's much simpler. If something is tagged discussion and gets +3, it goes hot, regardless of answered status.

59

A: What criteria are used to select the links that appear in the community bulletin sidebar block?

The rules are as follows: If there is a community moderator election, a link to it appears in the bulletin. Events can be created with a start date and time, an end date and time, a simple title, and a link to something somewhere on the network. Current or upcoming events are listed, with those...

There are some other quirks, like how a moderator status tag or manual removal will take a post off, and hotness expires 2 weeks after original post date, but the core of the algorithm is just "discussion + score of 3"

Rand al'Thor

@bobble No, those are necessary conditions, not sufficient ones. The linked text "hot tab" in that post goes to this one:

44

A: How are questions in the 'hot' tab on a site selected?

What formula should be used to determine "hot" questions? Based on my analysis of the above and the comments so far, here's the second version of what I have implemented so far. This might suck. I don't know: (log(Qviews)*4) + ((Qanswers * Qscore)/5) + sum(Ascores) ------------------------------...

> semi-randomly-selected questions from the hot tab on the per-site meta, which meet the following criteria

It means questions must meet those criteria in order to go hot, not that everything meeting those criteria is eligible to be hot.

bobble

I think you linked a different thing than you meant to?

That's about the "hot" tab of main-site, like the "active" or "featured" tabs

Rand al'Thor

No, the words "hot tab" in Shog's answer like directly to the Atwood answer that I posted.

Apparently it's different from the algorithm for hot network questions, but the same algorithm for hot main and hot meta posts.

bobble

I could've sworn that I got a post on HMP without an answer

puzzling.meta.stackexchange.com/posts/7186/timeline

Yeah, see how this went hot before either answer posted

All of my experience has been that once a post gets +3 it goes hot

Being in the "hot" tab isn't hard at all

Tsundoku

2:17 PM

@Randal'Thor Surely the right answer is, "After drinking too much retsina"? Oh, wait, was it ouzo?

Bookworm

2:51 PM

0

Q: Paragraph Explanation

This paragraph in the novel (Five Children and it) I couldn't understand, any explanation, please? Here it is: "The shadows got longer and longer, and at last there were no separate shadows any more, but one soft glowing shadow over everything; for the sun was out of sight—behind the hill—but he ...

meaning cultural-context e-nesbit

Bookworm

6:17 PM

0

Q: Why did Victor Pelevin's books fail to get such popularity as they had in Russia?

Victor Pelevin is presumably the most best-selling contemporary writer in Russia. Several of his books have been translated to English, but none of them became even slightly popular among the Western audience. Why is it so given that Pelevin's books are extremely popular in Russia? There certainl...

russian-literature victor-pelevin

Bookworm

7:09 PM

0

Q: Meaning of "Now things can only get better" and "starry cold" in the context below

This passage is from The Children's Bach by Helen Garner Dexter emptied his bowl for the last time, then lifted it in both hands and licked it out, pushing his face right into it. There was soup on his nose, his chin and the front of his hair. He wiped it off on the sleeve of his jumper and sat ...

meaning the-childrens-bach helen-garner

Eng Lit Learner

10:23 PM

3

Q: Meaning of "A bigger boy ran in the back door, and kicked it to"

‘I’ll go and get him,’ said Dexter. ‘Athena – Vicki must be sat near the warmth. She’s from sunnier climes, aren’t you, Vicki.’ He rounded her up, sidling and dancing with his arms out in their big curve. Vicki scowled with embarrassment, but obeyed. Elizabeth abandoned her plan to watch ‘Sale o...

meaning phrase-meaning adverbs literature

Bookworm

11:17 PM

0

Q: Who said "The thing is- fear can't hurt you any more than a dream?" in "Lord of the Flies"?

In Lord of the Flies, who said The thing is- fear can't hurt you any more than a dream? Why is it important?

quote-source lord-of-the-flies william-golding

bobble

@Randal'Thor Thing is, if something meets the criteria it's almost certainly on the Hot tab. Literature Meta's Hot Tab has a question whose last activity was March 18. So in practice, especially on a small meta, being a +3 discussion is far more important. The algorithm basically just determines the order of posts on the Hot tab - and who even looks there?

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