The Reading Room - 2021-05-02

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12:04 AM

0

Q: Why do poets opt for this strange technique?

What is the point of enjambment in poetry?

Is there still an active Close review for this question? It's sitting at 4 CVs and I don't see the ending of a review in its timeline

VTDs requested on old NAA (which I can't re-flag as NAA)

2 hours later…

2:30 AM

1

Q: How did they cover 1,000 miles in 110 days at a speed of 5 miles per day?

In the beginning of Chapter Four of King Solomon's Mines we are given the distance travelled: Now I do not propose to narrate at full length all the incidents of our long travel up to Sitanda's Kraal, near the junction of the Lukanga and Kalukwe Rivers, a journey of more than a thousand miles fr...

king-solomons-mines henry-rider-haggard

1 hour later…

3:47 AM

adaptation-comparison instead of movies? literature.stackexchange.com/questions/9170/…

1 hour later…

4:58 AM

@Bookworm this needs a title & first line edit to make it clearer that it's now been scoped just to the example poem given, instead of "all of poetry". However I can't because there's a pending suggested edit which I Approved before wanting to edit, so I can't pull the Improve trick.

And wow I've been talking to myself in here for a while. Let's see if any of these backlogged messages get pinged while I'm a-sleeping.

2 hours later…

7:01 AM

Wow, woke up to +200 in my rep inbox. Been a while since that happened.

(My latest Q here and A on SFF, both story-ID, went HNQ.)

@bobble Same if I answer one from you, based on a sample size of 1.

Actually I guess story-ID questions have a good chance of HNQing. If someone who sees it in the first few hours either recognises the description or is good at searching, an answer can be posted fast which is clearly correct.

@bobble I felt like it's an interesting question - I'm interested in this kind of thing, classification of different story types within a given genre - but it's closed now.

@bobble Yes.

@bobble Dunno why we need a movies tag at all on this site. We have a general adaptations tag which can cover it.

Hmm, now I wonder how many of our adapatations or adaptation-comparison questions could be changed to textual-history (cc @verbose). I just changed one, since presumably the musical is just as on-topic as the play, but it gets a little dicier when we're talking about film or video-game adaptations.

7:28 AM

@bobble Enough pings for you? :-)

7:44 AM

@Bookworm Just from the title I knew this would be an @Alex question.

@Randal'Thor I’m that predictable?

@Alex Apparently you excel in having a keen enough attention to detail to notice small apparent discrepancies (especially numerical) in various stories.

1984 is off the first page of tags. Now we just have 7 authors and 3 specific works on the front page, among more generic tags.

(The 3 specific works are The Lord of the Rings, Atlas Shrugged, and Swimming in the Dark.)

1982 pages to go.

2 hours later…

9:42 AM

1

Q: Why does Mr Merdle ask for a penknife with a darker handle in "Little Dorrit"?

In Chapter 24 of Little Dorrit, in one of the last scenes, Mr Merdle asks for a penknife. When Mrs Sparkler hands him the knife he asks if he could have one with a "darker" handle. ‘So I am off,’ added Mr Merdle, getting up. ‘Could you lend me a penknife?’ It was an odd thing, Fanny smilingly ob...

charles-dickens little-dorrit

10:12 AM

Currently running topic challenges: Gargantua & Pantagruel and the Mahabharata, both continuing throughout this month.

10:23 AM

There are five proposals tied on 4 votes for the next topic to be chosen, from five different languages/cultures: Maltese, Hindi, Bengali, Hungarian, Korean.

11:12 AM

@Bookworm 5 miles per day to the HNQ.

3 hours later…

2:15 PM

@Randal'Thor just enough :)

@Randal'Thor weird that it's taking so long. Maybe a bunch of active reviews Skipped it?

@bobble I think you have enough rep to see review history. A couple of people voted to leave open.

Ah. I was assuming that of no one skipped it there would be enough voters to come to a decision either way

Historically there haven't been that many active reviewers here. I'm still pleasantly surprised each time I see a question quickly closed or reopened by five people without mod intervention.

Today's been a busy day though: five different reviewers in Close Votes, one of them doing 4 reviews and two moe doing 3.

I don't review as much as some others because it's other people who review the old Unanswereds which I send to the queue

Two ways to get rid of an Unanswered are answering it or realizing it's too opinion-based/needs more details to be answered well, then closing

2:57 PM

@Randal'Thor I guess that means it's one and two thirds of a mile a way.

@Alex Yes! Finally we have a calculated figure for the distance between this site and the HNQ list.

Does anyone have a handy bridge that's one and two-thirds of a mile long?

I used to have one. But it was recently abridged.

Now it only covers the distance to the Close Queue.

One of the downsides of having an abridged version... — Mithical Apr 12 '17 at 12:01

When passing under a bridge, you only see the downsides.

If you don't get eaten by the troll first.

It'll be fine if @Tsundoku is with me - he eats trolls as well as spammers.

3:09 PM

Before you head off on an adventure with him you may want to make sure that if the regular food supply runs out he doesn't feast on moderators as well.

Or you can do nothing now and just cross that bridge when you get there.

Don't worry, I won't leave civilisation behind. Wouldn't want to burn any bridges.

Too late for that. All this talk of excitement has already gotten me fired up.

If your fire works, you may want to save it for 4 July or 5 November.

That just sparked me to read about Guy Fawkes. What an explosive story!

He was quite a guy, hoping to emerge phoenix-like from the ashes of Westminster.

3:27 PM

I'm afraid I can't hold a candle to your knowledge of British history.

3:40 PM

A candid admission.

4:31 PM

0

Q: Why does Quatermain (the narrator) translate for Umbopa if Umbopa understands English?

In Chapter Five of King Solomon's Mines the narrator, Allan Quatermain, acts as a translator during a conversation between Sir Henry and Umbopa: Sir Henry nodded. "I was sure of it," he said. "If George set his mind upon a thing he generally did it. It was always so from his boyhood. If he meant...

henry-rider-haggard king-solomons-mines

user image

Is tag order just randomized when tags have equal number of questions?

4:47 PM

Maybe.

Maybe it depends on which one you typed into the tag box first.

Btw isn't he normally referred to as H. Rider Haggard?

@Randal'Thor I did in fact type the one that appears first first. I guess I'll have to wait for my next question to further test this hypothesis.

@Randal'Thor Indeed, that's how his name appears on the book. Not sure of the tagging convention though, so I just went with the full name.

I merged and synonymised.

So you'll now get [h-rider-haggard] if you start typing "henryrider".

And I feel sure I've created that tag before. Maybe nobody put a tag wiki and it got removed ... which makes me think it should be on another question somewhere ...

@Alex Actually, I retract that. I mixed up the questions because the tag page had them in reverse order. It actually shows the one I typed second first, so that refutes that hypothesis.

@Randal'Thor Thank you.

@Randal'Thor I was somewhat surprised that it did not exist yet. The back cover describes it as Praised as "the most amazing story ever written", the book went on to become one of the bestselling novels of the nineteenth century.

I'd think it would be somewhat popular here.

I've never even read it in an unabridged form.

Just a Ladybird illustrated version when I was a kid.

I have read She and Ayesha by Rider Haggard, after learning that they inspired Tolkien and Lewis.

5:03 PM

@Randal'Thor I hope they didn't gratuitously change details.

5:15 PM

@Alex I imagine (without ever having read it in full, or even seen the abridged version for decades) that it might not have aged well, in its portrayal of African peoples?

British imperialism, "civilisation" and "noble savages" and all that stuff?

Makes sense. I saw some discussion about that.

Were you going to [status-review] the custom close reason text meta soon?

Yes, probably this coming week.

@Tsundoku said he'd have another look, and didn't give any further feedback, so that means either he doesn't have any further suggestions, or he didn't get around to checking :-P

5:33 PM

@Bookworm HNQ.

no pun?

tsk tsk

@bobble Not even a little punknife.

If you punned it every time you'd be a pundit.

Actually I am.

Oh, good to see Peter Shor has joined the surprisingly small number of people with that badge.

I have 5 comments with score 5 or more, but I prune and self-delete my comments once they become outdated so that might be hurting me.

And once this question is Roomba'd I'll have 4 such comments

3 hours later…

8:59 PM

@Randal'Thor I don't actually eat trolls, I chew them out.

9:13 PM

@Randal'Thor "List/recommendation question" -> "List or recommendation question"

"seeking recommendations or open-ended lists." -> "seeking recommendations or an open-ended list."

"any/all such works" -> "any or all such works"

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