The Reading Room

Q: In which Chinese fairy tale does a painter disappear into his own painting?

12:01 AM

I just hope it isn't Pennywise.

Bookworm

The online description of Rüdiger Safranski's book Wieviel Wahrheit braucht der Mensch? begins with the following sentence: In einem berühmten chinesischen Märchen verschwindet der Maler in seinem eigenen Bild. Translation: In a famous Chinese fairy tale, the painter disappears into his own pa...

1:02 AM

literature.stackexchange.com/posts/18587/revisions

this ain't a question no longer

11 hours later…

12:00 PM

@Bookworm This question has disappeared into its own HNQ.

2 hours later…

1:56 PM

Unanswered update: 1079 left

C'mon folks, only 13 more to get to 1066

1 hour later…

3:16 PM

Feb 13 at 15:17, by Tsundoku

I a matter of hours, the number of unanswered question has gone up from 1047 to 1077. We have work to do, folks! At your keyboards!

Our Unanswered count is now back to the same number (absolute number, not percentage!) as it was in the middle of The 95 Questions.

\o/

@bobble Well I'm averaging one unanswered a day at the moment, I'm doing my bit!

@Spagirl I am... not :)

@Spagirl I noticed you chipping away at the Unanswered list, nice work! Racking up some Revival badges this month :-)

@Randal'Thor You ought to have noticed as you seem to be the author of about 40% of the unanswered questions!

There's one (not of Rand's) that I've close voted. literature.stackexchange.com/questions/12053/… It is already answered to the same guy on a different account on Sci-Fi. He won't be back, he go his answer, it seems silly for it to sit there open?

3:24 PM

Feb 21 at 19:19, by Rand al'Thor

94 from me. Should I be pleased of so many questions challenging/obscure enough that nobody's answered, or ashamed of increasing our Unanswered stats so much?

both?

I have six questions on my backlog to answer - a bookmark for me means "I know an answer and will write it up once I have time" (though all those are competing with each other, Puzzling, and school for my attention)

@bobble I just looked at that propagator one and decided to, as we say in Scotland, give it a body swerve...

@Spagirl That's strange, he posted it here years after the answer on SFF appeared, and it still isn't accepted. He mentioned in comments here that "Valorum nailed it", but there's no answer or even comment from Valorum.

@Randal'Thor maybe they got confused with Valorum being the last editor of their question?

3:28 PM

@Randal'Thor there's a comment from Valorum on the answer at Sci-Fi with a link to the story on in Playboy

Urgh. Story-ID duplication on SFF is decided on the basis of OP confirmation, but I've never before seen a case where the OP confirmed an answer is correct in comments o a different site.

The account Doug used at Sci-fi hasn't been seen since december 2014, I doubt he knew how to log onto that account at the time he made the account he used to ask us.

By my calculation, Doug should re-enter the Stack Exchange orbit in December 2024. Perhaps we can ask Doug3 to sort his mess out.

@Randal'Thor wow

What was our Unanswered % before The 95 Questions?

Q: "Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs."

3:52 PM

Feb 14 at 17:09, by Tsundoku

The percentage of answered questions dropped from 76% to 74% yesterday. Now it's back to 75%.

Feb 21 at 9:09, by Rand al'Thor

Aaand we're back to 76% answered! Probably thanks to Tsundoku and verbose taking down some old unanswered targets.

Bookworm

From The Comedy of Errors, Act III Scene II: DROMIO OF SYRACUSE: No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip: she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her. ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE: In what part of her body stands Ireland? DROMIO OF SYRACUSE: Marry, in her buttocks: I fou...

william-shakespeare wording-choice the-comedy-of-errors

@Bookworm something I found with a quick Google:

> Its use for toilets is now often derived from the resemblance of latrines and outhouse cesspools to bogholes,[2][3] but the noun sense appears to be a clipped form of boghouse (“outhouse, privy”),[4] which derived (possibly via boggard) from the verb to bog,[5] still used in Australian English.[3] The derivation and its connection to other senses of "bog" remains uncertain, however, owing to an extreme lack of early citations due to its perceived vulgarity.[6][7]

not an answer and that's as far as I can get (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bog)

Gallifreyan

4:08 PM

I seem to remember @Randal'Thor being fond of axolotls: reddit.com/r/ImaginaryAww/comments/n96kd2/…

Not enough to recognise them in cartoon form :-P

4:38 PM

Those are the strangest looking tardigrades, and humongous ones since they seem bigger than the axolotl

4:49 PM

Axolotl Roadkill is the title of a German novel.

@Bookworm Apparently not a bog-standard meaning of that word.

Do we have any obituary / in memoriam posts on Lit Meta, i.e. posts announcing the death of either a famous person in literature or a community member? I can't find the tag for these.

5:04 PM

To be clear, no, I'm not asking because I want to post bad news right now. The last time that's happened was the death of Ron Graham in 2020.

5:23 PM

@b_jonas Apparently, we don't have such a tag and we have never posted obituaries on Meta. Not even for Ursula Le Guin; instead, we had a topic challenge.

@Tsundoku Sci Fi meta does not seem to have an obituary for her either.

@b_jonas Not yet.

Q: RIP Ursula Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the greatest science fiction and fantasy writers of all time, sadly passed away yesterday at the age of 88. Her writing career spans six decades, from 1959 right up until 2017, and her writings include speculative fiction, realistic fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, lib...

discussion in-memoriam

ah. I can't search.

It's one of the top-voted RIP posts on SFF meta, only behind Terry Pratchett, Stan Lee, and a prominent member of our own community.

So who is going to write an obituary for the Estonian writer Vahur Afanasjev, who died today at the age of 41?

5:30 PM

Well if there is an obituary on Sci Fi Meta, then I can understand not duplicating it on Lit Meta.