The Reading Room

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12:00 AM

Hey, @matt!

@Bookworm does Hamlet say "Death is silence"? I only found references to "The rest is silence". Is there some parody with a character named "Helmet"?

sad bobble has been talking to herself in here for a while, it seems

@bobble in case anyone is interested, the Shakespeare that I've read is A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth

Alex

@bobble CTRL+F of the full text for "silence" turns up five results, none of which is "death is silence".

bobble

VTC'ing as Needs Details or Clarity until I/we figure out what in the world is going on

Bookworm

12:46 AM

Q: Was Professor Moriarty ever be apprehended or killed by Sherlock Holmes?

Professor Moriarty was Sherlock Holmes' arch enemy. Was Professor Moriarty ever be arrested by Sherlock Holmes?

4 hours later…

Bookworm

4:22 AM

Q: Nietzsche: It is improbable that you are not mistaken: double negative

In Beyond Good and Evil, chapter 1, #16, Nietzsche is criticizing idealism, and he says: He who ventures to answer these metaphysical questions at once by an appeal to a sort of intuitive perception, like the person who says, "I think, and know that this, at least, is true, actual, and certain" ...

friedrich-nietzsche

bobble

4:34 AM

what is it with the recent increase in questions?

@Bookworm from browsing a bit, the answer is "no, if you restrict it to the Doyle stories". but need them to clarify, because if you allow e.g. the BBC show then the answer is "yes"

@Bookworm a bit surprised this still has only my "Needs More Focus" vote, after all this time

@Bookworm I'm not going to answer this until a week passes and they don't repost to ELL.

Mithical

@bobble ...and "no, Moriarty killed off Holmes" :p

Rand al'Thor

@bobble Those were also three of the four first Shakespeare plays that I read.

(I had a collection of five Shakespeare stories; the other two were Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar.)

Well, if by "read" you mean "read a retelling of". Actually reading the original texts of the plays came later.

bobble

shh, Rand, stop giving more proof that we're actually the same person

mods aren't supposed to have socks, don'cha know

(well I mean some socks okay)

(but we do Q&A to each other)

Rand al'Thor

@bobble That would be an absobloodylutely fantastic answer, but I don't know what it would do to your time management.

bobble

It would also require acquiring a new friend D:

time management?

in PSE D&D Chatroom, 4 hours ago, by bobble

I spent an hour researching and found nothing so I put it in anyways hehe

Lews Therin Telamon

4:49 AM

@bobble They aren't?

Rand al'Thor

^ introducing my sock account

bobble

i vote on your stuff :)

that would be so not allowed

Rand al'Thor

@bobble This is Literature SE - why would the ~~awful~~ BBC show be relevant?

@bobble I know what you meant :-) Just wanted to bring in my sock for entertainment value.

Or to give you a new friend :-P

bobble

first adaptation I could think of. I assume there's others which are written that might have a killing

@LewsTherinTelamon do you have the entire Railway Series? If so, I have a proposal.

Mithical

@Randal'Thor I'm over here

bobble

4:55 AM

I could have sworn I saw a post on meta-se that closed questions are hidden from anon users on the homepage, but I can't find it after weeks of searching on-and-off (it's been at least three hours at this point)

mostly I want to find it to post a bug report about it

Lews Therin Telamon

@bobble I had a single-volume collection of it, but not any more.

bobble

@LewsTherinTelamon In that case, do you happen to have a time machine?

Lews Therin Telamon

No, only a madman inside my head.

bobble

Drat.

Rand al'Thor

5:12 AM

@bobble It depends what you mean by "homepage". If an anon user just types "literature.stackexchange.com", they'll see a list of recent questions (maybe the "hot" tab?) which doesn't usually include closed ones. But if they go to the active tab (which is where "literature.stackexchange.com" redirects to for us), they see the same thing as us.

Source: often viewing SE from a machine I'm not logged in on.

6 hours later…

b_jonas

11:17 AM

@bobble Yes, Dark Helmet from Spaceballs, the film that parodies Star Wars.

Alex

12:11 PM

I suppose Dark Hamlet could be the alternate version in which most of the main characters die.

Tsundoku

12:38 PM

@Bookworm If the question is about "the rest is silence", it is a duplicate of The meaning of “The rest is silence” in “Hamlet”.

2 hours later…

Tsundoku

2:22 PM

@Alex "Most of the main characters die": that is actually the current version. An alternative version would have a happy end.

Mar 1 at 10:51, by Tsundoku

@verbose You know why Shakespeare's tragedies end after the fifth act, don't you? Otherwise, the first row of spectators would also perish. :-P

bobble

So far I've confirmed that none of the online library collections I have access to include books from the Railway Series

lila

3:01 PM

@bobble hi, I just read about this in another chat room and this whole situation looks concerning, I do not know the specific policies and I have never visited this site before, but I do think most people who use flags are doing so in good faith and they should not be declined in borderline nor arguable cases, on my site of origin we also had a problem with moderators being too enthusiastic about declining low-quality-non-answer flags and it was just disheartening ...

Mithical

...did you bounty all your rep away @lila

lila

@bobble ...and discouraging. Public SE tutorials on this subject tell clearly not to penalize people whose flags have merit, even if no moderator action is actually needed in the moderator's opinion. Also, there does exist an option to "dispute" low-quality-non-answer flags via review by clicking "looks OK" as a way not to penalize the person who reported the post, and in my personal opinion moderators should really relax a bit ...

@bobble ...about single-handedly declining all these flags in favor of leaving them pending in order for flagged posts to enter review queues and be reviewed by a wider audience.

@Mithical I gave my reputation away to the good answers on my site in order to stir up activity and encourage more participation, yes

Mithical

cool

Tsundoku

3:30 PM

I have written a number of tag wiki excerpts again. These include mother-teresa and greg-lemond. Can we avoid creating tags for people who (have) never published anything? (That would also include boris-spassky, for example.) Author tags help people focusing on / specialising in specific to find questions they can answer. Nobody who studies literature specialised in the works of Mother Teresa, Greg LeMond or Boris Spassky.

Rand al'Thor

They might be tags that nobody would follow (didn't we have emma-watson at some point?), but their existence isn't harming anything unless the 5-tag limit gets involved on those questions. The SE database can fit a few more tags in without exploding :-)

Since our site scope allows a very broad interpretation of what "literature" is, we also need to have a broad interpretation of who counts as a "writer".

bobble

3:49 PM

@Tsundoku mother-teresa should get cleaned up soon when its question is Roomba'd, and greg-lemond was created in accordance with the regular policy for quote-source questions when the author is known

Tsundoku

@bobble "when the author is known". I carefully checked; Greg LeMond isn't author of anything that I could find.

I am not in favour of creating author tags for people who haven't written anything because it fills the tags with rubbish that is unrelated to literature.

bobble

"author" can be used in the sense of quotes

and... maybe it's best for my mental health to not be here right now

Tsundoku

That makes the term "author" meaningless.

Bookworm

Q: Is there an author who could be considered the Steinbeck of Arizona?

Growing up adjacent to the coast and valleys of central California, we always had great pride in Steinbeck and his attachment to the land there. Since moving to Arizona, I’ve wondered if there is any author who has a similar command of the land and its people. I’m not expecting a literary giant, ...

identification-request

Tsundoku

4:47 PM

@Bookworm Opinion based?

Bookworm

5:08 PM

Q: Who wrote, and what is the name of, this famous essay on criticism?

Written between 1400 AD and 1900, the long essay--a translation into English from Latin or French--has a terse title, something like "On Criticism" or "On the Art of Criticism" or "Criticism," if I recall correctly. Perhaps it's by Disraeli or Erasmus or Diderot (my bet is Erasmus). The essay beg...

identification-request

4 hours later…

Tsundoku

8:48 PM

We reached 5600 visitors per day in early March. For some reason, the numbers have declined since then; we are now at 3737 visitors per day. I have noticed a similar trend on Language Learning SE.

Alex

9:40 PM

@Tsundoku I meant that to be the joke.

2 hours later…

bobble

11:20 PM

So I Googled for the cost of a set of the original 26 Rev. Awdry books, and this Amazon listing has Hardcover at $9.12 and Board Book at $110.97... neither of those seem right :p

... and the page updated, now Hardcover is $54.83

I swear, it was $9.12 before

In any case, that's the book I would need, according to the Wiki it does indeed have all of the originals. ttte.fandom.com/wiki/…

... and bobble, really, stop thinking about buying books for the purpose of writing an answer

shakes head at self

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