The Reading Room

Q: Trying to find: short story about man meeting cannibal on train but escaping

4:29 AM

@Jasperrolla Hello!

Bookworm

5:22 AM

0

In my highschool's Western Lit class (1980s), the teacher, Mr. Carlson, handed out three short stories on the theme of modernism and existentialism. One was "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" by Hemingway and another was "The Blue Bouquet" by Octavio Paz, but I can't remember what the third was. It ...

short-stories

5:35 AM

Odd that the answer which took much much less time has 5x the votes. (Of my two latest)

Unfortunately that's pretty common on SE.

5:49 AM

@bobble Where are you seeing a "Looks Okay" review? I'm not seeing that.

literature.stackexchange.com/review/low-quality-posts/12258

Q: How do you keep track of your reading queue?

Thanks

I've converted it to a comment. You're right that it doesn't meet the requirements to be considered an answer, but it might provide a direction for someone to look into.

I haven't yet read the Ballad so I can't confirm the accuracy of the statement, myself.

CowperKettle

7:37 AM

Bookworm

10:24 AM

0

I usually have about 20+ books in my open reading queue at any given time, on various formats and devices, from paperbacks to eBooks and PDFs. There are entire collections I intend to read thoroughly and completely in my lifetime, like the European classics and the Western Canon, and then there a...

reading

Gallifreyan

@Bookworm this question may be on-topic, @Randal'Thor, if not on main, then at least on meta

We have literature.stackexchange.com/questions/13709/… which is similar in nature

It was @Mithical who closed it, I was just responding to the "question closed without comment" autoflag :-)

@Gallifreyan I feel like that's more asking for techniques rather than recommendations, therefore less open-ended listy?

Could be on meta, though, yeah. Like the "free online resources" meta which is totally open-ended listy.

10:42 AM

This was pretty explicitly asking for software recommendations / resource requests, which we don't generally allow on the main site.

The way I keep track of my reading queue is by looking at my bookcases and going "What did I stick on here meaning to read and then forget about?"

Gallifreyan

11:00 AM

I'll offer to move it to meta then

11:51 AM

@bobble I generally don't like the idea of deleting a new user's answer within the first two days of it being posted. In my opinion, we need to give people time to become familiar with the site and give them time to improve their answer.

@CowperKettle Surely, you know that's Plato on the left?

Q: What is the famous song about the independence of Bahia or Brazil?

12:41 PM

The works of R. A. Lafferty currently has five upvotes and may become our next topic challenge.

Bookworm

12:55 PM

0

Like many other novels by Jorge Amado, Home Is the Sailor is set in Bahia, one of the states of Brazil. On the second of July, one of the novel's characters organises a ceremony during which [trumpet sounds] wake the sun of the second of July, which—as the famous song claims—"on this day is Braz...

quote-source portuguese-literature jorge-amado home-is-the-sailor

CowperKettle

1:54 PM

@Tsundoku Yes, it's a recognisable picture. I'm not an expert on Plato, we only passed him briefly at the University, but the picture is widely used ))

2:46 PM

@Tsundoku Hmm, an American science fiction author? Maybe we could try to make a joint topic challenge with SFF in early 2022.

SFF and Arqade had a joint topic challenge in August this year.

3:12 PM

@Tsundoku then don't handle the flag until then.

3:28 PM

I'm considering editing the how-to-tag meta to say that quote-source questions should be tagged with authors that they are widely attributed to, even if wrongly, and especially if that's the impetus for the question. Is that an accurate representation of a current practice we would like to codify?

4:16 PM

@bobble I don't know if that's a current practice (so this chat message is NAA), but if it is, I'm not sure if I like it. If someone didn't actually say that quote at all, why should their name be on a question about it? Plus, a lot of these "widely wrongly attributed quotes" have been wrongly attributed to a bunch of different people in different places, and we can't put all their names on the question.

Today I knocked one more of the 95-Questions-Day questions out of the Unanswered list, plus another more recent question.

Trying to get the Unanswered list back below 1100.

There's a related practice of sticking two author tags and asking "which said it?", often with the answer being "neither"

It's certainly not a universal practice, e.g. this question has no author tag.

Is it a general practice, i.e. most quote-source questions with a supposed source do it?

Q: Did Leonardo da Vinci really say this quote about flight?

1

The following quote is frequently attributed by the internet to the famous 15th-16th century polymath Leonardo da Vinci: Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return. It's well known...

quote-source leonardo-da-vinci

A question owner can't add an author tag if they have no idea what the source of the quote might be. Tags are based on question content, not on answers.

Q: "Tradition is meant to be broken" - who said it, Emerson or Thoreau?

1

I seem to recall a quote from either Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau that was something like "Tradition is meant to be broken." Which of them said it?

quote-source henry-david-thoreau ralph-waldo-emerson

3

Q: Source for the "monsters under our bed" quote attributed to Darwin

I'm trying to locate the source of the famous quote usually attributed to Darwin (and sometimes, The Joker...): We stopped looking for monsters under our bed when we realized that they were inside us. Google books and Archive.org only gave me secondary quotes, without any sources. In the follow...

quote-source charles-darwin

etc.

4:24 PM

@Tsundoku Yes, but bobble is asking about the case where the OP knows that a quote is "widely attributed" (e.g. on the internet) to someone, regardless of what the correct answer might be.

From the question owner's point of view, it makes perfect sense to tag such questions with the presumed author(s).

@Randal'Thor I was also wondering about that, but the previous discussion about a joint topic challenge went nowhere. We can still try, though.

@Tsundoku I'll propose Lafferty on the SFF meta thread, with a comment that it could be a potential joint topic challenge.

@bobble The practice I prefer is first posting comments with suggestions for improvement. If these are not acted upon within 48 hours, they can still be flagged.

@Randal'Thor That would be great. I'm really curious how a joint topic challenge would work out.

The SFF-Arqade one was a bit of a flop, but that could have been the time of year, as summer is often a lull in SE activity.

@Tsundoku but if I've already flagged, why remove my ability to flag later?

5:19 PM

@bobble When or in what way has your ability to flag been removed?

Can't flag the same post for the same reason twice. So if a NAA flag gets declined once, next time it's got to be a custom flag.

That makes sense but it is not a removal of flagging abilities.

And delete-voting is still possible.

Custom-flagging seems wrong. I don't want it to be dealt with by mods, I rarely want any of my NAA flags to be dealt with by mods, but a custom flag must be dealt with by mods

Well, you can't flag without drawing the attention of a moderator.

Mods can choose to leave NAA and VLQ flags to be dealt with by the community

5:26 PM

Yes, by ignoring the flag. They can't actively ask the community - except in chat.

There's a built-in time delay before a mod is shown such a flag - not long enough for a site of our size - that's designed to allow for that.

And we have a review queue which will deal with it eventually

8:58 PM

The most recent NAA flag has apparently not yet reached any of the review queues.

That'd probably be because it already went through, and some amount of time has to elapse before it goes through again.

9:19 PM

"Looks OK" by another reviewer.

My annoyance with that answer was, mainly, that the flag I was told to raise was declined, and less the eventual outcome

@Mithical That would be more than five months in this case, which seems very long.

11:35 PM

Our QPD on Area 51's site statistics is currently 2.6. Do we want to increase that a bit before the data get frozen at graduation? I have a stash of 70-80 questions (not fully written out) that I was saving for a concerted action to push our QPD over the threshold of 10.

Actually, I have 90 spare questions. I could post 8 questions per day for 11 days :-)