The Reading Room

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verbose

03:32

I only just noticed that we're all grown up 🥲 and no longer have "Beta" next to our name; when did that happen?

2 hours later…

Mithical

05:27

218

Q: Congratulations to the 59 sites that just left Beta

This is an exciting day for all of us who work on community here, and for the communities that have given thousands of hours of their time to build sites on the Stack Exchange network. Today, we are excited to announce that 59 sites are bidding adieu to their Beta statuses. The last time we did s...

Or, more specifically:

Q: Literature is graduating on December 16th!

All of your hard work has paid off: We're officially graduating! The Community Managers have confirmed that as part of their ongoing work on site lifecycles, as of December 16, Literature.SE will be leaving Beta. What does this mean for us, practically? Practically? Almost nothing. We'll be losin...

discussion

Bookworm

Q: Was "sweet" a common euphemism for "foolish"?

In Sweet Darusya, many of the townspeople believed Darusya to be "foolish." She was believed to be eccentric in her behavior, unaware of her surroundings, and unable to speak (which Darusya disagreed with, believing that she simply didn't want to speak). She's also described as evidently sufferin...

ukrainian-language sweet-darusya maria-matios

Q: Why did Maria rub badger fat on Darusya's head?

In chapter 2 of Sweet Darusya, Maria rubbed badger fat on Darusya's head and put a cabbage leaf on top of that in an apparent effort to help with her headaches. Why did she do that?

ukrainian-language maria-matios sweet-darusya

verbose

@Mithical Thanks!

5 hours later…

Bookworm

10:58

Q: Detectives with superhuman strength in dime novels

What inspired the author to portray dime novel detective old sleuth of someone who possessed superhuman strength ?

character-analysis history-of-literature historical-context inspiration authorial-intent

3 hours later…

Tsundoku

13:56

@Bookworm Is this a modernist or a postmodernist HNQ?

Rand al'Thor

14:29

Congratulations to Clara Diaz Sanchez, now our 34th 3k+rep user.

Rand al'Thor

15:22

Q: Are the various site Tweetbots affected by the upcoming twitter API changes?

This is more of a "is it sunset"/"officially dead" question over a "can you fix it?" post. Twitter recently decided, with the usual level of foresight their current management shows (for future historians - none at all) that there will be changes to the free API tier. I'm not quite sure what they...

discussion twitter

I'm not a Twitterer, but does this affect Lit SE's (community run) Twitter account? Not SE's sunsetting of official Twitter bots, but the changes in Twitter rules. Are they going to cause problems for our semi-manual auto-posting from a chatroom, as much as they do for the SE bots?

@Mithical?

Mithical

15:34

@Randal'Thor probably

I don't remember exactly how it works, but I believe it uses the API

Rand al'Thor

I forget, who created that Twitter account and set up the chatroom to post there automatically? Was it Hamlet?

Mithical

Shokhet

4 hours later…

Feeds

19:16

One Minute Reviews: Shakespeare by Hans-Dieter Gelfert

posted on February 07, 2023

Shakespeare (2000) by Hans-Dieter Gelfert was published in a series similar to the Very Short Introductions by Oxford University Press, namely the Beck'sche Reihe by the German publisher C. H. Beck. At 120 pages, Gelfert’s introduction is similar in length to Stanley Wells’s and faces the same challenging question of what to include and what to leave out. Unlike Wells, Gelfert spen…

Bookworm

20:15

Q: What does 'a gentleman in the bedchamber' mean in War and Peace

Could anyone explain what it really means in War and Peace? Is it a position in the govenment? Part III, ch 1 With Pierre at hand in Moscow, Prince Vasily secured him an appointment as gentleman of the bedchamber, a position which put him on the same footing as a state councillor,1 and he insist...