The Pantheon

@durron597 I did. But I don't check my mails :P

Ahhh we also have Indian mythology question too. Seems like cross post between Hinduism and other religious site is going to be occur

Q: Is there any textual evidence that confirms the color of Hindu gods?

11

Hindu gods, most notably, Shiva, Krishna, Vishnu, Kali, are depicted as blue colored beings. But they are also depicted with many different skin colors, some looking more natural than others. Is there any textual evidence regarding the color of the skin of the gods? Or were these ideas of skin...

I community wiki'ed my answer because it was verbatim the same as the hinduism answer, lol

hehehehhe...

I think mythology should be advertise over othe religious site.

Atleast a community add on Christianity

5:32 AM

@AnkitSharma What do you think, @El'endiaStarman?

femtoRgon

@durron597 - Yeah, definitely some deja vu there. I'd been meaning to come back around to answer that one for awhile now actually.

ooops

@AnkitSharma Yup yup

its already there

meta.christianity.stackexchange.com/posts/4555/revisions

But have 0 votes

It should be edited to our new ad: meta.movies.stackexchange.com/a/1799/21178

5:35 AM

@durron597 nopes....its better for scifi and movies.se only

Might be something new

Need 2 more vote in movies.se to get selected for community ad.

@AnkitSharma Ask in your chatroom?

done

ughhh i just realized, I lost my ~~10k~~ 2k 4k tools when we went public

@durron597 hehehehhe, now try harder

@AnkitSharma Trying pretty hard already

5:45 AM

@durron597 It sucks >.<

We need more questions.

I haven't been asking them myself recenly, I admit.

I'm not getting anything to ask >.<

le brain is in lazy mode

Will check all existing before asking anything. Will be after office

6:03 AM

Please upvote this everyone. Will help to drive traffic now that we've launched: reddit.com/r/mythology/comments/35swc3/…

6:52 AM

1 hour ago, by Ero Sɘnnin

@durron597 I did. But I don't check my mails :P

This is the story of how @EroSɘnnin never got a diamond on Myth.SE ;)

9:26 AM

@Yannis ;P Cant help it. Laziness is like a brother to me. I just can't say no to a bro

10:45 AM

@EroSɘnnin Laziness is a virtue.

> Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. - The three great virtues of a programmer, Larry Wall

11:17 AM

^_^

12:01 PM

12:25 PM

I thought only controversial one make into HNQ

Like this one which i answered.

@Yannis ooh an incomplete red circle

@AnkitSharma Looks like the recently-answered-question-with-a-significant-number-of-votes makes the HNQ list

12:45 PM

That was just a joke

lol

whups

sorry :P

oh btw @Ankit .. have you guys been receiving any spam posts on Movies.se lately?

Sometime few spam answers

But useless question bothers me more :)

we got 3 spams in 2 days on anime.se

@AnkitSharma the easily google-able type?

Bad ID, list,recomedation

ah .. its ID and recom for us

and now spam

12:52 PM

For spam we got advertisement stuff few time. Like jackets etc. But they can be easily handled. As we all three mod belongs to different timezone in movies.se so it can disappear instantly.

ah .. that's very effective

I want to participate more on anime too but i watched very less of them. And anime are too long to even think to follow.

Like naruto, which looks like never ending to me now.

Lol. I wonder what Kishi plans for the future >.> Naruto's great-grandson: Goruto and his friends!

lol

Anyways first two chapters looks good to me but i like watching anime more but they always do fillers.

Yeah the new chapters are going nice. For now.

Beh. I stopped watching Shippuden

filler after filler >.<

1:03 PM

I like current filler of second chunin exam but there placement in the story was very bad.

And reading black and white manga doesn't excite me much.

@AnkitSharma Yeah. Couldn't they put the fillers after the epic fight >.<

Something like OVA between shipuden and naruto gaiden

yeah

I think we better go to Maid Cafe and discuss anime stuff before ppl kick us out from here:P

hahahhahahha.....

Can't, you guys post too many girl anime images. Looks wired in office.

Even few are bit exposing :D

Lol. Agreed. But I think Hakase changed something and updated the library

1:10 PM

Why room name is Panthéon

If we are covering all world mythology

@AnkitSharma That. .. is a good question

:P

Because other suggesion sucks more :D

8

Q: Name our chatroom

Our chatroom should have a cool name, not just "Mythology". Examples: Programmers.SE - The Whiteboard Codegolf.SE - The Nineteenth Byte Puzzling.SE - The Green Llama Answer here with your suggestions; vote for the suggestions you like!

discussion chat

@AnkitSharma Lol .. that is a good reason too

Specially when we have suggestion like "EL DORADO"

lol

1:23 PM

ahhh so we also have pastafarianism question

yuss

Woohoo I woke up to being over 2k.

congrats @durron597 :D

A: How does merging of two gods actually work?

One day too late pile on the delete votes @Yannis ;)

How should we be handling answers like this one? See the revision history and my comment

0

There are a number of different types of syncretic relationships: Some were political, often involving foreign deities. Serapis (making an Egyptian deity who would be acceptable to Greeks), Arensnuphis-Shu, etc. Some were one god inhabiting another. In the Amduat book, Ra comes to rest in Osir...

I think it's clear the author knows what they're talking about

@durron597 Amm .. I think the user was present from private beta .. so why the "Welcome" ? :P

1:30 PM

@EroSɘnnin Oh; I had never seen them before

Still, trying to be friendly before I bitchslap ;)

lol

@durron597 The comment does convey a clear message :D

3:08 PM

@durron597 I'm here now.

@HDE226868 How many decks does a ship of the Vogon constructor fleet have?

I actually do have a point, if you'll bear with me.

@durron597 Too many?

No, seriously. Could you do me a favor and look it up for me? I can't find it anywhere

(I'm joking, but perhaps you see my point?)

@durron597 I think I do. I have no idea, though.

The point is, that is a detail about a story that the author never chose to include

There is no way to look it up, there is no way to figure it out

(Plus, Douglas Adams is dead now)

3:18 PM

Ahhhhh.

Now I see.

Damn. My questions.

I tried to look up this one. For awhile.

There was literally nothing

Because there are no corroborating sources.

Detailed questions about one particular story are simply going to be impossible to answer

This stack thrives on questions like "what did the <culture> believe about xyz?"

... at least, that's what I'm thinking right now. I'll make a meta post about it but I wanted to see if there was some agreement here first.

My motivation is that there are always related stories. Always. I have yet to find a stand-alone tale in the stories I've been reading. I always feel like there's a chance that some related story explains a detail.

I was also thinking a meta post would be good.

I'm trying to be very careful in what I say...

If you asked "How might the mighty man of magic have atoned for his sins? What sort of magic powers did people have in welsh stories?"

That would be answerable

But how did this one specific guy do it?

The problem is that that would be overly speculative.

it's not overly speculative. "what magical abilities did people believe existed in 12th century wales ?"

3:25 PM

"How might the mighty man of magic" seems a bit speculative. "magical abilities" seems overly broad.

There's a new power in every tale.

@HDE226868 That suggests there's no answerable question at all.

3:41 PM

This is super cool!!

2

@durron597 How did you find it?

@HDE226868 It's on the mythology reddit ;)

Oh, cool.

5:31 PM

@HDE226868 Oooooooooops :) Thanks

Q: Are questions about modern / urban legends on topic?

No problem.

The gods discuss...

0

There are two sorts of urban legends; Ones that happened somewhat in the past but well after we started to have good historical records e.g. Roanoke Colony - Associated Test Question; London Monster Ones that happened really recently, e.g. Area 51; Loch Ness Monster; Bigfoot; Jack the Ripper. ...

discussion scope

6:08 PM

@Yannis Do you find the entire idea unconvincing or just my examples?

Both actually.

@Yannis Well obviously the former implies the latter ;)

The key distinction between folklore and urban legends is that people don't necessarily believe urban legends.

Most get spread just because of their entertainment value.

I could perhaps be convinced about questions about cryptids, but thankfully the community seems to consider them off topic.

Some people believe urban legends.

How do we know whether people actually believed that a serpent attacked aethopia?

How do we know that what we consider mythology now wasn't an "urban legend" 2500 years ago

People believe that vampires exist today

Because said people went through huge troubles for said beliefs

It wasn't just a joke they told each other.

And (folklore) vampires are on topic.

6:16 PM

People haven't gone to huge trouble to figure out whether Nessie exists? Or what happened to the Roanoke colonists?

There's definitely much more known about Roanoke than I put in my question, that was on purpose.

By folklore vampires I mean the kind of vampires that made people behead the corpses of their loved ones, so they wouldn't become vampires.

What about a question: "Why do people say 'God Bless You' when someone sneezes?" would that be on topic?

Eh? Why would it be?

> The practice of blessing someone who sneezes, dating as far back as at least AD 77, however, is far older than most specific explanations can account for.[9] Some have offered an explanation suggesting that people once held the folk belief that a person's soul could be thrown from their body when they sneezed,[9]

> that sneezing otherwise opened the body to invasion by the Devil or evil spirits,[10][11] or that sneezing was the body's effort to force out an invading evil presence.[9] In these cases, "God bless you" or "bless you" is used as a sort of shield against evil. The Irish Folk story "Master and Man" by Thomas Crofton Croker, collected by William Butler Yeats, describes this variation.[12]

God bless you

God bless you (variants include God bless or bless you) is a common English expression, used to wish a person blessings in various situations, especially as a response to a sneeze, and also, when parting or writing a valediction. The phrase has been used in the Hebrew Bible by Jews (cf. Numbers 6:24), and by Christians, since the time of the early Church as a benediction, as well as a means of bidding a person Godspeed. Many clergy, when blessing their congregants individually or corporately, use the phrase "God bless you". National Geographic reports that during the plague of AD 590, "Pope Gregory...

@durron597 A question about the actual folk belief would be on topic.

6:19 PM

Such as?

It's the same as with your Roanoke question. If you had asked about an actual urban legend surrounding the disappearance of the settlers, it might work. As is, it's a crap history question.

Give me an example of a question that would be on topic, in your mind, for either Roanoke or sneezing.

Sorry, I'm not going to find your examples for you.

Especially since I don't want the site to start accepting urban legend questions.

My point is that you're narrowing the scope of these legends to the point where they're completely off topic.

And what's wrong with that?

6:22 PM

Which is fine, but I'd prefer that you just say that, rather than wiggling around it by saying "a question about the actual folk belief would be on topic"

How is the Roanoke question about an urban legend?

I don't want to have any 99% off topic topics like the ones that cause trainwrecks on programmers

Perhaps you should wait for actual problems to appear before you start looking for solutions?

Urban legend might not be the correct term

How is the Roanoke question as currently phrased anything but a history question?

6:25 PM

The big difference is that even though Roanoke island is basically folklore at this point, there's evidence to support that it actually happened. There's no evidence to support that a gigantic sea serpent attacked Aethiopia

@Yannis How is the cthonic cults question anything but a history question?

> Did these cults consider Zeus a sky god with chthonic properties, or a completely chthonic deity?

Then you should remove "Which cities had a Zeus Chthonios or a Zeus Katachthonios cult?" from the question.

assuming it's off topic, but i actually don't think it is

I just feel like if you're going to draw the history line as narrowly as you are now, you make a lot of overlappy questions off topic

I don't think there's any comparison between the cthonic cults question and the Roanoke question.

"Which cities worshipped XYZ?" is a historical fact.

Yes. But that's not all there is to the question. The Roanoke question has absolutely nothing to do with folklore, urban legends or mythology.

I may be missing something, of course. Perhaps if you could focus on explaining this:

9 mins ago, by Yannis

How is the Roanoke question as currently phrased anything but a history question?

What kind of answers do you expect?

6:35 PM

Can I be clear - I'm actually not advocating for these questions to be on the site. I'm attempting to explore the topic, and it's entirely possible the result of the exploration would be to declare these questions off topic.

I'm taking the "pro" side right now because if I start from the "anti" side we don't actually learn anything.

Frankly, the examples you picked seem so bad that at first I thought you were on the "anti" side.

I found this: "A question about the actual folk belief would be on topic" Wholly uncompelling, mostly because I don't see how I could construct such a question that isn't more of a history question

I'm on neither side

I'm on the "let's talk about it and figure it out" side

But why talk about it at all?

Your examples are obviously constructed, why not wait and talk about it when (if?) genuine questions appear?

Because broadening the site can draw traffic from people who are interested in "unsolved mysteries" but don't care about whether Antigone lived happily ever after or committed suicide.

My goal now that we're in public beta is to try to drive as much traffic as possible.

That is my main goal. But I want to do it in a way that doesn't hurt site quality too much

Forget the word "urban legend". Are "unsolved mysteries" on topic?

No.

6:41 PM

The answer might be a resounding no. But we're no worse off to have discussed it.

Or, to put it another way: I wouldn't be interested in participating on a site where questions about "unsolved mysteries" would be on-topic.

@Yannis Why not?

I'm actually asking, because I'm trying to come up with clear reasons why these things ought to be off- (or on-) topic

Because I don't feel it's a topic worth my time.

I wholeheartedly agree that we need to have these discussions. But only after at least a handful of genuine questions about the topics actually appear.

Forcing these discussions is a huge waste of time.

Q: Are questions about modern / urban legends on topic?

-1

There are two sorts of urban legends; Ones that happened somewhat in the past but well after we started to have good historical records e.g. Roanoke Colony - Associated Test Question 2k link; London Monster Ones that happened really recently, e.g. Area 51; Loch Ness Monster; Bigfoot; Jack the R...

discussion scope

Is that better?

Eh, no, not really. Other than Nessie and Bigfoot, none of your topics are primarily urban legends.

And cryptics have already been declared off topic, so you can take Nessie and Bigfoot of the list.

6:50 PM

@Yannis Whoops, I forgot to make one last change (the title)

A: How will we define mythology?

21

Okay, I'm going to take a stab at this. mythology vs. folklore To me, folklore is more localized to one geographic area or span of time, whereas mythology tends to be more encompassing. In addition, mythologies tend to have an overall structure, whereas folklore tends to be mostly composed of ...

Oh, when you say cryptics do you mean cryptozoology?

I gotta run. be back later

Meant cryptids, sorry

Ixrec

7:14 PM

hm, my spreadsheet currently has cryptids at "Yes?"

though the "Available Canon" being "Minimal/None" covers the main reason why I'm not terribly interested in seeing cryptid questions

9:11 PM

@HDE226868 I really should spend more time in World Building. It is the coolest Stack, bar none.

El'endia Starman

9:30 PM

@durron597 I'm actually a little surprised that it's doing well. Seems like EVERY question is pretty much primarily opinion-based.

@El'endiaStarman It does well for the same reason that randall monroe's what-if does well

The questions are just all really interesting. No one cares that it's opinion-based.

10:14 PM

@durron597 It's pretty cool, right?

I was part of the micro-movement to get more science questions in there. It succeeded; we now have a hard-science tag, which demands reputable references, such as peer-reviewed papers. It is what the science-based tag was supposed to be; that one became overused.

I was quite fed up with people using popular science facts in answers when I got behind that.