The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Marvin

2:28 AM

0

Q: Name of a book that has to do with a vampire family?

I read this book back in the early 2000s in either elementary school or middle school or high school. It was a chapter book and I believe the front is a vampire family standing in front of their Victorian house with their son and their fangs out. I thought it was Living With Vampires by Jeremey S...

AncientSwordRage

3:06 AM

@b_jonas I take it to mean you also want to honour their memories and/or appreciate that someone posted the memorial

xkcd

4:36 AM

My competitors say the tiny single tiny caster is unsafe, unstable, and offers no advantages over traditional designs, to which I say: wow, why are you guys so mean? I thought we were friends!

Marvin

7:40 AM

1

Q: What was the "lost" chapter from 'The Ring of Solomon'?

After re-reading the Bartimaeus sequence recently, I took a look at the series's official website, which has a couple of offcuts from The Amulet of Samarkand. The website is quite antiquated - no HTTPS, several broken links, etc. but still seems to have news articles published recently. The page ...

bartimaeus jonathan-stroud

Marvin

9:10 AM

0

Q: Football pools in Dr Who

I was just online buying my National Lottery tickets and I got to thinking about Dr Who. In School Reunion he meets Sarah Jane Smith after many years, prior to this it's disclosed that he got the teaching role because the previous teacher won the National Lottery with a mystery ticket posted thro...

doctor-who episode-identification

Feeds

9:26 AM

Darths & Droids: Episode 2516: Katana Split

posted on September 10, 2024

SQB

@DavidW just for the record, I still vehemently disagree with this policy (even though I reluctantly adhere to it). To me, a tag should be a Bat-signal for experts (fans, enthusiasts, afficionados, and so on).

For JK Rowling, the only works of hers that are on topic (so far), belong in the Harry Potter series, so that tag suffices.

For Tolkien, most but not all of his work belons to his Legendarium.

But for Ray Bradbury (to pick one of my favourite authors), there is no overarching series that his works belong to, other than "Works by Ray Bradbury".

If I want to follow questions about his works, I need to follow all tag for his individual works. But even then, since I can't follow nonexistent tags, I miss the questions about a work not yet featured on this stack.

If we were to use author tags as "for questions about the author or about questions about any of their works", I could follow the author tags for any author I'm interested in.

For authors such as Rowling, the tag could read something that boils down "just use [harry-potter] if it's not about JKR herself". For Tolkien, it could be "use [tolkiens-legendarium] unless the work's not part of that".

But oh well, I'm afraid I'm nearly alone in this.

</rant>

Rand al'Thor

10:16 AM

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 I'll have to strongly disagree on Sanderson's writing versus Jordan's. He's got a bit better since the Mistborn series, but the style of the later WoT books still felt off to me somehow.

Mar 21, 2019 at 16:55, by Rand al'Thor

@muru Sanderson ain't very good at "show, don't tell". Wellen perked up, remembering something. "What?" the Survivor asked, apparently noticing Wellen's change in posture. <--- one of many examples — Rand al'Thor Jun 14 '17 at 10:53

Marvin

0

Q: Story about a pig(?) going to the jungle and needing to defeat a clan of tigers

I have a recollection of this story from my childhood (we're talking 30-35 odd years ago here). I'm fairly sure the main character was a pig (or some other similar harmless farmyard animal). He becomes lost, (possibly running away from home), and ends up in a jungle, where the other animals are l...

story-identification childrens-novel animals

Rand al'Thor

Interactions between Sanderson's characters just don't feel natural. The word "pause" was ridiculously overused in the Mistborn trilogy. Don't get me wrong, he's brilliant at overarching plot, but he should just design the plot and then hire a more skilled ghost to write the actual lines (rather than ghosting for a dead guy himself).

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Grand finales are something that (while admittedly not as consistently awesome as in Darren Shan's Demonata series) the WoT series has done well several times. The Battle of Dumai's Wells being the outstanding example, but there was also the Cleansing of Saidin and the Fall of the Stone of Tear and ... quite a few now that I come to think about it.

Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2

11:16 AM

@Randal'Thor - Not going to disagree. Maybe it's just a style preference for me? I'm not saying Jordan was a terrible writer, there was just a few things which he did which kind of did not sit well with me. I think it took me a 3rd of the time to get through 12 than it has the other ones thus far. He definitely kept my attention. And I'm still waiting for the Moiraine rescue! :o) I don't need spoilers, so don't say anything, lol ...

btw, I was betting something along those lines was going to happen even before you said what you did, so I didn't consider it a spoiler :o)

I guess my big point about Sanderson is ... thus far in my reading, his writing for Jordan hasn't ruined the series.

Rand al'Thor

11:39 AM

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Not ruined it, sure, but Sanderson's WoT is noticeably less readable to me than Jordan's original WoT.

I've always said that one of Jordan's greatest strengths is his ability to conjure up a gripping atmosphere in medium-length prose like a single chapter. The Four Kings chapter in book 1, for instance, or the "get me the hell out of this city ASAP" vibe of Mat in Ebou Dar, or So Habor. Jordan would've made a great writer of short horror stories, that's for sure.

Marvin

12:31 PM

2

Q: Any "Scissorhands" before "Eduard Scissorhands"?

I just remembered about a movie (I saw some of it when I was a child), about a man who had scissors instead of hands. Searching on the net I found only the 1990 "Eduard Scissorhands" movie with Johnny Depp. So my question now is... isn't there another movie with a similar character / plot, but ol...

story-identification edward-scissorhands

AncientSwordRage

2:57 PM

@Randal'Thor Sanderson's biggest strength is to do foreshadowing and long term plotting, but if Jordan already had that he just had to work with the notes I guess?

@SQB Sounds like we could use like ray-bradbury-works ?

Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2

3:59 PM

@Randal'Thor - And part of me coming back to chat with you about the series is just wanting to talk to someone about it. My wife is planning on reading the series at some point, so I'm not really going to be talking to her about it ... I don't want to spoil thing for her. Speaking of which, way early in B12 I noticed one of the chapter headings was, "The Death of Tuon" ... I was like, "OH NO YOU DIDN'T!", but figured it would end up something like he wrote it.

I like the Mat/Tuon relationship (and a huge dynamic twist to things) so I'm wondering where it's going to end up. Didn't want it to be like, "Boom ... she's dead".

Marvin

4:36 PM

0

Q: Looking for the Name of a fantasy Book about humans and gnomes

The book was a series where first a human enters the "Gnome" world and stop them from destroying the earth and the second was a gnome entering the "Human" world. I thought the title of one of the books was something like; "Human in the GnomeWorks", but Google doesn't help.

story-identification books

DavidW

4:57 PM

There's a new neat trick. Downvote a post in review, click "Other Action" so it shows up as "Reviewed" and then cancel the downvote. Presto! It looks like you did something, but you really didn't!

@AncientSwordRage Is flagging an edit review as "Vandalism" enough to get mod attention?

We've got a new user acting out (check the last 5 suggested-edit reviews).

Marvin

5:43 PM

0

Q: A probably Fantasy middle-length fiction about a probable vampire during the Blitz

I read this novella (or perhaps a very long novelette) about 20 years ago in a collection that was probably somewhat older. During the Blitz, the volunteers who dug the rubble caused by the bombs to find survivors slept very little. So their judgments became impaired. For instance, one became co...

story-identification vampire novella

Sean Duggan

6:42 PM

@DavidW "Guest" and his UFP nonsense?

DavidW

7:08 PM

@SeanDuggan That's the one.

SQB

8:20 PM

@AncientSwordRage That would work and I would like that a lot. But then again, why not tag it ray-bradbury? How many questions do we get about authors but not about their works?

fez

8:32 PM

@DavidW seriously??

@SQB because that wouldn't be using the tag correctly. It wouldn't be a question about the author, but about the work

SQB

@fez I mean, why wouldn't we use that tag both for questions about the author and for questions about any of their works?

I can't imagine someone being interested in questions about an author only and not in questions about their works.

fez

Tags used to mean you were an expert in a topic, right? So an author tag would call for experts about the author. The book tag would be for experts about a book. You could be a total expert in the life of Ray Bradbury but not know a lot about his stories, and vice versa you could be waxed in the stories but know nothing about the author. It's like if every PHP question was tagged with [rasmus-lerdorf] - it wouldn't make sense

2

DavidW

8:51 PM

@fez I watched it happen. I was typing in a comment, post got a downvote as I watched. Posted the comment and completed the review, the post no longer had a downvote. Went back to the review, and it had been "Reviewed" a few seconds before mine.

fez

@DavidW wow, that is pretty reprehensible

DavidW

@fez That's a really good point. I certainly read Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 and S is for Space and a bunch of other stuff, but I never really got into Dandelion Wine or a lot of his more horror/fantasy stuff. So I certainly would instantly recognise "There Will Come Soft Rains" or a number of other stories, but not everything by Bradbury.

fez

@DavidW I understand the frustration when it comes to using tags to discover content, but that's what the tag wikis are for - not the questions themselves

Like the most recent meta post about the [character-motivation] tag - if you take tags to mean you can be an expert in it, how exactly can someone be an expert in character motivation?

DavidW

10:04 PM

@fez ...which is one of the reasons I don't really like character-motivation, right? :)

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The Restaurant at the End of the Univ…