The Reading Room

@Riker see you ;)

@Riker No need to feel punted out of the room.

@BeastlyGerbil Yes. Totally.

:-P

Q: How to protect a body in the wilderness?

4:13 PM

7

I am hiking in the wilderness, a round trip to civilization and back is at least 24 hours. I know where I am and I can return to the same spot. If my hiking partner dies, how can/should I protect the body while I go to get the authorities? I want to protect my partners body while I am gone, w...

backcountry wilderness

My mind drifted to Hannibal here

And then to this:

409

Q: How can I tell if a corpse is safe to eat?

I am a human wizard, and I just killed a monster, leaving a corpse on the ground. How do I tell whether it is safe to eat this corpse? I leave the monster unspecified because I am interested in "how can I figure out whether this is edible," rather than whether any particular monster is edible. L...

nethack

DForck42

@Gallifreyan that's a creepy question...

Q: How do you safely pray to your god?

Arqade has a lot of perls, actually

77

Can somebody please give me a good overview of the prayer system in NetHack? From what I understand, you can pray once and your god is more than happy to help you out, but if you pray again, you get punished pretty severely for being so needy. Basically, how does NetHack prayer work?

nethack

Or

147

Q: How can I keep monsters out of my nether regions?

In order to find myself some nice lapis lazuli and get away from my current base, I'm building a little tunnel in the Nether to allow me to get into the midst of some fresh chunks fairly quickly. I have a nice little stone house, but as Ghasts and zombie pigmen can spawn at "any light level" in ...

minecraft

Q: What's the best way to dispose of a body in the backcountry?

@Gallifreyan Possibly inspired by this?

21

Suppose you needed to dispose of a large carcass for one reason or another while in the backcountry... what would be the best way to dispose of it in the woods so that it wouldn't be discovered? You always hear stories of people burying bears that they've had to shoot, but I can't imagine digging...

leave-no-trace garbage-disposal

@Randal'Thor added to my favourites :P

DForck42

@Randal'Thor don't even...

4:23 PM

A separate +1 for the tags

@Gallifreyan You can favourite a locked question?

TIL.

A: Would a large number of people simultaneously turning on a load of 3 kW be sufficient to bring down the electricity grid across 500 sq km?

4:40 PM

18

Yes and No Would you believe this occurs at a predictable time every day in the UK? During the break at the end of popular soap operas a significant percentage of the population of the UK puts the kettle on. Total load spike on the system can reach 3GW, equivalent to approximately 1.8kW load pe...

I am back since art and darth stopped making puns

That tea tradition has some unexpected consequences, huh?

@Gallifreyan the uk is so cool

plus you have rain

and doctor who

@Gallifreyan Wow.

@Gallifreyan I've played that game (and am right now) and it's a lot harder than it looks

4:41 PM

@Riker Maybe they're socks?

Darth

:-P

woah

@Riker looks hard enough to me

is that you? or just from the internet

@Riker just from internet

code-golf string cops-and-robbers quine restricted-source polyglot math

ah k

it's pretty fun

on a somewhat interesting note: one of the guys on the devteam is on SE

about 10k rep on codegolf

ais523

11.9k 3 29 92

user61230

4:51 PM

@Randal'Thor I think this largely means reading a little more, though. There's no rush to sort these things out; it's not like the community is split on anything immediately actionable.

user61230

It may not be a good idea for mods here to push people toward a consensus (even if any consensus is acceptable) without a good reason to.

@Emrakul Tagging?

user61230

That's already a lot of work to change. For something like that, though, I'd think a unifying meta post is a good idea.

user61230

But even that largely comes down to making/watching a meta post and reading the discussion surrounding it.

Right, but what happens when (as currently) we have multiple meta posts on more or less the same issue with a different consensus on each one?

Or when (as will doubtless happen at some point) the same meta post ends up with two opposite answers at roughly equal score?

user61230

4:57 PM

I think that's not unhealthy. It's not a signal to push for consensus, it's a signal to wait and think a bit.

user61230

Meta's the magic 8 ball of site issues. That kind of answer is usually "unclear" or "ask again later."

And in the meantime, what should the mods do in the event of, say, an edit war?

user61230

Ask the editors to take their discussion to meta for now, and if need be, lock the post.

Hmm. Well, it's more of a gut feeling than anything else, but I still think this site is going to be tougher to moderate than a lot of betas.

It doesn't help that a lot of our userbase is still behaving as though they're on SFF / M&TV / whichever other SE site they came from.

user61230

That's true. The site has its structural problems, for sure. But what I'm not seeing is a bent for fractiousness in discussion, and that speaks well of the user base.

user61230

5:05 PM

People seem largely comfortable expressing an opinion and disagreeing, without feeling significant pressure to present a unified opinion (i.e. discussion remains largely friendly). And honestly, especially for a Literature site, that makes a lot of sense.

@Emrakul I've seen that occasionally.

@Emrakul On the main site, that makes sense. But unified opinions on meta are what makes the whole thing tick.

user61230

@Randal'Thor Yes, but pushing too quickly for that consensus is what causes sites to make decisions that... are later regretted.

user61230

(Especially when the issue as it stands is answerable with "we don't really have a good way of knowing.)

@Emrakul As we know only too well, right? ;-)

coughsandboxcough

user61230

I say this from experience ;)

user61230

5:08 PM

Heck, that even had a score of, what was it, +30/0? Before implementation?

user61230

We weren't wrong to implement it at that point. Just ill-informed through pushing for and immediately accepting a decision.

And now it's on +37/-14 and my answer is on +38/-5.

Incidentally, I find it quite amusing that my two highest-voted answers on meta.PSE are both rejections of proposals made by you :-)

user61230

To be fair, both of those proposals would have (in the case of Sandbox, did) actually do what they were intended to do. :]

user61230

They were just burdened with other problems, too.

Oh yes. Although I stand by my view that they were / would have been bad ideas to implement, they were still useful discussions to have.

And to be fair, even SE made the same mistake in interpreting all upvotes on a proposal meta question as support for the proposal.

user61230

5:16 PM

It's possible. But it depends a bit on what you mean by "bad" and "good."

user61230

This might just be where we diverge on first principles, though.

For defining "bad" and "good", we should probably head to Philosophy :-P

user61230

Well, philosophy of moderation, for sure :P

user61230

I think questions of site direction are hard to frame as either bad or good under nearly any lens.

I suppose so.

The result of many meta discussions probably depends more or less on who can argue most convincingly, rather than the rightness of their position.

But hey, it's the same in real life, as any lawyer could tell you.

Q: Why does the former nurse create with metal?

5:25 PM

@Mithrandir Yay!

Bookworm

0

In Kay Chronister's short story "The Fifth Gable," the women who live in the four-gabled house are described in an interlude. Before they had been women who lived in the four-gabled house, they had been: A maiden aunt. A minister’s wife. A washed-up stage actress. A nurs...

short-stories kay-chronister

user61230

@Randal'Thor Or who's straight-up willing to advocate longer.

@Bookworm You're getting faster. That's good :)

@BeastlyGerbil is this where your nickname comes from?

This one's even better:

Beastly Gerbil

:P Sorry I'm going to have to take that off you :P

5:31 PM

@Emrakul Oh, I dunno. Lots of people get into extended comment discussions on meta insisting that they're right, and still get nothing but downvotes for their trouble.

@Bookworm Oh, if you haven't read the story yet, @Standback, hold off on this question. Spoilers :)

Beastly Gerbil

@Gallifreyan i.imgflip.com/tubon.jpg

Standback

@Shokhet Awesome! :-)

I just put up the story club post:

squeeandsnark.com/index.php/2017/02/21/…

@Shokhet I just realized the irony of telling @Standback to "Stand back!" :P

2

@Standback Cool. I'll take a look

9:46 PM

Literature finally made it onto my combined flair! :)

....which only works in chat if you paste only the img url, and not the whole thing

@Shokhet Nice!

@Randal'Thor Thanks :)

I guess it's already showing up on mine, since it's my #3 site now?

Yep.

...now I just need to bump it up some more

Lit and Lifehacks are easy to mix up at a glance.

9:51 PM

@Randal'Thor I know, right? ...ideally, I'd like my lit account to come out ahead of LH, but that might take a while...

For that to happen, I need >~2800 repz on Lit (or severe serial downvoting on LH)

@Shokhet Yep, another 2k rep or so.

Should be doable in 2 weeks if you really go crazy with the rep gains ;-)

...or deleting my MSE, LH, A51, WB, and Travel accounts :P

@Randal'Thor Hey, it's not just up to me. I need people to vote up my posts *cough, cough*

:)

@Shokhet So either set up a bunch of socks, game the HNQ system, or just post really good answers.

;-)

Yep

So far, I've noticed that my questions get way more votes than my answers. I don't know if that's representative of all posts on the site, tho

My posts are a small enough sample size that it could just be a fluke

@Shokhet Anyone else notice that for their own posts?

...there's probably something on the site that would give that info. Maybe the data explorer?

@Shokhet Maybe because everyone wants to encourage more (decent) questions here but not everyone agrees on what makes a good answer?

10:00 PM

@Shokhet I have too many to check, but I think so.

in Mos Eisley, Jun 26 '15 at 23:35, by rand al'thor

Questions get less rep than answers,
But rep-whores are just foolish prancers.
The pride a well-posed question brings
Is greater than rep or other things.
Answers need their nourishing questions:
Naught else can suit their select digestions.
Those vital questions, food for all,
Cannot be overlooked. Askers stand tall!

@Benjamin You're a bit of a special case though, with (last time I checked) 60 questions and only 6 answers.

@Randal'Thor I think this could very well be true.

@Randal'Thor Yes, because I am not very good at answering.

@Randal'Thor That could very well be

Martin Ender

@Shokhet the only data point I have are my question and answer about Slade House and they agree with your observation (but are obviously even less significant in terms of sample size)

@Randal'Thor Very nice 👏👏👏

@MartinEnder Hmm...

I have one question with a score of 33, and nothing else with double-digit scores (yet)

I posted this Q/A yesterday, and the Q is +5, and the A is +3/-1 literature.stackexchange.com/q/1771/481

10:10 PM

@Shokhet Some relevant Data.SE requests: Average question score by reputation and Users answer quality rate

Actually, for questions, this one is probably better: Average question score by user (above 5 qs)

To get the best comparison, fix "minimum reputation" to 1 and "minimum number of answers" to 5 in the query for answers.

TL;DR: it looks like there's not much difference.

I'm not quite sure what "Usefulness Rate" means, and why @Benjamin and I are the only ones with <100 there.

@Randal'Thor Does it look like a percentage?

@Benjamin Yes, but how is that percentage defined?

My answers here have been better received here than my questions, as far as I can tell...

@Randal'Thor It appears to be based on the parameter "Useful", but I can't find that in the documentation right now, if you could that could tell you.

Also, a prime example of something that could be taken the wrong way if seen out of context:

@Mithrandir Everyone is stupid. — Rand al'Thor 16 mins ago

10:23 PM

@Mithrandir That's my fault. Next time I ask a question about the author, I'll be sure to put her first name in the title :P

@Randal'Thor I don't think I'm in this one. I don't think I had 5 q's last time the db was updated

Although it's nice to see that my Usefulness score is 100 (whatever that means) :D

@Mithrandir Because you chose the second option here:

32 mins ago, by Rand al'Thor

@Shokhet So either set up a bunch of socks, game the HNQ system, or just post really good answers.

;-)

Anyway, gtg now (bio test tomorrow). See y'all around!

(Well, y'know, not game the HNQ system as in abuse it, but at least profit from it.)

Later @Shokhet, and good luck with the test!

A: Should my flair include sites with less than 200 reputation?

10:46 PM

@Randal'Thor ah, thanks :)

(Sorry, my Internet died.)

@Shokhet adios!

Oh look. I won't have 29k on my flair anymore :/

2

A tiny bit of backstory: stackexchange.com used to be a separate solution (in the .NET sense), so it talked to Q&A through a set of API calls, both public and private. It's been a part of the normal Stack Overflow solution for going on two years now, and we've been slowly removing these API calls...

(I understand none of the jargon in that answer o_o)

11:02 PM

I find it amusing that SFF Meta has star-trek and star-wars tags...

hey @Randal'Thor mind if I steal the text of your close vote meta for veg.se?

A: How do we feel about using other people's answers on a different site as a source?

6

The same principles apply as for citing any other source. From the Help Centre page on How to reference material written by others: When you find a useful resource that can help answer a question (from another site or in an answer on Literature Stack Exchange) make sure you do all of the fol...

cool

11:16 PM

@Riker Which one - the "close votes are not super-downvotes" answer?

Sure - that was partly (including the tagline) inspired by meta posts on RPG and Arqade anyway.

@Randal'Thor no, the question abuot remembering close votes

in public beta

o/ @DJMcMayhem

Q: A reminder to those with 500+ reputation: please remember your close/reopen votes!

12

Literature SE has just entered public beta - yay! - which means a lot of the reputation thresholds for site privileges have changed. Specifically, the one whose threshold has changed the most is the ability to vote to close and reopen other people's posts. Up until this point, everyone has been ...

discussion close-votes reopen-votes

DJMcMayhem

@Riker o\

11:34 PM

@Riker Oh. Sure, of course.