The Reading Room

@b_jonas That's like saying Stack Overflow came first, so Windows SE should be closed as a dupe :P

@b_jonas Most questions on Literature SE would be off-topic on Mythology SE; the reverse is not true. Literature SE looks more like a superset of Mythology SE, so it's definitely not a duplicate.

Alex

1:59 AM

The one question I asked on Mythology did pretty well.

Though that might be because someone bountied it.

5:44 AM

@b_jonas That's not how duplication works. As Tsundoku said, Mythology scope is now a subset of Literature scope.

Gareth Rees

9:26 AM

The two sites have overlapping scopes, to be sure, but they are not subsets of each other -- take for example "How were sun-showers viewed?" which is about comparative anthropology rather than literature, and I doubt it would be considered on-topic here, where we prefer to have a specific text

Gareth Rees

9:51 AM

With regard to "le seul Christ que nous méritions", it's worth remarking that "méritions" is ambiguous between imperfect ("we were meriting") and subjunctive ("we would merit")

10:04 AM

Ah, subjunctive is the one mood I never studied in French.

10:37 AM

@GarethRees Thanks for spotting that; it's a subjunctive due to "le seul que". I have updated my question.

Having overlooked that puts me in a despondent mood.

Matt Thrower

1:22 PM

Sorry to be dense but why do some open questions sometimes appear to be "grayed out"?

Napoleon Wilson

1:37 PM

Do you ignore any tags by any chance?

@MattThrower What Napoleon said. I think this is the right link to check/change your settings for tag watching and ignoring.

(if you replace the number with "current" it should work for anyone)

Gallifreyan

1:59 PM

@Mithical I've taken the liberty, @Randal'Thor, if you don't mind

Matt Thrower

@NapoleonWilson @Randal'Thor Ah thanks. How odd, I don't remember adding that

Q: What's meant here by "all things return"?

2:16 PM

@Mithical Ah, didn't think of that. I just used my own link and swapped out the user ID for Matt's.

Napoleon Wilson

2:27 PM

You should also be able to see them on the right side of virtually any page, under the community bulletin.

Bookworm

4:26 PM

0

In "The Dagger with Wings" by G. K. Chesterton, Mr Aylmer was talking to Father Brown, trying to convince him by mesmerism Don’t you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars ...

4:57 PM

Okey dokey, I
Have finished editing the
Empty tag wikis

5:15 PM

who's user 111

hamlet

thank you. I was referring back to a meta post but couldn't figure out who it was

Is user 80 Az(i don't know the rest of their name)

Gallifreyan

5:54 PM

Yes

Okay, I've posted the meta question regarding genre tags

Well, that answer was an experience.

@Randal'Thor Yeah, I saw

That was loooooong

I hope I wasn't too ranty about the ~~obnoxious self-pitying spineless~~ character :-)

Answering questions on this site has led me to read a lot of interesting stories that I'd never have heard about otherwise.

I've still got two questions to answer and an entirely unrelated essay

6:00 PM

@NorthLæraðr Great!

2 mins ago, by North Læraðr

That was loooooong

@Randal'Thor lol

@Randal'Thor Okay, I got rid of the list on the question. You make a fair point about it

Yeah, because if we get a consensus for some course of action without nitpicking the list, then it'll seem as though the consensus is for doing the same thing to all those specific tags you mention.

Or even people might refrain from supporting a proposal because of some of the specific tags it might apply to.

okay

Anyway, nice meta.

Thank you! It's my first one here

6:08 PM

I'm beginning to come round to your/Tsundoku's idea of replacing tags like comedy, satire, gothic-literature, mystery-novels with a plain genre tag for general questions about any particular genre.

Not least because having tags for individual genres is likely to lead to (mis)use of those tags on every question about books in that genre. E.g. people trying to slap mystery-novels on every Poirot or Holmes question.

Q: Can we get rid of specific genre tags for good?

It seems like Hamlet already made that proposition long time ago

Librarian

6:27 PM

2

About a month back, I've decided to dedicate more time into Literature SE, and have contributed to editing (and still editing) many of the tag excerpt wikis. I've learned a lot about community expectations & guidelines, what we do here, and how we tag things. During my time, however, I noticed so...

discussion

Okay, more suspicious tags

casey-and-the-bat is an individual poem

Gareth Rees

6:43 PM

@NorthLæraðr "Casey at the Bat" has been published on its own in book form so my rule of thumb would justify the tag

@Randal'Thor That's a very good answer

7:19 PM

@GarethRees Thank you! It was enjoyable to research and write.

8:00 PM

@GarethRees Hmmm alright

Okay, all tag excerpts under letter c have been updated

A common misspelling to be fixed.

Hm?

Ah

It's Meursault

You want me to go edit all of them?

I had absolutely no idea how to spell it so I simply copy/pasted it in every scenario where I used it.

Doesn't have to be you, but someone :-)

I just posted here as a PSA rather than going to edit them all myself.

8:15 PM

@Randal'Thor Uh quick PSA: it's spelled Mersault in Camus's A Happy Death

A Happy Death

A Happy Death (original title La mort heureuse) is a novel by Absurdist French writer-philosopher Albert Camus. The existentialist topic of the book is the "will to happiness," the conscious creation of one's happiness, and the need of time (and money) to do so. It draws on memories of the author including his job at the maritime commission in Algiers, his suffering from tuberculosis, and his travels in Europe. Camus composed and reworked the novel between 1936 and 1938 but then decided not to publish it. It was eventually published in 1971, over 11 years after the author's death. The Engli...

French has more consistent vowel letter-to-sound correspondence than English, so if you know some French and you know how Meursault is pronounced, it's easy to remember how to spell it.

I know neither of those. :P

@NorthLæraðr Whaaaat ... oh, apparently that's a different character.

Dammit Camus :-/

The main character's name is Patrick Mersault, while in The Stranger is Meursault. That's confusing

Yeah. I get that it's a device rather than an oversight, but still.

Hmm. I wonder if we could cook up a question for the site out of that.

"Why did Camus choose to give two characters almost identical names, rather than either identical or easily distinguishable?"

"Did he just hate his readers and want to confuse them?"

8:20 PM

@Randal'Thor Oooh

hmm do I edit twenty more tags to reach over 900 or do i post a question....

hmm

I could also answer a question but that takes even more work and time

9:24 PM

hmm can we update the name of doctor-faustus to something like doctor-fautus-marlowe or something? As to avoid confusion?

Apr 28 at 10:26, by Rand al'Thor

I found it while trying to find if we had a discussion previously on how to tag Faust questions. It seems we didn't.

^ there's a discussion about Faust tagging which starts there. I don't remember what the outcome was.

because there's also Johann Faustus, the dude; Faustus, the German story character, and Goethe's Doctor Faustus

Well that's hella confusing

We have doctor-fautus for Marlowe's work and just faust for Goethe's version. Really?

As I wrote on [28 April](https://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/54216575#54216575):
> We might use [tag:doctor-faustus] for Marlowe's play and [tag:faust-part-one] and [tag:faust-part-two] for Goethe's plays.

@Tsundoku Why don't we just do faust-goethe to encompass both part one and two?

it's much more straightforward that way, no?

and doctor-faustus-marlowe so it's pretty clear

Those are two plays written several years apart. We don't combine Shakespeare's three Henry VI plays into a single tag either.

9:32 PM

Oh okay

So are going to call it faust-part-one and faust-part-two?

Because I need to know in order to update the usage guidance to doctor-faustus (which, by the way, I still think should be called doctor-faustus-marlowe)

Oh, and in addition to Faust, Part One and Faust, Part Two, there's also Urfaust. I'd prefer to actually read those plays before blindly changing those tags.

Good grief, all these Fausts

Goethe's plays don''t use "Doctor" in the title. People should be able to read tag excerpts and recognise the authors' names.

hmm

okay, then I'm going to leave doctor-faustus alone for now

Aside from that, all tags starting with "d" have been updated

Oh yeah, do we need a dungeons-and dragons tag

No tagging system for this site will ever be perfect. Let's see whether the next question about Goethe's plays gets the tags wrong instead of retagging for the sake of retagging.

@NorthLæraðr What would you replace it with?

9:39 PM

I'm not really convinced it should exist, but I guess it's fine for now...

I'm not saying the tagging system can't be improved, but no amount of retagging etc. is going to improve question quality, answer quality or site statistics.

mm okay

Also be aware of the risks of burning out. SE tagging systems are great black holes into which I've seen several users get sucked, never to return the same again.

May 7 at 21:36, by Gallifreyan

Alas, tags seem to suck the life out of anyone who's dealt with them long enough

I'll try to be careful

I limit the amount per day I do

Writing tag wiki excerpts should be safe, though. At least I think I came out healthy. It's the tagging wars that are treacherous. :-/

Our QPD has been above 3.5 since 24 April; it was usually below 2.5 in the three months before that. And our percentage of answered questions has not gone down because of that. This doesn't say much about answer quality, but it's still nice, I think.

9:53 PM

hmm

really school?

You're blocking gareth's web site because it's ... a game site?!

Gameth Rees?

It's not a game site, actually. It's more like a blog with articles on literature and programming topics. Nothing that needs to be blocked, as far as I can tell.

My district's algorithm is so weird and inconsistent I don't even

I guess you can't install Tor on that laptop. If it's a Windows system with an unencrypted drive, it's easy to change the password, though, and install whatever you want. Or you can get a USB drive, copy Ubuntu onto it and then boot from the USB drive to see whatever site you want.

Do you have access to this article about putting Ubuntu on a USB?

USBuntu?

9:58 PM

(In the past, I have even bypassed BIOS passwords that prevented me from booting a PC from a USB drive. Easy if you can open the computer casse and temporarily remove the battery.)

Hmm interesting

It doesn't need to be Ubuntu; you can run many other Linux distros from USB, e.g. Manjaro, Linux Mint, and others.

Though I might get introuble with the school :P

Or it might just block the application from starting

Changing the password is a bad idea then, but checking whether you can boot Linux from a USB drive should be fine. The Linux system won't touch the hard drive or any of the Windows settings. It's a very safe way of getting to know Linux without installing it.

what is linux?

10:03 PM

Of course, downloading a complete Linux distro may tax your network connection, unless you choose a lightweight distribution.

Linux is a family of free and open source operating system that are all based on the same operating system kernel. Basically alternatives to Windows and Mac OS.

These operating systems are usually called distributions, because they "distribute" the kernel and the other components that you need to build a full operating system. Ubuntu is probably the best-known Linux "distribution".

The computer I am using at the moment also runs a Linux distribution instead of Windows. In fact, it used to have Windows 10, but I wiped the drive and installed Linux instead.

One of the nice things about many Linux distributions is that you can put them on a USB and run them from there. Windows isn't meant to be used in this way.

(so confused by aight)

Honestly, I just need to wait until I can get my personal laptop fixed lol

Which part was confusing?

Just... like the whole thing? If I;m understanding correctly, you're saying Linux runs on like different parts

So I do like download one of the Linux onto a USB drive?

Any operating system consists of several parts. That includes Windows: it has a "kernel" (the part responsible for communicating with the hardware), a user interface, a file browser, etc. That is the same with Linux, except that it's a different collection of components.

Yes, you can download most Linux distributions for free; most of them are maintained by volunteers. Ubuntu is a good place to start because it already has many users (so it's easy to find help online) and it's user-friendly.

I see...

10:15 PM

What you download is a so-called ISO file, named after an ISO standard for optical disks (CD-ROMs and DVDs). But you can write the same ISO file to a USB stick, insert the USB drive into a PC, boot the PC, and then the Linux distribution on the USB drive should boot.

Ubuntu is a 2.5 GB download, though. So if you don't have a strong internet connection, you should either choose a light-weight alternative or find a computer magazine that comes with Ubuntu on a DVD.

Hmm, interesting.

Thank you. Now you should probably go to sleep :P

I've got a Jane Eyre essay to write anyways

See you tomorrow, Mr. Rochester ;-)