Slartibartfast
The Restaurant at the End of the Univ…
The question Short story about a heist that gets foiled because the thief unknowingly crosses the international dateline was closed due to a lack of evident sci-fi content. In its entirety it reads;
I read this really cool short story in middle school about a heist that gets foiled because the t...
Sometimes "serial voting" is the right response.
There's currently a [philosophy] tag, which came to my attention because it was used to tag one obviously off-topic question.
The other question it currently tags is also off-topic in my opinion, though the consensus is less clear.
Is [philosophy] a reasonable tag to have here? It seems to me it ...
Peter David (Wikipedia) passed away May 24, 2025. The author of dozens of movie and TV show novelizations and tie-ins (including more than 40 Star Trek novels), I remember him best for 1987's Knight Life, one of the few humorous fantasy novels, other than Discworld, that I recall from my childho...
Scottish character actor Prentis Hancock passed away on May 30th. Though he was perhaps best known in the genre for his role as Paul Morrow on the 70’s sci-fi series SPACE:1999, Hancock appeared in a number of other science fiction and fantasy programs. Prominent among these was no less than...
This is not the first time I've thought about this, but this question reminded me.
It's closed as off-topic because it doesn't seem to have scifi or fantasy elements (something I agree with). However, it was asked a mere 3 hours ago, at the time of writing this.
However, it's usual that people as...
The tag wiki for secret-wars states that it's for the 2015 Secret Wars comic storyline. To avoid any mix-ups with the original 1984 Secret Wars, it would be clearer to rename this tag to secret-wars-2015.
Also, since the original Secret Wars comic series was first published in 1984, our current t...
I answered a story-id question three years ago and my answer was accepted. Upon subsequent re-reading of the three novels involved, I now know that that answer is incorrect. I identified the series correctly, but not the book. A few details supporting my answer are wrong as well.
What should I ...
We have an art tag with 74 questions.
23 of those questions are also tagged story-identification, including both seeking to identify stories involving art and seeking to identify actual pieces of art. Some of the questions not tagged story-identification are also seeking to identify pieces of ar...
On April 1st, someone asked: "Monster-of-the-week teen/kids show from the late 1990s". Reading through it, I immediately thought, "Wait, that's The Pink Opaque"—which isn't a real show but actually a fictional TV series from the 2024 movie I Saw the TV Glow.
I left a comment pointing this out but...
The tag wiki excerpt for good-against-evil is as follows:
Good vs Evil is a common trope used in Fantasy literature and is central to the mythology of Star Wars. In this trope, the main characters are often struggling against the forces of "evil".
On the face of it, it appears to be a "meta" ta...While doing some other editing cleanup over the past few weeks, I've noticed that there is a tag muggles, specifically for Muggles (non-magic users) in the Harry Potter universe.
Does this tag really make sense? Nobody is an expert specifically on Muggles, rather than on the Potterverse as a whol...
Gene Hackman found dead, with wife and dog
Oscar-winning actor Gene Hackman and his wife, classical pianist Betsy Arakawa, have been found dead on Wednesday afternoon in their home in the Santa Fe Summit community northeast of the city.
In a statement to the Santa Fe New Mexican, County Sheriff ...
A farewell to Michelle Trachtenberg, who played Dawn Summers in the Buffy The Vampire Slayer series.
She tragically passed away at the age of 39 today. The cause is unknown, but there is no suspicion of foul play and "is not being treated as suspicious"[1].
- [1]: https://www.elle.com.au/cultur...
Why not combine wizards and witches into gender-neutral spellcasters like what Yu-Gi-Oh! does?
Jules Feiffer, famously illustrator of the classic fantasy novel "The Phantom Tollbooth" and author of his own, less famous fantasy novels "The Man in the Ceiling" and "The Odious Ogrehas" has died at age 95.
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/21/839273361/jules-feiffer-dead
The TV series Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man (2025) has just been released. The tag your-friendly-neighborhood-spider-man is too long as it exceeds the 35-character limit, so I opted for friendly-neighborhood-spider-man in a question I posted about the show.
Should we stick with this tag, ...
Yesterday, I asked this question about a novel I read in middle school. It was closed as a duplicate of this question, presumably because the two questions have the same answer. However, the stated details of either question are significantly different; for me personally, if I read only the bodie...
In addition to the few authors and creators who had a large enough influence or impact on me that I wrote individual in-memoriam posts for them, there were a number of other authors of note who passed away in 2024:
Brian Lumley (wiki), asked about here as the author of Necroscope and its sequels...
NPR Article
Director David Lynch has died. His sinister, surreal vision of America made him a leading counterculture auteur in the 1980s and 1990s, with movies such as Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive, as well as the groundbreaking television series he co-created with Mark Frost, ...
It’s that time of the year again! As we bid farewell to the year that's concluded and welcome the new one, we have a tradition of sharing moderation stats for the preceding calendar year.
As most of you here might be aware, sites on the Stack Exchange network are moderated somewhat differently t...
The other day, I asked this question about the interpretation and implications of a particularly weird scene in Alien Resurrection:
Is Ripley 8 the Newborn’s Grandmother and Father?
The question received: 3 up-votes, 4 down-votes, 1 un-down-vote, and even 1 delete-vote. And it ended up getting c...
Barry N. Malzberg passed away on Friday, Dec. 20th, at the age of 85. He was a prolific writer of short stories (hundreds in total, and over a hundred just in the first half of the 1970s alone) as well as an essayist and an editor.
His often dark and psychologically-oriented (especially later) f...
Notable SF artist Greg Hildebrandt (SFE, Encyclopedia of Fantasy, Wikipedia) passed away on Hallowe'en 2024. With his twin brother Tim, they rose to prominence in the 1970s as notable illustrators of Tolkien's work, leading to a 30-year series of Tolkien calendars.
Working mostly with Tim, the B...
Recently, Tony Todd (December 4, 1954 – November 6, 2024) passed away.
He was well known in the sci-fi community for the roles of Kurn in Start Trek TNG and DS9, Alpha-Hirogen in Star Trek Voyager and of course, old Jake Sisko in DS9, among many other acting and voice acting roles, far to many to...
It's OK either way, but I'd rather have them in the same.
Hitchhikers Guide: was Marvin the computer that deep thought said would follow it?
It's unfortunately common that story-identification answers get a comment (or non-answer) along the lines of "Thanks, this is the one!" instead of the author formally accepting them. These comments may get deleted (in some cases with a single flag), which is essentially impossible to prevent and ...
I have a notification for story identification posts, but I really would like to exclude any posts on certain tags/topics (like manga/manhua/manwha and fanfic). Is there any way to do this?
I know many people here rely on the Internet Archive to source books for quotes, but they have been undergoing a DDOS attack and password hashes may have been compromised. If you haven't reused the password used on that system, you'll just want to change it when they're back up, but I know a lot ...
I guess this is not a very new change, but I just discovered it very recently. It used to be the case that moderators could only undelete comments if they'd been deleted by moderators (including the Community bot), whereas self-deleted non-mod comments and comments deleted by user flags couldn't ...
The acting legend Dame Maggie Smith has just passed away, at almost 90 years old. Her extensive acting career, starting from 1956 and continuing up to at least 2023, earned her two Oscars, five BAFTAs, four Emmys, three Golden Globes, and a Tony Award - "quite enough to be getting on with", as Pr...
A common pratice in the Gardening and Landscaping network is for location information to be solicited from the questioner in order to help identify plants, give tailored growing advice for the climate, or whatever.
My opinion is that this network could benefit from the same thing with its identif...