Rand al'Thor

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The Reading Room

Welcome to chat for literature.stackexchange.com — Read any go...

Rand al'Thor

11:34

I've been busy travelling in the last couple of weeks and haven't been much in chat, but I saw some brouhaha about a new look for the reply functionality, which I'm not seeing myself. Was that an A/B testing thing only for some people, or has the change already been reverted?

Rand al'Thor

11:32

(I haven't looked into this specific issue to see how bad the edits were that were approved, just a general comment on the "others had been approved so I figured these edits were allowed" inference.)

Rand al'Thor

11:32

@bobble Just because 1-2 people approve something, doesn't necessarily mean it's allowed. They might be wrong (robo-reviewing suggested edits is a thing), or it might be something worth creating a meta discussion about to get a clear consensus that can be followed.

Rand al'Thor

11:30

The same user has another self-deleted answer; that one has a score of 0, so less obviously useful, but I thought I'd drop a link in case people want it undeleted too.

Rand al'Thor

11:29

@NapoleonWilson Not sure if that was a rage-quit or what, but the answer seems useful, so I've undeleted it.

Rand al'Thor

Jul 18 12:23

@bobble Sorry, I haven't been around as much recently. Dropping a message just to make myself pingable again.

Rand al'Thor

Jul 5 12:09

@verbose Proposal for feet as a synonym for legends.

Rand al'Thor

Jul 4 11:58

@bobble Thanks for the ping, but I'm the last SFF mod who should be looking into that; Null has a silver tag badge in [the-matrix] and I know nothing at all about the franchise. However, I pinged the others in our mod room, and a flag has also now been raised, so I guess it'll be sorted out one way or another in due course.

Rand al'Thor

Jul 3 08:12

echo in here?

Rand al'Thor

Jul 3 07:30

@verbose Done, I think.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 19 14:34

@bobble Thanks, but meh - this has been a long time coming anyway. I've always heard good things about Duckduckgo compared with Google; it was just inertia keeping me with the most popular search engine until now.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 19 11:44

^ see also

Rand al'Thor

Jun 19 11:44

Q: Old Literature Stack Exchange migration links no longer work properly

I've been browsing elsewhere on Stack Exchange, and I noticed that a few questions that have been migrated redirect to Literature via their post numbers - as they should. An example is What order should the Chronicles of Narnia books be read in?, on Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange. There...

Rand al'Thor

Jun 19 11:44

@ClaraDíazSanchez The onebox you're replying to is so old that it's from the original iteration of Literature SE (Lit.1, as I call it), not the site we're on that started in 2017. The system didn't "remember" which post IDs had already been taken in the old site, so question #1340 in the new site is something totally different from that one with the same URL.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 19 11:42

Personally I've recently switched over from Google to Duckduckgo for web search, due to the apparently undisableable "AI overview" that Google shoves in front of your face at the top of most searches.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 19 11:41

If we keep populating the One Minute Reviews blog, eventually it'll start showing up in search results for people Googling the books we've reviewed. Maybe it already does, even.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 19 11:40

@bobble I once posted a book series review on the SFF.SE community blog which got a comment from the author herself.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 13 06:21

@Bookworm This was self-deleted :-(

Rand al'Thor

Jun 13 06:19

@verbose Yep.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 12 09:33

No new questions for 5 days? :-(

Rand al'Thor

Jun 8 10:56

Q: How can I find out who translated a book on Project Gutenberg?

There's a translation error in Project Gutenberg's English-language version of The Count of Monte Cristo. I'd like to know whose translation was being used which contained this mistake. But in the Project Gutenberg text I can't find the name of the translator anywhere. Do Project Gutenberg trans...

translation

Rand al'Thor

Jun 8 10:55

@verbose If some poking around was needed and it's not "obvious", I'd say it's worth a Q&A. Sometimes the info is relevant, and it's something you might want to include if you were, say, answering a question here with quotes from that book. See also:

Rand al'Thor

Jun 8 10:53

@bobble For a moment I wondered why you censored the word "specific" :-)

Rand al'Thor

Jun 2 13:40

As you're the OP of the Kolatkar answer, though, in this case you could have self-deleted it instead of flagging for mods :-)

Rand al'Thor

Jun 2 13:40

@Feeds Thanks for that, @verbose - great resource!

Rand al'Thor

May 30 09:52

@bobble Awesome!

The Restaurant at the End of the Univ…

General discussion for scifi.stackexchange.com, both on-topic ...

Rand al'Thor

Jun 25 14:19

^ if this is "not really alternative history", is it actually speculative fiction at all, or off-topic?

Rand al'Thor

Jun 25 14:18

A: One episode, in Japan, of a long "alternate history" novel

This sounds like the novel The Confusion, part of the Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson. The story is, well, exactly as described. The plot follows multiple threads starting multiple sets of characters in the late 1600s, one of which is the English vagabond/adventurer "Half-Cocked" Jack Shaftoe, ...

Rand al'Thor

Jun 25 14:18

@DavidW No idea. I assume they're equivalent - is there any tangible difference?

Rand al'Thor

Jun 21 11:14

@Adamant The SFF chat community was killed in 2017.

The Greenhouse

General discussion for vegetarianism.stackexchange.com

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 16:03

Hanging in there.

Stack Exchange Lobby

The beginner-friendly chat room for all users on the Stack Exc...

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:42

Everyone with a blue username in chat is a moderator somewhere.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:41

@ElectroFieldHeatofMountainSun Yeah, but here I'm just chatting.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:41

@ElectroFieldHeatofMountainSun It was less than five minutes.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:40

One of the sites I moderate has a main site chatroom whose last message was 132 days ago.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:39

Five minutes without a message isn't that quiet.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:32

@terdon I was expecting a response along the lines of "Rand Althor's Mother" :-P

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:29

But this chat is without RYM or reason.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:28

@Otaku I was ribbing @terdon :-)

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:27

RAM = Rodent Anagrammed Man?

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:26

@terdon rimshot?

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:25

@DanGetz But why's the rum gone?

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:24

Dammit @terdon!

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:24

@JourneymanGeek There's an even older thing called Rome.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:23

@Otaku That's what I thought, so I clarified that he meant printed fonts.

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:11

@Otaku Printed?

Rand al'Thor

Jun 11 15:10

@ElectroFieldHeatofMountainSun There's no fixed topic for this room, so I guess "why people are talking about fonts" is "because that's a topic that interests them". Do you have an alternative topic to chat about here?

Rand al'Thor

May 31 09:01

@Anonymous Someone should? Or you should?

Rand al'Thor

May 30 09:57

@JourneymanGeek While browsing some sites where I don't have accounts (hence not logged in), I saw popups from the "Chat" thing in the left sidebar, which now leads to this room instead of to that particular site's list of rooms.

The Screening Room

“We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselv...

Rand al'Thor

May 31 21:49

I watched Interstellar today, and now I understand why @NapoleonWilson chose the username TARS on another site. "A giant sarcastic robot" indeed ;-)