Stats
Top Question:
The top two voted questions, with a tie of 130 votes each, was Given a magical world, why is the Quibbler ridiculous? and Does Hobbes ever do anything that Calvin himself could not do?, asked by
The Walrus469 and Machavity respectively.
Top Answer:
The highest voted answer, with 334 votes (and not the accepted answer), is from the story-ident question Does anyone know what this fantasy script is from? answered by Adele C.
Top Viewed:
The most viewed question, with 27761 views in the quarter, was If the Galactic Empire had over 25,000 Star Destroyers, why were only 27 at the Battle of Endor? asked by RichS.
User Picks
I haven’t nominated myself before, but I have some answers that I put some work into:
- How big is the town of Gravity Falls? because I compared lots of stuff, including images, real-life maps, and Oregon prison statistics.
- Why was the Black Pearl so special? because I had to buy and read a whole Pirates of the Caribbean novel, which was not very good, to answer the question.
I’ve always wondered this myself: Why didn’t Hermione get an Outstanding in her Defence Against the Dark Arts O.W.L.? and this question finally got a plausible reason for it. In addition, it’s actually a question I like that doesn’t involve “the dark side” in some way, which is rare. 😛
CandiedMango’s answer for my question Why didn’t any Death Eaters come back as ghosts? is really comprehensive, and did an excellent job explaining why something I always thought should have happened didn’t. His answer managed to entirely change my mind on it.
I had a lot of fun answering this question, because since their defining traits are “cunning and ambition” Slytherin students should be more intelligent than other students, and I enjoyed the chance to come up with an explanation for something that had always seemed odd to me. Why do less-bright students end up in Slytherin?
This is my first quarter actually contributing to scifi.se and here are two answers I am particularly proud of:
How long did it take the Millennium Falcon to do the Kessel run – Though I had to bend over backwards to do so, I feel I was able to get all the various information to resolve nicely into a legitimate answer. Especially given the (in)famous nature of the subject.
Which lightsaber form did Obi-Wan use against Maul on Tatooine? – Post-Phantom Menace lightsaber duels are fascinating and exciting, so being able to analyze and breakdown the fight in question was nothing short of fun. I mean, who doesn’t love to spend an afternoon exploring wookiepedia and everything it has on lightsabers?
And one that isn’t mine:
In answering “Does anyone know what this fantasy script is from?“, santyclause not only answered first, but was able to provide a legend for the script/alphabet that was pretty damn close to the “real” answer. All without knowing where the language came from (Brian Jacques’ Redwall).
I’m biased, because it’s my question, but I really like DCOPTimDowd’s answer to my question of What went down at the July 1974 Comic Art Con?. He put quite a bit of effort into explaining the circumstances and the people involved. It’s a bit of an odd duck as a question on the site, being about the fandom, but people seem to have received it well.
Selecting from one of my own this time: Did Anakin want kids?. I thought it was a pretty good idea for a question and it was definitely one of the ones I did the most research on before posting. If only there was more information on it.
Thunderforge’s response to my question of whether or not Pokemon can die while inside their Pokeballs. While it doesn’t directly answer the question (to no fault of his own), it does give lots of insight on what is likely and I don’t think we’ll get any better an answer given the current available information.
The question Have there ever been 25 or more stars on Wonder Woman’s “panties”? generated quite a bit of a flubbub over whether or not the word “panties” is appropriate for this stack. As always, nerd controversies (especially over a superhero’s underwear) are good fun and enjoyable to read.
NB: I’ve selected these items on the basis of being interesting, so they are not necessarily correct or “useful.”
In this answer, we learned that Hobbes’s existence is deliberately ambiguous. Not content with that, Machavity then asked Does Hobbes ever do anything that Calvin himself could not do?, which is an interesting way to approach the problem and generated a significant amount of discussion in several different directions.
Edlothiad’s answer to the question about whether Galadriel’s temptation of Boromir was “instrumental to his fall” was very thorough and made me think about both characters in a different way. I’m not sure how true it is, but it’s quite thought provoking, moreso than the highest-voted answer.
(Quite a lot of people in the comments to that answer seem to think it’s claiming that Galadriel was somehow “evil,” but I don’t see that claim in the answer itself, nor in any of the older versions of it, so I am disregarding all of that criticism as unsound. Nevertheless, the answer may be reaching in some other aspects relating to Boromir’s state of mind, so I’m not about to claim it’s accurate in that respect.)
I see Britain, I see France, I see Wonder Woman’s… satin tights? has the funniest title I’ve seen on Meta in a while. It’s also a great example of the collaborative process working as intended.
Image questions are always fun to answer. They help break up the monotonous giant walls of text I always end up writing.
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