Comments on: You Found My Bubbleship!

You Found My Bubbleship!

ilana — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 10:32:08 -0800

MeFi is the best! Thank you for restoring a piece of my childhood.

This is my first post to MetaTalk, so I hope it's appropriate! Almost three years ago I posted a childhood book question to AskMe, about a the identity of a book that had been bothering me for at least a decade. I was positive that AskMe would be my saviour and was crushed when nobody figured it out. Over the years I received various messages from users asking if I ever tracked it down, and always had to respond in the negative. Today, I got a message from jeather, who had diligently solved the puzzle after three years (turns out this book, by Elwy Yost, had two different titles, "The Mad Queen of Mordra" in Canada and "Billy and the Bubbleship" elsewhere, making it even more difficult). It's a small thing, but it's absolutely made my week. Thank you, Metafilter, and thank you jeather, who remembered my question after so long!

By: ldthomps

ldthomps — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 10:48:49 -0800

Awwwww - it's awesome when Metafilter answers questions in minutes or less AND when they answer a long-lingering puzzle. Yay jeather for finding your book!

By: zamboni

zamboni — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:01:19 -0800

Is this the longest known ask-to-answer? I had one that was nearly a year.

By: zamboni

zamboni — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:06:18 -0800

Other long term resolutions:

1 year, self-resolved.
2.5 years.
5 years, self-resolved.

By: BozoBurgerBonanza

BozoBurgerBonanza — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:22:19 -0800

MetaFilter Obit post for the author, Elwy Yost

By: tilde

tilde — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:38:56 -0800

By: boo_radley

boo_radley — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:46:40 -0800

:A-Team theme song:

By: item

item — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:47:33 -0800

It only made your week? Time to reevaluate your priorities, if you ask me. Which you didn't because I'd more than likely give you terrible advice.

Enjoy the book or movie or videogame or sandwich recipe or whatever!

By: axiom

axiom — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:57:41 -0800

Can mods post the answer in that thread so that any other web searches leading there reveal the answer? You should at least tag it with the book titles and author name.

By: pracowity

pracowity — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 11:58:01 -0800

Elwy Yost? I was just thinking about him yesterday. I had no idea he wrote books.

By: ilana

ilana — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 12:08:58 -0800

item: I was going to go for something more dramatic than just a week, but then I thought it might make me look pathetic. Plus, if I said it made my year, my fiance might ask for the ring back (though, as he gave me the MeFi account, it would be purely his fault/his indirect success).

axiom: I've tagged the question with the book titles and author; thanks for the suggestion.

I had no idea it was Elwy Yost; I also didn't know he'd written a children's book. It makes me feel even more kindly disposed towards this novel.

By: misha

misha — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 12:12:53 -0800

Yay! Another win for the AskMe Detective Squad.

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 12:18:42 -0800

Internet Detective Squad!

Finding facts/Avoiding Work.

By: mintcake!

mintcake! — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 12:32:14 -0800

What are you - the best?

/Pete Holmes

By: mannequito

mannequito — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:10:57 -0800

Hey, sweet!!

This happened to me as well, last year.

By: mannequito

mannequito — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:12:48 -0800

Also now I know about the 'resolved' tag, and added it to my old post!

By: Decani

Decani — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:29:17 -0800

Happened to me too. This is one of the things Metafilter does well.

By: batmonkey

batmonkey — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 13:53:23 -0800

You give me hope!

never declare any portion of your Ask as "easy" - it will be the one thing no one will ever know

By: Wilder

Wilder — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:27:25 -0800

yes, I have new hope that my Google+ question will find and answerer too! Thanks and congrats on the find. KUDOS to jeather!

By: Jofus

Jofus — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:28:57 -0800

Awesome! Kinda sorta happened to me too.

By: headnsouth

headnsouth — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 14:35:21 -0800

Cool! So there's still hope for the as-yet-untitled story title I asked about?

By: Artw

Artw — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:37:00 -0800

I'm always too late to help on book identification questions - there's Mefites who pounce on those as soon as they appear like a pack of hungry wolves.

By: item

item — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 15:48:37 -0800

While this has never really happened to me in any sense that I can think of, a (sort of) similar phenomenon has happened to others who've seen posts/comments/answers/yaddayaddayadda of mine waaaaaaay after the fact and've e/memailed me to let me know that their problem's been solved by a years-old contribution to Mefi of mine.

This of course makes me a hero in the truest sense of the word.

By: MCMikeNamara

MCMikeNamara — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 16:05:44 -0800

Artw, I feel the same way. I guess we should start trolling the "three years old and unanswered" questions if we want to help.

Speaking of, how does this even happen? jeather (or anyone else who might have similar answering habits, I guess) -- did you just happen upon this unanswered query or were you looking for it specifically for some reason?

By: ilana

ilana — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 16:15:47 -0800

MCMikeNamara, jeather had been the one to answer the original question, corroborating my memories but also unable to find the title. It was more of a "that question has been bugging me as well for years since you asked it" (for which I am very sorry, but it has a happy ending) than a "I found your question" scenario.

By: cmoj

cmoj — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 16:55:25 -0800

:A-Team theme song:

I'm gonna start using the :A emoticon.

By: deborah

deborah — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 18:34:04 -0800

I had two childhood book title questions and was amazed at how quickly the answers were provided. They were book titles I'd searched for for years and *boom* AskMe provides!

By: cooker girl

cooker girl — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 18:42:35 -0800

I know jeather from here and another venue and she is truly awesome! It doesn't surprise me that she'd stick with something like this.

By: jessamyn

jessamyn — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 19:53:02 -0800

Can mods post the answer in that thread

We can't. That is, there is no current mechanism for doing this and we've talked about it a few times and never found a decent way to do stuff like that. restless_nomad has been really interested in the possibility of finding ways to cross-link posts and Meta posts about them so that people could reference them backwards and forwards but we've never really gone anywhere with that idea.

By: crunchland

crunchland — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 19:55:11 -0800

Internet Detective Squad! -- "Collective Detective."

By: The Whelk

The Whelk — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 21:07:50 -0800

All of us are more inquisitive then one of us.

By: onlyconnect

onlyconnect — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 21:12:01 -0800

It's not possible to add in a tag that is somehow also a hyperlink, is it? Anyway, this post is so lovely, and kudos to jeather!

By: gt2

gt2 — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 02:58:42 -0800

As an aside, how do you pronounce Elwy? like El Why? it's an unusual name?

By: pracowity

pracowity — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 04:05:13 -0800

EL-wee Yohst could sell me toast.

National Post: He was born in 1925 in Weston, Ont., then a suburb of Toronto, the only child of a pickle manufacturer, also named Elwy.

By: cortex

cortex — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 08:44:32 -0800

It's not possible to add in a tag that is somehow also a hyperlink, is it?

Nope, they're explicitly plain-text entities on the design side that inherent automated hyperlinks as part of how they're displayed on the site. Adding in a custom extra link there would be a bad scene.

By: SisterHavana

SisterHavana — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 09:58:03 -0800

I asked a question over seven years ago that I just found the answer to within the past month, thanks to a photo of the cover posted on the Shelf Discovery Facebook page. (The book in question was Bettina's Secret by Britt Hallqvist.)

By: Lexica

Lexica — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 10:36:23 -0800

Maybe a new tag (or two) would help, something like ResolvedAfterClosing and CheckTheResolvedAfterClosingWikiPageForTheAnswer? Clunky, admittedly.

By: jeather

jeather — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 12:58:15 -0800

Yes, I have actually been thinking about this question for (according to the date of the post) three years, because I liked the book too and could not remember the title. And it was so weird, how could it not have any googleable results? It's a charming book. I think. I am likely to buy it now.

I got the answer because at the end of last year I asked one of those book finder websites and didn't get a notification that my question had been answered (about a week later, after I had stopped checking the page and went to waiting for an email), and then when I googled it again I hit on the keywords that I had used the first time (underwater bubble queen chess).

By: ilana

ilana — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 10:13:36 -0800

Update: I tweeted about this and Star Crossed Press got in touch with me; apparently they're reprinting the book this fall. I think I might just have to buy a copy!

By: wilful

wilful — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 18:53:33 -0800

Still no one could help me with my request for identifying a vampire novel from the 80s.