[agamal007]

So I have to ask (for every fans of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Are you St. Petersburg along the Mississippi River?

[Pericles]

Are you in Yoknapatawpha County?

Congratulations, Pericles! It took you 4 questions to arrive at the correct answer.

Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional county in Mississippi created by the American author and Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner (1897-1962). It is based upon and inspired by Lafayette County and its county seat of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. He often referred to Yoknapatawpha County as "my apocryphal county". From Sartoris (1929) onwards, Faulkner set all but three of his nineteen novels in the county.

As Faulkner conceived it, Yoknapatawpha County was a veritable universe, replete with its own geography, history, and interrelated narratives. "No land in all fiction lives more vividly in its physical presence than this county of Faulkner's imagination," Robert Penn Warren wrote. Faulkner included hand-drawn maps of the county at the end of Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Malcolm Cowley's anthology The Portable Faulkner (1946, reproduced below).

The area was originally Chickasaw land. White settlement started around the year 1800. Prior to the Civil War, the county consisted of several large plantations: Louis Grenier's in the southeast, McCaslin's in the northeast, Sutpen's in the northwest, and Compson's and Sartoris's in the immediate vicinity of Jefferson. Later, the county became mostly small farms. By 1936, the population was 25,611, of which 6,298 were white and 19,313 were black.

While best known as a literary location, the county has also been depicted in film adaptations of Faulkner's novels, including Intruder in the Dust (1949), Sanctuary (1961), The Reivers (1969), As I Lay Dying (2013), and The Sound and the Fury (1959, 2014).

Wikipedia link

Comment: I didn't expect this round to last as long as it did because I thought one of the first questions would be: Are you a real (or fictional) place? -- and the field would have instantly narrowed. How many times have we seen a variation of that question among the first posed in WAI? But that didn't happen and for a long time it was simply assumed the place was real (until bob zea mentioned a fictional town in Question 33). I'm just as guilty of blinkered vision as the next person but it goes to show the importance of getting broad, general questions out of the way before narrowing the field of inquiry.




Map of Yoknapatawpha County drawn by William Faulkner

Congrats Pericles!

Thanks WB for the topic. It was a nice, short one for a change!

Comment: I didn't expect this round to last as long as it did because I thought one of the first questions would be: Are you a real (or fictional) place? -- and the field would have instantly narrowed. How many times have we seen a variation of that question among the first posed in WAI? But that didn't happen and for a long time it was simply assumed the place was real (until bob zea mentioned a fictional town in Question 33). I'm just as guilty of blinkered vision as the next person but it goes to show the importance of getting broad, general questions out of the way before narrowing the field of inquiry.

Yeah. I'll raise my hand and plead guilty to playing a dud game. I did some quick, very specific questions to keep the thread alive (literally after about two seconds of Googling). But in retrospect, even if it meant dooming the thread to the second page (due to too few players), it would have been better to wait till some preliminary research was done, and then formulate some general questions. The other folks did a good job with the general questions early on, but it was surprising that the real vs fictional wasn't asked earlier. Kind of like how everyone on the What Am I thread used to ask about software. Then when Avo actually had a WAI that dealt with software, no one asked that question and the round went on forever. We need to keep a list of general questions that need to be asked.

[raindrops]

Now that was a different location


Pericles found workerbee with 4 questions and so gains 20 wrz$...
However it took 40 questions to find him so workerbee gets 200 wrz$.
Pericles is invited to be the next guest after sending me a pm with the location for approval.

[Pericles]

Round 8

1. Are you a real place? Yes, we can definitely get that out of the way and say it’s real.
2. Are you in the northern hemisphere? Yes
3. Are you in a population center? (defined as a city, metropolitan area, town, village, hamlet -- rarely anything else.) Yes
4. Are you in Nevada, USA? No
5. Are you in Europe? Yes
6. Is the name of that population center the answer (we're not looking for e.g. a building inside a population center)? No
7. Are you in the Americas? No
8. Are you in Central Europe -- the area marked as light blue on the map? Follow actual State Borders, ignore Cultural Proximities. No
9. Are you created by people? Yes
10. Are you in a building / a building itself? Yes
11. Are you in a national capital? No
12. Are you in the UK? No
13. Are you in the countries named SE Europe, located in bob zea's map (orange color)? Yes
14. Are you in Southern Europe -- the area marked as PINK on the map? (Again, following actual State Borders, and ignoring Cultural Proximities ... which should be understood for all questions that reference this map, but just want to say it one more time. No
15. Are you in Western Europe according to the map above? No
16. Are you in the France? No
17. Are you in Eastern Europe? No (see 13)
18. Are you in Greece? No
19. Are you in Northern Europe (on the same map)? No
20. Are you a place where it snows? Yes
21. Are you in Romania? Yes
22. Are you Bran Castle in Romania? No
23. Are you in any of the countries comprising the former Yugoslavia? No
24. Are you in Bulgaria? No
25. Are you in Transylvania? No
26. is the building a castle or palace? No
27. Are you in the deva theatre? No
28. Are you a tourist attraction? Yes
29. Are you in the Moldava region of Romania? (see kat's map) No
30. Are you in a church in Romania? Yes
31. Are you at Moldovita Monastery in Suceava? No
32. Are you in Ieud a wooden church from 1364, Maramures? No
33. Are you a Romanian Orthodox church? Yes
34. Are you in the Black Church (Biserica Neagra)? No
35. Are you in the Voroneț Monastery (Sistine Chapel of the East)? Yes!

Are you a real place?

Are you in the northern hemisphere?

Are you in a population center? (defined as a city, metropolitan area, town, village, hamlet -- rarely anything else.)

(Does not include non-traditional or temporary residences like schools, campgrounds, military bases, etc.)

[coolcat59]

Are you in Nevada, USA?

[profprofessorson]

Are you in Europe?

[avoran]

Is the name of that population center the answer (we're not looking for e.g. a building inside a population center)?

Are you in the Americas?

Are you in Central Europe -- the area marked as light blueon the map? Follow actual State Borders, ignore Cultural Proximities.

[katkatj]

Are you created by people?