"People have different tastes. Is that really so hard to comprehend?"

well obviously, I just mean I can't understand what assortment of tastes would lead someone not to have Poe as a favorite

diff'rent strokes I guess

Tolkien.

Tolkien is actually my number 1, where as I have no real interest in Poe at all. This is only partly because horror as a genre is not that interesting to me.

Poe wrote detective fiction as well. Go read The Gold Bug and The Purloined Letter.

Not being a fan of detective fiction or horror, Poe has largely passed me by. I may give one of those two a shot, but I don't hold out much hope.

Also, while we call it horror, Poe is less slashed and more mystery. Albeit macabre mystery... But even the Tell Tale Heart and A Cask of Amontillado (which are very detailed, no mystery) aren't brutal or other worldly like Stehen Kings reliance on the fantastical in It or The Stand or Carrie. No, Poe grounded his works in reality. A man buried alive by his frenemy could very much happen. A car coming to life and slowly killing it's owner (King's Christine) not so much.

"the answer is poe wrote on both of them! you don't know this?"

It's an open-ended riddle by Lewis Carroll, it has no specific answer (to my knowledge, anyway.)

And my answer was reasonably close to that one, anyway...

Poe also invented the "locked room mystery".

Oh God, he was the prat behind that wave of tedious crap? So glad I voted Tolkien!

Poe. Tolkien's a legend, but Poe is better.

Unless I overlooked a vote, we are tied at 12.

Poe 12
Tolkien 12

Sorry I can't fathom somebody applauding Tolkien while calling somebody else tedious.

Every author can be tedious. In fact, what one reader calls tedious, another calls descriptive. I love Ian Fleming but many consider his drawn out detailed descriptions of Bond's meals (eggs cooked to a precise time, specific brand of cigarettes with a specific number of gold bands on them, etc) to be tedious. Tolkien could have told his tales in a fraction of the pages by trimming songs and details about the locations that are way over the top. But fans of the Professor revel in those details.

Obiwan, while the riddle was originally open-ended, when pressed for an answer by fans Lewis Carroll eventually came up with "Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front."

The problem is, some editor thought "nevar" was a typo, and changed it so that it didn't make sense anymore.

Tolkien

I don't think Poe is that good. The horror ('horror') gives an interesting edge but gets boring rather quickly.
I think The Gold Bug, previously mentioned by someone else, is the only non-horror one I read, and it was just boring, predictable and, well, bad. All IMO of course.

It's gone over 24 hours - is it over?

if it is then Tolkien wins (13 Tolkien, 12 poe)

Pretty sure obiwan said that the final would span the whole weekend.

It goes to the end of Sunday, all weekend.

Tolkien: 13
Poe: 12

Draug, Poe absolutely wrote supernatural horror. The Masque of the Red Death, Facts in the case of M. Valdemar, and the Fall of the House of Usher would be excellent examples.

@semck
"That said, bracket-based voting systems are notoriously awful at choosing what would meaningfully be called the favorite candidate of a group of people."
Someone mentioned STV a few pages back. If anybody wants to do a follow-up with our elite 8 (vote by ranking them 1st through 8th), I'll do the calculations (either Aussie or Seanad rules). It might be interesting to see who gets eliminated in what order under that system and who ends up winning.

^And if no one wants a re-run of the authors, I'd still be interested to see how this would work with a vote among the top n (preferably n<10) of some other category. And the nice thing is, it would only need one round.

Well, Smoker, it would certainly be interesting. I think we should be careful not to do something to challenge the legitimacy of the official tournament, though, since it IS the system that was chosen. (And, frankly, it's a lot more fun than one of the other systems, which is much of the point in a situation like this).

It could be an interesting footnote what-if, though.

"It could be an interesting footnote what-if, though."
Yeah, that's really all I had in mind. I don't intend to de-legitimize anything (if in fact there's any "legitimacy" to be erased) -- especially since I would have voted Tolkien as my #1 favorite from the very beginning.

@semck- I just watched the talk. It was pretty interesting- one of my friends back in high school was pretty into voting theory so I had heard a bit about Arrow's impossibility theorem and some of the paradoxes involved. I liked what he was talking about at the end as seeing the Borda Count as the most symmetric voting system and thus the most intrinsically fair and strategy-proof. That was interesting intuition.

I agree, uclabb. The talk was really interesting to me. One of the things that was really clear, I think, is that one's intuitions about what a voting system should accomplish are really important to the conclusions one draws. I didn't entirely agree with his conclusion about the Borda Count, at least for political elections, because I think there would be real downsides to preferencing candidates that are "mostly harmless" over those that large numbers actually forcefully desire.

There might be benefits too, though.

I agree. There are definitely some serious problems with the system currently in place, but I don't think the Borda Count is the answer, at least for political elections. It might be worthwhile in the next mafia game though.

Tolkien

Tolkien 14
Poe 12