NihilCredo posted:Why are you giving the author so much credit? It's obviously just Big Yud making a really loving terrible analogy because he's a drooling moron. it was a joke, yud gets no credit even if quirrell is misdirecting he gets no credit Jazerus fucked around with this message at 11:52 on May 17, 2018 |
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# ? May 17, 2018 11:50 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 13:57 |
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Xander77 posted:As an aside - is there anything in cannon to support the notion that SS himself and Slytherin house were ever anything but a bunch of KKK rip-offs? That is, was there anything to be "corrupted" from to begin with?
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# ? May 17, 2018 12:51 |
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Tiggum posted:Slytherin himself seems to have basically agreed with the other founders of Hogwarts except on the issue of Muggle-borns being allowed in. So the "blood purity" thing was in there right from the beginning, but it's not the only thing Slytherin cared about and it stopped being an official criterion when he left. Otherwise the house basically favours leadership traits. Basically he wanted to foster strong leaders for the magical community and he just happened to think that "pure blood" was one of the things a good leader needed. Also, there are several canon examples of good guys who are/were in Slytherin and bad guys who aren't/weren't. Death Eaters are just ideologically radicalized wizards.
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# ? May 17, 2018 13:29 |
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Canonically I'm actually pretty sure ravenclaw churns out the most dark wizards under circumstances where you don't have terrorists actively recruiting. Which, given that a lot of dark magic seems to be actively corruptive, kind of makes sense, the 'can't stand not knowing something' house decides THEY won't get corrupted by the corruptive magic. They do.
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# ? May 17, 2018 18:26 |
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Tiggum posted:Slytherin himself seems to have basically agreed with the other founders of Hogwarts except on the issue of Muggle-borns being allowed in. So the "blood purity" thing was in there right from the beginning, but it's not the only thing Slytherin cared about and it stopped being an official criterion when he left. Otherwise the house basically favours leadership traits. Basically he wanted to foster strong leaders for the magical community and he just happened to think that "pure blood" was one of the things a good leader needed. Also, there are several canon examples of good guys who are/were in Slytherin and bad guys who aren't/weren't. So, Wizard KKK from the start, then.
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# ? May 17, 2018 19:19 |
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Night10194 posted:So, Wizard KKK from the start, then. Less 'Wizard KKK' and more 'secretive wizard circa the 10th Century'. Hogwarts was founded before the Battle of Hastings. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 22:41 on May 17, 2018 |
# ? May 17, 2018 22:22 |
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Tiggum posted:This is really dumb. People know how to write. People know what it takes. There's even extensive analysis of what makes books good or bad. It's not as easy as saying that if you know everything there is to know about a certain type of art then you will be a good artist as well. I think this a valid claim because art has an intrinsic human component, it doesn't exist independent from the observer. Being an artist isn't just about technical skills, it's also about creating something that an independent observer will consider artistically valuable, so there's always something fuzzy and subjective to it. For all that it sounds like a lame cliché, art genuinely is about speaking to people, and you need to understand people and what matters to people if you want to really understand or create art. The problem here is really that Harrykowsky doesn't know whether he wants magic to work like a science or like an art, so it's a half-arsed mess in either direction. Well, he's also poo poo at the "understanding real people" part, rather than the people that exist only in his imagination, but we already knew that much. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 02:45 on May 19, 2018 |
# ? May 19, 2018 02:14 |
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Cardiovorax posted:He's not exactly wrong when he says that knowing all those things is not the same thing as being a good writer, though. You can know everything there is to know about writing in a technical sense and still be a garbage writer, because writing is an art, not a science.
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# ? May 19, 2018 03:27 |
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I don't know jack about golf as a game beyond "put the ball in the hole," so I'm really not in any position to gainsay you there, but I'm still getting the impression that you're oversimplifying it for the sake of making an argument. Golf as a sport and writing as an art are simply too fundamentally different to be compared like that. They're not the same thing and shouldn't be treated as though they work the same way. I mean, I get it, I don't want to agree with this dipshit about anything either, but where there's a point there's a point.
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# ? May 19, 2018 03:40 |
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if someone comes to you and says they wanna write a book you can point them in the right direction more than just by shrugging your shoulders and saying no one knows how books are made
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# ? May 19, 2018 03:44 |
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Cardiovorax posted:Golf as a sport and writing as an art are simply too fundamentally different to be compared like that.
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# ? May 19, 2018 03:52 |
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quote:if someone comes to you and says they wanna write a book you can point them in the right direction more than just by shrugging your shoulders and saying no one knows how books are made quote:They're both just skills for which some people have more natural aptitude than others. There's nothing magical about either. Cardiovorax fucked around with this message at 04:05 on May 19, 2018 |
# ? May 19, 2018 03:58 |
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yeah but in the end it's an in universe deliberatly terrible and unhelpful explantion becuase the guy doesn't want harry to learn how to do it
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# ? May 19, 2018 04:04 |
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Can't argue with that.
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# ? May 19, 2018 04:06 |
What makes a 'good writer' is absolutely more subjective than what makes a 'good golfer'. You can easily make the argument that Yud is a good writer: he can string sentences together and tell a story, there's not many grammar/spelling flaws, he has a big following, etc. But you can also argue that he is a really bad one, too. You can learn all the rules of writing and write, and I reckon being able to do that with consistency (and a lucky break or two) would make you a Stephen King, Lee Child or Dan Brown. But the more you read, and write, the more you realize that there's more to writing than knowing and applying rules. It's about that voice, that spark, the hard to pin down quality that makes something capture a reader. I read and review a lot of web serials and there's heaps that can turn out functional sentences, plots, characters, and so on -- but they lack that spark. edit: But then there's Ernest Cline who proves that you don't even need to know or care about the rules of writing, too. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 04:40 on May 19, 2018 |
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# ? May 19, 2018 04:37 |
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I'd say Yud's not a bad writer; he's a bad storyteller and his opinions are crap, but he's technically proficient and he can turn a phrase, He's just unable to create realistic characters who aren't author inserts or stereotypes.
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# ? May 19, 2018 05:33 |
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Personally, I'd call that "bad writing," but in a sense that isn't necessarily covered by technical proficiency, which really just proves the point.
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# ? May 19, 2018 05:36 |
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Cardiovorax posted:Personally, I'd call that "bad writing," but in a sense that isn't necessarily covered by technical proficiency, which really just proves the point. Well, if he were writing, say, technical manuals....
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# ? May 19, 2018 05:37 |
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For whatever it's worth, I think he's persuasive. It's just that the things he's persuading people of are bad, and therefore it's bad that he's persuasive.
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# ? May 19, 2018 05:51 |
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regardless, it reflects poorly on yud!harry that he accepts this as an explanation, and poorer on everyone else that this is common enough to be a reliable explanation
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# ? May 19, 2018 05:51 |
Apparently that dumb basilisk thing got Elon Musk laid. Perhaps I should formally swear allegiance to the Future AI overlords.
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# ? May 19, 2018 06:04 |
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Apparently that dumb basilisk thing got Elon Musk laid. apparently he was making fun of it with a dumb pun
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# ? May 19, 2018 06:10 |
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Apparently that dumb basilisk thing got Elon Musk laid. I only just realised recently that Musk is named in the original basilisk post: Roko posted:A more exciting (and to my mind more preferable) way to overcome the problem is to quickly become so rich that you can turn charity into business by single-handedly changing the faces of high-impact industries. Elon Musk is probably the best example of this. I swear that man will single-handedly colonize mars, as well as bringing cheap, reliable electric vehicles to the consumer. And he'll do it at the same time as making even more money. The Prophet Roko named Musk as one who was already saved and in a state of grace!
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# ? May 19, 2018 08:25 |
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Tunicate posted:apparently he was making fun of it with a dumb pun They both independently made the same dumb obscure pun and bonded over it on Twitter. That's gotta be a metaphor for something.
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# ? May 19, 2018 14:57 |
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The Shortest Path posted:They both independently made the same dumb obscure pun and bonded over it on Twitter. It’s a metaphor for wanting to bone Grimes.
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# ? May 20, 2018 18:48 |
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Chapter 91: Roles, Pt 2quote:"Seriously?" the boy said flatly. quote:Though if spells were always being invented in some mysterious way, new rituals being carved as new levers upon the unknown machine, it might just be that people just kept inventing rituals that involved wands, just like they invented phrases like 'Wingardium Leviosa'. It really seemed like magic ought to be, in some sense, almost arbitrarily powerful, and it certainly would be convenient if Harry could just bypass whatever conceptual limitation prevented people from inventing spells like 'Just Fix Everything Forever', but somehow nothing was ever that easy where magic was concerned. quote:"Dad," the boy said thinly. "Mum. Yes, she's dead. They didn't tell you anything else?" quote:"I think we are now well past Ender and on to Ender after the buggers kill Valentine." quote:"You brought my parents here," the Boy-Who-Lived said. "To Hogwarts. Where You-Know-Who or someone is lurking around, targeting my friends. What exactly were you thinking?" quote:"Clever move, bringing them here," Harry Potter said. "Probably damaged our relationship permanently. All I wanted was to be bloody left alone until bloody dinnertime. Which," the boy looked at his wristwatch, "it now is anyway. I'm going to go say goodbye to Hermione by myself, which I promise will take less than two minutes, and then after that I'll come out and go eat something like I would have done regardless. Do not disturb me for those two bloody minutes or I will snap and try to kill someone, I mean it, Professor."
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# ? May 22, 2018 08:32 |
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As far as I know, Valentine survives to the end of the Ender's Game series.
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# ? May 22, 2018 11:34 |
Epicurius posted:As far as I know, Valentine survives to the end of the Ender's Game series. if you count dying of old age and then being revived by mormon space magic, anyway wait, was that peter? i can't recall really
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# ? May 22, 2018 11:39 |
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Jazerus posted:if you count dying of old age and then being revived by mormon space magic, anyway
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# ? May 22, 2018 12:54 |
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What is it with seemingly half the science fiction authors of the last 30 years being Mormons, anyway? Well, not half, but is seems to be a disproportionately large number. Is this some kind of cultural thing? I'm European and I've never even met a Mormon, so I honestly wouldn't know.
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# ? May 22, 2018 13:04 |
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The only big Mormon sf/fantasy authors I can think of are OSC, Tracy Hickman, and Brandon Sanderson, and Hickman hasn't done much lately. Are there more big names?
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# ? May 22, 2018 13:35 |
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Wikipedia says that a quarter of all Hugo awards have gone to Mormons, so I assume there would be, unless the same people got a whole ton of them over and over again. It just seems a strange number for how small of a religious minority they are, at least to my knowledge.
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# ? May 22, 2018 13:50 |
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Cardiovorax posted:Wikipedia says that a quarter of all Hugo awards have gone to Mormons, so I assume there would be, unless the same people got a whole ton of them over and over again. if you and I are looking at the same Wikipedia page (the one about LDS fiction), that's not what it says. It says quote:According to Preston Hunter at adherents.com, a quarter of novels that won Hugo or Nebula awards had an LDS author or references to Latter-day Saints and Utah. which is obviously a different thing. The thing is, I don't know if that's even true. Going to the adherents.com website, there's a list of works and authors that reference Mormons or Utah., and a lot of Hugo and Nebula authors are on that list, but... Issac Asimov won the Hugo for The Gods Themselves (No identified Mormons). If you click through to the list, it Asimov, it quotes two books by him...one an autobiography where he says he and his wife have always been interested in Mormonism, because she had Mormon ancestors and he thinks any religion that considers him a gentile, and the second a joke book that has a joke about the Pope talking to God on the telephone and ending with the punchline, "The bad news is, he's calling from Salt Lake City." David Brin won Hugos for both Startide Rising and The Uplift War (neither of which have Mormons), but the link it has for him is that, while his novel The Postman doesn't specify a location for the novel beyond the post apocalyptic US, the film adaptation sets part of it in Utah. So...
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# ? May 22, 2018 16:15 |
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Well, I suppose that either means the Wikipedia article is misleading about what it means or it's my own fault for not being able to recognize a reference to Mormonism even when I see it. I've seen other people talk about the strange prevalence of Mormon authors in scifi and fantasy, though, even if I can't personally point a finger at very many of them in particular, so I just figured I'd ask since this thread seems like the place to do it.
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# ? May 22, 2018 17:41 |
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Cardiovorax posted:Well, I suppose that either means the Wikipedia article is misleading about what it means or it's my own fault for not being able to recognize a reference to Mormonism even when I see it. I've seen other people talk about the strange prevalence of Mormon authors in scifi and fantasy, though, even if I can't personally point a finger at very many of them in particular, so I just figured I'd ask since this thread seems like the place to do it. I think it's just that the Wikipedia article was misleading or wrong. I've also heard people talk about the number of Mormons who are science fiction writers, but I don't see it either, at least not as big ones. Oh, I guess I'd add Stephanie Meyer, author of Twilight, to the list.
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# ? May 22, 2018 19:06 |
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Epicurius posted:David Brin won Hugos for both Startide Rising and The Uplift War (neither of which have Mormons), but the link it has for him is that, while his novel The Postman doesn't specify a location for the novel beyond the post apocalyptic US, the film adaptation sets part of it in Utah. So... Except The Postman's novel version is specifically set in Oregon. The AI he meets is at Oregon State in Corvallis, even, and the whole thing is set in the Williamette Valley. The antagonist militia are out of northern California and using the California 'Bear Flag' as their standard. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 01:54 on May 23, 2018 |
# ? May 23, 2018 01:51 |
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Liquid Communism posted:Except The Postman's novel version is specifically set in Oregon. The AI he meets is at Oregon State in Corvallis, even, and the whole thing is set in the Williamette Valley. The antagonist militia are out of northern California and using the California 'Bear Flag' as their standard. Sure, but the movie starts with the Postman leaving Utah and entering Idaho on his way to Oregon, so because the movie adaptation of the novel lists Utah, it counts it. It also lists Phillip Joseph Farmer's novella "Riders of the Purple Wage", because the title is a play on Zane Grey's "Riders of the Purple Sage", which is a western about Mormon settlers. It's a stupid list, in other words.
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# ? May 23, 2018 02:45 |
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Dark Lord's Answer by Eliezer Yudkowsky Yudkowsky’s first attempt at the Light Novel form, from which he says he learnt many lessons for Red Tidday Up. “Content warning: sexual abuse, economics.” A didactic economics parable in novella form, on the value of monetary policy rather than a rigid gold standard - “So you see, Prince, that you’re not being told to steal from your country of Santal. Even if, to save it, you must transgress the righteous rules against usury and adulterated coinage.” The S&M slave girl is the author mouthpiece, and the viewpoint character is handed an idiot ball to make the mouthpiece look smart. Gratuitous S&M for flavouring, and to provide Yudkowsky’s favoured Philosophy Tough Guy ethics tests. A porned-up version of the Sequences. At least the plot is coherent and not stupid. Not worth 99p and I won’t be reading it a second time, but at least the author admits its deficiencies. the joys of doing your research, eh. An hour reading this thing and I get 0 useful words out of it. Oh well. 2 stars on Amazon, ‘cos it’s not quite 1-star bad.
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# ? May 26, 2018 15:09 |
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Chapter 92: Roles, Pt 3quote:The Boy-Who-Lived-Unlike-His-Best-Friend trudged the long, echoing corridors toward the Great Hall. With all his energies of thought exhausted, his mind was starting to throw out thoughts like an image of Hermione walking beside him and wordless concepts like That will never happen again until another part yelled No and shouted it down with determination to bring her back, only that part's voice was getting tired and the other part seemed tireless. Another part of his mind insisted on reviewing what he'd said to Professor McGonagall and Dad and Mum, even though he'd only been trying to get them out of there as quickly as possible and had been running on limited mental energy. As though somehow he could have done better, by an act of his defective will. What would be left of his relationship with his parents now, Harry couldn't guess. quote:Do we understand what we did wrong? his Slytherin side said coldly. quote:Harry was starting to worry that he was going insane. The conversations he had with the voices in his head weren't usually like this. And now it's for Quirrelmort to dunk on McGonnagal, because lord knows that's what we need some more of. quote:"I am David Monroe, who fought Voldemort," the man said, still in mild tones. "Heed my words. The boy cannot be allowed to continue in this state of mind. He will become dangerous. It is possible that you have already done everything you can. Yet I find this a very rare event indeed, and more often said than done. I suspect rather that you have only done what you customarily do. I cannot truly comprehend what drives others to break their bounds, since I never had them. People remain surprisingly passive when faced with the prospect of death. Fear of public ridicule or losing one's livelihood is more likely to drive men to extremes and the breaking of their customary habits. On the other side of the war, the Dark Lord had excellent results from the Cruciatus Curse, judiciously used on Marked servants who cannot escape punishment except by success, with no reasonable efforts accepted. Imagine their state of mind within yourself, and ask yourself whether you have truly done all that you can to wrench Harry Potter from his course."
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# ? May 30, 2018 11:15 |
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# ? May 21, 2024 13:57 |
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Somehow I doubt that torturing the people who work for you for the slightest failure is actually a great way to get them to give you their best efforts and unwavering loyalty.
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# ? May 30, 2018 13:05 |