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I'm just going to say right now that I'm not going to try and rewrite this thing like I did last time.
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Feb 21, 2015 22:57
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Moddington posted:The best part is that he's never actually read Harry Potter, only fanfic of it. It really sounds like "close enough" is his raison d'être.
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Feb 22, 2015 09:44
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Religious tract fanfiction has a storied history as old as Pilgrim's Progress. In the introduction to the second part, the author mentions that after releasing the original work there were numerous knockoffs and unofficial sequels, something which was actually a real problem before nations started to stiffen up intellectual property laws. So fanfiction is in no way new; what's new is the fact that you can use the internet to distribute fanfiction without getting into trouble with current IP laws.
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Feb 22, 2015 18:50
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You think Harry would bring up Conservation of Energy when he first sees someone levitate without wires or any sort of major power source. I mean, turning someone into a cat is even crazier what with the immense amounts of energy needed to violate the Conservation of Matter like that, but still. Hell, that's a pretty good object lesson in a scientific response to an amazing discovery. After radioactivity, fusion, fission, and special relativity were explored, "Conservation of Matter," a principle going back to the 18th century, was updated to "Conservation of Mass and Energy." A true scientist should not object to an outrageous but verifiable and repeatable phenomena, he or she should object to the theories which cannot account for such phenomena. Bobbin Threadbare fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Feb 23, 2015 |
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Feb 23, 2015 02:53
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Arcsquad12 posted:Jesus h christ that was annoying. How drae a book about wizards and broomsticks not have a functioning bank system! Though you must wonder how many of these supposed "fkaws" in Rowling's writing are really her fault and how much of it is yudkowski putting words in characters' mouths to make them look stupid next to harry. I'm pretty sure the flaws in Rowling's books stem from "she is not an economist, nor did she think she would need to consult an economist to explain a background detail in a children's book about magic and wizards." Yudkowski sure showed her, didn't he?
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Feb 24, 2015 22:32
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He didn't even use "Great Scott" in its proper context. It's meant to replace "What the gently caress just happened?" And I will say this: magical first aid kits really should be on Hogwart's list of required items.
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Mar 3, 2015 04:31
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JosephWongKS posted:Hmm, I never thought of that question myself. I know that if you put a Bag of Holding into another Bag of Holding, you get a big-rear end explosion and both Bags of Holding and their contents vaporize. Do the D&D rules cover what happens if the person holding the Bag of Holding himself crawls into the Bag of Holding? Indeed they do! Bags of Holding work by shunting your stuff into a pocket dimension, and so the real trouble is that you're stuck with whatever air is in there. Unless you also have a magic bottle that refreshes the air or something similar, you can only survive inside for a few minutes, and I don't think you can get back out without help.
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Mar 5, 2015 04:08
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SSNeoman posted:Holy poo poo stop it, you little poo poo! You can't win a conversation unless you get the first word, the last word, and the majority of the words in between.
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Mar 5, 2015 08:18
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Got a broken italics tag, there.Hieronymous Alloy posted:I thought they tore a dimensional rift open if you did that and you would fall out into the infinite void between planes. You're thinking of what happens when you put something sharp in a Bag of Holding without a sheath or scabbard. Stuffing yourself in is no trouble at all by at least 3rd edition (aside from the suffocation thing, I mean).
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Mar 6, 2015 04:58
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JosephWongKS posted:Chapter Six is really long (10,000+ words) and I only have that much free time each day. drat, that one chapter is passing by "short story" and moving into "novella" territory.
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Mar 9, 2015 07:24
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See, this is why the author needs to die (speaking figuratively, I mean). There's really no point in arguing about authorial intent when the "intentionally bad" and "unintentionally bad" interpretations are perfectly valid within their own contexts.
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Mar 10, 2015 12:11
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Fenrisulfr posted:That's not how those spells work, those types of spells tend to be "caster/target plus stuff they're touching". Invisibility (in 2nd edition AD&D) just says "gear" so you might be able to argue that it should apply to an animated object owned by the target, but Teleport specifies that it only takes things along that the caster is touching, and that up to a weight limit. Of course, Harry's still showing a deplorable lack of curiosity about a spell that can apparently measure a person's level of belief in a thing, as he simply accepts that that's how the wall works and thus his luggage must have some form of belief. He's also missing another possibility: belief is not required by the spell directly, but it is necessary to avoid flinching or stopping short.
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Mar 13, 2015 20:00
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JosephWongKS posted:What. And...this is the guy...Yud wants Harry to hang out with?
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Mar 18, 2015 07:23
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Nessus posted:And yet, we're the centers of "sneer culture." The best way I think I could put it is, "HP&tMoR doesn't deserve all this scorn, but its author does. Therefore, the response." Sounds rational enough to me!
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Mar 19, 2015 04:31
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Calling it "the blood of the Enlightenment" is sort of missing the point in five words or less, isn't it? I know he's trying to play off of Draco's "blood of Merlin" thing, but you've got to be precise about this sort of thing when anti-nepotism is part of the platform.
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Mar 19, 2015 08:32
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petrol blue posted:Damascus steel & Greek Fire. Chemistry seems to have not carried on too well from generation to generation. Guess those classical blacksmiths/chemists/builders must not have really known what they were doing. I believe we're pretty sure that Damascus steel is simply the old folded steel technique. The thing about lost inventions is that without a patent system the only way to make money off your unique creations was to keep them secret. Incidentally, the modern patent system grew out of an earlier system in which kings awarded monopolies over goods or inventions to those whom he favored. So if you really think about it, modern R&D economics has more to do with greedy noblemen than with the great Enlightenment thinkers.
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Mar 20, 2015 05:37
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Deptfordx posted:Britain, once again saving proper civilisation. The best way I've ever heard it put is in the book title "All the Countries We've Ever Invaded (And the Few We Never Got Round To)."
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Mar 21, 2015 20:57
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I'll admit that science is partly about a willingness to be wrong, but it's not really about "understanding something for the very first time" so much as it's about performing an experiment over and over and over again until you're so certain of your results that you can use it to reliably predict the future.
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Mar 23, 2015 05:12
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Luna Was Here posted:If you are in the 99.9999th percentile of loving anything, you do not go on in life to write Harry potter fan fics and logical fallacies. gently caress,I know people who got 10s and 12s on the act and even they get the basic concept of prisoner dilemmas Now you're giving too much credit to standardized testing.
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Mar 24, 2015 18:33
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Is anyone else blinking abnormally often as they read about this dust speck debate?
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Mar 27, 2015 04:39
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JosephWongKS posted:I’m not in academia / research myself, but I don’t think real scientists actually sit around measuring themselves and each other by the books they’ve read, do they? I'm fairly certain that scientists measure their dick sizes by comparing how many studies they've authored, books they've written, and/or projects they've completed and by how much attention they've garnered in the process. And to be fair, that's not the sort of comparison a couple of ten-year-olds could really engage in.
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Mar 30, 2015 16:33
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Really the stereotype is that Wise Old Men have to have big beards.
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Mar 31, 2015 16:02
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Arbite posted:Don't forget the two slices of bland meat! You get bland meat with your ramen? Lucky.
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Apr 1, 2015 18:38
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Basically the field of taxonomy is less about being actually useful and more about trying desperately to make us feel like we can make sense of the tremendous nonsense that is terrestrial biology.
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Apr 6, 2015 07:43
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So the key to self-awareness is to be asked a bunch of inane questions?
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Apr 9, 2015 15:20
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Fried Chicken posted:You have to have never read the books to think she isn't Gryffindor. Moddington posted:The best part is that he's never actually read Harry Potter, only fanfic of it. Makes sense.
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Apr 10, 2015 17:00
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You know something funny? In addition to all being Gryffindor, the Big Three of the Harry Potter books all kind of represent the other three houses. Hermione has a Ravenclaw's love of knowledge, obviously, but Ron is kind of a salt-of-the-earth Hufflepuff there to ground the other characters, and Harry is half Slytherin: he's a natural leader, he ignores rules that get in his way, he's prone to fits of anger, and he tends to judge people before getting to know them. It's got nothing to do with HPMoR, I just happened to think about it now.
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Apr 14, 2015 23:27
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Night10194 posted:I mean, that's sort of supposed to be a core tension. The Hat even tells him as much in the real books: "You could be one of them, you'd do amazingly well." I wouldn't call it a core tension, exactly, since the decision's made in the first book and only referenced once afterwards. A lot of people seem to dismiss Slytherin as "the bad guy house" and forget that it's also the house that the main character was equally qualified to join, personality-wise.
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Apr 15, 2015 04:42
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In the books, when Harry asked the Sorting Hat why it put him in Griffindor, its response was basically, "Because you told me you didn't want to be in Slytherin." Essentially, the sorting was not about where you deserved to go so much as where you wanted to go, just with the assistance of some magical mind-consultation. In this case, however, the Sorting Hat is babbling some nonsense about how free choices create predestination which is why you belong where you belong and how that justifies trolling the kid at a ceremony where no one would consider the trolling funny. I'm kind of torn by this ending. On the one hand, if the hat had any real insight and kept to the philosophy it was spouting it would have stuck with Slytherin, but if it was going to go along with the book's version where it's more advisor than king-maker then it should have gone with Ravenclaw straight away and spared us the pointless debating.
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Apr 27, 2015 06:13
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SSNeoman posted:The first two were fine. The third was okay. I honestly prefer a few of those over the actual chapter. As for the third one, it would have been more appropriate for the hat to scream, run, and explode somewhere towards the middle of the chapter because it would have better represented the reader's reaction to the interminable arguing.
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Apr 29, 2015 08:47
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