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JosephWongKS posted:That is indeed a rather terrible condition to suffer. Is this an actual thing that exists in the real world? It is actually. Though it normally only happens to people that are completely blind. So, still doesn't make sense.
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Feb 26, 2015 09:36
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JosephWongKS posted:Is there a stereotype that “wise old men” are supposed to be “Oriental”? Only if you're in a martial arts movie.
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Mar 31, 2015 13:31
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Added Space posted:Mules, ligers, and other crossbreeds are not viable because they cannot reproduce. Such animals are sterile and cannot produce children, even with the opposite gender of the same crossbreed. Ahem.
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Apr 6, 2015 06:41
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Doctor Spaceman posted:Not in the same way that doing experiments and testing ideas is. Helps of course that his guesses and speculation are always correct.
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Apr 16, 2015 10:15
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Krotera posted:Wasn't this sort of thing exactly what he acted like a hardass with Hermione for? He has two theories which aren't together exhaustive, and since he's proven it wasn't one he's assumed it was the other. Pretty much yes.
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May 7, 2015 04:41
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JosephWongKS posted:Was there a Penelope Clearwater in the canon series, or is this an Original Character of Eliezer? She was mentioned as Percy's girlfriend, but I don't believe she ever got any screen time.
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Aug 25, 2015 05:04
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DmitriX posted:No, because "damage" is just a more major shift if you think about it. And if it pulled them away from wherever they are that could cause a great deal of other problems... Why? It rearranges all of your molecule's compositions and locations both to transfigure and untransfigure (detransfigure?) anyway, why would anything carry over?
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Sep 11, 2015 17:46
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Tiggum posted:Avadra Kedavra is hard to even justify as self defence, because if you can use it then you probably have non-lethal options available to you as well, given that you have a wand and can speak. It's impossible to justify for self defense because it requires proper intent to cast. "I want this person not to hurt me" or "I want to protect myself" wouldn't do it. It specifically requires a mindset of "I want the person I'm casting this on dead." Same with the other Unforgivable Curses.
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Oct 1, 2015 17:31
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That right there is the exact point where I just gave up and stopped reading. I managed to hang on this long by assuming it would get better due to all the rave reviews, but this scene is just too goddamn stupid for anything to justify it.
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Oct 25, 2015 15:24
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Tunicate posted:Also moody's replacement bits are more functional than his original ones. His eye is anyway. He leg is never implied to be anything but a standard peg.
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Nov 1, 2015 03:07
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JosephWongKS posted:
Except that he really wasn't. At all.
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Mar 17, 2016 20:58
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divabot posted:If you're into HP fic and you want a Harrymort who sucks less, there's a nice crackfic called Seventh Horcrux (that's the index page) which is a moment's amusement. quote:Hermione pouted. “So, that means we don’t need to brew an illegal potion with stolen ingredients, knock out three of our classmates, tie them up in a closet, sneak into the Slytherin Common Room, and interrogate Malfoy?” Yes. This will do.
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Apr 6, 2016 07:11
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Pvt.Scott posted:I think JK is doing it on purpose, or this is a dummy script to generate furor. Who cares? It's her property. She deserves a chance to poo poo on it. Probably. I mean lets be honest, the whole series has always been more about making her a dump truck full of money than telling a good story. Which personally I respect. Woman found a way to make herself pants shittingly rich without hurting anyone else and maybe even improved the world a little bit. Good on her.
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Jun 15, 2016 05:48
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Cavelcade posted:I dunno that seems pretty unfair given the fact that she's done nothing but give away her money since she got it, to the point where she's no longer a billionaire. I did say she's improved the world a little bit with her dump truck of money. And yeah, it's a pretty good story, I just don't think telling a good story was a higher priority than making loads of money. She's businesswoman before she's a writer, that's not a bad thing. Especially since, as you said, she spends a lot of the money she makes on charities.
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Jun 15, 2016 11:45
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HIJK posted:I could have gone my whole life without reading this But what kind of life would it have been?
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Feb 26, 2017 11:53
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Added Space posted:He's also referencing a common Voltaire quote: I really feel like you're giving him too much credit here.
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Apr 9, 2017 08:53
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quote:An open question. Harry wouldn't let his mind see something false, and so he didn't see anything, like the part of his visual cortex getting that signal was just ceasing to exist. There was a blind spot under the cloak. Harry couldn't know what was under there. In a rare moment of self realization Yud discovers that he litterally cannot see things that contradict his world-view.
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May 15, 2017 02:34
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Xander77 posted:How much of the whole Occlumens / Leggimens / Veritaserum is in HP, and how much created specifically to stop any investigations from starting and ending with "just make him drink some truth juice and tell us everything"? None of it. Exactly none of it. Mazerunner posted:-memory is fallible thanks to magic, which means veritaserum (and pensieve memories) are untrustworthy. Obliviate can remove memories, and there's a spell that can add false ones (what Hermione used on her parents). A guilty person could use those two spells to have no memory of committing a crime, and a memory of their alibi (or to frame someone else for a crime). Although doing stuff like this seems to leave signs if not done perfectly (like in Slughorn's memory of telling Riddle about Horcruxes). We saw someone, the aforementioned Slughorn, try that. It was absurdly obvious.
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Jun 17, 2017 19:04
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Xander77 posted:Then Quirrell casts 30 spells to ensure their privacy which... I'm not much of an author, but a powerful wizard trying to relate a secret should really settle things with 1-3 spells. 30 goes past "expert in security", past "paranoid" and into purely ineffectual. Why exactly did he decide that snakes talk like cavemen? Snakes are quite erudite in the books. And even if they were too stupid to speak with proper grammar, why would that cause Harry and Quirrell to stop doing so?
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Jun 27, 2017 01:47
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Xander77 posted:Shouldn't HPMOR's far more rational and prepared Aurors just blast whoever else was present with a stun spell (since those are easy to cast and have no ill effects) They do cause damage actually. Not much, but McGonagall took half a dozen at once in one of the books and ended up in the hospital, with people honestly surprised that it hadn't killed her outright.
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Jul 31, 2017 10:58
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Yudkowsky posted:people who stopped to think didn't spring very good ambushes.
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Oct 14, 2017 13:43
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Wasn't Draco actually planning to rape and murder her though?
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Jan 17, 2018 06:12
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MikeJF posted:(Aberforth confronted Dumbledore about Grindelwald, Grindelwald attacked Aberforth, Dumbledore came to his defense, the whole thing turned into a major duel, and his sister was caught in the crossfire Plus their sister might have actually been part of the fight and was possibly killed in self defense. It's implied by the supplement books that she was an Obscurial, someone that had lost control of their magic due to childhood abuse and would turn into a massive monster that wrecked everything around it when stressed out.
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Feb 13, 2018 19:59
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Roadie posted:So... reinventing sati? Sati is part of a religion and therefore This is obviously totally different because Yud said so.
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Apr 19, 2018 04:19
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Cardiovorax posted:I got curious and checked the Potter wiki. Turns out they're just third cousins. Harry's great-grandmother was one Dorea Black. I've read somewhere that this is about the same degree of genetic similarity you would have to any random person anywhere in the world, on average, so I guess it doesn't come to much except for the ick factor of knowing how closely related they are at all. Not even that actually. Somewhere in Harry's ancestry is Charlus Potter, who married Dorea Black, but it's not stated specifically where. His great grandfather was Henry Potter, who married a woman whose first name was never mentioned, and was the last member of the Fleamont family. Which is why Harry's grandfather's first name was Fleamont, as a nod to his mother's family. Which I only know because I was curious as to why in the hell someone would name a child Fleamont. Ron Weasley is actually closer related to the Blacks than Harry (his grandmother got kicked out of the family for marrying a Weasley)
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Aug 8, 2018 16:12
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Tiggum posted:I haven't read the book, but the stuff you quoted seems to indicate that they don't have any specific rules about keeping magic secret, they just might, on a case by case basis, consider someone knowing too much to be a threat and react accordingly? Specifically they keep things that any idiot could do without needing magical talent secret, because that poo poo's dangerous to everybody. No one needs some rear end in a top hat to summon the Crawling Chaos in downtown Manhattan.
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Aug 10, 2018 15:29
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Cardiovorax posted:You heard it here first. Sadly, not even close to the first place I heard it.
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Aug 11, 2018 17:33
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Xander77 posted:Chapter 101: Precautionary Measures, Pt 2 You know, out of all of that, I'll I can think is "If someone was trying to kill you with a spear, they probably wouldn't only use the blunt end. It's not a weapon for beating someone to death."
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Aug 13, 2018 01:43
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Cardiovorax posted:Dunno. In this particular situation? Maybe. I'm general, I'm not so sure. Europe doesn't have 'at will' employment and teachers get special protection. It's not just expected that someone can and will eventually get hurt in shop class, it's a guarantee, no matter how many reasonable precautions you take. You don't fire people for minor accidents that effectively unavoidable in the long run. Hagrid is a groundskeeper and Filch is a janitor.
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Aug 16, 2018 05:15
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Tiggum posted:That is not how copyright works. The rights holder can basically allow or disallow whatever copies and derivative works they want under whatever terms they want, and they can change their mind at any time. Yes, but if it's done without the copyright holder specifically allowing it then the copyright can be challenged on that basis, as they are no longer the sole provider of works falling under that copyright. edit: Jesus loving christ the loving donations these idiots are funding though. quote:($70,000): A major expansion of the Metaculus prediction platform and its community quote:($40,000): Scaling up scenario role-play for AI strategy research and training; improving the pipeline for new researchers quote:($20,000): Performing independent research in collaboration with John Salvatier quote:($70,000): Building infrastructure for the future of effective forecasting efforts quote:($25,000): Supporting aspiring researchers of AI alignment to boost themselves into productivity quote:($30,000): A research agenda rigorously connecting the internal and external views of value synthesis quote:($27,000): Building infrastructure to give X-risk researchers superforecasting ability with minimal overhead quote:($20,000): Working to prevent burnout and boost productivity within the EA and X-risk communities quote:($50,000): An offline community hub for rationalists and EAs quote:($39,000): Producing video content on AI alignment quote:($30,000): Formalizing perceptual complexity with application to safe intelligence amplification quote:($30,000): Broad project support for rationality and community building interventions quote:CFAR ($150,000): Unrestricted donation quote:($50,000): Unrestricted donation quote:($50,000): Unrestricted donation Stroth fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Apr 9, 2019 |
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Apr 9, 2019 18:50
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Tunicate posted:I disagree that is actually pretty funny I mean, the whole thing was kicked off in support of a woman who killed herself with the express intent of using her suicide as a weapon against sexual abusers in the rationalist community. Maybe a little respect.
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Jun 21, 2019 06:29
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Cardiovorax posted:What I really meant was that I think the people, as in the actual characters shown in the story, behave and think and act in a way that I could believe real people would, if put into their situation. The heroes aren't like comicbook characters, not even the grim and edgy ones. Even the villains have this sense of banal, human evil to them, which is something I really liked. Like, I could point you at a hundred people who probably only didn't end up as a Jack Slash or what have you for lack of having a trauma-induced superpower dropped into their lap. The state of the world in Worm makes far more sense when you realize that the inner circle of the conspiracy that's manipulating everything consists of four people with absolutely zero qualifications (Contessa was a little girl, Doctor was literally just the person that happened to be there, Alexandria and Eidolon were random teenage ICU patients that were chosen completely at random) and one guy who A: Is a psychopath and B: Really just does their accounting.
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Aug 21, 2019 00:21
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PupsOfWar posted:why did a guy go "Welp, I guess I'll have to write a version of Harry Potter where Harry is a hyper-pragmatic manipulator" when Sabriel already exists What? Are you sure you're thinking of the right thing?
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Sep 1, 2019 08:22
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Cardiovorax posted:Sabriel is more like backwards Harry Potter: girl goes away from boarding school to learns about friendship and magic. And then she looks for her dad or... something? I gotta admit, I don't really remember. Has absolutely nothing otherwise in common with HPMOR, though. Girl at non-magical boarding school finds out her dad is dead (for a given value of dead given that they're a family of Necromancers) and instantly leaves to go find who killed her dad and find out if she can bring him back to life. Total time spent in school is negligible and had nothing to do with the actual school.
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Sep 4, 2019 21:55
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Cardiovorax posted:Keys to the Kingdom certainly isn't bad, but it's also very noticeably young adult. Honestly Garth Nix is mostly worth reading just for examples of settings that are actually somewhat unique instead of ripping poo poo off without being so dense that they're impossible to understand.
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Sep 5, 2019 08:30
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Cardiovorax posted:Yeah, it's not too different from that, really. A lot of posts in this thread go into how this story really fails at its own premise (the whole "scientifically investigating magic" angle) and instead quickly becomes nothing more than an extended power trip for the author self-insert. It tends to appeal largely to people who can identify with that to some degree. Speaking as a decades long connoisseur of terrible fanfic: This is terrible even by the standards of extended power trips for author self-inserts.
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Sep 9, 2019 07:40
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90s Cringe Rock posted:But at least it's not the Salvation War. Praise be!
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Sep 9, 2019 08:20
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Tunicate posted:Didnt salvation war have bill clinton defeat some demons in 1v1 combat? He walked out of a McDonalds after his morning jog, grabbed a shotgun from his Secret Service detail's car and blew a succubus' head off while she was enthralling his bodyguards. When asked how he'd seen through her illusions he said that of course he could recognize a soul sucking bitch from hell, he'd been married to Hillary for decades.
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Sep 9, 2019 16:58
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The Iron Rose posted:Did you know that the yud has a Twitter and worm opinions Okay, trying to follow that line of reasoning actually made my head hurt edit: does he just not know what "empirical" means?
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Sep 10, 2019 05:47
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