Trin Tragula posted:

It's really easy to do this when you've got no idea who Less Wrong is, and then it's just "hey, it's to serve the purpose of poking a bit of fun at the bits of Harry Potter we usually just gloss over for the sake of the story, of course he needs to be a ridiculous smart-alec, I can roll with this".

SSNeoman posted:

Harry is a spoiled brat no matter what he uses to justify this purchase. Especially since McGonagall said he could get a first-aid kit at Hogwarts. This sob story and the preceding isn't enough to justify his stubbornness.

i81icu812 posted:

This chest is more expensive than all of Harry's actual school supplies combined. A wand is 7 Galleons, a textbook 9 Galleons. Harry buys a wand, 8 textbooks, and spends maybe another handful of Galleons for clothes and a cauldron. That just about covers his school stuff and is generously around 100 Galleons.

YudHarry instead decides to throw tantrums and spend an extra 45 Galleons on a bag of holding and a medical kit. Then he doesn't have quite have the 105 Galleons extra for a fancy magical chest, and can't settle for a cheaper chest.

This whole passage has been "Harry can't budget and is spoiled" rather than McGonagall doesn't understand human nature and estimation. Harry took out 150% more money than he needed for school supplies but spent it all on nonessential stuff! Additionally, those withdrawn 250 Galleons (plus the 30 he stole) weigh some 20 pounds. I'm surprised his pockets haven't given out.

Avalerion posted:

Could also be that when Quidditch is played on a professional level rather than by highschoolers 150 points mean nothing, like when during the championship Krum caught the snitch but his team still lost.

Can't be too hard on this guy dissing Ron though, he is kind of useless in the original too.

divabot posted:

And remembering that it goes back a decade or so.

HPMOR is seriously the most popular HP fic ever. If it got an honestly-garnered 2016 Hugo "Best Fanwork" nomination (and not "Best Novel", I mean gently caress off), that wouldn't be a disgrace to the rocket. For the genre it's not bad. It's when you add the serious intent and the author's delusions that it becomes champagne comedy.

But how did it become by far the most popular? Note it wasn't LessWrongers spamming it, it was HP fans coming to LW. Was there pent-up demand for "approaching HP magic as science", even if it didn't deliver? What was going on here vis a vis the HP fandom itself?

YggiDee posted:

Okay this Arithmancer story is pretty cool but it's literally half a million words long and that's the sort of thing you warn someone about before they start.

JosephWongKS posted:

(b) The goblins have ways of finding people who Transfigure things into other things that look like money, but does this extend to things like gemstones which have high trade /barter value but are not themselves typically considered to be “money”? [/b]

Tehan posted:

Eliezarry is complimenting them on recognizing their own mental inferiority and gravitating to their 'correct' position, the minion of an upper-class intellectual. They are awed by his perceptiveness and flattered by his compliment.

Yud thinks actual people would actually act this way.

JosephWongKS posted:

Separation of Gryffindors and Slytherins during classes isn’t a Hogwarts teaching convention in canon, though. In Book 1, Snape had both Gryffindor and Slytherin students in his Potion classes. Another sign that Eliezer didn’t read the books.

mastajake posted:

I don't know what the deal is with fanfics (okay I've only read this one and The Arithmancer) having the "villain" characters (Slytherin) saying mudblood all the time. It was a big deal in the third book when Malfoy said it, both for Harry, who had never heard of it, Hermione, who had never been called it, and Ron, who was about as enraged as you'd be hearing one of your friends called a friend of the family to their face. It was possibly even a big deal for Draco to say it at that point. It's like they want to rush all the character development (good and bad) the original had going for it.

Death Bot posted:

The delivery is bad, but with brooms being hard enough to ride that they teach you to do it in school there's definitely some space to wonder why no one's cruising through the skies on an enchanted la-z-boy

GottaPayDaTrollToll posted:

I'm genuinely curious as to what works of fanfiction you would consider not "bottom tier poo poo".

Tiggum posted:

Is this ongoing or complete? If ongoing, is it still being updated or does it look like it's been abandoned?

Eldataluta posted:

Okay, so there are a lot of things that should be said about Snape. For example, being one of the "good guys" in the end doesn't excuse everything he did to his students. Snape literally became the thing Neville was most afraid of. He tormented a child until he became more terrifying to that child than the whole host of magical things that could kill him such as dementors and werewolves and death eaters. Not exactly ground breaking, but it's an important thing to say given the Albus Severus nonsense in the epilogue.

I just don't think that this is the arena to say that in. Like, remember how the premise of this story was trying to apply science to magic? Potions would be a really great place to do that. But then I remembered that this is HPMOR, and Yud forgot his own premise long ago in favor of whatever the hell this is. I expect that whatever point he's trying to make will be handled with the usual grace that anything is handled in this story.

Pvt.Scott posted:

I somehow made it through that Rocket Alignment Problem. I'm not sure what the point of that was. Was it that fictional rocket engineers are bad at calculating curved trajectories and that MIRI are a bunch of obtuse unhelpful cunts?

Crowsbeak posted:

Can anyone explain to me why is it that I have two friends on facebook both recommending this dreck to me, but they both are STEM majors?

Qwertycoatl posted:

Somehow, I can't imagine that "11 year old has tantrum after a teacher asks him some questions he can't answer" is going to be the explosive headline that takes down the establishment.

Murphy Brownback posted:

Can someone explain to me where the enjoyment comes from in reading those things? Is it just "look at how close to not-gibberish my computer program can get"?

In It For The Tank posted:

I think I read the first two books worth of Arithmancer and remember getting annoyed at how Hermione had to be centrally involved in absolutely everything. To me, it fell into the typical fanfic trap where one character overshadows all the other characters, steals their lines, triumphs, etc. Also that recurring joke about her hitting Voldemort in the face sure got old quick.

The Iron Rose posted:

I mean don't get me wrong I still read every update of the Arithmancer and its sequel that I'm forgetting the name of, but it does feel like Hermione kinda overshadows everyone else?

Which is half the point, but it gets a little bit grating when she's tutoring Dumbledore and Professor Sinestra.

BravestOfTheLamps posted:

lol

Argue posted:

Is there a Mary Sue fanfic where Ron is the rational genius and is there a crossover fanfic where HPATMOR Harry, Arithmancy Hermione, and ??? Ron team up?

Xander77 posted:

Yeah. But that doesn't make it believable in-universe. Furthermore (I'd say I'm ashamed to know this, but I'd be lying) someone catching the snitch yet not winning the game is a freak occurrence by professional league standards as well.

NihilCredo posted:

That made me realize, canon Harry's not only a war orphan, he's also improbably unlucky in being the child of twenty-year-old parents yet still having no living grandparents - especially with two of those grandparents being magical.

Yes, I realize it's narrative convenience, and the fact that I never thought about it before shows it's an entirely forgivable one. Still, it would have been really easy to just make them into four more of Voldemort's victims.

Liquid Communism posted:

Wow. That's not creepy at all.

Milky Moor posted:

I've always thought it pretty indicative of immortality-seeking when it is the domain of almost every villain in popular media. "I don't want to die" or "I want to stop someone I love from dying" or "No one should die" always leads to ruin.

It's one of those things that always seems to sound like a noble goal to people who are overly idealistic. Wouldn't it be good to stop people from dying?

But you know what happens to a world in which no one dies? The same thing that happens to your body. Cancer.

Milky Moor posted:

You remind me of an old man I used to talk with. He was adamant that no matter how bad it got, no matter how much of the permafrost was melted away, no matter how many species went extinct, no matter how much of the oceans were acidified, that "someone, somewhere" was going to develop a golden bullet to fix and even reverse climate change because that's what science does. Like scientists are wizards who will pull humanity from the brink.

Same thing here. 'If we all become immortal, society will magically create a solution'. There's this idea that scientists can just magic up utopian strong immortality if enough people believe in it and you're an idiot to argue that it 1. might not be possible and 2. even if it was, there are huge other factors to think about. What, you're so worried about dying and being remembered only as SA Poster Tiggum that you need to get this vehement over it? It's weird!

Come up with a solution, then, if I'm being so obstinate and my objections are so obvious. What do you do when people don't die? Let's assume the world up is made up of people who hit their prime and stop aging (let's say 25) and our medical technology has advanced to such an extent that even grievous wounds can be healed immediately and all sickness is a thing of the past, which seems to be the world some posters in this thread will expect to magically happen because it is "progress".

As I said, accepting the possibility of death is the sign of a mature person. It's a sign of the immature person that equating someone accepting death as a part of life is arguing for death. It's a very surreal thing to see people insisting that immortality - something that'd utterly alter human nature to an extent that it'd dwarf any other discovery in human history - would just be something like the telephone. Oh, people will just adapt. We'll figure out a "solution" to this, because we believe in the deified Science. We will slay the dragon named death with the weapons granted to us by Science, and I hope no one wonders what it reveals about the author's insecurities that they wrote death up as a terrifying beast that eats people at random.

Let me know when they cure entropy, human nature, fix up things so our planet can support the people we have even now, implement progressive social welfare to account for the conditions we're facing with the labor market right now, find some new way of accounting for the generational culture shift that arises from old people at the top dying, and, while we're at it, create some kind of working FTL engine so we can spread our numerous trillions out across the stars and I'll start taking the claims of people who get so hysterical about dying somewhat more seriously.

As it is, it's watching like watching people seriously consider a magic bullet that'll end all of society's woes, because that's the root of all evil: people get old and die, people get sick and die, people die and no one's going to remember me.

Milky Moor posted:

reignonyourparade posted:

The very first bit of magic we get is a snake that knows it's supposed to be from Brazil despite being raised in captivity, and also apparently knows how to read.