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ShardPhoenix posted:Anyone who's a fan of Harry Potter and just a little bit of a 'sperger (this means you) should read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It's arguably better written than the original series and twice as awesome. I hate this thing so goddamn much, it's like  and  had a baby and love to whip pictures of it out at every opportunity to show how awesome and clever they are.
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Aug 12, 2010 04:59
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Hedrigall posted:She's a teenager you creepers. I loved Alan Rickman as Snape. The disconnect between the pubescent fantasies of Snape that a lot of girls seem to have had of him and the way he's actually described in the books (greasy, slimy, gross, pretty much insufferable and openly antagonistic) always bugged me, Rickman may be a little old and too cleaned-up but he perfectly plays that insufferable smug bastard aspect of the character. I think the one casting that really bothered me was Mad-Eye Moody, he was described as worn and ancient looking with bits of his face missing and a big, heavy wooden leg and in the end we got...a slightly old guy with an eyepatch. They should have broken out the prosthetics or something.
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Aug 19, 2010 09:00
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Harashaw posted:YES. Alan Rickman is the perfect actor for utter bastard roles. He would have been excellent as any of the villains. Or all of them. Including Umbridge and Petunia Dursley. Oh god, as I read that Alan Rickman saying "Duddykins" instantly popped into my head. 
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Aug 19, 2010 18:46
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caleramaen posted:WHile I loved OOTP, Dolores Umbridge is by far my least favorite character in the series. She is literally the worst type of person imaginable. My only regret about her is that the centaurs don't kill her. Yeah, OOTP was probably my least favorite because nothing happens and Rowlings has absolutely no idea what it's like to be a teenage boy or how to write their dealings with women as such (I  whever she tried to address his relationship with Cho or just Harry dealing with girls in general) but Umbridge was such a transparent strawman of every bureaucratic cliche ever that before long I was annoyed with her for all the wrong reasons.
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Aug 22, 2010 18:51
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FrensaGeran posted:I just couldn't imagine being told who and what I am at 11 years old with no prospect of ever changing it. That's some serious psychological damage. It's funny, because that's the exact reason why (in America, at least) schools no longer practice "tracking"; it used to be that at a young age the "good" students would be put on a higher track and the "bad" students were on a lower track. The idea was that the advanced students could study harder things without having to worry about leaving the other kids behind and the slower kids could receive specialized attention, only in reality once kids were assigned to a track they never ever left it precisely because it affected both their own self-image and the way the teachers treated them. Paragon8 posted:Did Harry Potter serve as a tipping point for deranged shipping? I think that, much like how Pokemon got an entire generation of kids into anime, Harry Potter just happened to come along at the right time to hook so many people into fandom; with the internet becoming widespread in the late 90s fandoms were no longer restricted to fanzines and obscure Usenet boards, so when Harry Potter came along people could see that other people had the same interests and it led to an echo chamber effect. Hobnob posted:I never really understood the whining about the epilogue. Wasn't it pretty much "Happy Ever After"? What was wrong with it? For me it was that you have the Snape flashback, which is some of the best writing in the entire series, and then immediately afterward you have the epilogue which had some of the worst writing and looked even worse by comparison. Also that you just had a huge battle, major characters have died, evil has been defeated, the whole thing is ripe for a victory lap and rather than explore any of that it just immediately cuts to a treacly happy ending years after the fact.
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Sep 5, 2010 19:03
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Hedrigall posted:Oh my, Mark (of Mark Reads Harry Potter) did not respond well to Sirius's death Thanks for saying it better than I ever could. It also showed the nature vs. nurture aspect of childhood: both Harry and Neville grew up in crappy households with adopted family but Harry was told he was The Boy Who Lived, received tons of special attention from the school and the wizarding world at large, was rich through inheritance, and through his fame met Ron and Hermione who were instrumental in him becoming who he was, and got to go on all sorts of crazy adventures that forced him to grow and improve. By comparison Neville was alone, overlooked by people at school, and was pretty much just a chubby and awkward loser with no friends. But as time went on he grew up, found purpose thanks to Harry and Dumbledore's Army, and wound up a kickass mage who rivaled Harry with some of his combat spells he learned at DA. Had things played out differently Harry could have been a shy and awkward Muggle-born while Neville was The Boy Who Lived and received the special attention and friendship necessary to make him realize his potential sooner. 
...of SCIENCE! fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Sep 7, 2010 |
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Sep 7, 2010 03:14
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Dickeye posted:This is actually explained a lot better in Dresden Files: Magic and technology don't mix. The newer something is, technology-wise, the better the chances of it exploding around him. He can't even have cassettes or credit cards. The magnetic strip and the tape just stop working. Also in the game Arcanum, technology operates within the laws of physics while magic exists by warping the rules of physics so they are fundamentally incompatible; just the presence of magic user causes the friction and tensile strength or metals of change, the digits of pi to alter slightly, etc. So a magic user might have to ride way back in the caboose of a train so as not to interfere with the engine by being too close to it, and even then a significantly powerful wizard wouldn't be allowed on at all.
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Sep 12, 2010 18:21
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Hedrigall posted:Nerdy question for anyone who has read both UK and US editions of the books. The Hagrid notes are awesome, in book 3 when they receive the letter from him about Buckbeak being taken away the paper is actually tear-stained and the ink is all smeared. 
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Sep 13, 2010 17:50
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Hedrigall posted:Hey guys remember that scene in the books where they're lions? I don't have the wherewithal to dig up the fanart of Snape as a pregnant naga, but after than I'm not really surprised at Harry Potter fanart anymore.
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Oct 15, 2010 06:05
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Hedrigall posted:
The thing I don't get is that they explicitly have Harry having a stag as a Patronus, it seems like if they were going to do furry fanart they'd run with that.
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Oct 18, 2010 23:43
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I love the poo poo out of audiobooks and have been listening to them ever since I was kid, if you ever have had to commute to work then you can easily knock out a novel in a few weeks by just listening to the audiobook while you drive. Same with running, so long as you're not the type of person who needs music to keep your heart rate up then audiobooks are a great way to pass the time. It seems like children's books have readers who are more animated and emotive than grown-up novels, and each reader has their own approach and idiosyncrasies, so try not ot reject the entire format based on a single example.
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Nov 7, 2010 09:32
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coffin posted:I'm just showing up to say that I'm reading fanfiction for the first time in at least five years, and that it is terrible and it is all your fault. All of the people who recommended Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality should feel ashamed of themselves. First-year Harry is generally the most endearing of all the Harry Potters, and yet somehow the author has managed to turn him into the most insufferable, annoying character possible. The author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality runs a terrible transhumanist singularity website, makes up a bunch of poo poo about AI despite having zero qualifications, and writes pages and pages of text about how he doesn't need things like "evidence" and "peer review" because he's so right about everything that the scientific method just slows him down. People who recommend Methods of Rationality are the atheist equivalent of Christians who tell people to read Left Behind because "it's a good book even if you're not religious!"
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Apr 7, 2011 14:03
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ShardPhoenix posted:edit: I definitely see why the typical self-loathing nerd-culture-cringing goons would hate it though. In fact, this is probably the one place on the internet where it would get the most hate (but a fair few fans too). Nothing screams "rationality" quite like confirmation bias 
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Apr 11, 2011 01:41
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ShardPhoenix posted:The author is from a site that's about 75% programmers or similar I wouldn't call a bunch of people with no qualifications talking about how awesome it's going to be when a benevolent AI makes us all immortal formless beings "programmers".
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Apr 16, 2011 15:42
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