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Voldemort was kind enough to give Harry his wand back so that he could make Harry swear an Unbreakable Vow not to destroy the world, so Harry's got that going for him I guess, even if he has a bunch of Death Eaters (who are portrayed as hilariously incompetent?) pointing their wands at him. Real answer: use his unique special-snowflake "partial Transfiguration" power (because why wouldn't super-smart ubermench Harry invent a new form of magic when he's 11 years old?) to transmute the air around him into carbon monoxide, an odorless, colorless gas that, in sufficient concentration, causes unconsciousness in 2-3 breaths. Once he's free from immediate danger, he can grab his stuff, use the Time-Turner, and figure out how to solve the problem better. Put Voldemort in magical stasis forever or something, gently caress if I care. Better answer: Harry casts a spell whose incantation is in Parseltongue, because of course he would have previously researched if Parseltongue could be used to cast spells. If every other language on the planet was used in incantations, why not Parseltongue? This new spell, which will probably be named after some zany anime reference, will have exactly the correct capabilities required to save the day. i81icu812 posted:Wouldn't it be better for everyone involved if he just died? actually, do this instead
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Mar 1, 2015 10:57
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Not only did he (extremely improbably) wind spider-silk-turned-monofilament around the necks of a bunch of Death Eaters while simultaneously bluffing Voldemort into putting off killing him, he then proceeded to not kill Voldemort (because death is bad and it would make his great-great-great-grandchildren sad) but instead pull a Memory Charm right out of his rear end to nearly completely erase Voldemort's entire mind and identity (which is basically murder, but not in the "dude stops breathing" sense because Voldemort's hundreds of Horcruxes would just revive him if he actually died) and then imprisons his unconscious body forever by Transfiguring him into a goddamn ring. Also, he had dynamite in his pile of equipment for some strange reason. For a final showdown that the author challenged his readers to solve without rear end-pulls, Harry pulled a lot of poo poo out of his rear end.
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Mar 4, 2015 06:35
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YggiDee posted:(Also, this is Harry Potter and the Eagle of Truthiness. People should read it. It's short.) Almost as good as the one where Harry was raised by a WWE Superstar.
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Sep 15, 2015 20:26
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There's a rather interesting technology called Spritz that purports to be able to massively improve your reading speed by dramatically changing how words are presented to you. Rather than dragging your eyes back and forth across the page, you keep your eye fixed on a single point and it blasts words directly at you. They claim that the words are positioned within the box so that your eye falls on the "optimal reading position" of the word, which is where your eyes apparently come to rest when you're reading traditionally. The sample on their front page goes up to 700 WPM, which I found to be still comprehensible, if only barely, and you better not blink. That's definitely faster than I can read normally, and I think of myself as a pretty quick reader. Not that I'm saying Yud actually uses this technology, but it does exist.
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Sep 19, 2015 05:08
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I'm willing to forgive Yudowski on this one. New spells in the Potter canon were pretty much just pulled out of nowhere and were a mishmash of bad Latin, fantasy Greek, and misspelled English. It is a perfectly reasonable thing to think that other magical civilizations have their own unique spells, which may or may not be in common use, and a professor of combat magic could reasonably have tomes full of esoteric jinxes. Fanfiction authors have gotten away with far worse, and we haven't even hit the bad parts of this chapter yet.
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Oct 13, 2015 06:14
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Hmm, I think breaking down these chapters into such small pieces is causing us to jump on any little thing to nitpick. Quite frankly, nothing unusual at all happened in this sub-chapter, so instead of rolling our eyes at the experiment itself we're splitting hairs about prime number tables.
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Oct 27, 2015 17:55
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I don't buy that he was foreshadowing from the very first chapter. It really feels to me like he started the fiction out as some sort of "lol look how dumb the HP universe is, let's unravel its illogic" thing, and then when it took off he started to put some more effort into it. He probably did sit down at some point and figure out the actual details of the setting, but this wasn't at chapter one and it definitely involved the back-justification of earlier chapters. That bit at the end where Voldemort asks Harry if anyone thought a REAL 11-year old would act like he did at the start of the fic was such an obvious and obnoxious retcon to address the story's earlier faults that you really must start to question what other dumb things that made sense later were truly designed to make sense from the beginning.
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Jan 17, 2016 19:14
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Does tumblr have a report button or something because I don't understand how someone could openly say "yeah i stalked a dude and asked him nicely to take his site down while insinuating that if he didn't i'd loose the crazy people who would ruin his life on him" and not get kicked off of a website.
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Feb 27, 2016 17:26
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To generalize: is a bad act performed to punish a bad person good? That's a really complicated question, and one that underlies the entire field of criminal justice. An Azkaban sentence, even a relatively short one, is often fatal, so the Azkaban case is an exaggeration of the death penalty case: is capital punishment ethical, and if so is it ethical for the method of execution to be torturous? The argument Harrieizer seems to be making is that Azkaban, which is state-sponsored murder via torture, is an atrocity, which it is, and that there is no benefit (as a deterrent, as a way to prevent recidivism, etc.) that could possibly justify it existing. The real-world question of whether state-sponsored murder is ethical or not is probably a little outside the scope of this thread, but there's been plenty of debate on the topic for quite some time.
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Jan 9, 2017 07:49
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I don't understand the box problem. If there's a million dollars in the box if and only if a perfect oracle predicted you were going to open the box, why wouldn't you open that box? Mind-gaming yourself into picking the other box only means the perfect oracle would have predicted you'd mind-game yourself into picking the other box. I can't figure out how this is supposed to map onto the Prisoner's Dilemma because the perfect oracle literally guarantees your "partner" will vote the same way you do.
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Mar 6, 2017 02:27
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If I recall correctly (it's been years since I read the books) Dobby was very much an exception when it came to house elves wanting or adapting to freedom. The other elf that got freed (Winky?) flew into a depressive spiral and became an alcoholic, and all of the other house elves reacted to the thought of freedom negatively. At the same time, we can look historically back and see that there were slaves and other bottom-caste people who were perfectly fine with being the lowest of the low, because that's just the way things were. We can look from the outside and say that these people's lives would have been objectively better if they weren't slaves, but they'd been conditioned to think that this is how things should be and that other ideas are wrong. We actually don't explicitly know from the text itself if house elves are naturally servile, if they were enslaved so long ago that they can't remember freedom, or if they were engineered (or bred) for their purpose. These all have different ethical implications, and I'm sure some turbonerd has written an essay thoughtfully exploring the ethics of house elves, but HPMOR is not the kind of work where you get thoughtful explorations of interesting setting details. ...Despite, you know, ostensibly being entirely about exploring the HP setting rationally.
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May 8, 2017 17:22
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Voldemort runs from death, acknowledging its inevitability. Harriezer is convinced that death is just another problem humans haven't solved yet. This isn't a superpower born of reading the right sci-fi books, it's born of being an absurdly optimistic transhumanist who believes in a gleaming, gleaming space-future that is coming ANY DAY NOW please let it be tomorrow I can feel my brain losing its elasticity as I leave my teenage years
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Jun 3, 2017 17:48
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Tiggum posted:How convenient that he's able to just reason away negative emotions. For most of us, knowing that feeling bad about something is unhelpful or counter-productive doesn't actually make us feel better, but I guess that's because we're just not rational enough. As someone who has dealt extensively with their own sadbrains bullshit, let me tell you that forcing yourself to rationally think things through is actually a legit way to break you out of a depressive death spiral. If these dementors were still a depression metaphor, then adding deliberate thinking to the list of things that work against them would be pretty apt. The bullshit here is that Harrieizer is able to do this effortlessly. It's a learned skill that takes years of therapy to get right. The character is ostensibly 11 years old, yet he's possessed with a great deal of mental maturity and self-awareness that many adults don't actually have.
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Jul 22, 2017 08:55
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