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If you really want to cut through the silliness, the logical thing for Dumbledore to do would have been to stick it in his desk and put the drawer under the Fidelius charm.
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Jul 5, 2017 17:11
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Eliezarry's "power" is knowing that any subdivision of an object is, in an abstract mathematical sense, an "object" in itself. Since "object" is a rather vague term which applies to both a flawless diamond, which is virtually identical throughout its composition, and a log, which is not at all homogeneous, and yet transfiguration works identically on both, the magic must choose what exactly to transfigure based on the user's intent, not any objective standard of what an object is. So, by thinking of part of the step as a separate collection of atoms from the rest, he can transfigure it separately. Non-science-literate wizards can do this, but only if they think of the parts of the object as separate things, so it's relatively intuitive to transfigure an arm separately from the overall human, or a doorknob rather than the whole door, but hard to do what Eliezarry is doing. It is a neat idea in its implications; Eliezarry uses it for trivial purposes because he's an unimaginative little poo poo, but in principle it could be used for precision transfiguration on a microscopic scale by a sufficiently knowledgeable wizard. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Jul 9, 2017 |
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Jul 9, 2017 04:53
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Mazerunner posted:Yeah in the Arithmancer. Hermione in the Arithmancer can do nano-scale transfiguration, though as you say it wasn't part of the radioactivity experiment; it's her most potent weapon by far. She can, for example, transfigure air into NO2 to knock people out in an enclosed area, or make carbon nanotube razorwires to cut through stuff from any carbon source. It's an infinitely better exploration of science-magic than Yud could ever write! Partially because magic in that universe (and the basic HP universe) obeys laws, unlike MoR magic which is all visualization and bullshit.
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Jul 10, 2017 00:46
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Mazerunner posted:oh, I don't remember any of that. Does that show up in the sequel? I had caught up on that early on and stopped reading to give it time to update. She starts messing with it in the first story when she invents the spell to extract and ignite soil magnesium, but not as much as in the sequel.
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Jul 10, 2017 03:50
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It's worth expounding on something I said, I think, because it really exposes how shaky MoR's foundations are. Magic in Harry Potter has rules. Scientific laws. They're only there in the background, and shape the narrative only insofar as they disallow things that would destroy the story Rowling wanted to tell (such as the exceptions to Gamp's Law, which disallow various types of transfiguration that would make wizards a little too godly or which would break the economy), but they exist. This is something good fanfiction uses to its advantage, and bad fanfiction ignores. That's why you can tell that in preparing to write MoR, not only did Yud not read the books (something we already know), but he exclusively read terrible wish-fulfillment stories about Harry being a very special boy whose magic has no practical restrictions, just because. That's what he thinks Harry Potter is.
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Jul 10, 2017 04:36
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Tiggum posted:It's certainly better than this one, but it's still fanfic - basically meaning that it could really use the attention of an editor and it requires a fair degree of familiarity with the source material. I don't regret reading it or anything, but it's nothing special. Familiarity with the source material is always required, it's why any fanfic is actually interesting - so that it can alter the premises, characters, situations, focus, tone, philosophical outlook, or any other part of the source and by doing so, explore facets of the setting or characters that the original work did not. A fanfic that tried to stand alone from the source might even be lessened by doing so, because fundamentally fanfiction is a response to the original work. Some of the interest is in how the consequences of the changes to the scenario play out. This metafictional quality is something many wholly original works don't have, or engage in at the margins in how they contrast with other stories of the same genre, while for fanfiction it's almost the whole point. I totally get why fanfiction has the reputation for poor quality that it does (99.9999999% of fanfiction is terrible, probably even more than that), but folks often misunderstand the inherent properties of the genre as inherent deficiencies even when they are used interestingly. quote:Certainly not up to the standards of Harry Potter and the Most Electrifying Man. I'll just leave off with Harry Potter Becomes A Communist Jazerus fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 05:37
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eliezarry's "special" transfiguration method is actually something most HP wizards can't do, and enabled by scientific understanding of the atomic nature of matter. the descriptions might be dull, but it's probably the least grating part of the fic to me because it shows a spark of a good idea and is the only advantage eliezarry gains through genuine factual knowledge instead of rationalist philosophizing now, transfiguration being so extraordinarily dangerous that it's practically always unsafe for students to use unsupervised is a dumb yud invention, yeah Jazerus fucked around with this message at 05:36 on Aug 2, 2017 |
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Aug 2, 2017 05:33
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Fanfiction.net removes actual urls from stories because their rules are bizarre, so that was Yud's only real choice for sharing his dumb reference.
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Aug 6, 2017 16:48
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Gitro posted:I was reading that awful thread someone (probably divabot?) linked a while back about rational fiction. The apologists in it recommended The Metropolitan Man as a positive example of the genre, a fanfic about Rational Lex Luthor plotting to kill superman. It was the most lifeless loving thing I've ever read. obviously methods of rationality sucks. but many of the fics supposedly inspired by it are a lot better than it, and metropolitan man is one of them. you are missing the point entirely the story is somewhat lifeless because that's lex luthor. a cold series of experimental destruction detached from human emotion is like the definition of his character. it's not out of place for him to act like a morally dubious randian ubermensch like it is for harry potter. but honestly the point of the fic isn't really lex luthor, it's the exploration of superman's morality that you mentioned. it's hardly aborted - the fic is really very effective at portraying the objective horror of a figure like superman, both for the humans around him and for himself, without overexplaining it. luthor killing superman through a lucky shot just after they've reached a reasonable agreement that will benefit both superman and everybody else is a really pretty unsubtle commentary on human nature and fear of the unknown leading us to violent solutions that simply maintain the status quo. Pvt.Scott posted:People aren't rational actors, so having a person be the protagonist of your rationalwank fic is a detriment, duh. There's no interesting ground to cover in a character struggling to maintain Rational goals and mindset in the face of their own human frailties and foibles. sure there can be. the problem with eliezarry isn't really that he's "Rational", it's that he's a rationalbot - everything he does is Rational because he does it, which is a revealing parallel to yudkowsky himself. eliezarry is the most rational one in the room, always - suck it, sheeple! but of course eliezarry's brand of rationality isn't rational at all. a realistically characterized character who is philosophically inclined to believe in empiricism & logic above all having to confront their emotions and impulses in difficult situations is something else entirely, and could be written interestingly. lex luthor's belief in himself as a brilliantly rational visionary has literally always been part of his character. but he isn't actually behaving entirely rationally from a sane point of view, and i don't think the story is trying to say that he is. it doesn't really try to sway you on whether superman or lex is correct, or neither. certainly i didn't walk away thinking that the story wanted me to feel that the good guy had won. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Aug 29, 2017 |
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Aug 29, 2017 20:15
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divabot posted:nah, not really. Pretty much every rationalfic is better than HPMOR, but you haven't seen a bar set that low outside the pages of Earthworm Track & Field. Alexander Wales writes better than Yudkowsky, but so does pretty much everyone, and Wales is still a bit dull a writer. yeah i just understand what metropolitan man is going for and appreciate it it's striving to be an old-timey sci fi story in an asimov or bradbury kind of way, where the moral questions and conflicts of philosophy are the point. it maybe doesn't get there entirely but it wouldn't seem entirely out of place in a sci fi anthology from the 50s
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Aug 29, 2017 21:26
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Milky Moor posted:I'm not even sure what rationalfic is. Whenever someone tries to explain it to me it always seems to be a story where the protagonist just kind of coasts through things by thinking Rational Thoughts and there are maybe some very video-y game-y elements. that's the really bad kind that directly apes MoR and tends to be by writers who just love tvtropes the better "rationalfics" tend to just feature a protagonist who's scientifically skilled and the author clearly has an academic background related to whatever kind of science the protagonist does. the setting is often altered somewhat to be more detailed and work according to some sort of scientific laws that the protagonist can figure out, if the original setting wouldn't really be amenable to that. they really have very little to do with MoR but many of them mention it as somehow inspiring them (perhaps to do better than yud?) so they're lumped in
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Aug 30, 2017 07:59
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Epicurius posted:So why does the author hate on McGonnigall so much? Is it just that she's a woman? Because canonical McGonnigall is pretty fierce. She's one of the best Transfiguration wizards out there, she's a skilled animagus, she's smart, she's logical, she's self-disciplined, she doesn't out up with foolishness from others, she knows how to read people, she's pretty much the only teacher at Hogwarts who is impartial when it comes to rewards and punishments, and she's one of the few adults in the series (along with the Weaselys, maybe), who doesn't have any agenda beyond fighting Voldemort and keeping the kids safe. You'd think Yud would love her. he literally didn't read the books to prep for MoR, he read bad fanfiction. yud doesn't know anything you just said
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Sep 7, 2017 22:11
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Tiggum posted:That bit's fine. It's the way he justifies it by saying that sometimes it's actually good to ignore bad things happening. Like, he's not criticising the method, he's straight up saying that you should sometimes just ignore evil. If you think that "evil must never pass unchallenged" then you're somehow worse than the people doing the evil to begin with. it's the "must conserve political capital" school of thought wrt evil
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Nov 22, 2017 00:12
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just to  for a moment, because this is another example of yud doing no investigation of his source materialprofessional quidditch games are very high scoring and the snitch is much harder to catch, so the snitch catch is just a component of winning rather than the deciding factor. in the context of hogwarts quidditch the snitch is really dumb though
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Nov 29, 2017 17:42
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this is where MoR really starts to go off the rails and loses any relationship to sensibility whatsoever
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Jan 13, 2018 17:19
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i can see why you'd assume that since "And in Asia they tell other tales entirely, which may not make Britain's version wrong." reads like yud suddenly slipped into writing a sourcebook for vampire: the masquerade
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Jan 21, 2018 18:20
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one of the only good things about MoR is that it led to someone writing The Metropolitan Man, which is an examination of lex luthor, and superman's relationship with humanity that's very good but don't read it as though lex is a hero - the story doesn't really come down on anybody's side, morally.
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Jan 23, 2018 03:36
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quirrell just doesn't want to explain spell composition theory to dumb little eliezarry, imo
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May 16, 2018 21:50
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NihilCredo posted:Why are you giving the author so much credit? It's obviously just Big Yud making a really loving terrible analogy because he's a drooling moron. it was a joke, yud gets no credit even if quirrell is misdirecting he gets no credit Jazerus fucked around with this message at 11:52 on May 17, 2018 |
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May 17, 2018 11:50
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Epicurius posted:As far as I know, Valentine survives to the end of the Ender's Game series. if you count dying of old age and then being revived by mormon space magic, anyway wait, was that peter? i can't recall really
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May 22, 2018 11:39
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:Also, in what loving way is a Cloak of Invisiility death-aspected? i've always thought that the implication was that the death part was made up - they were just three powerful artifacts created by three brothers, one of whom was harry's ancestor and another who was voldemort's reminder: yud has never read the actual books
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Jul 12, 2018 00:35
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Mazerunner posted:In other fanfic news, Arithmancer/Lady Archimedes wrapped up recently. the original books have the same issue, it's a fundamental problem with the harry potter narrative structure because it all has to culminate in teenagers killing a resurrected warlock who has lived five times as long as they have, with powers beyond those of other men, who has hidden his heart within a jar, etc. which is fundamentally implausible within the established rules of the world and causes the narrative to contort further and further as it closes in on the end i enjoyed LA as a better version of the story than the originals but it's still a bad skeleton for a story no matter how you flesh it out
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Jul 20, 2018 05:03
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Darth Walrus posted:I mean, they set up the balance of the conflict right from the beginning. Voldemort is powerful, but it’s an entirely selfish power. Everything is invested in himself, and he’s incapable of understanding others or inspiring loyalty. He’s pitted himself alone against a large, diverse magical society, and the key to defeating him is to remind all those hundreds and thousands that they can be better than him, that they don’t have to crumble away into thousands of tiny islands of fear and greed, and that every contribution they make to opposing him, no matter how tiny, will be part of a vast, crushing tide. Voldemort may be more mature than Harry physically, but mentally, he’s still a stunted, selfish child. oh yeah i agree, but ultimately the prophecy forces it to be a personal confrontation, one that can only be won through suddenly-appearing ancient artifacts because knowledge is literally power for a wizard and it's impossible for harry to challenge voldemort's mastery of magic directly without outside help. that's why the first four books are more compelling than the story arc that connects 5, 6, & 7; voldemort is a tractable threat before his resurrection, but not after. the solution is for harry's role to be less personal. he should uniformly get his rear end kicked by voldemort once voldemort is resurrected, with his own strength, as you say, being the ability to rally society's strength. LA definitely is better than the original story on this count, but hermione ends up taking on too large of a role rather than society at large rejecting the death eater ideology and fighting back
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Jul 20, 2018 19:24
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Roadie posted:Sounds like an opening for some muggleborn antifa to cause strategic chaos. there's a story where fudge sells out to voldemort and hermione leads the muggleborn antifa. the muggleborn uprising or something like that? it's not bad, not really outstanding either tho
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Jul 23, 2018 00:04
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End of Shoelace posted:as they both are. hpmor is atleast a bit more interesting. it's really not; it's an absolute chore to read, even setting aside that it's an ideological screed clothed in the trappings of the most popular source work for fanfiction purely to drive recruitment for yud's cult
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Jul 29, 2018 02:45
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End of Shoelace posted:more good bits from renegade cause: for all of the poo poo a person can give bland-but-competent fics like the arithmancer well it's still a top-tier fic, because below the top 0.1% there's a lot of stuff like renegade cause
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Aug 6, 2018 23:13
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Ccs posted:So the thing in the movies, where Voldemort's green beam of light would hit Harry's red beam and they would crackle against each other, is that a normal wizard thing? Like you can block an Avada Kedavra with an Expelliamus as long as you time it right? Or was that a trick of Harry's wand being connected to Voldemorts? giant snakes made of fire can attack on non-linear vectors and do area damage; it's kind of like asking why you'd ever use a grenade when you've got a gun. the advantage that voldemort and dumbledore have over other people is that they know all sorts of weird poo poo that will surprise their opponents, which means that you can't fight them as though they're just a guy with a gun that shoots slow bullets, unlike someone who only knows the linear line of sight spells like killing/stunning/disarming the good guys usually use the stunning spell because, well, a wizard might be useless without their wand, but what if they're not? just knock them out instead and you don't need to worry about it.
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Aug 8, 2018 02:57
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Stroth posted: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. most fanfiction operates under the idea that charlus is harry's grandfather and dorea his grandmother, and under that premise harry and tonks are second cousins. nobody knew fleamont existed until long after the idea that harry was quite closely related to the black family had been firmly entrenched in fanfiction OctaviusBeaver posted:I thought Salazar Slytherin was all about blood purity, wasn't he from the middle ages? there's no particular evidence that he cared about the kind of blood purity that modern purebloods do. everything the reader is told about slytherin comes from biased sources that view slytherin, the man, through the lens of slytherin, the designated house for evil children Jazerus fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Aug 8, 2018 |
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Aug 8, 2018 22:22
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Doctor Spaceman posted:The dude did leave a basilisk lying around the school. which makes him a paranoid possibly evil weirdo, pretty par for the course as far as wizards go - that doesn't mean that blood purity was a thing in his era. the basilisk will attack anybody if ordered, and won't attack anyone if not ordered, apparently. blood purity doesn't seem to factor in. wizard historians are terrible so there is no reliable historical record as to why the basilisk existed in the first place
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Aug 9, 2018 21:04
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Let's Read HPMOR: "I find," Albus Dumbledore ground out, "that I do not care."
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Feb 28, 2019 13:04
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Xander77 posted:I mean, if you're going to do such a radical personality reconstruction that he's not even magic Hitler anymore, than you're basically executing him anyway, just in a more horrifying way. lockhart did it to himself, but he was literally a master of memory modification even if he sucked real bad at everything else
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Jun 7, 2019 14:22
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yud subscribes fully to the worst fan theories about how magic works "literally anything works if you just visualize it enough and also are harry potter" is one of the most common fanfiction crutches
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Jun 7, 2019 16:11
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Pvt.Scott posted:Wouldn’t the entire universe exist in some funky clusterfuck of superpositions if time did not exist? yes, either that or it requires a single rigid timeline, the "all time travel already happened" type of model. but that's just the many worlds vs single world argument, nothing new. "timeless physics" isn't actually total gibberish but it's also not groundbreaking in any way. it's an extraordinarily complicated way to explain a method to visualize space-time as opposed to space alone - that is, that every combination of spatial location and position in time is a unique position in space-time such that you're not really in the same "place" from moment to moment, if you were to view 4d space-time from the outside. this idea predates yud's birth significantly
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Jun 8, 2019 03:29
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Tiggum posted:Why is the story not over yet? What is left to say at this point?
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Jul 2, 2019 19:18
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well, here we are what a long and pointless journey
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Aug 18, 2019 14:01
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ending his propaganda fanfiction with a literal quote of himself trying to sound like the wise master in a ninja movie is pretty choice tho
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Aug 18, 2019 14:09
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literally everything about MoR that is appealing in any way is done better by some other piece of fanfiction. not even considering original fiction. time travel? the slipshank trick where an object suddenly appears because you intend to place it there later as a time-traveler is probably the single most interesting thing that happens in MoR, but it's a reasonably common idea nowadays. high-powered magic? there are HP stories whose action scenes and ritual magic scenes put both yud and rowling to shame in comparison i mean, it even fails as a "rationalist" story because it really isn't about rationalism. it's about yud's very specific neuroses concerning death, faith, etc. that he has conflated with rationalism. there are stories written by MoR fans that do a way better job of the 'x but with the scientific method' shtick than MoR ever wanted to. there's no reason to like this story anymore, if there ever was at all Jazerus fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Aug 19, 2019 |
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Aug 19, 2019 16:44
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DACK FAYDEN posted:I did not like Worm but everyone who isn't me seems to, should I give it another shot when the author is done with the remastered-or-whatever edition no it's bad yet another author that can't escape the escalation problem and just keeps ramping poo poo up to cosmic scale threats because they don't know how to write falling action once in a while there are worm fanfics that take the good universe it's set in and actually do interesting things with it but the original story is, on the whole, not good
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Aug 19, 2019 16:50
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Cardiovorax posted:Worm was pretty definitely written with an eventual escalation to a literally world-shattering crisis in mind from the start. I'm the last person who would say the story doesn't have a lot of problems (god knows I could never make it all the way through) but "threat escalation" isn't a justified criticism as these kinds of thing go. it's not executed well. it doesn't have the dbz escalation problem where toriyama just kept making every enemy bigger and badder because there was no plan, but the cosmic aspects of worm just aren't compelling paired with the street crimefighting aspect. there's a reason batman fights street crime in one comic line and cosmic horrors in a different one, basically. the main line doesn't really talk about those times batman went to another planet to fight darkseid, while justice league doesn't dwell on the penguin or the riddler - that poo poo is tonally incompatible! if worm was an experiment to see if you could do both, well, it was worth a shot but the results are clear Jazerus fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Aug 19, 2019 |
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Aug 19, 2019 16:53
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:What's interesting to me about the final confrontation is how meaningless it is. In works by a competent author a fight is ultimately the culmination of a disagreement between characters, ideologies, or forces (man vs. God). yud isn't unaware of the central conflict you mention. mor, apart from being advertisement for yud's scam camps, is an explicit rejection of rowling's thesis and themes. harry in this story is not harry from the books. he's (unknowingly) a shard of voldemort's soul that has consumed or subsumed good old heroic harry potter and then been raised in better circumstances than he was the first time around, but he retains some of voldemort's neuroses, including preoccupation with death. voldemort calls him out on this very briefly at one point before/during the final confrontation but it flies over harry's head since he is unaware of who he is. this is actually kind of clever and i will give yud a bit of credit for trying to throw himself a lifeline on the whole issue of harry being a profoundly different person. the point, i suppose, is that voldemort is correct in his goal of immortality but wrong in his approach, and dumbledore is wrong in his passive acceptance of death but correct in his conduct, while harry, as the reincarnation of voldemort, is able to bring scientific rationalism to the table in order to synthesize these antithetical positions into something both correct and moral. sounds like an interesting story, too bad he mostly just hosed around doing dumb bullshit and talking about rape with malfoy Jazerus fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Aug 19, 2019 |
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Aug 19, 2019 22:13
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