This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 99, 100, and 101. The previous thread is at nearly 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.
Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
Interesting tie-in to:
So the centaur and Trelawney seem to be reading from the same playbook. Any guesses to who the centaur approached sixteen years ago and what lines he crossed? Seems like a plausible time to be Lily, no? Could possibly be the payoff to this from Chapter 1:
The destruction of the sun is a recurrent theme with Quirrell.
Plausible, if her being nicer to her sister is why Harry got the upbringing he did instead of the canon one.
Via: "Lily is nice to Petunia" -> "Lily makes Petunia prettier" -> "Petunia ends up with Michael and not Vernon" -> "Harry learns science instead of ptsd".
If Quirrell wanted Harry dead, he would kill him. Even without being able to use magic against him directly, there are plenty of ways for him to do it.
I think Quirrell still wants or hopes something from Harry. Maybe it's just that Harry needs to be still alive for the "blood, bones, flesh" rituals, but I think it's something much more specific, linked to Harry's dark side and why their magic can't interact.
Premise: Quirrell plays the game one level higher than Harry Potter.
Observation: This entire incident is uncharacteristically sloppy. Why were the unicorn corpses found? Why was Quirrell discovered?
Observation: Harry Potter is now really pissed off that herds of unicorns to slay aren't standard procedure for stable-izing people with life threatening injuries. He has just been given another "if only" to fixate on. It has been brought to his attention in ways that wouldn't trip his "why am I being told this" sense.
Hypothesis: Reminding Harry that there were ways the wizarding world could have saved Hermione was the primary effect. Possible secondary effects may include impressing on Harry just how ridiculously powerful he is. Perhaps implanting the desire to save Quirrell into Harry's mind? Quirrell may not actually need the blood right now, though I suspect it doesn't hurt.
While he's certainly determined to make Harry believe he's going to die ("this is the last time I will be able to do this for you"), it is likely he is lying for a couple of additional reasons. The man obsessed with not dying, prepared to tear his very soul to shreds to stay alive, has
a) been trying to prevent Harry from seeking a way to bring back the dead, and
b) been doing so purely as part of an effort to save the world - which he has no reason to care about unless he expects to remain in it.
I'd think that unicorn blood has unique properties on phoenix tears.
Otherwise Quirrel would be tracking down Phoenixes and... showing them the first 5 minutes of 'Up' or something.
I know Harry is just a kid, but his reaction towards unicorns don't seem very rational to me. Remember, Harry became vegetarian for a while when he was afraid animals could be sentient. And now, he speaks about massively killing unicorns, magical creatures whose sentient status isn't very clear (like with phoenix), for a "temporary" stop of death at a cost of "permanent side-effects", without inquiring how temporary temporary is, what are those side-effects, and how sentient unicorns are. Without measuring those three parameters, there is no way to know if utility(killing unicorns in St Mungo) is positive or negative.
I think it's less that Harry is a kid right now and more that he's specifically extra-freaked out than usual by perma-death at the time. Plus the Quirrel Distortion Field is keeping him from ever seriously considering anything Quirrel does as really evil.
I'm not generally in the habit of calling out typos, but that particular one is probably worth fixing. I think Quirrell understands mortality rather well.
Why did Quirrell allow the unicorn corpses to be found? Why didn't he dispose of the corpse by making it disappear, instead of trying to pass it off as a predator? Would anyone notice if a unicorn vanished without leaving a corpse? ( I suppose they might, since they're medically valuable, but since unicorns are known not to have predators the predated corpse is hardly a good cover, as we saw. Vanishing the corpse would have made it take longer to notice.)
Anyway, this is one of the few times we see Quirrell's plot clearly failing without anyone actually acting to thwart him. Is it plausible that he was actually unable to kill and drink a unicorn without anyone immediately noticing?
Heh, so Quirrell doesn't know what guilt feels like.
This reminds me, if you can make a homing version of the stunning spell, can you make a homing version of the killing curse? Sounds like that would be useful.
The chapter endings for 100 and 101 are a little odd. They stop very abruptly, specially 101. Usually you would get an extra sentence or paragraph to give the chapter a sense of closure.
The reason Quirell and Harry cannot interact magically is supposed to be so Quirrell cannot read harry's mind, memory charm him, confound him, or outright imperio him. But this feels a little weak to me. What's stopping Quirrell from threatening, bribing, tricking, imperiousing, etc... a third party to do it on his behalf?
And if the homing version of "Stupify" is "Stuporfy," how ridiculously twisted would AK get? "Averder Kerderber?"
Abracadabra, surely.
Nothing specifically to do with these chapters, but it's only just occurred to me: Is it supposed to be significant that the initials of Potter-Evans-Verres are also the start of "Peverell" (indeed, you can get more if you take a few more letters of "Verres")? It seems a rather superficial observation, but "Verres" is a really unusual surname and it would be nice to have an explanation for why Eliezer chose it.
Peverell -> Potter Evans Verres Quirrel?
Yay pattern matching.
This isn't a particularly bad thing, but I must say, chapter 100 was perhaps the most self indulgent this story has had yet.
I would say Eliezer. Introducing another event from the first year of school and subverting it utterly. Blatantly referencing Twilight AND My Little Pony (to the point of bending canon for its inclusion) AND a Methods or Rationality fanwork AND an obscure math program AND Several other cameos sprinkled throughout.
Lets talk about chapter 99.
Chapter 99 was there for a reason. I think the most likely reason is to emphasize the 10 days later. Chapter 98 was April 20, and chapter 100 was May 13. For some reason EY wants the first attack to happen on April 30. This could be because QQ only needs to drink the blood every couple weeks. However, why not just make the first unicorn found on May 12 and have no chapter 99? This would make more sense. I would expect the forest to be searched immediately afterwords. This is empathized further in chapter 100:
Maybe the goal with this is to give some character a full 2 weeks to research unicorns or make a plan.
Other theories for chapter 99:
He wanted the reveal of the unicorn to fall under the Roles sequence for some reason.
He wanted to build suspense. (But then I would expect him to have posted 99 on Sunday and 100 on Wed.)
He wants chapter 99 to be written in passive voice to hide the identity of the person who "found" the unicorn.
I think that the fact that chapter 99 falls into the 'roles - aftermath' title, indicates it's relatedness. This is the consequence of the roles arc, somehow - perhaps this is Quirrell's response to the new regulations, whyever that might be.
Quirell saw that. Partial transfiguration is not the power the dark lord knows not.
Reddit discussion of chp 99-101, which includes a few words from the author.
Eliezer: I got the math joke.
Explanation and implementation (spoiler if you haven't spotted the joke yet): http://tinyurl.com/hpmor100mathjoke
(But this only covers the first half of the joke; I had not heard of the second half before!)
If you want to play with a (rather tame, since it doesn't always use its regeneration powers) Bucholz Hydra, here's a link for you: http://www.madore.org/~david/math/hydra.xhtml
For my part, I knew about hydra games and had forgotten the name, but the context made it fairly obvious that this was a joke about the hydra being so hard to kill that you can't prove you do it with only Peano arithmetic.
Was this by any change a reference to Permutation City? That was 17× slowdown, but that could be explained by taking the ratio of real+simulated time. But I do not get the "sixteen major tracks of memory" then.
Far fetched, I know...
It seems the entire race of centaurs have taken something of a hit - in the books, they were perfectly aware that their divination was based on one's state of mind and could easily be applied to the patterns perceived in, for example, twisting smoke from a campfire.
I wouldn't mind much - Eliezer may not even have known or remembered that - except that this is not a new lesson for the readers, and it seems a missed opportunity to talk about pattern-matching, maybe tie it in with some of the other stuff about subconscious knowledge or desires in that scene.
I'm torn between vaguely hoping Eliezer will decide to change this, and uncertainty as to whether he even reads these comments. Heck, why should he? I certainly can't write anything like HPMOR, why would he expect to get a useful suggestion from such a comment? (And it doesn't help I'm signalling incompetence with typos from this darn phone, props to TobyBartels and others for reminding me to fix them.)
It seems that your entire first paragraph -- which one might have expected to end with something explaining what it seems is true about the entire race of centaurs rather than stopping in mid-sentence.
[EDITED to note that now MugaSofer has fixed the mistake I was commenting on.]
We know Quirrel can't directly influence Harry with magic, but Bellatrix was broken out of Azkaban long ago and barely mentioned since. Has anyone noticed if harry is particularly more irrational/credulous in the chapters after this than he was before? Because Harry knows Quirrel can't mind-rape him he might be less suspicious than he should be of his mind being bent by Bellatrix to be less suspicious of Quirrel.
We know Harry thinks that. We know Quirrell has let him go on believing it. We have some further evidence that it's true (e.g., the business with the AK in Azkaban) but it's hardly conclusive (e.g., because blocking an Avada Kedavra is an unusual enough thing that it might have weird consequences for reasons other than interaction between Quirrell's magic and Harry).
Unless there was a lot of deception going on in the Azkaban section of the story, she wasn't in a great state to do anything so subtle the last time she and Harry were in the same place. If it can be done from a distance (which most magical things in canon HP and HPMOR alike apparently can't), why single out Bellatrix in particular? There are other powerful nasty wizards around.
Not sure what to make of Harry's willingness to go to any length to preserve Quirrel. Immediate emotional reaction to the death of a 'friend'? Or change in underlying morality?
Not a fan of Twilight Sparkle dying.
We're getting less of Harry's inner narrative than we did before the troll, so it's entirely possible that he's fully aware that Quirrell is almost definitely the big bad, but still wants him to live in spite of this.
After these latest chapters, though, I'm starting to think Harry's mind is being blocked specifically from anything that would harm Quirrell directly. Quirrell's perspective in chapter 89 says that he can't influence Harry directly through their connection, but Harry's "Dark Side" might be another matter. (How did Quirrell think talking to an Inferius like he was modifying its memories would help? He knows exactly how smart Harry is!)
Well, yes, in the sense that Alicorn isn't dead either, and this isn't a crossover universe with MLP (as far as I can tell). But it depends on how you interpret this.
I think something about giving unicorns in the HPMoR universe (whose only plot relevance is that valuable things can be extracted from their corpses) cutie marks skeeves me out, and makes their death that much more tragic.
Interesting, I had almost the opposite response: I thought it seriously undermined the seriousness of the chapter and gave for a very conflicting feeling.
Sooo... Quirrel knows a stunning hex that looks like Avadra Kevadra?
Then, back in Azkaban, facing that auror, when Quirrel used Avadra Kevadra in an attempt to force the auror to dodge, and Harry stopped it with his patronus...
...why did Quirrel not use the green stunner, unless Quirrel actually wanted to kill the auror?
And how long will it be until Harry asks that question?
As in this comment: Probably Quirrell is lying. When he realized Harry was upset about the centaur dying, he thought fast and Inferiused the centaur and made up the bit about green stunners.
IIRC, in canon Avada Kedavra has a distinctive color not shared by any other spell.
If Quirrell is lying, then asking the question "Why not use the green stunner in other circumstances where Avadra Kevadra was used?" may lead to that lie being uncovered.
I admit I had not considered Inferius on the centaur. However, I rather suspect that Quirrell is priming Harry here; he does something (hitting a centaur with a green stunner) that looks evil, then demonstrates that it is less evil than it was. In the future, then, Harry will be more inclined to believe that Quirrell has done something less evil than it looks like he has done; he could, for example, use Avadra Kevadra on Dumbledore later (making it look like a green stunner to Harry) in circumstances where a green stunner would not be evil and then rely on Harry to prevent any immediate revenge against himself (long enough to portkey away at least).
Unrelated to the latest chapters:
Inspired by RomeoStevens's comment in this thread, I am going over HPMOR, summarizing each chapter in a haiku. Tell me what you think:
Chapter 1:
Chapter 2:
Chapter 3:
Chapter 4:
Harry thinks every death is a horrible tragedy. So, wouldn't he want to bring back everyone in the past as well? Make their deaths "not happen"? So he goes back in time to Atlantis, to arrange a self consistent history where no one has in fact died, but only seemed to die, much as he suggested Dumbledore do for Hermione's death.
One of the first lessons was ComedTea, and thinking about causality going backward in time. There's people like Harry and BDumbledore thinking about history as a story. There's the ridiculous levels of foreshadowing we see... (read more)
Discussion on HPMOR (along with other Potterverse topics) on the blog Crooked Timber.
I found it interesting because Crooked Timber is a (very good by the way) mainstream-liberal-academia blog, and I got a sense of "worlds colliding" by reading the opinions of their commenters on LW and its more niche subculture.
Who is Sirius? Fudge!
- It is well known that Sirius was replaced before he went to prison (the repeated "I'm not serious", the phoenix screaming particularly loudly at one particular door)
- Fudge was present at the capture of Sirius, and made Sirius go to Azkaban without a trial- which means Fudge needs to keep the person in Sirius's body locked up for some reason.
- Sirius can switch bodies somehow (Someone who looks like Sirius enough to fool everyone else is in prison)
- Fudge is under the thumb of the Malfoys- why? He's using them for support, but
... (read more)Oof, this was a punch to the gut of a chapter. I've gone from "Harry, Wake Up!" to a sort of baffled expectation.
What on earth is up with you, Harry? You are usually so clearsighted! Are you still grieving for Hermione? What possible ethical system justifies the decisions of this chapter?
A speech about the power of truth, then a cover up. Punishment for Filch and Hagrid, but mercy for the centaur and Quirrel.
Feh, this is just what the entry describes as refusing to process something I've already processed. There's an easy description for ... (read more)
Consequentialism in action? Hogwarts would be better off with Filch and Hagrid removed, but no future purpose is served by exposing Quirrell or killing the Centaur.
Filch testified that he intentionally wanted to expose them to assault and a chance of dying. Quirrel didn't do anything that gave Draco a chance of dying.
Quirrel on the other hand drinks the unicorn blood to safe it's own life. As far as Harry thinks Qurirrel also only stunned the centaur and wanted to safe Harry's life.
For Harry morality being alive and saving lifes is very important. Short term pain and being stunned doesn't factor much into Harry's utility calculations.
Let's try an analogy that's a bit closer to the mark:
"I know a guy who needs to eat freshly killed bald eagle meat every now and again to stay alive, and while doing so he was discovered by some forest rangers and kids out hiking on public land. He quickly used a gas grenade to knock them out without harming them, then gave them a drug that caused them to lose their short term memory of the event. He then dialed 911 on one of their cell phones and watched from a distance to make sure they didn't get eaten before help arrived."
Note that there are several things here which don't have good conversions into Real Life due to magic. In cases like that, you can't just pick the 'closest equivalent' and expect it to make sense. Sometimes, you'll have to drag something magical into the real world as well.
Analogies are hard, at least if you're trying to be accurate. Doing a double analogy to see if you can get back the original helps. For example, let's take your analogy, and try to convert it back into the original scenario:
"I know a guy who was killing some horses in the forest when he was discovered by a group of aurors, a school teacher, and some kids. This guy beat ... (read more)
I have an alternative explanation for Harry's Dark Side: Harry's mother is narcissistic, impressed by education, and not particularly smart.
"by far the simplest explanation for this unverbalizable fear of yours is just the fear of losing your fantasy of greatness, of disappointing the people who believe in you" (ch. 77) is textbook thinking for a child of a narcissistic parent. The child feels perpetually ignored because the narcissistic parent needs validation from the child's accomplishments but refuses to actually listen to the child. Thus, t... (read more)
Narcissa?
So, I am mildly amused that Eliezer appears to have killed off Alicorn.
Also, that the second unicorn appears to be Twilight Sparkle.
(And thirdly, the not-very-hidden Twilight reference.)
Didn't get the proof-theoretic joke until I looked it up, unfortunately, but it was rather amusing once I did.
And finally: I think Quirrell just got himself added to the "to be resurrected" list...
Oh - and I notice that Draco is thinking in Bayesian terms. Good for him - and good for Harry, too!
Quirrell:
The Sorting Hat:
... (read more)I assume the centaur tried to kill Harry because he prophesied that "the skies will soon be empty" because of Harry. Based on what we know about Harry, the skies could be "emptied" because of Dyson spheres or star-lifting.
Although, if you look at it that way, it would still take thousands of years before the skies appeared "empty," since we're getting light from thousands of years ago. I'm not sure if a centaur would use "soon" in this sense, so perhaps Eliezer has something different in mind.
I've already forgotten why, but I wound up wondering how Quirrell confronting Grendelwald might go in HPMoR. I can't think of a reason it would happen, but it'd doubtless be entertaining, if canon is anything to go by.
(In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Voldemort goes to Normengard to interrogate Grendelwald over that device Dumbledore mentioned. Grendelwald believes from the moment he detects Voldemort's approach that he's probably going to die, and still deceives and verbally belittles Voldy, until he laughs at the Avada Kedavra aimed at him. Not b... (read more)
Grindelwald accepted the inevitability of his death, and did not fear it—hence the laughter. Remember, Rowling is a deathist, and considers this to be a mark of Grindelwald's maturity (he is a foil to Voldemort).
Harry's blindness to Quirrel being pretty obviously bad news at this point is definitely something I'd like to see explained. I know that as the reader I get to see things more clearly than Harry does, but when you start thinking painfully murdering magical creatures to preserve your life for a short amount of time is fine if the person doing it is someone you like, something is going wrong there! I am fully expecting at this point to understand that Harry's thinking on Quirrel is being deliberately suppressed. After all, Harry's meant to be fundamentally curious about magic... why has he not investigated what could cause the anti-magic effect?
Actually, no, he outright approves - he doesn't think unicorns are sapient, which means that their suffering is automatically worth less than a wizard's life.
Also, there's no anti-magic effect, Quirrell is just blindingly fast at casting and then False Memory Charmed Draco.
Well, really now, Harry eats meat. In other words he will accept the death of a nonsentient creature for purposes, not even of keeping himself alive for a few additional hours - he could eat veggies - but just because they taste good. To preserve life? Pff. The argument about sentience is one he ought to have, but conditional on unicorns being nonsentient, they are just not valuable compared to additional months of life.
His best friend just died and it looks like his mentor is next. Good recipe for motivated reasoning.
Harry can obliviate people well enough to make them "lose every single life memory involving the color blue". This is a Big Deal. It allows for things like:
O-
October
After walking Herminone to Broomstick class, Harry wandered alone about the upper hallways of Hogwartz pondering Neville's rememberal. He must have forgotten about something important, but w-
Ow!
A Green Elephant appeared out of nowhere and struck Harry's head. It was a stuffed animal, the type you might buy for a small child, if the child's favorite color were Eerily Glowing G... (read more)
Just to check: Chapter 100 is the scene foreshadowed in the opening quote, right?
(Unicorn blood)
(The aurors and McGonagall falling from their brooms)
...this doesn't quite fit, unless I'm picturing the scene wrong.
Edit: Uncertainty. Based on replies, I'm now leaning against this being the foreshadowed scene.
I don't think it does for meta-reasons. The opening quote is build up too much to not be perfectly fitting and clear. It's also more narratively pleasing to have it return in the final chapter.
I don't think any of it fits. "Tiny fragment" and "fraction of a line" don't sound like blood spatters, or anything liquid. The sound of black robes falling doesn't sound like bodies hitting the ground, and if this were the fulfillment of the Chapter 1 epigraph, I would expect there to be at least a mention of their robes.
This whole scene doesn't seem significant enough to be such a heavily anticipated revelation. I'm going with "No" on this one.
It seems like a stretch but is there any chance
is a shout out to
from the Dresden files?
Also could the spell Quirell used to destroy Hogwarts walls in earlier chapters be used to dungeon bypass the third floor corridor by going through the back of the room with the mirror of desire Erised>
It's probably a reference to Worm (which has a character called Imp whose superpower is to selectively stop other people from noticing or remembering her).
I'm a bit bothered by Dumbledore's behavior in 101. He's supposed to be at least reasonably wise and reasonably cunning, with a dead brother and a room full of gravestones. He knows all about prioritizing people's lives. He's just had the first student fatality in 50 years, and now he almost had a second. So how could he possibly have taken Filch's side?
Sorry if these questions are stupid, but with the long pauses betwen the chapters I find it difficult to remember what exactly happened.
1) What exactly is the puzzle we are trying to solve?
If I remember correctly, Eliezer wanted us to solve something before the story is finished. Which pretty much means now or never. I just don't know what exactly is the question. (Yeah, knowing the question is half of knowing the answer.) Who is Voldemort? Seems obvious that it's Quirrell. What should Harry do? What exactly is happening? What are the motivations of the ma... (read more)
The silver from the begging of HPMOR seems unicorn blood. Eliezer said:
Tvira havpbea oybbq vf nobhg ceriragvat qrngu, jr unir gur vaterqvragf sbe n zntvp evghny.
Tvira gur cebcurpvrf gung evghny vf cebonoyl tbvat gb unir n punapr bs qrfgeblvat gur jbeyq. V guvax vg cebonoyl qbrf.
Given that:
1) Quirrell believes that bringing back Hermione would be the surest way to prevent Harry from destroying the world. ("Miss Granger was the only one whose worries he truly heeded - with her gone - all checks on the boy's recklessness are removed"; "You truly do care about that girl (...) I do not understand it, but I know the lengths you will go to because of it. You will challenge death itself, for her. Nothing will sway you from that.")
2) Preventing the prophecy from coming true appears to be at least one of Quirrell's top priorities as of the Roles arc (which, for some as-yet unestablished reason, the beginning of the unicorn deaths falls into).
3) Quirrell has been killing unicorns and storing away their flesh.
4) Eliezer has said, as above, "I’ll state outright that at the end of the story Hermione comes back as an alicorn princess".
Semi-serious hypothesis: Quirrell is intending to bring Hermione back using unicorn blood.
My theory about HPMOR and what is going on.
"Voldemort's final avenue is to seduce a victim and drain the life from them over a long period; in which case Voldemort would be weak compared to his former power."
But raw power is nothing compared to intellect and Harry Potter seems like the best possible candidate for resurrecting this way.
... (read more)Quirrell and Harry both have a dark side, and dark sides are parts of Volondemort soul. They are horcruxes basically.
Quirrell's dark side took control over good old Quirinus Quirrell. He is in the same conditio
I think Harry might have been the one to secure Hermione's body. He managed to convince McGonagall to remove the restrictions on his time turner. He probably used the time turner right after he was allowed to be by himself in the room with Hermione's body. That would have given himself more time to think and act. He was also checking his wristwatch a lot, especially when he had to leave the room, and when he had interruptions.
In the scene where he convinces Dumbledore and the others that he doesn't have Hermione's body, we don't get very far inside Har... (read more)
For what reason does Harry think Quirrell is applying false memory charms to everyone? What's wrong with what they saw?
I'm just curious how Hagrid felt about his own role in Hermione's death. I'd wondered if I'd see evidence that he thought about it.
Perhaps his personal hero Dumbledore persuaded him it's none of his fault and that he'd acted reasonably.
Nice double (well, one and a half) cameo for alicorn, under different names.
Of course, the real reason that it's not gleaming is that Eliezer once read that!
Your characters can be mentally superior you in at least three ways: they can think much faster than you can, they can independently think of things for which you needed outside help, and they can come to correct conclusions based on less evidence and/or less obvious evidence than you would have required.
While these mechanisms can potentially make a character seem smarter than the author, the last one can also backfire; you can slip up and make the character leap to the right answer on the basis of less evidence than could plausibly isolate that answer.
This is one of the main issues which prevented me from buying into to the conflict in Death Note.
I get where you're going, and I mostly agree, but technically it's not 100% exact. Eliezer, like every human, forget things all the time, and reading HPMoR can makes him rediscover things, or can make him see things under a new light. It can also teaches him things about himself, about how his vision of things evolved with time.
Re-reading things (be it "serious" stuff like LW posts/comments, fiction work or even to a point source code) I wrote a while ago regularly enough does "enlighten" me, making me remember things I forgot, making me "propagate" some updating I did since but didn't fully propagate, and improving my internal model of myself.
You can go and choose to read things that the character would that you under other circumstances would not. The set of things I've read pretty much solely so as to be able to write in character is small but nonempty.
Is the unicorn who was "not white, but pale blue, or appearing so beneath the moon and sky," with a mane that was "green-black but with a sheen like pearls," and a cutie mark which is "a small white shape like a starburst, a center surrounded by eight straight rays" Alicorn's ponysona?
Hey guys, I have a couple of mutually exclusive theories:
- If I understand correctly, the author thinks that a body can be "repaired" after death. So he believes that Hermione can be resurrected by nanobots or engineered microorganisms, or some advanced muggle device like that. And we know that he can't just transfigure some water into nanobots and make them do their job, and them just let them turn into water, or take them out. In the case he couldn't sustain the bots until they finish, then he can make a molecular 3d printer, purify some silico
... (read more)Why everybody believes that centaur wanted to kill Harry ? It rather seems like centaur was disarming him. And it is even possible, he was under imperius curse (from Quirrel) while disarming Harry. He seemed to be surprised about what he was doing (looked up with widened eyes) and he apologised. I believe Quirrel just wanted to interrupt the conversation between Harry and Centaur.
I have some thoughts about the HPMOR story going forward, various clues I've noticed, and speculation.
Avada Kedavra
I am intrigued by the possibility that Avada Kedavra might be used for prolonging life.
What if, when Lily Potter started to cast it, she was not casting it on Voldemort, but on Harry? Avada Kedavra involves a complete preference for death over life in the mind of the caster. What if she had a complete preference for life over death in regard to Harry, and so was attempting to protect him with the spell? What if it partially worked, and th... (read more)
Quirrell
Self pity because people someone didn't come to look for a way to resurrect him?
Huh, add unicorn blood and the Silvery Slytherins to the list of silver anti-death things.
Rot13 for being partly based on a author's note Eliezer has recommended people not read:
Abg fher ubj gb gnxr guvf hcqngr vagb nppbhag jura svthevat cebonovyvgl Urezvbar ernyyl qbrf pbzr onpx nf na "nyvpbea cevaprff." Ba gur bar unaq, ersrerapr gb "nyvpbea" frrzf gb or frggvat gung hc. Ba gur bgure unaq, V'z univat n uneqre gvzr cnefvat "havpbea ubea cevaprff" guna "jvatrq havpbea cevaprff." Ba gur guveq unaq, guvf.
Probably a stupid question, but wasn't Draco was out of the picture already?