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Why do you say Dumbledore helped Lily make the potion? Lily was a rising star of Potions herself.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92
When Dumbledore showed Harry the comments he made in her potions textbook the potion he was commenting on was the Potion of Eagle's Splendor, which is the potion for an increase in the Charisma stat (which technically doesn't have to involve appearance but is often considered correlated with it) in 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons.
ETA: The other things which makes it more suggestive is that the potion Petunia took was dangerous or rare, else more witches would also have permanently improved their appearance, and a normal potion listed in the standard 5th year text presumably wouldn't be; The suggestion presented was thestral blood, thestral blood was implied to have a role in the permanence of the Cloak and as Harry deduced that potions making isn't creating magic but reshaping that which is there some component in Petunias potion must have an association with Permanence.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90
The word "sacrifice" means to give up something valuable, to experience a loss in trade for gain.
If we lost our own Sun, that would be a tragedy and life on Earth as it currently is would end.
If we lost a neighboring star, we just wouldn't care. That's why I wouldn't call it a "sacrifice". It could be a material component of a spell, certainly. But it wouldn't be a sacrifice.
If you permanently Transfigure a ball of glass into iron with Crystferrium, you don't think of that as "sacrificing" the ball of glass that you had. You're just... using it up.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90
If someone performs the ritual to summon death then they lose a sword and a noose, unless they're a particular sort of obsessed with the remnants of past crimes they wouldn't care either except that they'd need to get new material components if they want to do it again. just as we'd have to pick out another star if we sacrificed Alpha Centauri A..
It seems to me that the term sacrifice is used simply to denote that even if someone wants their spell component back they can't get it, whereas there is a spell to reverse Crystferrium if you find you prefer the original to the glass.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90
Usually you need to sacrifice something that is yours. Assuming we're not talking about our own Sun, sacrificing some other star seems too easy. It would be like sacrificing someone else's drop of blood to fuel Fiendfyre.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90
Somehow I doubt even those who believed Tracey's Harry summoning ritual was real believed she had ownership over Yog-Sothoth.
It seems to me that Harry was a bit too quick to dismiss the Resurrection Stone option. Certainly if it functions according to his current conceptions of it it won't bring Hermione back in the sense he finds meaningful. However the experience of that soul/magic explosion at Hermione's death gives at least some evidence of a soul actually existing, even if still not enough to make it the most probable explanation for the stone's function, and there are other non-soul requiring ways that the stone could function such as looking back in time for the most recent functioning mind. Given the potential difficulty in finding it and the legend about how it's actually counterproductive its still probably not worth spending much effort pursuing it if you don't already know that pursuing it = convincing Riddle/Quirrelmort to go fetch it out from whatever defences he has it under or breaking them yourself, but he should still probably have put a bit more thought into it before rejecting it.
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LW Women- Female privilege
I found the anonymity-inducing paragraph interesting for a number of reasons. The submitter asserts that she's not like most girls, but then goes on to list a bunch of things, half of which, in my experience, most girls, including most self-described feminists, would also say about themselves. She likes looking pretty, and getting better at sex -- shocking! Within the bedroom, I also suspect a plurality of women are at least somewhat submissive.
Regarding "get in the kitchen!" -- submitter seems to be making an implicit connotative jump, because she likes cooking, to take it as if the sentence were simply equivalent to "Go do your favorite thing!" But that's not the connotation that is usually there. The people saying something like that usually mean it more like "Go do this thing whether or not you like doing it all, because it's too low status for males to bother themselves with it." That may not be the intended connotation of everyone who says it, but it doesn't take that many bad apples in the barrel to get people pattern-matching, so this is what more feminism-inclined people hear when they hear "Get in the kitchen," and that's why they get offended.
Regarding wolf-whistles and such, it seems like in an ideal world, we'd invent a new obvious signal, like a red bracelet or something, that explicitly showed that a woman enjoyed this sort attention. Right now, there's a bad pooling equilibrium where some women dress sexy because they want that kind of attention, and some women want to dress sexy without getting that kind of attention, and there's no way to tell them apart. At the moment, it doesn't seem like my suggestion would work in the real world, because clearly the submitter is concerned about the other kind of female being able to identify her, or there would be no need for the anonymity here. (If, despite everything she just said about herself, the anonymity is about keeping her identity from men, then either she has an as-yet unidentified alief, or I'm really confused.)
As a male who prefers to dominate in the bedroom but sincerely wants an equal partner outside of it, I think that the submitter is, despite a valiant attempt at self-awareness, overgeneralizing from personal experience in assuming that most people desire to have social relations in public mirror their bedroom preferences. Actually, given that I have some sadistic tendencies, I'd be very strongly opposed to society trying to structure social relations around what arouses me personally, even as part of an aggregation of preferences.
Also, I'm mildly curious about
And the same testosterone that makes me good at a male-dominated subject, makes sure I'm really easily turned on.
I realize that there are fields in which men seem to perform better. But I had thought this was usually attributed to differences in brain architecture, not hormones. Unless the submitter is a professional athlete, I'm curious what field she benefits in by having more of a hormone that provides additional strength and aggressiveness.
Regarding "get in the kitchen!" -- submitter seems to be making an implicit connotative jump, because she likes cooking, to take it as if the sentence were simply equivalent to "Go do your favorite thing!" But that's not the connotation that is usually there. The people saying something like that usually mean it more like "Go do this thing whether or not you like doing it all, because it's too low status for males to bother themselves with it."
Also of "you ought to be feeding us because you're not important/competent enough to otherwise contribute"
There is no Harrymort. Her loyalties would be divided between Harry and Quirrellmort.
To spell it out more explicitly, the suggestion is that while currently she's loyal to Harry because she thinks he's Harrymort, in the event that Quirrelmort wants to deny Harry influence over her by revealing 'Actually I'm the one with the Dark Lord in his head, I was just manipulating the boy in a complicated plot, as is my style,' she still might maintain some loyalty to Harry because manipulated or not, he still broke her out of Azkaban and performed all those impressive feats for her in the process. Especially the fact that he faced down the dementors without a patronus made her think he might actually be coming to care for her even when she thought her rescuer was the dark lord, knowing that it was actually the boy he looked like who did all that for her is likely to inspire some loyalty.
On the other hand, the dark ritual assisted brainwashing she went through was so thorough she was willing to Crucio herself, so the Dark lord might be willing to rely on that to prevent her from obeying Harry instead of stealing from her the memory of what she owes him.
Either way I imagine that the obliviation Harry saw was likely to be fake, after all he would probably want her report on the events that occurred while he was unconscious in case Harry left any details out in his summary.
Break the line of Merlin, using partial transfiguration. This would almost certainly be seen as Merlin himself expressing extreme displeasure from beyond the grave.
Given that Dumbledore is on Hermione's side, I'm not sure that destroying his badge of office would be a helpful move.
If the enchanted stone that the Line is made of is subject to Harry's power of partial transfiguration then instead of breaking the Line he could take a piece of the chamber and make it into a new Line for himself. 'Merlin's spirit and Magic itself have endorsed me, now actually LISTEN to what I have to say.'
ETA: Or, since a few months ago in Azkaban he had enough power/skill to make quite a large hole in the walls and he's presumably improved further since then, and still assuming that partial transfiguration isn't one of the things the special stone is protected against, he could reshape a portion of the wall to say "Release Her". 'The stones themselves cry out against the injustice of this!'
I don't think making a Horcrux qualifies as a ritual. And if it did, it requires one death whereas the one Quirrell mentions requires two (albeit indirectly and with the possibility of them not being murders).
He probably is hiding some darker rituals, but I doubt the making of Horcruxes is one of them.
Also, he could be judging the ritual most terrible on effects rather than sacrifices, and Quirrel's worldview obviously judges summoning Death, especially without the dismissal, as more terrible than making yourself some flavor of immortal.
BTW, we're told in canon there are other schools for wizards and witches, but everyone famous seems to have gone to Hogwarts. Why? There isn't even an entrance exam, and most of the teachers are incompetent; so it can't be either their selectiveness or the quality of their education.
How can we estimate the number of witches and wizards in the world from canon? And, also, the number of students at Hogwarts?
Most of the teachers? Binns and Trelawney certainly, Snape, but arguably he's more unprofessional and unpleasant than incompetent. Often the defense professor is incompetent, I suppose. Canon!Harry had Lupin, Snape and fake Moody for competent defense professors and Quirrel, Lockhart and Umbridge for incompetent ones. We have no reason to doubt the teaching ability of Mcgonagall, Flitwick, Sprout, Sinistra, Vector or Babbling. Burbage's Muggle studies course is often a subject of ridicule in fanfiction, but that might be a result of the (inter?)-national curriculum rather than her individual competence, and so would be no better at other schools. Hagrid's Care of Magical Creature's lessons were of very uneven quality, but he could teach well when he had his head together.
As to the preeminence of Hogwarts, perhaps its as simple as Hogwarts being the only British school with a comprehensive curriculum, the others focusing on particular areas of magic and functioning more or less as magical trade schools. We don't technically know that there's no entrance exam for the common witch or wizard, we just know Harry didn't have to take one, he could have been admitted as a legacy student or simply because he's the boy-who-lived. Or the barrier could be financial.
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I know the blood is used to mark the Deathly Hallow symbol on the Cloak, but could you remind me where it says this relates to permanence? I rather assumed that, since thestrals are invisible to all those who have not seen and comprehended death, the relevance of thestral blood was to do with death and/or hiding from it.
I really really wish I could believe that, but I can't, not in the wizarding world. Felix Felicis, which is extremely difficult to make and disastrous if brewed wrong (and disastrously powerful when brewed right, especially in the hands of children), is to be found in the same textbook.
Hmm, rereading the section of his Azkaban trip where Harry was making his Cloak related discoveries I seem to have confused the fact of the thestral blood symbol empowering the Cloak with someones conjecture in some discussion thread after we learned the law of potion conservation that the thestral blood suggested as a substitution in the eagle's splendor potion could have served as a modifier to make it permanent.