tondwalkar

I'd prefer never having existed to death at the moment. This might change later if I gain meaningful accomplishments, but I'm not sure how likely that is.

Sorry, how did he stand to benefit from telling Harry about the plaque?

Does Harry even count as an enemy in MoR? Seems like he'd need the blood of someone on Dumbledore's side, and if he's just as arrogant and greedy as he was in cannon, then he'd go for the blood of Dumbledore himself.

Excellent.

Meta 1: It would be nice if reviews rated the material out of 5 or 10.

Right now, reviewers are starting with things like "Absolutely fantastic." and "Extremely, extremely, recommended", which, while are a nice indicator of high-value materials, is less efficient and more fuzzy than a rating on a standard scale. This would also motivate more people with medium value materials to come forward.

Meta 2: I think this would be much better suited to a wiki piece than a post/set of comments. Ideally it'd be in something like a collab... (read more)

I'm not sure what you mean by "runs an app for all users", Are you writing a separate app that you want the hangout to automatically open on entry? Doesn't it make more sense to do this the other way around?

We're not comparing Dumbledore in his thirties to Snape in his thirties, but Snape in his thirties to AD at "64". If we assume that he's been using his time turner since age 11, like HP (though based on his backstory, it seems he got a large intelligence boost at 10, so that might be where he started), he's effectively over 77 when he fought Grindelwald, giving Snape upwards of 4 decades (longer than he has lived thus far) to reach Grindelwald-defeating levels of power. In addition, we know that Snape has good reasons to hide how powerful he is (... (read more)

While Snape is in his early thirties, it seems unlikely the extra three decades would make all that much of a difference.

Keep in mind, in HPMoR, it's heavily implied that AD's artificially aged because he's been overusing time-turners, possibly since his Hogwarts days.

No, HP could go back in time and call himself Tom Riddle. Especially if he was becoming one of those "Dark Wizards who change names like you and I change clothes"

Predictions: Tom Riddle is Hat-n-Cloak (95%). Tom Riddle is female (35%). Tom Riddle was Voldemort, but the title was taken over by Qmort who is not TR (20%). The feeling of doom between HP and Qmort is because of time travel (95%). Qmort is an older HP, sent back in time with memories removed (30%).

Since Rowling follows around HP and not HG, we don't actually know how HG thinks. Since JKR wrote the story, she can use preknowledge to make HG arbitrarily smart, and since she doesn't have too large of an impact on what actually happens, she can do this without needing to account for how smart HG is; even if she were to devise some genius plan to beat voldy, she'd have to act through HP, who could easily and stupidly reject her plan offscreen. That is, I'm arguing that even if you kept making HG arbitrarily smart (but not arbitrarily powerful or prophecy... (read more)

Have you accounted for ambient temperature being the cause of both? Being too cold to work and therefore feeling the need to wrap yourself in something warm? Alternately being warm making you less productive?

I've discovered that my productivity starts to drop off sharply above 73 Fahrenheit, for example.

Well certainly. I wrote that sentence from the perspective of "cannon happens, author follows around writing down the story" rather than "author makes up story." I guess a better way to communicate that would be to say "were we to write HGMoR in the cannon universe, we wouldn't have to change anything."

I think it sounds the way an official lie would sound, and afaik the consequences of botched time travel are truly staggering.

Disclaimer: I am thoroughly enjoying HPMOR. That said, I just don't think Eliezer is quite grokking the substance of feminist complaints.

I agree, but I don't think you're quite groking his responses either. His main point is that it's an exercise in futility to apply critical theory to an incomplete work, in particular one that claims to be more complicated than Death Note; for all we know HG asked AD to help him fake her own death, or maybe she's been outsmarting everyone from behind the scenes all long. (Though I admit that both of these are unlikely, they would be within the level of "where did that come from?" that EY's already done)

my first thought was HGMOR would be delightful, and it wouldn't take bending canon nearly as much. It's a lot easier for me to imagine canon Hermione taking an interest in theory of how to think better than canon Harry.

It's been a while since I've read cannon, but isn't this almost exactly what happens in cannon? HGMoR sounds like it'd just be cannon written with JKR following around HG instead of HP (which, admittedly, would be rather interesting)

but all rewards are subject to Goodhart's Law. I expect to see people doing a lot of ill-thought-out somethings because the reward structure is too simplified.

Well, since the reward structure isn't explicit, and we expect McGonagoll to get much smarter on a much smaller timescale than opportunities to earn a reward by "disobeying McGonagoll according to your own judgement."

Aside from that, take a look at Hermione Granger and the Burden of Responsibility, which is a recursive fanfiction of HPMoR diverges during her trial. It's really only just getting started, but I have hopes.

I've just read the first chapter and this is excellent. Though I'm concerned that the title indicates that it might culminate in Hermonie angst-mongering. If that happens, I might just start a fanfic of order 3 with Amelia Bones as the main character.

In my opinion, what was going on was that he wasn't sure what the boundaries that he needed to not cross were, and wasn't sure he could regulate his behavior, so he was trying to avoid further punishment by saying he was helpless and suffering enough already.

This is very enlightening. I'm going to probe this by modulating my response to it, and see what I find. Thanks; one karma point feels insufficent.

I think a post on this (?and related) would be much apprecaited if you and/or someone with similar experience could put one together.

Since then, he's a

i.e. unceremoniously killed offscreen

nitpick: Hermionie wasn't just killed onscreen, she was front and center.

a natural, self-protective response to what seems like an impossible demand. Sometimes the demand actually is impossible, sometimes the demand is understood correctly and falsely believed to be impossible, and sometimes the demand is defensively interpreted as impossible because the reasonable part is felt to be not worth doing but it doesn't feel safe to just refuse it.

I'm not sure I follow. What demand?