/u/Limro suggested to create a sticky thread with a list of the most popular fics similar to HPMOR.
Worm
An introverted teenage girl with an unconventional superpower, Taylor goes out in costume to find escape from a deeply unhappy and frustrated civilian life. Her first attempt at taking down a supervillain sees her mistaken for one, thrusting her into the midst of the local ‘cape’ scene’s politics, unwritten rules, and ambiguous morals. As she risks life and limb, Taylor faces the dilemma of having to do the wrong things for the right reasons.
Ra
Magic is real. Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity.Student mage Laura Ferno has designs on the future: her mother died trying to reach space using magic, and Laura wants to succeed where she failed. But first, she has to work out what went wrong. And who her mother really was.
Mother of Learning
Zorian, a mage in training, only wanted to finish his education in peace. Now he struggles to find answers as he finds himself repeatedly reliving the same month. 'Groundhog's day' style setup in a fantasy world.
Shadows of the Limelight
This is a world where fame grants powers. Dominic de Luca was a thief and a liar before entering into the apprenticeship of Welexi Whitespear, the greatest hero of modern times. Now he must navigate the world of the Illustrati, the famous and the infamous, as he tries to secure for himself a place among the gods.
The Martian
A (hard) science fiction novel set in the near future. The story follows a resourceful and witty NASA Astronaut who becomes stranded on Mars as the rest of his crew mistakenly abandons him for dead in a sand storm. It has been described as an Apollo 13 meets Cast Away and lauded for its technical and scientific accuracy.
Endless gratitude to everyone whose work made it possible for me to enjoy this magnificent piece of literature.
Take it and print! (: https://github.com/artjomaverin/HPMOR-LyX
So, I think we can all agree that canon!voldemort's horcrux hiding locations suck. On the other hand, the five suggestions Harry made (Deep space, a volcano, high atmosphere, underground, and the deep sea) aren't great either - a horcrux needs to come into sustained contact with another animal (ideally a human wizard) in order to actually possess it.
The solution for this is still trivial though. You make the horcrux a doorknob, or something else unassuming that a lot of people are going to be touching. So let's add in another feature from the original books. While not immediately noticeable, the locket and the diary both cause a sense of unease after long exposure, to the point where getting rid of the horcrux provides immediate and noticeable relief.
So, we have horcruxes that require prolonged contact to work, but also have observable negative effects from prolonged contact. So if you had the resources and inclinations of a dark lord, how would you hide your horcruxes to secure the safety of your soul?
Harry's fault in solving P=NP using the time turner was that his algorithm didn't have a case for inputs that weren't two prime numbers. If the algorithm was modified to result in an empty paper if the input is anything but two prime numbers or an empty paper, and a method was used to ensure that the algorithm was enforced no matter what horror the message from the future read, then it really should work, right?
Suppose you had a computer running the algorithm and a hard drive sent back in time instead of a piece of paper. The human operator using the time turner would never see the content of the drive before the experiment was over and beyond the range of another time turner (wait 6 hours). Then, the computer should be capable of solving gigabytes of different P=NP problems in one time turning operation, as long as checking the solution was possible for the computer to do.
What interesting things would this theoretical turning computer be capable of doing? How does it compare with the capabilities of a quantum computer and a traditional turing machine?
HOW HASN'T ANYONE ON THIS THREAD READ HARRY POTTE...
It was in the "who's affraid of killer robots" episode (: they talk about the dangers of AI.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/144grdDhy7McZuF94SgOsq?si=yAQC_sUhTN61N3B-WI6Uog
Why, in Chapter 28, does Harry say
Things were made of atoms, and every atom was a tiny separate thing. Atoms were held together by a quantum mist of shared electrons, for covalent bonds, or sometimes just magnetism at close ranges, for ionic bonds or van der Waals forces.
He means electrostatic attraction, not magnetism surely.
Just finished reading HPMOR for the first time, wondering if I missed something — since Death Eaters White & Grim are unable to maintain the energy required of the UB it should have lost all influence by the time Harry flew back to Hogwarts. Unless I misread and they’re still somehow alive, he shouldn’t still have felt the compulsion to withhold his fourth condition, right?
In chapter 109 Quirrell said, "I have outwitted myself, I fear. Neither you nor I dare be reflected in this Mirror. " It is also described on his character sheet on TVTropes that "All of his major setbacks are results of him systematically out-thinking himself." The meaning of this particular expression, however, has long eluded me.
I've considered two possible interpretation of it, but neither sounds fit:
(a) Quirrell's tendency of overthinking makes him prone to being double-bluffed, just like how he decides to play the long game in the potion chamber despite him being practically impervious to a dementor ambush even if there is one. His intelligence makes him overcautious, and being bold is not always the worst option in decision-making. (Doubtful. Although the conclusion leans toward mundane wisdom, the anti-intellectual "relax-and-let-your-intuitions-take-control, unlearn-what-you-have-learnt" vibe doesn't really fit into the atmosphere of HPMOR, and I find it highly unlikely that EY's true intent behind the words "Quirell claims that he outwits himself" would fall into this option)
(b) Quirrell's seemingly "cunning" plots (that he enjoys weaving) often come back to bite himself in the ankle (Oft evil will shall evil mar, that is). In this scenario, this manifests in that Harry's resemblance to him (the outcome of a deliberate choice on his part in the past) causes both of them to be vulnerable to the Mirror's traps, rendering his carefully crafted heir and puppet useless in this vital plan of his. (More likely than the first one, but it still sounds unconvincing somewhat)
Would you mind to clarify to this clueless HPMORer?
After reading HPMOR and the original seres, I liked HPMOR better. Harry and most of the other characters acted coherently, with one exception - Hermione seemed nerfed to the point of becoming a strawwoman to Harry. In the original, she is much more realistic and sensiible, whereas here, calling her naive and soppy would be an understatement. Do you think EY was trying to create a Watson to Harry, or am I missing something?
This is a theory about the words inscribed on the mirror, relevant passage (yes, I'm aware of the easter egg, let's look beyond that for now):
"The runes say, noitilov detalo partxe tnere hoc ruoy tu becafruoy ton wo hsi -" Harry stopped, feeling more prickles at his spine. Harry knew what the rune for noitilov meant. It meant noitilov. And the next runes said to detalo the noitilov until it reached partxe, then keep the part that was both tnere and hoc. That belief felt like knowledge, like he could have answered 'Yes' with confident authority if somebody asked him whether the ton wo was ruoy or becafruoy. It was just that when Harry tried to relate those concepts to any other concepts, he drew a blank.
Also a very important quote:
I had wondered if perhaps the Words of False Comprehension might be understandable to a student of Muggle science. Apparently not.
Suppose you want to inscribe a message, a Voyager plaque so to speak, for people to understand what you know. Your organization has worked for decades, maybe centuries, and found a very non-obvious groundbreaking insight on the key to making, say, a Friendly AI. So you write the insight down, but what if the people have a different language? So you devise a translation spell that maps the words to the mental structures a person has for their meaning, so they understand it no matter what language they have.
But hold on. Suppose that you're a caveman who barely gets addition, and the text reads something like (just a random example):
Yoneda's lemma concerns functors from a fixed category C to the category of sets, Set . If C is a locally small category (i.e. the hom-sets are actual sets and not proper classes), then each object A of C gives rise to a natural functor to C called a hom-functor. This functor is denoted...
What would be the experience of the caveman reading this? Probably much the same as Harry's experience in the passage at the top. They've tried their best to tell us something, we just aren't sufficiently advanced to have even the groundwork of understanding what their terms mean.
In Ch47 Draco remembers:
Father had told Draco that to fathom a strange plot, one technique was to look at what ended up happening, assume it was the intended result, and ask who benefited.
I'm wondering if this is a (possibly altered) quote from somewhere, or just another piece of Eliezers wisdom? I have googled but couldn't find anything.
Harry initially thinks that Comed-Tea might be usable to rewrite reality to his wishes with a simple Confundus or two, based on his inaccurate assumption about the Comed-Tea causing things to happen rather than future-things causing an impulse to drink Comed-Tea. However, once Harry realizes how it really works, he essentially writes it off entirely, only busting it out once or twice later when he knows it will be highly enjoyable for him to do so and then forgetting about it once it's gone.
Several related thoughts spring to mind to me for other possible uses that Harry didn't consider:
He could still potentially use the Comed-Tea as a warning by conditioning himself or hexing himself to find certain dangers bizarre or humorous. He could test whether or not it's possible to use Comed-Tea as a means of retrieving other future information as well.
Comed-Tea is remarkably precise. It's constantly scanning the immediate future for events the drinker will find the sort of amusing or surprising that will cause them to do a spit take. If Harry could reverse engineer it or otherwise obtain the recipe and figure out how, magically, that effect is created, he may be able to replicate the effect; or more importantly generate other effects with some changes. It may be that changing a single ingredient could cause it forewarn the drinker of dangers an hour away by giving them profound goosebumps on their left thigh, or stirring it counterclockwise instead of clockwise for the last bit means the drinker will feel a distinct tingling sensation whenever someone appears just behind them. Heck, there's a non-zero chance that research into Comed-Tea could produce something akin to the main canon's Felix Felicis potion in terms of its ability to direct the user into circumstances that will be favorable to them. It's a small chance, sure, but worth investigating. There could be all manner of interesting products, and if nothing else it stands to improve understanding of both Time and Divination.
Not sure if this would work at all, but a friend of mine suggested that the cans of Comed-Tea themselves should have something highly amusing or shocking about them that occurs once you've drunk a certain amount, or purchased multiple, or some chaining action--it's not clear exactly how the cause-effect relationship works in this context, but there might a not-quite-but-approaching-"Do-Not-Mess-With-Time" sort of way to cause the act of buying and drinking Comed-Tea itself to be self-sustaining, with you constantly having impulses to drink more and more with future shocking events continuously occurring. If it works, it could be very addictive, so Harry probably wouldn't swing for it, but he might be able to share some sort of business ideas with the Comed-Tea people to increase revenue in exchange for a cut if he can refine it. My suspicion is that this would not work, but again, something potentially worth testing, probably as a part of the experimentation done on # 2.
Any fun thoughts on Comed-Tea? I find myself very interested in it and low key wishing it had still popped up a bit more frequently past the first third of the book.
Has anyone talked about setting up a GoFundMe for professional recording of HPMOR? I love audio books and would love to see a free download available recorded by a professional actor.
Has EY talked about not wanting this or anything?
Thanks
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