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[Awaclus]

And yes, I know I'm supposed to get good lighting instead of a lens that will work without good lighting if I want professional results. But I can't have good lighting because it takes time to set it up every time, which would interrupt my workflow, and I can't have it set up all the time either because that would take too much space and I might also need to shoot in different rooms. I can, at least in some cases, have simple lights to bring at least a bit more light into the scene compared to just normal everyday room lights, though.

[silverspawn]

Does anyone know anything useful about wide angle (but not fisheye, something like 12 to 18 mm I guess) Micro Four Thirds prime lenses that are suitable for low light/indoors video?

Yes.

Sorry.

[silverspawn]

(and I don't, obv)

[silverspawn]

More jokes! More manipulation!

[silverspawn]

Harry being the only one to resist the Imperius curse is such bs

[silverspawn]

He's not actually smarter than the others, so you gotta pull a plot contrivance out of your hat to remind everyone that he's indeed SPECIAL

[silverspawn]

Tonight I had basically the quintessential dream. I was in a train, obviously, and it was a very large train with lots of people and two levels.

I want to get to C, but as it often is, you have to first go to B, and the train I'm in goes to B. Someone had told me that the train actually first goes down to B and then up again, but that's crazy, then there would be no need to change and I think I have to change. I'm pretty sure that was just something I've dreamt about.

We get to B. I go down a level to get to the exit. But someone pulls me back up at my arms. It's a friend I used to hang out with in school and university. He tells me again that the same train goes down to B and then up again, and I try to express how surprised I am that he's really there because I was so sure I had only dreamt him up.

[silverspawn]

This is lovely

[silverspawn]

maybe I should start calling people trumpnozzles or wanksuckers

[silverspawn]

Here's another interesting calculation.

Hogwarts has 12 subjects. (Plus some minor extra stuff like Flying and apparition.) 7 are mandatory (Defense, Charms, Transfiguration, Potions, Herbology, History, Astronomy), and 5 are up for for choice up from year three (Runes, Arithmancy, Muggle studies, Care for Creatures, Divination). Harry chooses only the last two. (Which is a pretty hilariously bad choice when you think about it.)

If all subjects have 4 periods per week, then you're at 48. You can fit 10 periods in a day if you start at 9:00 in the morning and end with dinner at 18:00. So students shouldn't need time turners.

However, teachers will actually have a tough time! A teacher like MgGonnagirl should have 22 different courses: 4*5 with four houses times 5 years, plus two for the last two years, where every subject is optional and they throw all houses together. So that would be 88 periods per week if each course has 4. That's not possible.

I therefore conclude that not mixing houses for mandatory subjects is a plot hole. Every mandatory subject should always take place with 2 houses at once. Then we get back to a barely manageable number. Unless the teachers all use time turners, but man they don't.

In the books, Potions takes place with the Slytherins, but Transfiguration is Gryffindor only, and so is defense

[silverspawn]

Also, the only class where we know the student number has 8 students -- even if it's 10 on average, two houses is still a small class with 20.

[silverspawn]

Just happened to relisten to Scott's Review of Sadly, Porn -- the most high-concept total bs genius nonsense -- and it had this throwaway comment on harry potter. The claims were thus:

- Harry is not the smartest person, that's Hermione.
- He's not the most ambitious person, that's Voldemort.*
- So why is he the main character? Because he has a prophecy about him. He fills a specific fetish. You don't want to be famous for what you did, because doing things is hard. You want to be famous for free, because your identity is being famous.


* not actually true! The  most ambitious person in Harry Potter (non-ironic answer) is Grindelwald, clearly! But he's also a villain, so the point that the ambitious people are automatically evil holds.

[silverspawn]

Would wager to guess that this is pretty much true.

[faust]

Just happened to relisten to Scott's Review of Sadly, Porn -- the most high-concept total bs genius nonsense -- and it had this throwaway comment on harry potter. The claims were thus:

- Harry is not the smartest person, that's Hermione.
- He's not the most ambitious person, that's Voldemort.*
- So why is he the main character? Because he has a prophecy about him. He fills a specific fetish. You don't want to be famous for what you did, because doing things is hard. You want to be famous for free, because your identity is being famous.


* not actually true! The  most ambitious person in Harry Potter (non-ironic answer) is Grindelwald, clearly! But he's also a villain, so the point that the ambitious people are automatically evil holds.

This is such neoliberal brainrot. You have imagined an Other that does not like to work, and now if the story does not feature what you in your twisted mindset consider the "valuable" people, it must be because of the Other. And the whole premise is so silly. In literature, you often want to focus on the most interesting person, and people are more interesting if they have flaws. Postulating that your focus should be on the "best" is just not understanding how that works.

The main reason Harry isn't those things is that Harry is supposed to be a blank canvas that the reader can identify with. Too much personality hurts this goal. Not saying that's good writing, but it is pretty clearly what is going on.

[Awaclus]

I don't really get why the main character should be the smartest, the most ambitious, or the most interesting character. The main character is just the character whose perspective the storytelling mainly uses, and it makes sense for Harry Potter to be the main character of Harry Potter because the most important plot developments are directly related to him and he's also there to experience a lot of them first hand. (Which is because of the prophecy, although I'm not sure if JK started writing the first book thinking there is a prophecy or if that's something that she invented later.)

[silverspawn]

I think writing a large book full of anti-memes and surface-level nonsense is a clever way to deactivate skepticism in the reader because when you have worked so hard to have come up with a interpretation, you don't just want to conclude that it's simply false. Also you've already spent so much effort deciphering the content, you have less left. Probably worked on me. I admit the take looks less convincing a day later.

[silverspawn]

You may even call it a libsuckery take

[Awaclus]

If anything, it seems to me like the thing that most main characters I can think of have in common is that out of the people who are involved with the story to a large extent, they are the one who initially knows the least about what's going on. That's useful because that way the reader gets to learn it as the main character is learning it.

[faust]

If anything, it seems to me like the thing that most main characters I can think of have in common is that out of the people who are involved with the story to a large extent, they are the one who initially knows the least about what's going on. That's useful because that way the reader gets to learn it as the main character is learning it.

It kind of depends on the kind of story, right? Harry Potter is arguably a plot-driven story, so here all of that makes sense. Other stories are more character-driven, and there you probably want your character to have some depth to explore.

[Awaclus]

If anything, it seems to me like the thing that most main characters I can think of have in common is that out of the people who are involved with the story to a large extent, they are the one who initially knows the least about what's going on. That's useful because that way the reader gets to learn it as the main character is learning it.

It kind of depends on the kind of story, right? Harry Potter is arguably a plot-driven story, so here all of that makes sense. Other stories are more character-driven, and there you probably want your character to have some depth to explore.

I think you want the character to have depth regardless, but even in a lot of the character-driven stories I could think of, the main character was typically someone who e.g. only very recently got introduced to everyone else.

[silverspawn]

It's moderately hilarious to me that like half of the harry potter fanfiction on Archive Of Our Own is shipping Harry and Malfoy

[silverspawn]

So I've stuck with the

Input/Output Level
Algorithmic Level
Implementation Level

framework for quite a while, but now I'm beginning to question it. Say you have an entangled wire and you disentangle it by making the surface repulsive. What the trumpgoblin is the algorithmic description of this process?

So instead of asking, "is consciousness about algorithms or about implementations?", I think the better question is, "does the algorithmic level even exist"? And if it does, then consciousness is kind of trivially about the algorithm, since well if you run the same algorithm differently, it has to give the same result (due to the established result that epiphenomenalism is not ok). But if you disentangle a wire by making the surface repulsive, there is no algorithmic description of the process. And ditto if you use the electromagnetic field for holistic computations.

[silverspawn]

That leads to the very important follow-up question of, what exactly does it mean to have an algorithmic description?

My idea here was, the system has to factor into a finite number of mathematically primitive elements. This is always possible inside a digital computer. Everything can be built out of transistors, and a transistor (I actually looked into hardware yesterday) can be described in terms of three binary elements. Then transistors build logic gates and logic gates build everything else. But even without understanding how the hardware works, you know it *has* to permit an algorithmic description because we write software in an algorithmic language. Every programming language is built on a set of operations.

Then it's a question whether you should say they have to be discrete elements, i.e. only have finitely many states. That's of course true in a digital computer; in fact they're binary. Though you could also build a trinary computer, nothing special about the number 2. And you can build an analog computer, where you care about precise voltage levels as the output rather than thresholded voltage levels, and then they wouldn't be finite anymore.  In an analog computer, the smallest units of computation are little real numbers instead of little bits. But they're still primitive compared to a wire surface. So "what are the smallest irreducible elements" or something should be the key question.

[silverspawn]

And thing #3 is that even if the algorithmic description exists, it's unclear what it is. Certainly everything in a digital computer can be described algorithmically, but you get a different algorithmic description when you talk at the level of transistors vs. logic gates vs. processor operations vs. programming language operations. Different levels of abstraction.

[silverspawn]

There seem to be a lot of artists who have done almost nothing I like, but there's one exception that's really great. Here it just works, the hyper simplistic music and the extreme focus on the voice