I spent last weekend reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is rather good if you don't mind extremely OOC!Harry and secular humanism. I managed to get myself through it in 4 days, so I really do mean "spent last weekend".

I noticed one thing while I was reading it: Grindelwald is alive, and was throughout nearly the entire story.  He's there basically to be killed in canon book 7, but in HPMoR he's mentioned once at the end of the first act, and then mostly ignored.  And now I'm thinking, gosh, maybe another fic writer can think of something to do with him.  (I haven't read all that much Potterfic, so maybe someone has already?)

The other, related question is what Doug will think of the Dementors once he actually puts together what Azkaban is.  Yudkowsky's story asserts that Grindelwald was not guarded by dementors, and that seems most likely to be case in canon, because something something Bayes.  Doug's Homeline has some way of keeping magical prisoners without torture, right?

DW8-1 Wrote:During Sirius's half of the conversation I learned about Dementors, the prison's guards. They sounded like a variety of undead not unlike the wraiths we occasionally ran across back home, and I decided that I did not want to encounter one.

Hey, Bob, did we ever finish casting the "live-action 1998 Disney Sailor Moon movie" that Lisa Vanette has in her collection? I noticed some discussion about it in the [fluff] Now Playing, from the Whole Fenspace Catalog thread.

We had a partial cast list:
Serena: Kirstin Dunst
Amy: Lacey Chabert
Raye: Natalie Portman
Lita: Jessica Alba
Mina: Ariana Richards
Molly: Amber Tamblyn
Queen Beryl: Geena Davis
Nephlite: Antonio Banderas

I don't think we ever cast Darien, Melvin, Jadeite, Zoycite, Malachite, or any of the supporting characters.

Hmmmmm... (consults Wikipedia) ...Tom Criuse was between movies in 1998 - Jerry Maguire was '96 and Eyes Wide Shut was '99. Do we have a Jadeite?

A reporter for Kotaku.com went looking for the Toon Makers Sailor Moon, reasoning that someone somewhere still had to have the original footage.  She discovered something no one in the fandom had ever suspected -- a second try, made several years later.  And that's not the only surprise. 

We Tried To Uncover The Long-Lost 'American Sailor Moon' And Found Something Incredible

And here's the second try.  Be warned -- it's just as bad and corny as the first try.

There's already a page for Tourism in Fenspace, but what about the darker sides of tourism....

Who are the places and people running tours to these places, and where exactly are they?

And, more importantly, which ones are Illegal more difficult for the would-be thanatourist to visit


Jusenkyou

While the majority of the nargle-field was subjected to BDZ by the Warsies, the main station was buried deep inside the original asteroid and too difficult and dengrous to outright destroy.
The majority of the equipment has either been destroyed by fighting, dismantled and gutted for security, or research purposes.

There're remenants of the accomodation blocks, including the Church of Santa Muerte, some of the original Pre-Boskone equipment and the luxury 'masters' residences were the station overlords lived.

While a small museum has been built containing salvaged artifiacts found over the intervening years - weapons, thionite production equipment, deceased berserkers, and Boskone artifacts including a statue of Santa Muerte in Venusian diamond.

However, the majority of the station is much as it'd been left by Great Justice in 2013- even after a decade.

A small guard keeps watch over the station - originally to watch for surviving Boskone horrors, but now in a more ceremonial roll.

Access to the station is off the beaten track - and it requires a skilled pilot to make the journey through the nargle field, but it's not otherwise illegal or unwelcome.

It is, after all, important that such places are remembered.


The SS Destiny Nova

The SS Destiny Nova[ is the last surviving Boskone 'Barbary Class' cruiser and one of only two former Boskone vessels that've survived to modern era.

She was captured by the Panzer Kunst Gruppe in the course of a mission on 16 Psyche, stripped for intelligence then placed into the service of Great Justice as a stop-gap.

She was placed in the museum as its founding exhibit after being refitted mostly back to her original Boskone configuration - or a facsimile thereof. Figurines play the role of crewmembers and prisoners.

The forward crew berths have been configured as an exhibit to her days as a Great Justice vessel, and her achievements.

Frigga 77, home of the worst nuclear accident in Fenspace.

Sort of an unofficial reason to visit, but one that swings between a nuisance that gets in the way, and lethally dangerous.

The radioactive areas are immediately lethal. But that hasn't stopped the curious. Thus far, most have been stopped by the isolation doors.


The Ruins of Crystal Osaka

Off Limits as a Gravesite, except for permitted researchers, former residents, and surface engineers monitoring the degradation of the city. It is next to impossible to get a lawful permit to visit the ruins.

A few have managed to make it without getting arrested.

But it's risky. The ruins are actively patrolled by the SAM - originally by the survivors of the City Guard. So long as the ruins stand, so does the Osaka guard.

Looters are ruthlessly prosecuted. That hasn't stopped illicit city artifacts finding their way onto the dark web.

And that's without getting into how utterly inimical to life the surface of Venus is.

To: <Henrietta.List><allhouses>
From: Meg@Henrietta7.
Subj: [Secret] Operation Collosus
Date: 01/04/2017 - 7:18:27

Ladies.

We're almost there and they haven't figured it out.

Anri and Lou have been working at Google and have gotten their access. Nam is ready at FB, and myself and Sylvie at the Amazon centre.

Once the upload has finished, the instrumentality of our minds and the worlds data can begin.

It's time to take over the world!

-Meg

With the closure of the last two in Alaska, there is now only one Blockbuster remaining in the USA

And, yes, they rent Blu-Ray discs. But their checkout computer is still so old that it has a floppy drive.

(Or can read German and has the search-fu to find Germany's copyright law online.)

I just downloaded a free document from the Wayback Machine's copy of a German website. The document states that it's Public Domain; however, it goes on to list usage and distribution restrictions.

In Canada, "Public Domain" means you give up all copyrights to the files, so either there shouldn't be any usage and distribution restrictions, or this isn't what my country's laws call Public Domain. Can somebody confirm the meaning of "Public Domain" in Germany, please?

Abstract of the paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Pop-science story on CBC

tl;dr: Bread-making (the unleavened sort, at least) predates farming by four millennia. Apparently, the recipe is an acquired taste.


So... what is this the best thing since?

Here's a thread I'm surprised we never needed before (or if we have, I've long forgotten):  Fics that are so bad they're bad -- they're not entertainingly bad, and they're not so bad they're good, they just suck and nothing rescues them.

I'll start off with a fic I gave a good long chance to, but have given up on as of this morning:  Mastermind Hunting by "Louis IX" (600K words).  This is a Harry Potter fic with a godlike!Harry, but I have never seen godlike!Harry written so dully.  

Okay, let me back up and give a little background.  In this story, Petunia has a miscarriage while carrying Dudley and as a result can't have children.  For some reason Dumbledore doesn't just leave Harry on the Dursleys' doorstep, but actually takes the time to talk to them, with the result that they agree to raise Harry in exchange for magical healing for Petunia.  Raising him proves a delight and fills a hole in their lives, so they formally adopt him, and soon he's the older brother to another boy and a pair of twin girls.  (And I've just given you about 75% of all the characterization his siblings get.)  

When Harry has his first bouts of accidental magic, he investigates and experiments with it for several years and becomes adept at doing a lot of things with it.  When a covert CIA agent operating in Britain catches wind of one less-than-subtle incident, it starts an odyssey that takes up most of the first 15% or so of the fic, where Harry and his family are split up and scattered around the world, and in an adventure worthy of James Bond Harry enlists allies, vastly improves on his abilities, discovers wizards and their culture, briefly serves as an avatar for Quetzalcoatl during the fulfillment of a prophecy (no, really), thwarts the CIA and several other organizations, and finally rescues his family, just in time to enroll in Hogwarts under an assumed name.

At least, it would be an adventure worthy of James Bond if it were written at all well.  The author has either never heard of -- or rejects as useless -- the fundamental writing advice "Show, Don't Tell".  Just about everything in Harry's life before he's 11 is drily, dully recited third-hand, with so little dialogue even in scenes where people are having extended conversations that you wonder why the author's bothering to tell you they're talking.  "Harry did x, while he thought y, and someone said z".  He also is prone to ridiculous malaprops, or perhaps he trusts his spell-checker far too much; I suspect he might not be a native speaker of English, as he writes things that I don't think anyone raised speaking English would do or say, like referring to a team of special ops forces as a "Commando", singular.  When Harry gets to Hogwarts, the writing improves a little, with more dialogue, but everything still just plods along, one thing after another, to the point that there's nothing making me eager enough to find out what happens next to keep reading.

Frankly, I am amazed that I stuck it out as long as I did.  Having done so, though, I can save other folks the effort.  Stay away from this one.

And at this point, it's pretty clear he doesn't need one. You guys are fucked.