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Chapter Three Is Now Up
02-15-2014, 04:50 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-19-2019, 09:02 AM by Bob Schroeck.)
Read it here.
Oh, and I made some kind of markup error in the concordance page, and haven't been able to figure out what it is yet -- except to determine that it's unrelated to the new entries for Chapter 3. I'm working on figuring out just what I did, and in the mean time, please do not feel the need to inform me that everything is black text on dark green background. Thank you.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Quote:"Give me their minds when they are young..."
I know this is a quotation or a paraphrase from something, but the only thing that comes up on a Google search is a single Marine Corps-themed website. .
It's a paraphrase of an old, old Jesuit motto: "Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man." Commonly attributed to St. Francis Xavier or St. Ignatius Loyola, but honestly I don't think anybody knows who said it.
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The version I'd heard was "Give us the child until the age of seven and we will answer for the man." I don't have a cite for that, though.
(Oh, and "his godfather's favorite joke"? Surely you can't be serious. )
--
Rob Kelk
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There's like a million variations on it, but they all start with the same basic premise. Memetic mutation at it's finest.
(Of course he's Sirius, and don't call him Shirley.  )
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Just a heads-up, but a few of the lines referenced in the Concordance somehow got left out of the text. The bits about teaching experience based on the dorama Jin, and the time at St. Trinians. There may be others I didn't notice.
I hate to say this, but Hermione's attitude is kind of reminding me of something Winnowill said once: "There are no secrets inside Blue Mountain, save those I choose to keep." Now I grant you, my first reaction to Winnowill was, "I think I'm in love," but that was just the Melnibonean in me coming to the fore.
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Big Brother is watching you. And damn, you are so bloody BORING.
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Quote:"He used it as an example of how clever uses of apparently harmless spells can completely turn around a battle."
I can't help but read this and recall some of the funnier gaming sessions we've had in Ars Magica, where 'Footsteps of Slippery Oil' has proved far more useful than a level 5 spell has ever had a right to be. Especially again big gribblies.
Thanks for a few moments that brought a smile to my face this morning.
Also, the CSS/formatting on the concordance has gone funny somehow for me. It might be a quirk in my particular installation of Firefox, especially since nobody else mentions it. I've deliberately zoomed out, but otherwise this is what I see
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"School days, school days,
Dear old golden rule days,
Reading and writing and 'rithmetic,
Taught to the tune of a hickory stick..."
At which point the authorities step in to remind you that corporal punishment is forbidden and tell you that you'll have to take that song someplace where impressionable children (and impressionable teachers) don't hear it.
So, yeah - the song is a relic of "when we were a couple of kids."
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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Quote:Also, the CSS/formatting on the concordance has gone funny somehow for me. It might be a quirk in my particular installation of Firefox, especially since nobody else mentions it. I've deliberately zoomed out, but otherwise this is what I see
Dartz, I mentioned that in the original post. I did something to the page and I can't figure out what yet. I have to go out shopping in a little bit, but when I get back I'll try to rebuild the page from scratch using my original page template and see if I can get around whatever the problem is. Quote:Just a heads-up, but a few of the lines referenced in the Concordance somehow got left out of the text. The bits about teaching experience based on the dorama Jin, and the time at St. Trinians. There may be others I didn't notice.
Crap. At the advice of my prereaders I removed an entire passage that was effectively a teaching resume for Doug, and forgot I had glosses for it. Something else to fix when I rebuild the page.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Actually, as of twenty years ago - the last time I had any experience with the subject - corporal punishment was still practiced in at least one Oklahoma school system. And let me tell you it was quite a shock the first time I heard a teacher say "You want the paddle or will you take the zero" when a student didn't do their homework.
Yeesh
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Quote: I mentioned that in the original post
And there's the reason why I didn't put 'Attention to detail' on my C.V..... Sorry 'bout that. I've the unique ability to miss what's right in front of my face while homing in on the obscure.
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Oh, yes - the chapter itself.
I noticed more than a few references to the Slytherins being not the nicest people in the Wizarding World - "putting the first-years in their place" (or words to that effect) being one of them. (Yes, I know there are probably some decent Slytherins out there. We haven't seen (m)any in this story, though.) There was also the comment about the Sorting Hat keeping the numbers roughly even in the four Houses. House Slytherin might be facilitating a cycle of bullying/cruelty/sadism/whatever-one-calls-it, but why would the Hat send youngsters to that House to enable the cycle?
Is this something that Doug would notice? I'm sure that he would Do Something About It if he does notice...
--
Rob Kelk
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them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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Very nice. I love how Doug takes the time (sorta - he seems to be in a rush himself!) to startle the hell out of the students with a small dose of his own personal brand of mayhem.
And I will be eagerly anticipating Draco's heel-face-turn.
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Okay, found what went wrong with the concordance page -- somehow my working copy got changed from ASCII to UTF, and the difference in characterset broke something in the HTML parsing. (I should have noticed the file was more than twice as large as it should have been when it was uploaded to the site, but it'd been a long day by that point.)
Rob, two things. First, Draco is an unreliable narrator in his letters to his father. To some degree he tells his father what he thinks his father wants to hear, or things that aggrandize himself. Unless you see it happen from a narrative viewpoint, you should not necessarily trust what Draco reports to be exactly as things happened. Second, if Doug sees evidence of bully or abuse in any House, rest assured he will act.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Just wanted to mention that the main page still claims there have been no updates since 27 September 2012.
www.accessdenied-rms.net/dwmain.shtml
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Actually, that date is for changes to the information on that page, like making a story active or marking it complete. Though I'm damned if I can recall what I changed on that in September 2012.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Loved the Cosby line. My Dad had/has several of his albums when I was a kid and my brother and I memorized a bunch of his skits, include all 3 parts of Noah. 8)
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Well, there's also the wargaming approach to fire teams. Although with the systems I know -WH40K & Flames of War- I think that FoW is close to the reality even if it's four-five "men" to a base for rifles/smgs, two-three for 'light' crew-served weapons/HQ with NCOs & officers added as required.
However from what I've been gathering, a FoW minature is a representation of heck of a lot more things then what your looking at. 40K, the typical minimum imperial infantry squad's is five with a sergeant and they can go as high twenty to forty(for some army's) troops, yet can only be split into two squads half the size of the original blob.
Also MP-FPS videogames also tend do the five man maximum squad too. Other videogames I've found seem to range from three to six (some down to hardware limitations, others to add difficulty).
So the Milliner I've seen with a office on a major road's being fashionably retro?
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Bob, you mentioned the issue with the background color of the Concordance in the OP, but Dartz's screencap seems to show some issues with type size and line breaks/autowrap as well, and those may have been unique to him. Well, I had the background color issue when I read the Concordance last night (Dayum, that was hard to read), but the type size was fine and the text wrapped normally, so those two problems weren't universal.
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Raven, you're having problems today with the concordance?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Looking through the entire Concordance, I noticed a rather common grammar error in the entry for Arithmancy in Chapter Two's notes: "... the fact that that Hermione ..."
The extra "that" has been there for a while; I doubt very many people would notice it if you leave it in until you post Chapter Four's concordance.
EDIT:
On to Chapter Three's concordance:
Quote:"kohai-sempai" relationships
For those readers who aren't also anime fans, "kohai" and "sempai" can, in this context, be roughly translated as "underclassman" and "upperclassman", but have strong overtones of "mentored" and "mentor"; another translation for "sempai" would be "senior".
Just to finish off the comparison, the North American staff on Aria the Animation, Aria the Natural and Aria the Origination translated "kohai" as "junior".
--
Rob Kelk
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02-17-2014, 04:31 AM
(This post was last modified: 02-19-2019, 09:06 AM by Bob Schroeck.)
Still reading, but I hit a particular line and just had to ask.
"I bid them goodnight, politely declining an invitation to join the latest round of the cut-throat floating poker-like game the staff played at least two nights a week using Tarot cards."
Did Hagrid's predecessor as Keeper of the Keys import Cripple Mr Onion? 
EDIT as I, too, reach the concordance:
Quote:You've not been reading enough Potter fanfiction if you don't know that fanon Sirius Black gets a lot of mileage out of "Sirius/serious" puns.
I used one in my (unpublished) prose adaptation of "Harry Potter and the Flack-Jacket Mafia" (my friend Janet Neilson's crossover of HP with her Daria self-insert "The Look-Alike Series"). There's a moment where Marcus "Warlock" Bishop, the TLAS character she had as DADA teacher in place of Umbridge, is explaining a plan to clear Sirius' name (by getting him to testify under Veritaserum), and Harry blurts out "You're serious." I had him thinking No, he's Sirius, I'm Warlock, you're Harry Potter. Try to keep up. (It's actually sort of in-character because Bishop, like the real person Jan based him on, is a Pythoniac.) Now you know, and knowing is half the Mandatory Educational Content Segment.
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No, I read it last night before you got the fix in. I was just commenting on the fact that the only problem I ran into was the background color, but that Dartz's screencap looked like it had a couple of other problems.
BTW, multitool with button hooks for people with arthritis who want to be able to dress themselves.
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Quote:Looking through the entire Concordance, I noticed a rather common grammar error in the entry for Arithmancy in Chapter Two's notes: "... the fact that that Hermione ..."
An HTML validator I was using to diagnose my problem with the concordance flagged the double "that", but I couldn't find it; I suspect it's wrapped across a line break in the page source; since you gave me a lot more context than the validator did, I'll go find it and fix it right now.
And wow, no, it's not split across a line break. How did I fail to find that this weekend? Quote:I had him thinking No, he's Sirius, I'm Warlock, you're Harry Potter. Try to keep up.
I have a scene written for chapter 4 which similarly plays with this cliche:
"...which is how we know the Ministry is building an army ofheliopaths." The girl was the one I'd seen parting from the12 Grim crew when they'd entered the Great Hall that first night:long dirty-blonde hair, eyes so grey they were almost metallicsilver in color, slender almost but not quite to the point ofemaciation. Her voice was thin and dreamy and seemed to wanderaimlessly through various tones and pitches even as her gaze
wandered randonly about the room. Her name was Luna Lovegood,
and something about her struck me with a profound sense of dejavu from the moment she'd responded during roll call.
I had no idea how she had ended up discussing the Wizardinggovernment's secret army of heliopaths, whatever the hell theywere. (I made a mental note to corner Wilhelmina and ask her.)
What I *had* asked Miss Lovegood to describe was where their
instruction the previous year had left them in knowledge and
skill.
As she stood there expectantly, the voice of Terry Jones floated
through my mind: "And that, my liege, is how we know the earth
to be banana-shaped." In an attempt (possibly futile) to
maintain the illusion of dignity and being a grown-up, I finally
said (for lack of anything better), "Surely you're not serious."
She turned her wandering gaze more or less back to me, tilted herhead slowly, then replied, "Of course I'm not serious. StubbyBoardman is. And don't call me Shirley."
I resisted the urge to facepalm. I must be getting old if I'mfinding myself the straight man while the kids start zinging me
with my own favorite lines.
I wince a little when I reread this, because I really can't envision Doug being enough at a loss for words to actually respond with "Surely you're not serious", but I so want to use the punchline for this scene. (And because, oddly enough, it sets up something for well down the road in the final chapter.)
Quote:BTW, multitool with button hooks for people with arthritis who want to be able to dress themselves.
Oh, very cool -- I'll have to include that in the entry. Thanks!
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
I can't help but think this was a rather short chapter. Well written, but short.
Also, I liked the bits of Draco's letter scattered through the chapter. While they highlight that Draco is being quite the idiot by buying into the pureblood rhetoric, he's at the same time not stupid, and once you compensate for his myopic point of view and arrogance is quite smart in how easily he identifies Doug's position.
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*snicker* Marblehead? As in The Witches of Eastwick and Hocus Pocus Marblehead?
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