Monday’s final How I Met Your Mother episode is going to go down in the history books as the best wrapup to a series ever. It shows just what can be accomplished when the show runners really know where they’re going and plan it out in advance. It’s particularly impressive coming off of the worst season of the show ever.
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An idiosyncratic list of the most intriguing, most mind altering, and just plain fun books/movies/games/etc. I read/watched/played in (not necessarily published in) 2013:
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Continuing to think about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, I noticed that the Stanford Prison Experiment continues to confuse me. Just what was Quirrell really thinking here? On no level did this make sense. And then I realized that I had neglected one key event in the story. Bellatrix comes to believe that her master is inside Harry. At the time I just assumed without reflection that this was just a necessary part of the plot to free her, but what if it’s more? In fact, what if it was one of the main purposes of the whole breakout? Voldemort is preparing Bellatrix to be ready for the time when he moves from Monroe/Quirrell’s body to Harry’s.
Now if this were any regular fiction, I’d stop there, but consider the author for a moment: Eliezer Yudkowsky, a man who does research in artificial intelligence and is fascinated with the idea of AIs and the singularity. Hmmm.
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An idiosyncratic list of the most intriguing, most mind altering, and just plain fun books/movies/etc. I read in (not necessarily published in) 2012:
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We now have two-and-a-half more chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality to consider. Chapter 85, while awesome and sad, doesn’t add a lot to the mystery. Nor does Chapter 87, which is primarily further character development for Harry and Hermione. But Chapter 86, now that’s interesting.
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To my mind the big open question in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is the identity of Hat-and-Cloak. I think there are two possibilities:
(Well I suppose there’s a possibility he/she is both of the above, but that seems overly complex, especially if the people who wear the hat and cloak are not working together.)
So which is it?
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