Author: Eneasz

I somehow missed in my first read-through that Snape had removed the memory of his presence from everyone who witnessed the Harry-summoning. Which – first of all – holy crap! How did I miss that level of malfeasance? But secondly, makes you consider just what a really powerful and dedicated group of wizards could do with rituals if they really put their minds to it. Might they even be able to nearly-perfectly erase an entire city of out of the world’s memory?

I used a time-rewind-ish sound effect for the Obliviation. I know the repeated Obliviations aren’t actually a time-rewind, but it felt very appropriate given the trail-and-error nature of the attack. Perhaps I’ve played too many video games, but I was reminded of the fail-rewind-try again mechanics of Prince of Persia and Braid immediately, so I jumped right to that.

The Mr Hat-and-Cloak whisper was frustrating. The first time he appeared I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do with his voice, but I wanted something interesting. So I did several different takes of his lines, figuring I’d pick whichever sounded best, and apply some sort of filter. As I was listening to them I thought “Hm… this might sound kinda cool if I just layered one over the other…” I tried it and liked the effect and went with it. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a procedure for what I did, which made replicating it this week darned difficult. I don’t feel that this is quite as good as before, but I don’t have the time to redo it entirely. Hopefully it’s very close, and it certainly won’t have been the first voice to have changed over time.

Martyrdom has been given a bad name by religion. Not surprising, since religion tends to poison whatever it touches. But at it’s core it is still a noble concept – to give up one’s life for something one deems to be more important for society or humanity. To gain more fulfillment of your utility function by dying to support a goal than could be gained by continuing to live – it is tragic and awe inspiring.

Belief in an afterlife seems to cheapen the whole concept. Jesus didn’t permanently die for anyone’s sins – he was temporarily inconvenienced. As was pointed out in 39, dying isn’t so horrible when it doesn’t end your life. When someone who knows that death is permanent accepts a significant risk of death, giving their life over for good, it feels to me like it means far more. This may be self-serving bias. But I think of Tricia Glasswell as a hard-bitten cop with no delusions of an afterlife, and it makes me want to write a fanfic-fanfic of her story. Facing annihilation when there is no afterlife recourse – that is hard-boiled badassery.

One might wonder why I take off for the holidays. Since I work a standard office job, the holidays should mean extra time for podcasting, not less. And indeed, I had originally intended to run 52 episodes a year. I don’t have any family that celebrates holidays in state (raised Jehovah’s Witness), and I was happily single. My first holiday non-episode was forced on me by a new relationship that exploded into my life back in Summer of 2011 (damn, has it really been that long?).

Now I’ve got a much larger social circle and all sorts of social obligations around the holidays that take up the extra time I gained from having work off, and then some. Not that I’m complaining, life is great. I try to always keep a one-episode buffer in case of emergencies. I’ve had to dig into it once this year due to sickness, and it’s a bit stressful running for several weeks afterwards with no margin for error while I build up another episode buffer. But it did allow me to continue putting out episodes without any unscheduled interruption. :)

So Happy Holidays everyone! There’s a brief Omake next week, and we’ll be back to regular episodes in the new year!