I'm reading Ever Upward which is so far pretty good. Harry runs away from the Dursleys at age 8, and ends up secretly being raised by the Basilisk underneath Hogwarts. Meanwhile, Dumbledore et al realize Harry is gone from Privet Drive, so they freak out that he is missing and maybe dead. Question: is Harry supposed to automatically get a Hogwarts acceptance letter when he turns 11? If yes, and if the letter is addressed to the Chamber of Secrets, 1) can an owl even deliver it there? 2) What happens when McGonagall sees the address on the letter?

If that was all it took to find the Chamber, after all, maybe someone could have written a letter to the Basilisk and asked an owl to deliver it.

 

Not exactly, the letter start to arive on jul 24, which just happens ro be a week before Harry's 11th birthday.

Probably not. Owls would be able to locate it, but that doesn't give them any special means of entry.

She'd likely assume that the person who kidnapped Harry managed to obscure their location through some form of concealment charm or by confounding the item thar writes down the student's location.

That's not a reasonable assumption.
For one, nobody knew there was a Basilisk in the chamber of secrets, and more importantily, you need an actual name for the post owls to find somebody, which the post owls do through the magical connection between a person and their name.

 

Aha, yeah, in this story it's possible to enter and leave the chamber through some underground tunnels that open outside of Hogwarts' grounds, but I guess more conventionally the chamber has to be closed off to prevent the basilisk from escaping. Thanks.

 

Update: in the above series, Harry *did* get an acceptance letter addressed to him in the Chamber, and delivered by an owl. Apparently it was auto-generated by some process inside Hogwarts without anyone paying attention to the letters going out, so when Harry showed up to start classes, everyone was shocked. He had been presumed dead. The series is mostly pretty good. There were 3 long parts and some shorter ones planned out in advance, so the 3rd long part wrapping up meant the story was supposed to be complete. But at around that point, the author decided to keep writing, and several more long parts ("long"=100K+ words) were added, with various characters getting an idiot ball during some parts. So there was a drop in quality but it still wasn't too bad. I'm ok recommending.

 

Yo, guys. Have dropped out of HP fanfiction for the past two years and I wanted to catch up and see if there is any shining light that I have missed. But either the forum has slowed down on sharing good Harry centered fics or there is really nothing good left, because I found nothing of interest in the library. Anyone got a gem, they might want to share?

 

This forum is pretty quiet and has been for a while. The subreddit r/hpfanfiction is still fairly lively. I don't post there but I sometimes look there for happenings and recs. As for recent reads, I liked the Ever Upward series, though it was finished in 2021 so it might not be new to you. "The Delicate Art of Raising Thestrals" (Harry/Luna) is a WIP that is good in some ways, but updates are slow and it got a bit mushy for my tastes, so I've paid less attention lately. Delenda Est Rebooted is pretty good but hasn't been updated since March. I like "Too old to be this young" (funny writing) but it is Tomarry which may be a breaker for some readers, plus it is WIP. In general I'm trying to stop reading WIP's because it becomes too difficult to remember what is happening in multiple stories getting updated infrequently.

New Blood has a dedicated following and it is updated 2x a week pretty reliably, so I've been following it, but it's a Super Hermione story that is ridiculously verbose a lot of the time. It has clever ideas but I'd give a mixed recommendation. DLP has a thread about it.

Spacebattles is very active but doesn't have much HP stuff since HP is by now almost as outdated a fandom as Star Trek. Spacebattles is mostly about media fandoms that I don't know anything about so I don't look at it much. But if you're more up to date than I am, you might like it.

 

There have been some decent stuff, but many people (myself included), tend to just recommend fics on the Discord rather than actually submitting them for review on the forums.

 

Oh, could you share a link to the discord maybe?

 

There's a link to it on the forum's mainpage.

https://discord.gg/dlp

 

Aha, thanks for this info. Unfortunately I hate Discord and don't plan to go there, but it's good to at least know what is happening.

 

Fanon has many such things to cure a hangover, anything from a super ritual that prevents them entirely (lol Cadmean), to potions that negate the effects. My question is simple.

Alcohol is a poison. Would not a simple bezoar sober someone up, or fix the hangover? Would it work on firewhiskey or any other magical drink?

Honestly though, the thought of swallowing a mass of essentially magically imbued goat hairball and other matter would probably make me hurl to the point of being insensate.

 

A hangover is less due to alcohol in the system and more dehydration as a result of the alcohol being in the system, right? I think a bezoar before you go to sleep might prevent the hangover. Though, that does lead to the question on if a bezoar is only effective on magical poisons or all poisons.

 

Anecdotally, heavily hydrating with water while slamming cocktails doesn't make a difference on the feelings of fuckme if I have to wake up early the next morning. Especially if I wake up between, like, 4 and 8 hours after falling "asleep" after drinking.

I don't know any science papers that study it, but I don't think that more water helps (it certainly doesn't hurt, however). Hangover seems to me to be a function of alcohol over time plus sleep time, not alcohol over hydration plus sleep time.

If it were just a result of dehydration, you could drink a cup of water after every shot, and, again anecdotally, that doesn't work. Alcohol has many more effects on the human body other than as a dehydrator. eg, blood sugar, nervous system inhibition, increase of blood pressure and heart rate, changes to thought processes, changes to inner ear function, increased liver function all in the short term.

 

Is there a way to see on fanfiction.net the dates on which individual chapters were posted? There is a WIP that I'm following but have forgotten what was going on in it, so I don't remember what chapter I read last.

Added: story is Delenda Est Rebooted which was updated a few days ago, in case anyone cares. It is an ok story but I can't really say so far that it's better than the original, which I also liked. So, I don't really see the point of the reboot.

 

I stopped the reboot because I just flat got tired of the word, "lieutenant."

 

Weird I don't even remember that word from it.

 

Usually when trying to track chapter releases, I'll look for the first review for a particular chapter.

 

Damn, that's smart.

 

Lionheart is the best thing (and one of the only good fanfic) I've read in the past year.

 

Just something that came up in my mind. We have some amalgamation texts mentioned in canon (standard book of spells 1-7. , but I wonder how many books in the library are just a single tome dedicated to the mastery of a single spell. Secrets of the Darkest Art seems to be one w.r.t. the composition and construction of the horcrux. IIRC, Goblet of Fire had like 3 books written solely on the summoning charm.

Taure had one I think in the Victoria Potter stories. Iron Skill or something. I wonder what else would be there.

What other single spell textbooks can yall see existing? Think there's books there on the stunning curse? Maybe how Albus managed to stun everybody in his office in book 5 (unless it was his own spell that he created?). A treatise on the leg-locking curse?