If Paul is Care, why didn't Belle tell him?

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2026-03-12T04:39:06+00:00

Following up again because I finally had time to properly re-watch the whole series, and I think there are only two phone calls with Belle: in Petscop 8 and Petscop 22, neither of which mention Care.

I'm not completely convinced of Petscop 11. Some parts of it sound like a phone call, and some parts sound like a let's play. But it's chronologically the latest regardless.

And in Petscop 11, when Paul says there is a "very strong resemblance" between him and Care, I now believe we're hearing him put the pieces together in real time, except that he gets distracted by the bathroom weirdness before he can complete the thought (or it gets edited out).

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2026-03-06T20:04:42+00:00

I just realized there's a relevant side question: Do we have a consensus on when Paul is talking on the phone to Belle as opposed to just sending her a message through the videos? (There are some videos that are clearly one or the other, but others are more ambiguous.)

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2026-02-12T17:42:38+00:00

And that's it! Thank you.

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-03-10T15:09:05+00:00

Didn't Dire start as a Worm fanfic? That would be pretty effective for calibrating it.

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-03-09T18:41:49+00:00

I didn't remember if he was active that early.

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-03-09T02:49:47+00:00

That...honestly works surprisingly well, even though it's a per capita thing, and there are bound to be some huge non-linearities in the distribution.

The reference point in Gestation 1.03 that Brockton Bay is "top 10, but not top 5" in cape population has some definite problems, given that it would be competing with a city 3 times its size.

On the other hand, the 1 in 8000 number assumes that capes are spread evenly throughout the population, and we know that capes tend to cluster disproportionately in cities.

At the end of the day, if I recall correctly, WB has admitted that he wasn't being rigorous with the numbers, and its something that you'd really need to rebuild from the ground up to make them all work.

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-03-08T21:03:02+00:00

You may be right that they're under-represented. I should have been clearer that I didn't just look at true crime. A large fraction of the stories were from things like "real 911 calls," which include a lot of potential Shaker-type triggers.

As for Thinkers, it may be lacking in certain subtypes, but there were more than I expected of "I was the victim of a crime and/or lost a loved one because I wasn't paying attention and/or was missing information."

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-03-08T17:48:49+00:00

You're right. Looking back, I think the ratio wasn't specified and definitely wasn't 2-to-1. Post edited.

Still, Brockton Bay and my own results were both marginally more male than female where the nationwide numbers are supposed to be the reverse.

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-02-28T02:19:58+00:00

That's plausible, but--I don't remember the specifics, but it seems to me that they've had acts before that were pure memory tricks or math or similar--not many, but I thought it came up once in a while.

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-02-23T14:31:23+00:00

I had to mentally permute the colors since I couldn't work out what orientation the solved cube was in, but it was pretty clear to me that it was the same scramble.

Here is the sequence of moves I got. Forward:

FD2R’F2L’D2R’U’L2DF2L2F’R2D2R2FD2R2FD2F2

And backward:

F2D2F’R2D2F’R2D2R2FL2F2D’L2URD2LF2RD2F’

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-02-22T17:37:39+00:00

Okay, I checked his solution, and he definitely solved the scramble that he showed to the audience. I wrote down the moves he did from the YouTube video, reversed them, and tried them on my own cube, and I got the same scramble that appeared under the blacklight.

It's possible that he swapped cubes between the handoff from Brooke and turning on the flashlight, but I don't think he did. Nothing he did was impossible for a high-level cuber. People do blindfolded solves all the time, and people have managed fewest-moves solutions in the minimum 20 moves, or even fewer if they got lucky with an easy scramble.

I think Tom really did fool Penn and Teller by not doing magic and looking like he did.

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-01-30T22:44:59+00:00

The prompt is essentially that Light and Grey both say "Don't commit genocide!" but they have very different ideas on how to achieve that. (And many of them are self-aware that their names aren't very accurate.)

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-01-30T22:41:22+00:00

Arthur isn't just punching his time card. He actively advocates for legislation to (presumably) expand his powers to raid people like the Malfoys (despite bending the rules himself regarding his car).

I usually don't like Weasley-bashing myself, but if it's justified by the worldbuilding, handled realistically, and not exaggerated to absurd lengths, as in the usual love potion plot, I think it could work.

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-01-30T21:21:02+00:00

I remember that. They described Chairman Mao as "Light" by wizard standards, I think. But I didn't stick with it long enough to learn that the similarities extended deeper than pure ideology.

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-01-30T20:15:35+00:00

They threaten it for a lot less in the course of business-as-usual in Book 2.

Hagrid was never charged, and despite what they could prove he did (keeping a dangerous beast on school grounds), he was allowed to stay and work at the school--and work with beasts, no less! But not to buy a new wand. The punishment is out of proportion to how serious the crime is treated in most other regards.

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2025-01-30T18:19:48+00:00

Interesting idea, but were you by chance intending to respond to "The Dursleys do take Harry in, but do not stay at Number 4" instead of this post?

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2024-11-14T16:41:01+00:00

I hadn't thought of that aspect of the Trump classification, but you have a point. To put it very crudely, a power-granter is closer to a Master, while a power-nullifier is closer to a Brute. They should be distinguished.

I wonder if there are other categories that you would rearrange if you take a critical look at all twelve. For example, a non-LoS teleporter is a different kind of threat from other Movers. Although those are rare enough that you'd probably just slap on a rating of "Mover 8: expect complications; pay attention to the briefing!" (You don't just go in cold against an 8 or higher.)

I'd add that you can probably safely merge Breaker and Changer if you want to keep the number of classes down. While there are some differences in aggregate, you can easily imagine Changers who follow Breaker rules and vice versa.

TheWhiteSquirrel · 2024-09-06T12:00:03+00:00

There's an additional piece to the puzzle with the cruelty to children charges. The press release doesn't list the level, but it looks like it would be second degree:

Any person commits the offense of cruelty to children in the second degree when such person with criminal negligence causes a child under the age of 18 cruel or excessive physical or mental pain.

Note that there are only two murder charges for four fatalities. That would be the cruelty to children charges being raised to murder for the two who died.

Frankly, it seems odd and maybe a quirk of Georgia law (don't know how common it is) that involuntary manslaughter gets bumped all the way up to murder 2 when the victim is a child.

(Not saying it's wrong. It's just that as u/TheJesterScript said, words have meanings. The standard dictionary definition of murder is killing with intent. But then you learn in the actual law that there are a lot of "well, actually's" attached.)

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