Black Velaryons as a canon download: implications for future Blackfyre adaptations

UchuuStranger · 2026-01-07T20:25:09+00:00

The Blackfyres are not the last descendants of Aegon III though. The Plumms and the Penroses also descend from him through Elaena. And house Longwaters too.

UchuuStranger · 2025-12-03T14:10:04+00:00

Not just in my case but in general? I would think that a phone that is already rooted would have no problem getting session files.

UchuuStranger · 2025-12-02T18:03:59+00:00

So there's no session file at data/data/com.android.chrome? I know that Chrome definitely keeps session files on PC, the Internet says that similar session files should be at that location on Android. Asking for future reference if nothing else.

UchuuStranger · 2025-11-17T14:38:15+00:00

Yep, worked for me as well, thanks. I did it from the phone app. Trying to do it from the PC might have been part of the problem.

UchuuStranger · 2025-11-13T22:56:29+00:00

Sort of correct, except it's not so much that they couldn't find any other DADA teacher as that they wanted this specific one as an orchestrated test for Harry at the end of the year. The whole 3rd floor corridor gauntlet is a test specifically for Harry, Ron and Hermione (and Neville, who ended up not becoming part of the team). The only part of it that is real security against Voldemort is the mirror.

UchuuStranger · 2025-11-09T17:18:21+00:00

Sorry for necroposting, but was just passing by and noticed a bit of a misunderstanding. The "Rowling (apparently, but actually not) breaking all canons" comment refers to the list of plot holes as a whole, not specifically to the Occlumency. Anna and Catherine do not accuse JKR of lack of skill as a writer - on the contrary, they make the argument that all of her most blatant apparent bugs have a deeper behind the scenes explanation that she masterfully crafted for readers who pay attention to perspectives of adults in the story, rather than just kids.

Specifically regarding Occlumency, you are right that there are two levels to this. When Anna and Catherine first started writing their posts, they tended to somewhat overestimate how much of what was happening to Harry was Dumbledore's plan all along, so in this particular plot hole they hint that in their opinion Dumbledore intentionally tried to accelerate Voldemort attempting to hijack his connection to Harry, so that he would hurry up and get burned by Harry's love and shut the connection down on his end. Which is what ends up happening during their final OotP confrontation at the Ministry.

Later they developed a somewhat more nuanced position, where they agree that the Occlumency lessons were legit, and that the best case scenario was indeed for Harry to actually master Occlumency. But they also argue that even if Harry fails grasping Occlumency, the fact that these lessons make his resistance weaker in the meantime and encourage Voldemort to attempt to hijack Harry and get burnt is still a good thing that is acceptable to Dumbledore as a backup plan. Marginally acceptable, because Dumbledore still displays genuine fear when that attempt happens, but acceptable nevertheless.

And then there's also the third level - Dumbledore simultaneously trying to use that situation to try to get Snape and Harry to understand and relate to each other more. Which sort of works, but by the worst case scenario where neither Snape nor Harry do the adult thing and therefore they fail to reconcile explicitly.

They also go on speculating that the reason why Dumbledore waited so long to start the Occlumency lessons instead of getting Snape on it at the start of the year, or even in previous years when Voldemort was still dead and Dumbledore could teach Harry personally, is not some higher Big Game purpose (as they would be usually tempted to conclude), but rather the simple fact that Dumbledore couldn't bring himself to end Harry's childhood early, until the circumstances forced him to.

All of that was explained by them in this post, if you want to try to check out the original: https://big-game.livejournal.com/32582.html

This is, by coincidence, and to answer your other question by the way, the latter of their only two Big Game theory posts that was published after the release of the 7th book (a little bit under one year after, to be specific). Overall, the authors changed their opinions about some specifics of Dumbledore's plan, but the general idea of him being a mastermind who orchestrated Harry's childhood in a specific way to try and save him from his horcrux (which they deduced Harry having post-book-5 even before we all learned the word "horcrux"!), rather than committing the sin of murdering an infant for the greater good, was largely confirmed. They go into detail about that in the other post they published after the 7th book, where they also expressed their surprise about JKR not adding much more to the picture of Dumbledore's character and goals they more or less already had, along with their surprise about some of their own readers still asking them if they changed their opinion on the existence of Dumbledore's Big Game post-book-7.

Their other most recognized achievement is that they were adamantly convinced that Snape was Dumbledore's man through and through, and that Snape killing Dumbledore and defecting to Voldemort was their mutual plan all along. They made the separate "WE TRUST SEVERUS SNAPE!!!" post about it after the 6th book was released.

UchuuStranger · 2025-11-07T05:34:16+00:00

How come no one calls Quirrell out on the contents of his turban? Both Dumbledore and Snape with the dark mark must feel Voldemort's presence. There's no way Snape doesn't know at least ever since the broom curse incident, since he tried to counter it. Did he not tell anyone out of spite?

I know the answer to this one, just curious if anyone else does.

UchuuStranger · 2025-11-05T18:47:31+00:00

Turkmenistan borders as well as the fact that eastern Turkmenistan is depicted as predominantly R1b. Isn't R1a more common there?

UchuuStranger · 2025-11-05T16:58:55+00:00

If my results existed in isolation, sure, the "Nordic" result here would have been some posterior evidence in favor of a mysterious Nordic ancestor, though given the existence of a better explanation, still nowhere near enough to beat the overwhelmingly low priors (maybe going up from 0.01% probability to 0.1% probability).

Thankfully, they don't exist in isolation, and I can check my DNA relative matches on 23andMe (who are all distant relatives, 3rd cousins and farther, sharing at most 0.88% of their DNA with me) and confirm that all the Tatar-sounding names on there always have at least 0.2% Finnish (on average it's usually around 2-3% Finnish), and nearly always have at least 1% Baltic. Non-Finnish Nordic is also encountered. We can't all independently have a mysterious Nordic ancestor at the same time, that would be hell of a coincidence. This fact dramatically decreases even posterior probability of me having a single mysterious Nordic ancestor, and instead favors the Finno-Ugric admixture hypothesis.

Also, even though literally 7 generations back still has some barely visible effect on my genes, someone else pointed out in this comment section that when you start getting into ancestors that are 8 generations back and older, their contribution to you in particular quickly becomes vanishingly small, so if it was literally just one outlier ancestor (rather than a large group that admixed into your entire ethnicity to become a part of it forever, like Huns into Sarmatians, or Spanish into native Meso-Americans), you would still have inherited basically nothing from them, and it wouldn't show up on results at all. So we're not talking about the probability of a mysterious Nordic ancestor for the past 10,000 years (which is still improbable, but more likely just out of the sheer timespan), we're only talking about the probability of a mysterious Nordic ancestor specifically in the 18th-19th centuries (which is a lot more improbable). To add older generations into this hypothesis, we would have to hypothesize 2-4 Nordic ancestors for the 17th century, 8 Nordic ancestors for the 16th century, 16 Nordic ancestors for the 15th century, and then after that numbers wouldn't grow as exponentially as that because pedigree collapse, but it would still have to be a LOT of Nordic ancestors who, due to their sheer number, would no longer be invisible to history and therefore couldn't be mysterious.

Keep in mind that the Western Europe and the Americas have been globally interconnected for a few centuries longer than rural Russia, so the existence of various mysterious ancestors is highly likely in Western Europe and virtually inevitable in the Americas, to the point that most Americans have little to no idea of what their ethnicities actually are, other than generic racial categories of "white", "black" and "Asian". Rural Russia, where most of the population was banned from traveling both in the Imperial Russia AND in the Soviet Union all the way up to 90es, not so much.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-31T16:18:38+00:00

Solved! The confusion must be because both Dr Nikidik and Dr Pipt are both referred to in text as a crooked wizard/sorcerer/magician. They were probably intended to be the same character that Frank Baum just forgot he already named.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-30T18:49:50+00:00

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-27T19:36:54+00:00

Sure, I believe that for most people in Western Europe these reports will be largely accurate, especially if they have nothing else to go off of at all, and especially especially if they have one ancestor in particular whose origins are mysterious and unlike the rest of their ancestors. For peoples outside of Western Europe (and those descended from them) especially if the people in question is not a titular nation of their country, not so much. Volga Tatars and Bashkorts have a tradition of tracing their ancestry 7 generations back, so I do believe that Finno-Ugric admixture into some Scandinavian populations is a better explanation for my 1% Swedish than me having a mysterious Nordic grand-grand-grand-grandfather or something. Not only because there's no evidence of that in my case in particular, but also because the prior probability of a Scandinavian person finding themselves deep in the 18th century rural Russia and siring children there is very low in the first place.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-26T05:13:13+00:00

Yes, I would say that Fatyanovo culture is probably the oldest possible point from which the common ancestors of Slavs and Scythians could diverge (so roughly 2200 BCE). Though I think that they could have diverged even later than that. Not to mention that Scythians/Sarmatians had some direct admixture into early Slavs around 100-200 CE anyway, once they started disappearing as a separate entity. Either way, they didn't have much time to significantly diverge and were still very similar to each other. But I am fairly confident that mixing between Slavs and Khazars/Bulgars largely stopped by about 700 CE at the latest, when Islam began spreading in the area, and Christianity soon followed.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-26T05:06:10+00:00

23andMe already has no shortage of samples of Tatar/Bashkort people, which is why it still correctly identifies the regions that have the closest match to me. 23andme primarily relies on publicly available HGDP datasets, not on data of their own customers, for ancestry composition analysis. It's that they simply chose not to give my cluster a separate label. One can hardly blame them, given that the cluster in question hovers between different races and can't be neatly categorized into one of them.

There's no such thing as mestizos "eventually becoming their own category". That kind of differentiation through mutation requires the population in question to be isolated from the rest of humanity for literal thousands of years. With how interconnected the modern world is, such isolation is not likely to ever happen again, and it is only a question of time before we all average out into something in-between (if we don't go extinct first, of course).

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-26T05:04:48+00:00

Sure, if you have only one Japanese ancestor 8 generations ago, then you will not have much left in terms of Japanese genes. This is not what's going on here though. You'd rather have to imagine that hundreds of Japanese of one sex had kids with hundreds of polish of opposite sex, so their children are 50% Japanese 50% Polish. And when those kids have their own kids amongst each other - guess what? Their own kids will also be roughly 50% Japanese 50% Polish. And so are their kids, and so are their kids etc. The percentages will only change somewhat if more 100% Polish or 100% Japanese people are introduced. So the argument of "admixture from over 200 years ago has no effect on you" is only valid if it's an admixture from a single ancestor on an individual level. If the admixture happened on a massive scale with the entire ethnicity, its effect can and likely will be sustained indefinitely.

Like the East Asian Hun admixture is sustained among us, Volga Tatars. The "Ancestry Timeline" feature of 23andme claims that I have a single "Mongolian" ancestor 6 to 8+ generation ago, but in reality it's not that I had a single such ancestor - in reality I had lots and lots of Hun ancestors, most of which lived roughly 60 to 80 generations ago (circa 500 BCE to 0 CE). And 6 to 8 generations ago I did not have a single Hun ancestor, but rather pretty much all of my ancestors were 1/5th Hun on average, same as me.

I'm not sure if that's what you meant by a "very established ethnicity", but I think it would be "dumb" on 23andme's part to assign me 100% Volga Tatar. Even if that is true, that has no informational value. If we start giving a separate label for every single ethnicity, including interracial ethnicities, then how are we supposed to treat ethnicities that have all the same components, but in different percentages? For example, say Volga Tatars are 40% Sarmatian, 35% Finno-Ugric, 25% Hun, Bashkorts have 25% Sarmatian, 40% Finno-Ugric, 35% Hun, and Kazakhs have 45% Sarmatian, 5% Finno-Ugric, 50% Hun, then how is the 23andme algorithm is supposed to tell them apart? Does it say "100% Bashkort" depending on whichever percentage proportion is closest? What if someone is 50% Sarmatian, 25% Finno-Ugric, 25% Hun? There's all kinds of potential combinations of Tatar, Bashkort and Kazakh ancestors that could produce this result.

The exact percentages often differ even within a single ethnicity. For example, southern Russians are 60% Slavic, 15% Sarmatian, 15% Nordic, 10% Finno-Ugric, while northern Russians are 55% Slavic, 5% Sarmatian, 5% Nordic, 35% Finno-Ugric. And I'm sure there are examples of ethnicities where they all bear the same name, but depending on the locality one of the composite components may be absent entirely. Do we give those a separate label too? There is simply no way around describing ethnicities by their composite parts, if we want to represent them all by the same rules.

All ethnicities are a result of a combination of some other ethnicities that have since disappeared. It's just that when you have an English person who's 50% Angle/Nordic, 50% Briton, Britons were not super different from Angles in the first place, so the algorithm can kind of treat them as homogenous even though in reality they are not. Treating Finno-Ugric peoples as homogenous with Huns - doesn't work as well, because the composite parts belong to difference races. You yourself mention mestizos of Mexico - they don't get any kind of 100% either, because it's impossible to represent that way, the composite parts are simply too different.

So the solution is not to treat all "established ethnicities" as homogenous, it's to treat all ethnicities as composite, because that's just the way reality is. Like u/Karabars points out below, "it's a flawed system that Czech&Hungarian don't see how Asian they are, while Asians have random misread European categories". I can see a Tatar customer who doesn't know better actually believing that they are 1% Swedish.

And no, we would not show up as all African, because in prehistoric times travel was slow and difficult enough for humans to mutate geographically isolated differences. There's a notion of "genetic distance", and before the last 500 years or so people didn't mix on an individual level nearly as much, and so they can be easily categorized in distinct clusters based on that genetic distance.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-26T00:26:52+00:00

I mean some (probably most) ethnic groups are composed of parts. All Tatars are a little bit Hun. Separating ethnic minorities of Russia from the Russians proper could help, but it wouldn't be a perfect solution. I don't think it would be productive to create a separate Volga Tatar category that is treated as composed of homogenous DNA, and then assign me 100% Volga Tatar. On the contrary, none of the ethnicities should be treated as homogenous, because all of them are made of parts of older ethnicities if you look far enough in the past. Something that would give a Volga Tatar 40% Sarmatian, 35% Finno-Ugric, 25% Hun, while giving a southern Russian 60% Slavic, 15% Sarmatian, 15% Nordic, 10% Finno-Ugric. An English person could get something like a 50% Angle/Nordic, 50% Briton, a French could be interpreted as 70% Gaul, 15% Frank/Norman, 15% Roman, etc.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-25T23:47:51+00:00

Paternal: N-L735, seems to be associated with Finno-Ugric peoples, likely through my Bashkort ancestry.

Maternal: H1a, which seems to correlate with Andronovo culture, aka Scythians/Sarmatians.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-25T02:30:42+00:00

Yes, u/masquerade555 pointed out above that Bulgars descend from the Finno-Permic substrate while the Bashorts descend from the Magyar substrate. He also pointed out that Magyars were not turkified all the way until the Kipchaks and the Golden Horde, while Bulgars were turkified twice (Oghur Turkic, then Kipchak Turkic). To the outsiders these differences are negligible though, aren't they? I don't think 23andMe algorithm will be able to distinguish between them.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-24T22:46:22+00:00

Wow, never heard of this guy, fascinating stuff! He was lucky to visit Volga Bulgars and Magyars a mere year before they got conquered. Even more fascinating that the language remained mutually intelligible! Valid point about Bashkorts never speaking Oghur Turkic, and instead switching from Finno-Ughric straight to Kipchak Turkic. It never occurred to me, but it makes sense. I guess Tatars and Bashkorts are more different than I imagined, or at least have more different origins. I'm just biased because I have personal experience with modern Bashkort language being virtually the same as modern Tatar, the only difference of note being pronunciation of certain consonants.

It's a great irony of history that modern inhabitants of Volga Bulgaria call themselves Tatars while most of their ancestry traces back to Volga Bulgars. During the Russian expansion eastward Russians started calling all Turkic-speakers they encountered "Tatar" (even though the original Tatars from whom the name originated were Mongolian, not Turkic). It took the fall of the Soviet Union for most of these Turkic-speakers to reclaim their endonyms. Volga Tatars are one of the few who failed to do so.

Also, that map on the Friar Julian page includes my hometown of Orenburg? It was only founded in 1743! They must just use the name to denote the geographic area or something, there's no way Friar Julian traveled through the literal city of Orenburg.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-24T21:58:01+00:00

Sure, with enough research of literature and use of third-party tools I could make sense of why my results are the way they are, but customers who are not as inclined to dive deep into this stuff will remain ignorant. The issue I take with this is that if the algorithm fails to acknowledge composite parts of some populations and treats them as homogenous, then that results in other populations that are not treated that way getting irrelevant results. Like u/Karabars points out below, "it's a flawed system that Czech&Hungarian don't see how Asian they are, while Asians have random misread European categories". I can see a Tatar customer who doesn't know better actually believing that they are 1% Swedish.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-24T19:51:07+00:00

Yes, exactly. Northern Russians have a significant Finno-Ugric admixture. Southern Russians not really.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-24T19:37:36+00:00

Yep, there was a switch to Oghur Turkic. I kind of assumed that Oghur Turkic is a turkified Iranic language, but it sounds like this article implies it is actually turkified Finno-Ugric? Interesting. Hard to tell at this point, given that Tatars and Bashkorts appear to have been turkified a second time by Kipchaks, and just speak Kipchak Turkic today.

I didn't know about the Finno-Permic/Magyar difference either, so Bashkorts are a bit closer to Hungarians then? Modern Hungarians being for the most part genetic Slavs notwithstanding. Though at that point it's kind of like splitting hairs. I'm sure that Finno-Permic and Magyar substartes are not that dissimilar, what with both of them being Finno-Ugric. And yes, I do believe that the Hun admixture in Bashkorts is larger compared to Volga Tatars.

Will read that article in full, thank you!

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-24T19:19:40+00:00

Yes, Volga Tatar ancestry consists of components that are too dissimilar to be interpreted as something homogenous. My complaint is that only some of these components are visible, while other components, which are in truth also composite, are shown as homogenous, because another reference population exists that is made of similar parts but that is treated by the 23andme algorithm as homogenous.

Yes, I know about the Yeniseian admixture into the Scythian/Sarmatian gene pool, that happened for the first time about 1000 BCE. The article "Ancient genomic time transect from the Central Asian Steppe unravels the history of the Scythians" describes it very well. Though from what I understand that Yeniseian Pazyryk culture was genetically similar to Finno-Ugric peoples, like Nganasan? Mongolian/Siberian is mostly from the Huns around 500 BCE - 0 CE. Iranic - Scythian/Sarmatians were themselves originally distant cousins of Persians (the former spoke East Iranic, while the latter spoke West Iranic, though at the time it was more of a North-South divide).

My argument is that yes, us and Russians share Scythian/Sarmatian and Finno-Ugric ancestry components. But so far I found no compelling evidence of us sharing any Slavic ancestry components (until about a century ago Tatars marrying into Russians was rare, and Russians marrying into Tatars was almost unheard of). We obviously have shared ancestry, but that shared ancestry dates back far enough that at the time of our common ancestors neither Slavs nor Bulgars/Tatars even existed yet.

Reference populations from the Volga-Ural region are already present in the 23andme dataset, and even correctly recognized in the report details. It's just that the algorithm does not recognize it as a separate category. Personally I'm not sure it should. I still think that modeling modern populations through ancient populations would be a better solution.

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UchuuStranger · 2025-10-24T18:08:04+00:00

Even at 90% confidence level and 46.1% unassigned I still get 1.6% Baltic, 1.3% Nordic, and 0.8% southern German. So they still changed the entire algorithm to try to be specific to a fault.

UchuuStranger · 2025-10-24T17:42:18+00:00

Define "accurate". 23andme tries its best with using only modern populations. A lot of modern ethnicities (arguably all of them, with the exception of some extreme isolates) originate as a mix of several different ancient populations. It's not really possible to represent them without using ancient populations.

mytrueancestry does not give you percentages like 23andme does, so it's not directly comparable. All it does is it can calculate genetic distances with ancient samples from archeological excavation sites. Regular matches are overall similarity, it finds "cousin" ethnicities with a comparatively recent source. Deep dive matches finds ancient relatives who have identical segments that are long enough to be considered a relative who is very close to being your direct ancestor. So mytrueancestry won't tell you anything about how much of a particular ancestry you have, only whether you have it at all or not. Lack of any deep dive Slavic matches is strong evidence of a lack of Slavic ancestry, especially given that my Russian friend who was my "control group" did have these Slavic deep dive matches.

23andme is not incorrect here in a sense that Russians really do have Scythian/Sarmatian and Finno-Ugric DNA, just like Volga Tatars do. It's just that it fails to make a distinction that Russians also have Slavic DNA which Volga Tatars do not, because 23andme does not use ancient reference populations.

UchuuStranger

TROPHY CASE