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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4314 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Probably a long shot, but has anyone here got a copy of the hpmor-affiliated song “Hermione’s Theme: Innocence”? It’s an instrumental piece uploaded to SoundCloud by a user called PurelySadistic. I recall listening to and enjoying it around 2015 or so. I think it might have been featured in the audiobook version of hpmor at some point, but it looks like song itself has completely disappeared from the internet. If anyone happened to download a copy of it and is willing to share I’d much appreciate it :)

is this it? used yandex (they maintain their own index, based, and probably filter copyright-infringing sites a bit less than google/bing), result 5 https://web.ligaudio.ru/mp3/hpmor%20%E2%80%94%20hermione%20theme%20is%20innocence

my 'process': try archive.org's audio section (nothing), then google (nothing), bing (nothing), yandex

It is! Thank you for digging this up!

I haven't heard the tune physically in a long time, so it's pretty interesting to note all the subtle ways in which the version in my head has drifted from the original. I was vaguely aware that Yandex had better results than US engines for e.g. piracy and culture-warrish topics, but it never occurred to me to use it to search for this song.

Yandex is censored regarding internal Russian politics, but for everything else, it's less censorious than the alternatives. This is a tip I picked up from Gwern's big page of tricks: https://gwern.net/search. Quite long, but I cannot overstress how worthwhile of a read it is for anybody who wants to do serious research online.

It's mentioned in the description of this youtube video which will presumably have dialog over it. https://youtube.com/watch?v=5HGJ05oSeYw

Good luck with your white whale.

Nailed my own a few years ago. When I was 15 or so, I downloaded this demo of a game called "Atomic Superball (The Chicken Edition)" and played the heck out of that thing. No idea how many hours. And then when I was 20 or so, it occurred to me: I could buy the actual game now.

Of course almost all traces of it had vanished. The website was still up but payment/delivery was non-functional, and no one ever responded to the email address.

More than a decade passed.

Still I thought about that game from time to time, and occasionally went digging for it. At long last, I found a couple of videos on vimeo or something of a dude playing with it. Commented asking if there were any chance he might still have his copy. Shared the story of how much I loved it and so on.

Surprise surprise, the actual creator of the game saw this and reached out to me. We talked about it back and forth over email for a while, and he was gracious enough to send me a copy.

It was... okay. The parts I liked from the demo were still awesome, but the rest of it, the levels, the unlockables, all that stuff, was kind of meh. After some soul-searching I decided to be honest with the guy about how I felt.

"Yeah," he said. "That's why we put that stuff in the demo."

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