Nova Daily - 10 May 2026: Gilderoy Lockhart (Recap Week 19)

Hi!

Blogging is an amazingly fun enterprise: finding something to write about, and then putting pen to paper (or, rather, fingers to keys). The best part about blogging in my opinion is the moment when something that I had in mind comes together. Usually that's way before the first words find their way into the text field that chess.com provides.

The fun is in the challenge to come up with something new and create it from scratch. It's almost always a challenge, but also one that you can get better at if you do it more often.

However, there are people who don't like to spend the time that it takes to actually become good at something. In a way, they remind me of a very enjoyable character from the Harry Potter universe.

Gilderoy Lockhart

Gilderoy Lockhart is a famous wizard who has many heroic deeds to his name. He graduated from Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in 1982 as a Ravenclaw. While reasonably clever, he suffered from two drawbacks. To begin with, his magical prowess was mediocre, and so he had to put in effort to excel in anything. The second flaw is the one that meant his downfall: his prime motivation is his obsessive craving for admiration.

This vanity of Gilderoy Lockhart has become his raison d'être. He needs the love of the public. That Marilyn Monroe quote of "I knew I belonged to the public" applies to Lockhart very well. However, charming looks don't sustain the aura of a star, because as most people will realise at some point in their lives, beauty is ephemeral and invariably loses its allure.

To give himself a more lasting type of fame, he realises that he needs street credibility. For that, he needs to have something on his resume. Because he doesn't have his own heroic stories, he decides to appropriate the achievements of other witches and wizards, and does everything within his power to guard his reputation. This is how he becomes a villain in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Vanity is a very human quality, and to a large extent there isn't much wrong with it. I too have things that I want to be known and remembered by. My choice for my personal favourite blog is partly inspired by how I see myself (based on the level of effort and the monumental volume of it, A bish of a knightmare is my magnum opus in many respects). However, my vanity is somewhat in balance. I'm not motivated by quantitative attention, and as such I don't feel the pull of, say, the TB badge. I'd feel highly uncomfortable uploading daily and elbowing everyone else off the TB page.

Gilderoy Lockhart is a caricature, but a very useful one. His narcissism and vanity corrupt him to the point of putting other people and potentially the whole world in danger, just for the sake of his own ego and his inability to admit any personal flaws. The staff see through Lockhart, and so does Ron from the very start, but many people don't. Partly because they don't know better, partly because most people are unable to see through an illusion that they desperately want to believe in.

What Lockhart represents to me are a few things. One of them is the shadow sides of fame, and the willingness of people to only "become famous" for the sake of being admired. Enormous amounts of effort are squandered daily over ephemeral and superficial things like getting more likes and views. If the same level of energy was spent on the acquisition and training of durable skills, it'd spare the world a lot of garbage. And theft of intellectual property.

The week in chess

Just my scores this time.

My current scores:

Rapid rating: 2413 (+2)
Blitz rating: 2624 (=)
Bullet rating: 2565 (+4)
Survival: 63 (=)
Puzzle Battle: 2209 (=)
Puzzles: 2538 (-28)
Repertoire: 4497 moves (=)