Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

koryos:

let’s call this post A BIOLOGIST’S 1 AM ISSUES WITH THE BASILISK IN THE MOVIE VERSION OF THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS (BY POPULAR REQUEST)

and let’s be clear most of the time i dabble in mammals and not herps so i’m expecting a herpetologist to whisk this post away when i’m done and get in on the real schooling

now let’s be clear there are some major differences between movie basilisk and book basilisk. by perusing my copy of chamber of secrets i can give you the major points of the description:

• very large (“thick as an oak trunk,” with a mouth wide enough to swallow Harry, a 12 year old gryffindor child, whole)
• “bright, poisonous green”
• “bulbous yellow eyes”
• “fangs long and thin as sabres”
• fuck i love rowling’s descriptions OKAY

and you know what, it’s pretty ok. aside from the size (i’ll discuss this in just a minute) it really works. with the bright green coloration, I always imagined it looking like a green mamba or a boomslang, two types of highly venomous snakes. (yes, a boomslang IS a real thing that JKR did not make up as a polyjuice potion ingredient!)

Above: a gorgeous boomslang. Tell me that fucker wouldn’t look awesome huge and CGI.

Okay now let’s look at movie!basilisk.

Oh…

Oh, no.

Keep reading

squintyeyeblinks-blog asked: cheers, halorvic~ if you drew sir ian mckellen as an animal, what would he be?

halorvic:

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, both tawny frogmouths, and that’s basically only because of a vague similarity I noticed between these two photos

so

Best mates for life

The one thing you never say to a 911 police dispatcher….

discipleofdante:

lulladie:

“You just sit behind a desk with a headset, how stressful can your job really be?”

How stressed would you be if this was your daily shift?

A child calls 911.  “My mommy and daddy are melting. They won’t wake up.”  [Child’s parents have been murdered and are covered in their own blood, child is 4 and doesn’t know their location.]

A man, middle-aged: He tells you that he has a gun and he’s going to shoot himself.  You hear his wife in the background and his kids are crying.  You hear his wife ask “What are you doing!? NO!” and the sound of a gunshot. You hear the gunshot again. The kids have stopped crying.  The man is heard, and hangs up.  [Family murder and suicide.]

A woman in hysterics:  Her vehicle became stranded on the road. A man offered to help her, and instead abducted one of her small children.  The woman won’t calm down to give you pertinent information and becomes suicidal.

A man calls, young adult: You can hear scuffling and nothing else at first, and then the sounds of pain.  The caller manages to tell you he’s been shot.  You hear someone else in the room, and you stay on the phone while trying to get information from the caller and listen to his death rattles as he dies on the line. [Caller was shot by an intruder.]

A woman calls, elderly:  There is an intruder on her property. She sounds calm, a little confused as to why he’s there.  She doesn’t seem to know where she is. Suddenly she is heard screaming bloody murder, over and over, as he kills her on the line. Link to Call: (Very graphic, you hear her die.)

And then the plethora of calls like assaults, DUI, medical (where yes, sometimes they die as you walk them through what to do until EMS gets there.  It’s very easy to feel responsible for things you have no control of) angry complaints about burger king making their burger wrong, suicides…the list goes on and on.  And these can sometimes be daily occurrences depending on where you work. 

Dispatchers are also prone to PTSD due to exposure to listening to people dying from violence, health problems, accidents, auto accidents, and other things the 911 dispatcher must respond to on a sometimes daily basis.

And, most importantly, dispatchers carry on their shoulders their officer’s safety.  Knowing where they are, where they are going, if there is danger where they’re going, getting them the help they need immediately, and sometimes even listening to an officer be killed over the radio.

It is a harsh job and not meant for everyone, and nobody should ever say you are just “Sitting behind a desk with a headset on.”

These people should be lauded as heroes. If rather be a cop than a 911 dispatcher. Hearing this happen in real time and being powerless to stop it. That would break me in a second. Just thinking of that makes me want to cry.

(via lupinatic)

loveandddrevenge:

amphetaheroin:

thepondsaregone:

thorinoakenbutt:

castielandpie:

poryqon:

it bothers me that Kansas and Arkansas are not pronounced the same

I’m from the UK and I have been pronouncing Arkansas as Ar-Kansas my whole life

For all my non-american friends, Arkansas is pronounced ark-an-saw

WHAT

WHAT

I’m laughing

(via academicfeminist)

exeggcute:

this is mean and terrible but it exhausts me to be around people who haven’t finished going through their pretentious asshole phase like okay holden caulfield i know we’re all helplessly suckling at the teat of modern media but can you shut up and play some goddamn mario kart for like five minutes

(via academicfeminist)

assetandmission:

goddessofidiocy:

[quietly breaks table] natasha romanoff is not a romantic prop to use interchangeably 

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

catastrophizer:

ahavaa-things:

baitnswitchblade:

shalottcinq:

chuppery:

Lol…the fact that people are getting seriously upset and offended by Banksy’s Dismaland makes me feel like I must live in an art “bubble”… like people think this a real amusement park? What. Its not an ~*edgy*~ version of Disneyland, its an installation meant to provoke an audience.. Its supposed to be creepy and confusing. Also he’s always made over the top, in your face art…almost always focused on politics and consumerism. 

Tl;dr Seeing non-artists react to art makes me laugh sometimes

this post is preformance art

#banksy isnt trying to provoke anyone he is creating a product to be consumed by people who want to fantasize about being an activist #without actually having to perform activism #he knows his audience and he knows what he is doing and its getting him attention and money #his success is built on the very things he claims to criticize and thats why he never examines those things too deeply #otherwise his business model would fall apart #he is not the first artist to do this nor will he be the last #and for the record: the idea that art should be intellectually inaccessible to non-artists is a concept rooted in classism #ergo any art that aims to dismantle violent capitalism and combat class based oppression #really cannot be ‘beyond’ the understanding the layman #by the nature of its design #final conclusion: banksy is shit (via)

I’ve seen people commenting on and critiquing it from an art perspective, so we run in different circles maybe? 

like, I can give you the five hundred words about why every time i see something of Banksy’s i want to bang my head on something hard. 

I feel like it’s very hard to describe anything Banksy has ever done without using the word sheeple sincerely, which is why he irritates me as an artist.  He’s the guy in your freshmen college art class who does a - shit, I don’t know, a painting of a mcdonald’s as a church with ronald mcdonald hanging out little cups of pepsi for communion for his first project, y’know? 

and then the professor says hm i think this is a solid idea but have you considered expanding it maybe?  because they’re too polite to say oh gooooooooooooood

and the freshman art dude says no no, you don’t get it, see, the mcdonald’s is a church.  because today, in america, people idolize fast food and convenience over god or morality, not that i believe in any sky fairies myself, let me tell you about the flying spaghetti monster

and everyone in the entire class is silently screaming shut UP JOSH

and the next project he does is a painting of the statue of liberty, but fat, or wearing low rise jeans instead of robes?  and the psychic energy of twenty-eight full grown adults thinking shut up shut up shut up can’t even touch him, he’s going to spend all semester doing this and oh god what if you ever get assigned to give feedback on his work, what are you going to say?  if you express any criticism whatsoever he will assume you don’t “get it” and explain it to you for about a hundred days and you will have to stab yourself with a paintbrush to escape

fuck.  where was I?  anyways.  banksy is the spirit of That Art Dude, and dismaland is the spirit of The Semester You Got Stuck in that Art Class with the Art Dude. 

EDITED TO ADD:

i wrote all that, and then I googled images of banksy’s art just to reassure myself that I wasn’t being too harsh, and immediately found his piece on the Mona Lisa holding a rocket launcher. 

like.  the problem is not that BANKSY is too INTELLECTUAL and his pieces are too COMPLICATED for pleb minds, okay?  it’s the mona fucking lisa with a gun, EVERYONE GETS IT. 

human-flesh-search

(via lupinatic)