Ok Snape, Voldemort and Harry are the three brothers but do you realise that Dumbledore is Death ? He greeted Harry at King’s Cross and was the one behind Snape and Voldemort’s death.
*epic jaw drop*
old friend
Fuck man
He’s the one who gave Harry the invisibility cloak too
For fuck sake
And he had the stone and the wand too
HOW IS THIS BOOK SERIES STILL FUCKING ME UP. ITS BEEN YEARS. WHEN WILL I HAVE MY FREEDOM BACK JOANNE? WHEN????
Force kids in school to read crappy, overrated books that are “the best books ever written” solely because they’re “classics” and then call those kids idiots because those aren’t the kind of books they like to read and sit back and wonder why we have a nation full of multiple generations worth of people who willfully and proudly refuse to read.
hello
I read every day in elementary school. I ate books up like they were the best thing in the world. Then middle school happened and they forced me into reading the books they thought were more important. Some of which are jn my opinion some of the worst books I’ve ever had the misfortune of laying eyes upon. They completely ruimed my interest in reading and only after high school have I managed to start reading books again.
Oh, and don’t forget trying to cram as much meaning into those “classics” as possible. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
what are the worst classics?? in your opinion?
Honestly fuck the great gatsby
Lord of the flies. I get it you’re clever and white people are awful now learn to fucking write dialogue and create characters I give two shits about.
Most classics are the epitome of “makes u think” honestly
Fucking catcher in the rye
The Grapes of Wrath. I swear to Christ, I wanted to light that book on fire.
The whole idea of “just copy the notes from someone else” always kinda frightened me because personally I take notes in a shorthand language that makes sense to exactly no one except me. Like I’d feel awful for anyone who tried to copy my notes when they’re just
Story time, When i was in highschool i got in trouble a lot from people copying off me (Yeah love those school rules, someone else cheats without my consent and I get in trouble) so i started taking my notes in a mixture of french, english shorthand, and irish, all of which was written not with the latin alphabet, but the derrillian alphebet that i created in middle school for the language i was making. In short they were a fucking mess and only comprehensible to me. I’ll look later today after i get some sleep and see if i can find my old notebook
wicked
I wrote down my locker combination in binary all throughout high school. Kept it displayed on my assignment pad for whenever I forgot it. Not that anyone was actively trying to break into my locker, but it was something.
Y’all work too hard.
Took all my notes in high school and college in cursive and textbook shorthand. Made a kid cry when I offered to lend her my notes.
I heard about this the other day and it’s honestly more fucked up than if they’d just whitewashed the whole cast
But no, POC people are allowed to exist…but they don’t get to be lead characters or heroes or anything they can just be the silent servants of the white main characters instead
SO MUCH HATE FOR THIS MOVIE
I remember going to see the Prince of Egypt in theaters when it first came out. That movie was fire
this is your psa to NOT USE AO3 TAGS the same way you would use tags on tumblr! AO3 goes through a lot of effort to create and track tags, whereas tumblr is freeflow and blog-respective. please only use AO3 tags that have story relevancy, NOT AS PERSONAL TAGS.
I’ve read multiple posts from ao3 mods saying this is not true.
FROM AO3′S OWN TUMBLR:
“The kind of one-off commentary tags that are frequently referred to as Tumblr-style tags do not put any kind of extra strain on the database, or require more work from the wranglers than any other Additional Tag, such as Romance or Angst or Pretzels. Even the fact that there are a lot of them isn’t really an issue.”
“It doesn’t create more work for the wranglers than the simple act of wrangling already does. And trust us: the wranglers really, really like organizing your tags in the background.”
AO3 mods have confirmed themselves that there is nothing wrong with people rambling in tags. It doesn’t strain the database, it isn’t any harder on the wranglers than any other tag. In fact, rambling tags are probably easier for them to chuck into the freeform or additonal category than someone who accidentally tries to create a new tag for a ship or kink or something.
Don’t tell people they can’t express themselves in the tags. It’s not just “ummmm lol so yeah” kind of stuff, some of it expresses things that are hard to tag for but the readers might want to know about the fic ahead of time. For example one of mine: “this is really just fluff + flirting and implied stuff at the end” or “X embarrassing Y and annoying the hell out of Z”. Should that stuff be in author’s notes? Probably. Am I going to put it there? For various reasons, no, the main reason being that you can’t see author’s notes from the outside of the fic.
In general, just stop spreading misinformation please, it took me two seconds to look up AO3′s actual opinion on rambly tags instead of assuming.
Welp, looks like I’ll have to do a mea culpa here. Did not bother to do recent fact checking since I knew in the past it was not an encouraged thing to do. However, I now stand corrected. It’s not my personal favorite thing to see, but as I abuse tumblr tags, I can’t hold it against people for using it.
Carry on, fic writers/artists/podficcers.
It just looks really obnoxious though so I wonder why people do it anyway, even if it doesn’t really cause any strain on the servers. I understand making new tags for new ships or odd little fandom names for certain concepts, or even the occasional tag that’s some inside fandom joke, or using them to post trigger warnings with other important shorthand info about what the fic is about, like that other tumblr user above pointed out they use them for.
But sometimes it’s just straight up rambling and if someone has a whole paragraph of tags that has cutesy commentary, that’s pretty much a guarantee I’m skipping the fic. The tags are there so people can get the quick and dirty on the important parts of a fic, like ships, kinks, etc. And there are a LOT of not-so-great fics to wade through to find the good ones. I’m not gonna wade through a paragraph of tag essays trying to pick out what’s important.
So people can do it if they want but the messier it gets, the more likely you’re going to lose some readers because you’re just rambling along. It’s messy and gives off the same “My writing isn’t good enough to stand alone with tags only about what the fic is about and a normal summary” vibes that the old “R+R, no flamez plz” stuff in summaries give vibes of on FF.net. Whether or not it actually causes problems for the Ao3 tag wranglers doesn’t change that the format is different, that it’s not your personal blog, and the READERS sometimes like that to just be a quick view of the most important things in the fic. That can sometimes mean non-standard tags like “this is just fluff” like the user above said but the ramblier you get, the more likely someone’s eyes will glaze and glance over. (Also, I mean, there is a “fluff” tag, so that doesn’t need to be a whole sentence fragment, honestly).
When I’m looking through a database to find things, I’m looking for things to be concise, well organized, and clearly labeled. That’s the difference between Ao3 and tumblr. Tumblr is social media where I’m specifically looking for people’s silliness and their thoughts. Ao3 is a database where I’m looking for specific things, and visually scanning for specific labels. It’s one of those self-indulgent things that sometimes benefits the writer’s ego more than the readers trying to find fic, if you use it a certain way. On the internet, it’s good to always consider the experience of the person trying to find something easily and quickly when you’re trying to get people to read, look at, or buy your stuff.
See, I see why you have your preferences, and understand that, but I will fully admit that I love certain types of rambling Tumblr-style tags on AO3 for the sake of finding things to read.
If I’m browsing a fandom or tag, which is often the case, freeform tags serve as a combination epigraph, blurb, and occasionally even flavor text (I could explain that last one, but it would take hand gestures and possibly a whiteboard) for their story. I’ve found some of my more enjoyable blind reads because their freeform tags grabbed my attention. They didn’t tell me a hell of a lot about the stories, but they did tell me enough about the authors’ tastes and senses of humor for me to give them a shot.
But I when I’m browsing AO3, I’m also treating it less like using a database for finding things (unlike when I want to find specific things, where I use the canonicals and search to dramatically narrow my scope) and more like wandering through a bookstore hoping something catches my eye, so we’ve got a different use case. Something tagged with strictly canonicals is going to look like every other book in the shop to me, where something tagged with ridiculous freeform conceits is going be unnecessary noise to you.
So they’ll gain some, lose some, and it probably, if previous discussions* I’ve had about it are anything to go by, evens out.
*(This is a discussion that I’ve had regarding freeform tags a few times, and it’s an interesting (to me) split, where about half of us in any given discussion found them helpful for finding things, and the other half found them irritating and only of use for winnowing. I’d be curious to see a survey on it.)
OMG, thank you, Min, I’ve been trying and failing to come up with a way to express all the things the random, rambly freeform tags do for me, and you just hit it out of the park.
I’ll add one: They can be a fantastic way to give me an idea of whether the author is ‘my kind’ in terms of how they read the characters/what tropes they think fit the characters best/what tropes I can expect that aren’t easily quantifiable.
Like, a story with a tag that says ‘Bruce Wayne is completely incapable of taking care of himself’ or whatever is probably gonna be my jam, but a story with a tag that says ‘somebody save Timmy’ or the like, even if all the other canonical tags look just right, will, I know, send me screaming into the night. Could those concepts be expressed with canonical tags? Eh, depends on the story.
But a) you’ll need more than one, b) you’ll probably be spoiling things you don’t want to spoil, and c) you won’t have caught my eye (and my gratitude) quite so quickly.
So, you know, I grok when people hate the freeform tags, I do, but there are a whole mess of stories which don’t use ‘em.
I wish I could remember the specific one that, yonks ago, solidified my views on freeform tags. All I remember was that it was an incredibly obscure reference that, after I laughed for several minutes straight, made me click on the story.
Thinking more about it this morning, when I would be lying if I said I were any more awake than I was last night (ah, sleep, I miss you, please come home), freeform tags can, and ideally do, tell us a lot about how the author views a specific piece of canon/worldbuilding/fandom trope (this would be what I mean by flavor text, really). I’m a huge fan of stories that take common tropes, esp. problematic ones, and turn them on their head. It’s very hard for me to get from the canonicals if an author’s attempting to do that with their story, but relatively easy to get it from the freeform tags.
I am, as I think I indicated in my tags in my original reblog, actually historically a pretty crap tagger for various reasons. I’m attempting to change that by keeping running tags lists while I’m writing–tagging in post is a pain in the ass for me, especially when importing older content–so this is something that I’m spending a lot of time thinking about from an author’s POV in addition to the reader’s POV above, given how valuable I find the damn things for finding reading material myself. With a freeform, if I use a freeform, what do I want to convey? What sort of thing do I want the reader to go into the story aware of that’s not exactly a spoiler for the story, but cannot be adequately captured in canonicals and doesn’t fit in the summary? (Note: I’m even worst at summaries than I am at tagging.)
Thus my decision to add “Parental Neglect Level: John Winchester” to the running tags list for the damn Push fic. While obviously not everyone in fandom is going to have watched Supernatural, it’s a juggernaut fandom, so a lot of people will understand straight off what that means either through having watched it or through fannish osmosis. There are canonicals I could use, but they don’t have the same nuance, and using the freeform allows me to say both what the canonical would (that there is child neglect involved) and what it wouldn’t (that it’s complicated and external forces are at work, which explains but does not excuse, and is going to fuck a body up), and allows me to do it all in five words and a colon.
I was all ready to agree with one side and then I discovered that I agree with the other side as well until I realized that neither side has fully discussed how much of a ramble is a rambly tag.
Frankly I love the little asides or fandom in-jokes and authors senses of humor, but frankly when there’s over maybe 10 solid lines in ao3 (about two inches on my screen) that are pure author’s notes I just can’t read that much underline I’m sorry.
Imagine if Dudley did have a magical child though.
He and Harry haven’t spoken since ‘I don’t think you’re a waste of space’ and he’s matured enough to realise his parents were not good to Harry, especially since the birth of his own little girls because God forbid anything happened to him and they were treated like Harry was.
On Daisy Dursley’s eleventh birthday theres a knock on the door and his wife, Anita, just stares and he feels his stomach drop because the stern lady on the doorstep is wearing a cloak and pointed hat.
They listen to the woman - Professor McGonagall - explain and Anita is surprised but receptive, Daisy is excited and Dudley is terrified of what this means.
It’s a surprise to his wife and little girl when at the end of her explanation, while Daisy’s flicking through a book with moving pictures and Anita peers over her shoulder, Dudley blurts out ‘it’s safe now then? Your world?’
Professor Mcgonagall gives a wry smile and assures him that the magical world is indeed safe. It dawns on him that she was expecting this, that she’d perhaps researched him and was aware of his relation to Harry.
He then admits to Anita and Daisy that his cousin is a wizard, before turning to the Professor and asking if she by chance knows a Harry Potter. Looking amused, professor Mcgonagall acknowledges that she does.
’D'you know where he lives?’
That does surprise her a bit, and she tells him that yes, she knows and that though Daisy’s acceptance into the school has been confidential up until this point, Harry would likely not mind a visitor if he wanted a word.
Daisy begs to come along and he relents eventually, bringing Anita and their youngest, Poppy, along.
All four of them stand on the doorstep of a modest house that Dudley would call nice if there weren’t squat little creatures snickering and running around the front garden.
The door is opened by a slouching boy with turquoise hair who arches a purple eyebrow at them. He yells over his shoulder for someone named Ginny and steps back to let them in, and, when he notices Daisy staring at his hair, he smirks and a second later it’s bubblegum pink.
Daisy squeals in delight and Dudley is still trying to get his head around that when young girl and boy around Daisy’s age with bright red hair and thick brown curls respectively, hurtle down the corridor.
‘Teddy you promised you’d practice the sloth grip roll with us!’ The girl yells in an accusatory tone.
A woman with hair the same shade of flaming red as the little girl appears with what Dudley recognises as a wand in her hand as the boy with blue hair flashes a grin at them before chasing the two younger children outside to a shout of ‘No higher than the treetops Teddy!’
Harry is much like Dudley remembers him, lanky with a pointed face, straight nose and mess of untameable black hair. It’s awkward, but, apparently forewarned, Harry greets him pleasantly and introduces his wife before Ginny goes outside to reign in a gaggle of children he assumes aren’t all Harry’s.
A woman with thick, bushy hair pulled into a messy bun with a wand stuck in it smiles and makes an effort to talk to Anita. She’s not too strange, he thinks, and reassures them that her parents were just as baffled when they found out she was a witch.
‘Why don’t you take Daisy outside to see the broomsticks, Al?’ Harry suggests to Daisy’s obvious delight and Dudley swears Harry’s trying not to laugh.
By the end of the visit Dudley is more informed about the wizarding world than he ever thought he would or wanted to be. Daisy, with a bruise on her forehead and scraped knees, because despite both his and Harry’s warning she hadn’t been able to resist trying to fly, is bouncing off the walls because ‘daddy how could you not tell us?!’
They visit Harry’s a lot over summer and Daisy befriends Lily Luna Potter and Hugo Weasley. Dudley doesn’t feel up to the trip to Diagon Alley but regrets his decision to not go when Daisy comes back with two owls, ‘uncle Harry bought the second one for me! So you can write without having to wait for me to send my owl!’
Petunia Dursley faints when she finds out, and Vernon spends a good half hour cursing and brandishing things aimlessly before retreating to his shed.
Dudley being introduced to what he calls ‘all those bloody gingers’ some of whom are only just on the right side of civil to him (one cheerfully introduces himself as someone who once visited his childhood home in a flying car and asks if he’s going to need to do the same for Daisy or will she be allowed to attend without punishment).
Daisy is shocked to find out Harry’s famous, and finds out as much as she can about him during her first term, which she relays to an increasingly guilty feeling Dudley, who’s gradually coming around to the idea.
It’s not as bad as his parents made out it was. He’s learned to understand Daisy’s ramblings about her subjects and spells and is proud of her achievements at school. He’s met a handful of witches and wizards through Harry and the world that he’s always been told is terrible doesn’t seem too bad anymore, after all, how could it with his little girl in it? He is prepared come excitable little Poppy’s eleventh birthday, for her to join her sister at Hogwarts instead of standing jealously on the platform as she leaves.
Poppy Dursley never gets a letter.
I TRUSTED YOU
No, but imagine. Three generations later, this family FINALLY gets the one wizard kid/one Muggle kid thing right. Poppy is never made to feel less, even though she’s disappointed. Daisy is never made to feel like a freak. Poppy is accepted by Harry’s kids, they play with her and she doesn’t need magic to play wizard chess or toss gnomes and Teddy takes her flying sometimes (she becomes a hell of a Quidditch referee and strategist with Ginny’s help, though she never plays).
Anita and Dudley talk to Poppy about what she’d like to do for school and she goes to a prestigious Muggle school, and as it turns out she becomes really, really good at tech and coding. She takes lots of time off to visit Daisy at Hogwarts where she becomes a favorite of McGonagall (so many clever questions). Eventually she meets Luna and spends most of a summer with her, following Crumple-Horned Snorkacks with the help of some trackers Poppy built to work around magic. Everyone is terribly impressed, and although Poppy tries to be blasé about it, she’s actually really proud.
And soon enough Daisy is graduating and working at the Ministry in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts Office with Arthur Weasley, who has been working on loosening some of the legislation, and when Poppy graduates she has a marvelous idea. She and Daisy open a shop in Diagon Ally for all these Muggle technologies that Poppy has fixed to work around and with magic. Dursley’s Muggle Magic, they call it.
And suddenly wizards are running around with iPhones and Kindles (Hermione made a digital copy of Hogwarts, a History RIGHT AWAY) and everyone is catching up on decades of video games and a century of movies. Scorpius Malfoy has an Apple Watch. And it’s all thanks the Poppy Dursley, the Muggle.
I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click
And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”
So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is
“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”
I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:
“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”
I accidentally called the director of the FBI.
My job got investigated because a computer randomly spit out a number to the Pentagon.
This is my new favourite story.
When I was in college I got a job working for a company that manages major air-travel data. It was a temp gig working their out of date system while they moved over to a new one, since my knowing MS Dos apparently made me qualified.
There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server.
The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors.
During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”
So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound.
I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.
So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…
“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”
It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.
There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.
The red phone never rang again while I was there, so the people doing my training were only slightly wrong in their estimation of how often the doomsday phone would ring.
These are my two favorite stories
IT GOT BETTER
I SALUTE YOU, RED PHONE PERSON
So my English teacher used to work at a place where they helped unemployed people find jobs and make stable livings. They would call the person ask them, where they wanted to work, what they could do, and basically help them find a job. So her colleague sends her a phone number and the name “Bill” next to it. So she rings it up and says, “Hello, is this Bill?” To which the person replies, “May I please know who’s speaking, and how did you get this number?” “Oh my name is Holly, I work at the [insert name (i forgot)] centre. I just want to know your job interests” “Mam, you do realise that you are currently speaking to the white house, which should not be possible by the way.” AND silence. And my English teacher just hangs up. She accidentaly called the whitehouse when the current president was Bill Clinton.
Interviewer: You’ve got this rage within you. Where does it come from?
Charlize Theron: Uh…surprise. Women have that. I’m not the only one. (x)
#i will never get tired of looking at Furiosa’s various murder faces
Attn: all the white feminists complaining that Furiosa isn’t a good feminist icon because she’s “acts like a male action hero” – rage is not masculine. Angry female characters are not “emulating men.”
I actually had that debate with someone right after I saw the movie (a dude, with whom I agree on many things politically), about whether you could call a movie where women use violence feminist. I was all “rage and violence do not belong to men, even if they are coded masculine in our society.” This article says it much more articulately than I did at the time.
I would like to write something further about this, because I have a lot of thoughts as a writer/director about women expressing anger and being violent on screen, and how it’s often only allowed to be shown in certain ways. (I wrote about some of this in Furiosa vs. Tropes for Women in Action.) But at the moment I think the number of notes on this post is doing a good job of making my point.
