Every Adult In “Harry Potter” Let Us Down At Some Point And That’s Important a 900 page dissertation by me
And that includes Joanne Kathleen Rowling a tear stained afterword by me
Hagrid Is The Exception a rebuttal by me
The Time Hagrid Told Voldemort How to Take Out Something Protecting an Object that Grants Immortality When He Was Drunk and Other Well-Meaning Fuck Ups a lengthy chapter
You’re Absolutely Right a retraction
How dare you assume Molly Weasley has done anything wrong ever
That Time Molly Yelled At The Twins And Ron For Saving Harry From Abuse And Starvation, Thus Likely Communicating To The Abused Kid In Her Presence That His Welfare Was Less Important Than Not Borrowing The Car, That Time Molly Was Utterly Condescending About How Harry Is A Child And Doesn’t Deserve To Know Anything In A Way That Probably Heightened His Determination To Prove Otherwise, That Time Molly Said The Twins Put Together Aren’t As Good As Any Of Their Brothers Over OWL Results That They Worked Hard On And Were Proud Of, That Time Molly Forcibly Cut Her Adult Son’s Hair Right Before His Wedding, That Time Molly Spent A Year Being Mean And Rejectful Toward Her Son’s Fiancee, That Time Molly Sent Hermione A Deliberate “Fuck You” Present For Easter Because She Believed A False Story Written In Witch Weekly Without Making Any Attempt To Ask The People Actually Involved, Those Times She Made Her Youngest Son’s Christmas Sweaters His Least Favorite Color, And Every Time She Belittled Her Husband’s Hobby, The Twins’ Interests, And Bill’s Appearance Because She Couldn’t Be Bothered To Understand Or Value Or Even Be Kind About Thema detailed reminder that no one’s perfect and sometimes what one person doesn’t mind or see hits another person hard
Florean Fortescue Just Wanted To Sell Some Ice Cream And Help Harry With His Homework He Is The Only Adult Who Didn’t Mess Up Until Getting Killed By Voldemort, RIPan increasingly strident addendum by me
OK You’re Absolutely Right Florean Fortescue Was In Fact Perfect As Far As I’m Awarea concession by me
What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”
Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it
Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.
Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/
Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄
Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.
“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.
In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.
“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”
“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”
Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.
“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”
Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.
Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.
it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.
Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago
These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least
Ain’t it amazing what white people consider history and what they don’t?
I always said disservice is done to oral traditions and myth when you take them literally. Ancient people were not stupid.
okay if I could time travel to the past, you know what I’d be most excited to see? THE QUALITY OF TEXTILES. Clothing was built to LAST before the industrial revolution and everything was HAND-MADE. We lose so much of women’s art from the archaeological record because textiles are perishable and we only get vague snapshots of what clothes and tapestries, etc, were like, and these would have been so important to everyday life! What did a hand-made toga feel like! How heavy was it! What did the tapestries hanging in castles look like! How did needlework enrich the home! Fuck! I love textiles!
Headcanon that in the new good future where Marty McFly never has his accident, he does become a famous musician, while still going on time travel adventures with Doc, and then when the internet comes along, people on forums and message boards start discovering and posting photos of people in the past who look eerily like famous rock star Marty McFly, and as time goes on, “Marty McFly is a time traveller” becomes one of the biggest and most long running memes on the internet.
When Doc finds out he freaks out and panicks and makes blog posts (because of COURSE Doc runs a blog) talking about how UTTERLY RIDICULOUS the idea of a time travelling rock star is, which the internet finds hilarious and only makes the meme spread more.
Marty meanwhile thinks the whole thing is the funniest thing ever and is just wheezing at every new forum or jokey article about it, and directly addresses the meme in interviews, bringing up this “crazy conspiracy” that people have, until eventually he can just say things like “well of course I am a time traveller” or “oh you like my hat? Thank you I got it in the 1910s”, and people just crack up, and Marty cracks up too because no-one realises that he’s not even lying.
When Marty starts doing this Doc’s blog posts get even more annoyed and passive aggressive, saying things like “even if time travel WAS possible, a SENSIBLE time traveller would KEEP OUT OF THE PUBLIC EYE and not just TELL EVERYONE LIVE ON TV”
Eventually a secondary meme starts up where people start joking “Doctor Emmett Brown is a time traveller himself and that’s why he’s so worked up about it” and Doc very nearly just deletes his blog and throws his computer in a skip.
Her Mortal Instruments series is a revamp of her Harry Potter fanfiction and entire excerpts, dialogue and plot were plagiarized from:
The Secret Country Trilogy, comprised of The Secret Country, The Hidden Land and The Whim of the Dragon from Pamela Dean
Epicyclical Elaborations in Sorcery from Patricia Wrede
Sorcery and Cecilia from Caroline Stevermer
Terry Pratchett books
All of which were published books. And I suppose you can say:
Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
because Mortal Instruments was an off-shoot from a Harry Potter fanfiction (so you can recognize a lot of characters personalities from Harry Potter). And let’s not forget either paraphrased or straight up copy paste of dialogues from TV shows such as:
Angel
Black Adder
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
and a couple of others
At the time in fanfiction, she ignored these allegations because it was fanfiction. But she is now published off this plagiarism and making money off others creativity. Other female fantasy writers.
Cassandra Clare (or Cassandra Claire, she changed her pen name) also harassed and bullied a number of people who brought up her plagiarism, including the authors that she plagiarized from. Her friend was a lawyer, so she basically bullied a lot of people.
As of right now, she is trying to get her litigation team to erase the internet history of her plagiarism and misbehavior.
Cassandra Clare and her loyal fans also ruined a lot of peoples lives through real world harassment. They tracked down IP addresses and threatened them for even talking about how Cassandra Clare plagiarized. Even tried to get a girl expelled from university as well as called people’s relatives and harassed them.
Cassandra Clare is not a nice person. Cassandra Clare stole creative works of others and has turned a profit from it and has not acknowledge it. Good chunks of text are from a lot of other stories. Those authors will probably never get a movie deal. But Cassandra Clare did because she is a literary bully as well as a real one.
Some people have sent me asks asking if I like Cassandra Clare’s work. The answer is no, and this is why.
Losing journalfen was a major blow to fandom history, but the wayback machine has a lot of the deets saved. Even if you don’t particularly care about Claire one way or another, the original expose is some gripping reading.
It’s a measure of how much fuckery Claire was involved in that no one has even mentioned yet that her fans attacked a woman with cancer when the woman’s daughter dared to ask for a link to her fundraiser. I don’t recall how long it took for Claire to call off the dogs, but I remember watching when it was happening, and I know it took too long for her to speak up.
To be fair, a lot of the bad shit that happened around Claire was done by other people who were trying to curry favor with her. She was a BNF in the then-hugest fandom, Harry Potter, which was full of young people seeking attention and validation, and for a number of years, a nod or a link from Claire could drive serious traffic (by the standards of fandom at the time). That created a poisonous environment of people kissing her ass and attacking her “enemies” in an effort to get recognition from her.
Claire didn’t create that mess, but she did profit from it. Her fans organized a fundraiser to replace her laptops and electronics when Claire was allegedly robbed, and I’m sure her HP following was a factor in her book deal, given that her first books were based on her HP fic. Yet a lot of people following her weren’t there for her writing, but for her pull within HP, or to keep up with gossip, since she was involved in so many crazy episodes in HP fandom.
I don’t love Tumblr as a fandom platform, but LJ was no picnic either.
and at no point has anyone thought “maybe we should not build a giant flammable goat this year”
They tried fireproofing. And armed guards. And fences, and cameras… Sadly the wikipedia page has been cut down by super srs folks to remove all the awesome Keystone cops tales of the goat’s history (emphasis added by me)
1966 Stig Gavlén came up with the idea of a giant goat made out of straw. But it turned out that Gavlén organisation did not have enough funding for the goat. Then Harry Ström, who at that time was the chairman of the Södra Kungsgatan Ideella Förening (a non-profit society), decided to pay the whole cost for the goat out of his own pocket. The goat stood until midnight of New Year’s Eve, when it went up in flames. The perpetrator, who was from Hofors,Gästrikland, was found and convicted of vandalism. The first goat was insured and Ström got all his money back.
1967 Nothing happened.
1968 The goat survived. A fence was built around the goat. Previously it was popular for children to play hide-and-seek inside and around the goat. There was also a rumor that one night a couple had sex inside the goat. In subsequent years the inside of the goat was protected by a chicken-wire net.
1969 The goat was burnt down on New Year’s Eve.
1970 The goat was burnt down only six hours after it was assembled. Two very drunk teenagers were connected with the crime. With help from several financial contributors the goat was reassembled out of lake reed.
1971 The Southern Merchants got tired of their goats being burned and stopped building the goat. The Natural Science Club (Naturvetenskapliga Föreningen:NF) from the School of Vasa (Vasaskolan) took over.
1984Burnt down on 12 December, the night before Lucia.
1985 The 12.5 metre (41 ft) tall goat of the Natural Science Club was featured in the Guinness Book of Records for the first time. Even though the goat was enclosed by a 2 metres (6.6 ft) high metal fence, guarded by Securitas and even soldiers from the Gävle I 14 InfantryRegiment, it was burnt down in January.
1986 The merchants of Gävle decided they were willing to build the goat once again. From 1986 on two goats were built, the Southern Merchants’ and the School of Vasa’s. The big goat burnt down the night before Christmas Eve.
1987A heavily fireproofed goat was built. It got burnt down a week before Christmas.[21]
1988 Nothing happened to the goat, but gamblers were for the first time able to gamble on the fate of the goat with English bookmakers.
1989 Again, the goat burnt down before it was assembled. Financial contributions from the public were raised to rebuild a goat that was burnt down in January. In March 1990 another goat was built, this time for the shooting of a Swedish motion picture called Black Jack.
1990Nothing happened. The goat was guarded by many volunteers.
1991 The goat was joined by an advertising sled, that turned out to be illegally built. On the morning of Christmas Eve the goat was burnt down. It was later rebuilt to be taken to Stockholm as a part of a protest campaign against the closing of the I 14 Infantry Regiment.
1992The goat was burnt down eight days after it was built. The Natural Science Club’s goat burnt down the same night. The Southern Merchants’ goat was rebuilt, but burned down on 20 December. The perpetrator of the three attacks was caught and sent to jail. The Goat Committee was founded in 1992.
1993 Once more the goat was featured in the Guinness Book of Records, the School of Vasa’s goat measured 14.9 metres (49 ft). The goat was guarded by taxis and the Swedish Home Guard. Nothing happened.
1994 Nothing happened. The goat followed the Swedish national hockey team to Italy for the World Championship in hockey.
1995 A Norwegian was arrested for attempting to burn down the goat. Burnt down on the morning of Christmas Day. Rebuilt to be standing before the 550th anniversary of Gävle county.
1996 The first time the goat was guarded by webcams, nothing happened.
1997Damaged by fireworks. The Natural Science Club’s goat was attacked too, but survived with minor damage.
1998Burnt down on 11 December, even though there was a major blizzard. Was rebuilt.
1999Burnt down only a couple of hours after it was erected. Rebuilt again before Lucia. The Natural Science Club’s goat was burnt down as well.
2000Burnt down a couple of days before New Year’s Eve. The Natural Science Club’s goat got tossed in the Gävle river.
2001 Goat set on fire on 23 December by Lawrence Jones, a 51-year-old visitor from Cleveland, Ohio, who spent 18 days in jail and was subsequently convicted and ordered to pay 100,000 Swedish kronor in damages. The court confiscated Jones’s cigarette lighter with the argument that he clearly was not able to handle it. Jones stated in court that he was no “goat burner”, and believed that he was taking part in a completely legal goat-burning tradition. After Jones was released from jail he went straight back to the US without paying his fine. As of 2006 it was still unpaid. The Natural Science Club’s goat was also burnt down.
2002 A 22 year old from Stockholm tried to set the Southern Merchants’ goat on fire, but failed, the goat receiving only minor damage. On Lucia the goat was guarded by Swedish radio and TV personality Gert Fylking.
2003Burnt down on 12 December.
2004Burnt 21 December, only three days before Christmas Eve. The fire brigade quickly arrived on the scene, but the goat could not be saved. No new goat was built.
2005Burnt by unknown vandals reportedly dressed as Santa and the gingerbread man, by shooting a flaming arrow at the goat at 21:00 on 3 December. Reconstructed on 5 December. The hunt for the arsonist responsible for the goat-burning in 2005 was featured on the weekly Swedish live broadcast TV3’s “Most Wanted“ (”Efterlyst”) on 8 December.
2006 On the night of 15 December at 03:00, someone tried to set fire to the goat by dousing the right front leg in petrol (gasoline). The red ribbon on that leg was slightly burned and fell off. The lower part of the right leg was scorched, but the rest of the goat failed to light. The leg was repaired that morning. The Natural Science Club’s goat was burned at about 00:40 on 20 December; the vandals were not seen and got away. On the night of 25 December, a drunken man managed to climb up on the goat. Before the police arrived on the scene the man climbed down and disappeared. He did not try to set fire to the goat. The Southern Merchants’ goat survived New Year’s Eve and was taken down on 2 January. It is now stored in a secret location.
2007 The Natural Science Club’s goat was toppled on 13 December and was burned on the night of 24 December. The Southern Merchants’ goat survived.
2008 10,000 people turned out for the inauguration of one of the goats. No back-up goat was built to replace the main goat should the worst happen, nor was the goat treated with flame repellent (Anna Östman, spokesperson of the Goat-committee said the repellent made it look ugly in the previous years, like a brown terrier). On 16 December the Natural Science Club’s Goat was vandalised and later removed. On 26 December there was an attempt to burn down the Southern Merchants’ Goat but patriotic passers-by managed to extinguish the fire. The following day the goat finally succumbed to the flames ignited by an unknown assailant at 03:50 CET.
2009 A person attempted to set the Southern Merchants’ goat on fire the night of 7 December. An unsuccessful attempt was made to throw the Natural Science Club’s goat into the river the weekend of 11 December. The culprit then tried, again without success, to set the goat on fire. Someone stole the Natural Science Club’s goat utilizing a truck the night of 14 December.[36] On the night of 23 December before 04:00 the South Merchant goat was set on fire and was burned to the frame, even though it had a thick layer of snow on its back.[37] The goat had two online webcams which were put out of service by aDoS attack, instigated by computer hackers just before the burning.[38]
2010 On the night of 2 December, arsonists made an unsuccessful attempt to burn the Natural Science Club’s goat.[39] On 17 December, a Swedish news site reported that one of the guards tasked with protecting the Southern Merchants’ goat had been offered payment to leave his post so that the goat could be stolen via helicopter and transported to Stockholm. Both goats survived and were dismantled and returned to storage in early January 2011.
2011 The inauguration of the goat took place on 27 November. The fire-fighters of Gävle sprayed the goat with water to create a coating of ice in the hope of protecting it from arson. The goat was burnt down in the early morning of 2 December.
2012 The inauguration of the goat took place on 2 December. It was burnt just ten days later in the hours before midnight of 12 December, one day before Lucia.
2013 As in 2006 and 2007, the straw used to build the goat has been soaked in anti-flammable liquid to prevent it from burning in the event of an arson attack. The inauguration ceremony took place on 1 December. But despite the anti-flammable liquids the goat was burnt down on the early morning of December 21.
Any history of plots involving a DDoS attack on the security cameras, a plot to steal it with a helicopter and flaming arrows shot by people dressed as Santa and the Gingerbread man is just plain hilarious in my book.
I’m laughing so much about this goat. obviously if you build something big enough people are going to have sex in it and burn it down. obviously
what the fuck is going on in sweden
how will the saga continue this year
fascinating
The saga of the goat is the best part of the season.
missionlameturtle 