I sincerely believe that by 7th year Ravenclaws would just tell the door to their common room to fuck off and it would open for them
Q “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” A “You shouldn’t shove either up your arse.” “…Technically, yes.”
Imagine it, a poor First Year is waiting outside the common room, they can’t answer the riddle in a way to appease the eagle and must wait until someone else to answer it for them. It’s getting late, they’re starting to resign themselves to having to spend the night here.
Suddenly, their saviour comes! It’s a seventh year! Back from a night finishing off their Araithmancy essay in the Library. They look angry, but our poor little first year squares their shoulders, waiting to see what will happen, and hope that they’ll keep the door open for them.
The Seventh Year bangs the handle against the wall, and a slightly disgruntled voice asks the question again: “What is the truth?”
The Student Replies, “The Truth is that I am so fucking sick of all these mother fucking questions about stupid fucking topics like this you bloody fuck-witted bastard. Who in the name of Merlin’s saggy left testicle gives a fucking damn about all this shit anyway? I’ve been working my arse off in the library for the last seven hours now let me the fuck in or, truthfully, I’ll blast my way in and take you with me.”
The eagle knocker tutts, but allows the student entry anyway, and our little first year enters, eyes wide and in shock. They watch the seventh year go up to their bedroom, awe all over their face at their new hero. They did, indeed, learn something that day by waiting for someone to arrive, they learnt that swearing has a magic all of it’s fucking own, and that sometimes it is big and clever to use it.
The only head canon I will ever accept. Its both perfectly witty and fantastically assholish
witty and fantastically assholish… pretty much quintessential ravenclaw traits right there
My favorite version of this headcanon is that there is one Ravenclaw who went all seven years by answering the riddles with some variation of “not a potato” and was only ever wrong once.
Skeletons are theologically controversial. Some clergy say that the
skeleton represents the enduring part of humanity, which will be brought
back to life on the day of judgment. After all, many relics are pieces
of bone. But other theologians claim that the skeleton, as the innermost
part of the body, hidden from all sight until death, represents
original sin itself.
– excerpt from Miserable Secrets, the upcoming bestiary supplement to Rose Bailey’s Castlevania-punk tabletop RPG The Shadow of Golgotha
(If you aren’t following Rose Bailey’s Pateron, you should be.)
Thought it was Catholicism reading the quote
Well, it’s not not Catholicism. The setting of Shadow of Golgotha proposes a future history in which the institutions of organised religion in Western Europe have been subverted by a vampire aristocracy, and all of the traditional vampiric weaknesses have been re-interpreted as signs of their holiness; for example, they’re repelled by the Cross because it symbolises the murder of Christ, poisoned by silver because it represents Judas’ betrayal, and so forth.
(The really fun part is that theological arguments like the one cited in the original post are reflected in the mechanics, in this case by the fact that whether skeletons are vulnerable to Holy damage depends on which side of the debate about the nature of skeletons the wielder falls on.)
Wait so faith only deals the damage you expect it to?
I’m not the game’s author, so I can’t speak to authorial intent, but if I was the one running it, I’d probably handle it like this:
In many denominations of Christianity – and particularly in Catholicism – there’s a theological notion called “honest intent”. A full discussion of what this concept entails is beyond the scope of this post, but in a nutshell, the idea is that a sacrament performed incorrectly, or by someone who doesn’t actually have the spiritual authority to administer it, may nonetheless be valid under certain circumstances, provided that the administering party honestly believes that they’re performing a valid sacrament and has no ill or self-serving intent in performing it. Similarly, a sacrament can be performed by a knowingly unqualified or duplicitous party and still be valid under certain circumstances, if the recipient honestly believes they’re receiving a valid sacrament and has no ill or self-serving intent in receiving it.
So in the case of our theological dubious skeleton, someone who believes that skeletons are holy – or at least, not unholy – creatures would be unable to invoke the wrath of God upon it, even if that belief is incorrect, because it prevents them from formulating the requisite honest intent.
(The concomitant question of whether one could successfully invoke the wrath of God upon a non-unholy creature in the honest-but-mistaken belief that it’s unholy is, of course, theologically fascinating – and, incidentally, heretical. Seriously, don’t wonder aloud about that sort of thing within earshot of a deacon; that’s a good way to get Inquisitioned.)
And, of course, if you count the skeleton as the recipient of the sacrament, you can wind up with all sorts of questions about what the skeleton believes.
Not to mention questions about whether getting blown up by divine wrath counts as receiving a sacrament!
Do an
outline, whatever way works best.
Get yourself out of the word soup and know where the story is headed.
Conflicts
and obstacles. Hurt the protagonist, put things in their way, this keeps
the story interesting. An easy journey makes the story boring and boring is
hard to write.
Change
the POV. Sometimes all it takes to untangle a knotted story is to look at
it through different eyes, be it through the sidekick, the antagonist, a minor
character, whatever.
Know the
characters. You can’t write a story if the characters are strangers to you.
Know their likes, dislikes, fears, and most importantly, their motivation. This makes the path clearer.
Fill in
holes. Writing doesn’t have to be linear; you can always go back and fill in plotholes,
and add content and context.
Have
flashbacks, hallucinations, dream sequences or foreshadowing events. These
stir the story up, deviations from the expected course add a feeling of urgency
and uncertainty to the narrative.
Introduce
a new mystery. If there’s something that just doesn’t add up, a big question mark, the story becomes more
compelling. Beware: this can also cause you to sink further into the mire.
Take
something from your protagonist. A weapon, asset, ally or loved one. Force
him to operate without it, it can reinvigorate a stale story.
Twists
and betrayal. Maybe someone isn’t who they say they are or the protagonist
is betrayed by someone he thought he could trust. This can shake the story up
and get it rolling again.
Secrets. If
someone has a deep, dark secret that they’re forced to lie about, it’s a good
way to stir up some fresh conflict. New lies to cover up the old ones, the
secret being revealed, and all the resulting chaos.
Kill
someone. Make a character death that is productive to the plot, but not “just because”. If done well, it affects
all the characters, stirs up the story and gets it moving.
Ill-advised
character actions. Tension is created when a character we love does
something we hate. Identify the thing the readers don’t want to happen, then
engineer it so it happens worse than they imagined.
Create cliff-hangers. Keep the readers’ attention by putting the characters into new problems and
make them wait for you to write your way out of it. This challenge can really
bring out your creativity.
Raise the
stakes. Make the consequences of failure worse, make the journey harder.
Suddenly the protagonist’s goal is more than he expected, or he has to make an
important choice.
Make the
hero active. You can’t always wait for external influences on the
characters, sometimes you have to make the hero take actions himself. Not
necessarily to be successful, but active
and complicit in the narrative.
Different
threat levels. Make the conflicts on a physical level (“I’m about to be
killed by a demon”), an emotional level (“But that demon was my true love”) and
a philosophical level (“If I’m forced to kill my true love before they kill me,
how can love ever succeed in the face of evil?”).
Figure
out an ending. If you know where the story is going to end, it helps get
the ball rolling towards that end, even if it’s not the same ending that you
actually end up writing.
What if?
What if the hero kills the antagonist now, gets captured, or goes insane? When
you write down different questions like these, the answer to how to continue the
story will present itself.
Start
fresh or skip ahead. Delete the last five thousand words and try again. It’s
terrifying at first, but frees you up for a fresh start to find a proper path. Or
you can skip the part that’s putting you on edge – forget about that fidgety
crap, you can do it later – and write the next scene. Whatever was in-between
will come with time.
Science Fact Friday: Bird lungs! Just like every other part of a bird, they’re weird.
This gif shows the path of a single breath, but the circuit holds 2 breaths at a time. So when the bird inhales, the just-inhaled breath goes through Inhalation 1 while the previous breath goes through Inhalation 2. Rinse, repeat. Thus, the lungs are constantly receiving oxygen – in mammals, our oxygen content dips slightly between inhalations because there’s no fresh air coming in. We also don’t empty 100% of our lung volume so some air is “stale” even during an inhalation.
not to vague, but have you ever loved someone like truly loved them. and I mean with their flaws and everything and accepted that. Do you know how like consuming that is, and I’m not talking about romantic love. I mean the power that comes with loving someone with like everything you have. through the good and the bad. through everything they’ve been through, through them doing things that shows how fundamentally flawed they are, and even in the sigh that you breathe that frustrates you, you can still feel it. how much you love them.
& how much you wish you never did
no i still love her bc i realize you dont have to end up romantically with someone you love. there are other ways of loving someone that can be just as consuming. this post was never meant to be depressing. this post was to demonstrate that you can love someone to their very core with everything you have so much that there are obvious fallibale behaviors with said person, but they don’t deter or stop you from loving them bc those behaivors are just human. stop trying to make it seem like loving someone is regrettable. there are thousands of words that can be used to describe loving someone and regret should never be one of them. a lot of the replies on this post have been so darkeningly cringy and it’s not even love, yall were obsessed with another person and thought that was love. and it wasnt.
Finally updated Pocahontas! I don’t think this is what people were expecting as the next entry in the series, but some of the criticisms of my first design have been eating away at me for years now and I needed to get off my ass and address them.
So hey! Spunky age-appropriate Pocahontas/Matoaka, sans feathers in the hair/European imagery/other superfluous details. This is closer to accounts and illustrations of Powhatan dress from the period, and I kinda think it’s closer to the Disney design anyway. WIN/WIN.
Thanks to everyone who’s educated my ass over the past couple of years, including moniquill, apihtawikosisan, this-is-not-native, and numerous others. You’ve made me a way more thoughtful artist in the process.
Reblogging bc I loveloveloveloveloveloveLOVE the updated Pocahontas. Too many people sexualize her. Major props for taking the time and care to fix this!
Homophobia, lesbophobia, transphobia, and sex shaming – guess whose discourse this is?? (It’s not Judith Butler’s!)
Great Moments in The Discourse 2: Ace Discourse Is Hateful And Irresponsible (TW: homophobia, transmisogyny, lesbophobia, serophobia, cissexism, heterosexism, slurs, hate speech, death threats directed at LGBT folks, wishing gay minors would die, appropriation, straight people shit, sex shaming)
The ace/MOGAI discourse isn’t harmless or a joke. It entitles cishets – straight people – to shout down LGBT folks and shit on people who are actually oppressed by homophobia and transphobia.
You can’t give cishet aces the mic in LGBT discussions without silencing people who are actually LGBT.
haha yeah, laugh at me. Its not that unrealistic of a thought, considering some of the other asks ive gotten. i dont know what your peoples problem is
what’s funny is you blowing it way out of proportion and assuming that im telling you to kys when all i really want is for you to just piss all over your entire pair of pants. urinate your trousers. empty your bladder all over your overalls.
please, for the love of god. just pee your pants.
while youre at it, maybe you should suck some toes along the way?
Langur monkeys attempt to care for and then grieve over a robotic monkey baby.
okay, I get that it’s fascinating to observe how other species emote, but these researches allowed relatively intelligent animals to believe that they’d killed a child. They caused pain and grief to a group of creatures intelligent enough to understand those emotions. This is not something you hire David Tennant to sound excited about, this is something you vow never to repeat because it’s exceedingly cruel.
The death was not intended or foreseen. Disguising cameras as animals is a tried and true method of studying that species up close because it does not endanger the humans or animals involved and allows observation of behaviors that a more suspicious camera would not, without accompanying them to human presence. It’s not as though the researchers rubbed their hands together wickedly and plotted to cause some monkeys emotional distress. Using the footage and hiring David Attenborough to narrate has clearly impacted millions of people by inspiring unexpected empathetic and sympathetic feelings towards a non-human species that may not have otherwise earned their respect.
Procrastination Station 