mooncustafer:

Anyone out there who knows more about optics than I do and would be willing to beta-read a short scene for egregious errors? Scenario involves someone trying to explain prisms and dispersion to a young child, while trying not to overwhelm her with detail. 

OK, gave up and ran it past my spouse, and nothing made him go O_o, so I risked posting: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15531390/chapters/37802231

neuroticpantomime:

feathersescapism:

biwlw:

for the last……..i don’t know, 5 or so years, my m.o. regarding internet bisexual disourse has largely been to ignore it and encourage other bi people to do the same. it made sense to me because as far as i could see it was an issue that exclusively existed on this site. which isn’t to say i didn’t think it was harmful – i hated myself for years as a direct result of the things other lgbt people said about bisexual women on here – but i thought the harm could largely be avoided by blocking the few loudmouths who were trying to start shit and hanging with people who weren’t evil.

i no longer feel that way.

i no longer feel that way because, as of yesterday, you absolute fucking buffoons have ran your mouth so far that your fire new radical materialist feminist discourse so hot even fellow lgbts cant handle????????? has reached lena fucking dunham

do you want to know WHY your radical materialist feminist discourse reached lena dunham?????

because a bisexual journalist made this simple ass tweet

and in response, some straight white woman decided to tweet this

which would have just stayed straight nonsense if an extremely smart and clever white lesbian writer friend of hers hadn’t decided to join in with a searing hot take based on a radical perspective towards gender that could only have been achieved with her clearly useful phd in queer literature

which would have just stayed mildly irritating if she and the rest of her friends hadn’t proceeded to defend themselves by arguing that bi women deserve rape and abuse actually

which would have only been horrifyingly offensive if all of these people weren’t 1.) people who make money writing about lgbt shit that 2.) were tweeting from their work accounts where 3.) they have enough reach to be followed by actually influential people such as comrade lena dunham

so seeing as the “close your eyes and maybe itll go away” method has CLEARLY failed, i am genuinely pleased to announce my new tactic. its called

“I Am Going To Spread The CDC Stats on Bisexual Assault and Abuse Everywhere Until It’s So Well Known Every Bisexual Has It Memorized and is Pissed as Hell About It” 

Can I also just draw out here that their argument is LITERALLY that “women who sleep with men deserve what happens to them.” 

Like. 

This kind of person is, straight (haha) up, the kind of person who is only here for “I want mine”. If they’d been born a straight guy they’d be the worst kind of bros. 

This is a thing that happens: I know PLENTY of straight white women whose grasp of feminism is limited strictly to “this affects me, so it’s important”. And of every other stripe of identity. 

But never mistake it for anything than what it is. 

Twitter really is Hell, this is fucking nauseating, JFC. Why the fuck do these people wanna justify violence and disdain for a specific class of women? Like what do they gain, as other marginalized people, often lgt, from shitting on bi people, especially women?

Is it just ugly, ugly entitlement that bi women won’t have sex with them? That’s the only explanation I can see.

copperbadge:

engineerleopoldfitz:

0hcicero:

snakewife:

• distinct sense of fashion (not necessarily good, but. distinct.)
• has almost died, like, twice, but it’s a really funny story–
• absolutely should not be in charge
• absolutely does not WANT to be in charge
• you’re pretty sure they’re into some weird stuff
• wants to help you out when you’re sad???
• may not be equipped to help you out and will fret if that is the case
• absolutely terrible OR top-notch taste in alcohol, no inbetween
• you’ve never seen more impressive shoes 

If you know someone who exudes a powerful Danny DeVito energy despite being a lesbian in her twenties, or if you know someone whose wardrobe choices would not look out of place on Jeff Goldblum, well, you got yourself an Uncle Friend, friend

@mindkindling Guess what – you’re the Uncle Friend, in the best way possible – Like a gay Taika Waititi ❤ 

Somehow I feel like this is all about @copperbadge‘s friend R…

And here I was thinking it was me. Though yes, R does also qualify for most of those and has almost-died more times than I have, technically speaking. 

He bought his last pair of very impressive shoes off a guy on a streetcorner at 4am. 

Just watched the new episode of Doctor Who, Jodie Whittaker carrys on the Doctor’s tradition of being the Uncle Friend.

wilwheaton:

aspiringpolymath:

vgfm:

fandomshatepeopleofcolor:

stephanemiroux:

bigskydreaming:

Okay heads up for all Americans eligible to vote:

The Supreme Court just issues a ruling allowing Ohio and other states to purge voters from their election registration rolls due to their failure to cast a ballot in previous elections.

This is a major victory for the Trump administration and the GOP, and a direct consequence of the Supreme Court being stacked with more conservative judges (the votes were 5-4). This is also a huge part of what Trump/the GOP were counting on to save them in the 2018 midterm elections, which is where Democrats have been hoping to take back a majority in the House, giving them more power to combat Trump’s abuses of power and Republican legislation.

What this means is YOU CAN NOT ASSUME THAT YOU ARE REGISTERED for the 2018 elections, just because you SHOULD be. Thanks to this decision, red states can purge voters’ registration based on their not having cast a ballot in even just previous federal elections, NOT just the national Presidential elections. Effectively, if you haven’t voted in previous senate races or for congressional representatives in the past few years, that’s all they need now to say you’re no longer registered and need to register again.

They’re deliberately counting on people assuming they’re still registered and so not checking until after registration deadlines have passed, or showing up to vote this November and only then finding out they’re no longer registered, when its too late to do a damn thing about it.

And this is absolutely targeted at marginalized communities, low income voters, disabled voters, and basically anyone who simply can’t always AFFORD to keep on top of every federal election and show up to vote in every senate race, etc. Which not so coincidentally happen to be all the communities and voters who have the most to gain from Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms and are the least likely to cast votes for GOP candidates at this point.

This was absolutely a calculated effort aimed specifically at keeping the GOP in power with a majority control of the government come November, and unfortunately, it has a DAMN good chance of accomplishing just that if it goes by unacknowledged. I’m not looking to alarm or panic anyone, simply to say:

If you are a registered voter in a red state at this point, please please please do not take your registered status as assumed. Check on your registration status, look up all relevant voter registration deadlines for your state and district, CIRCLE THAT SHIT ON YOUR CALENDAR, and check your registration status AGAIN right before those deadlines pass, so you can be sure of it before its too late to do anything about it til the next voting cycle.

Yikes

Reblog this shit right now

Here’s a Twitter thread with resources for voters in every state to check on their registration status: https://twitter.com/AnaMardoll/status/1006221580458790912

Make sure you check it periodically because the newest voter roll purges likely haven’t happened yet.

IF VOTING DIDN’T MATTER, THEY WOULDN’T BE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY YOUR RIGHT TO DO IT.

Reblog this and then reblog it again.

heartofaquamarine:

muchadoabouttruffles:

heartofaquamarine:

Slytherin occupies an odd place in the Harry Potter fandom. In canon, while it is the house with the second most development, that development is almost entirely negative, with the house and a large quantity of its students acting antagonistically throughout the piece. Heck, Hagrid, the lovable gruff figure who acts as Harry’s (and thus the audience’s) introduction to the magical aspects of the series explicitely calls them the most evil house before Harry has even seen the castle. This, along with Draco Malfoy’s terrible introduction (Malfoy will be covered in detail later in the piece) and the fact that Harry is already having to distance himself from Voldemort by the time of the sorting, is the major reason that Harry chooses anything but Slytherin. While the house, or rather its representatives, are sort of given more naunce later with Slughorn, Malfoy’s Draco and Narcissus, and Snape, the core example of how it is treated in the series comes just before the final battle, when the entire Slytherin student body either sides with Voldemort (Crabbe and Goyle, and to a lesser extent Parkinson who is willing to hand over Harry to save herself) or refuses to fight the good fight at all. 

The weirdness comes from the fact that Slytherin is probably the most popular house to self identify as within the active fandom. Aside from having traits many consider positive associated with it (cunning, loyalty and ambition), it is also treated as the outcast house to the rest of the school, particularly the Gryfindors. The treatement of Slytherin therefore sticks in a lot of fan’s nerves, and understandably so. The notion of Houses, defining people at age 11, is already a weird way to handle things, after all, and defining an entire group of them as evil from the start? Yeah that’s not great, particularly if you identify with aspects of them. I myself would probably be a Slytherin or a Ravenclaw, so I can understand this distaste.

But…here’s the thing. The reasons for treating Slytherin this way are not entirely diagectic in nature. The house is the centre of a massive pile up involving world building, characterisation and most importantly some fairly blunt and pointed social commentary about the British School system and society at large. 

It’s been a running gag that what racism is to the American political discussion, classism is to the British. This is not entirely true (for one thing we are certainly not over racism or xenophobia here), but there is a nugget in there. British society is heavily class stratified society. We have some of the worst mobility in the developed world, and much of our political system is dominated by a very small part of society.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is that there is a particular branch of the schooling system that dominates government, known as the Public Schools. That name can be confusing at first. The original group of Public schools vastly predate the mandatory schooling system; the oldest of them predate Columbus’ birth by over a decade. Not his voyage to the Americas, but his birth. The original idea was that they would take promising boys who normally would not get an education, due to them not coming from families who could afford them to be educated, hence the name Public Schools. Nowadays these are all elite private schools, not linked to the department of education. While approximately 7% of the population attend these schools, 33% of the members of Parliament (MPs), 50% of the Peers in the second chamber of government and 70% of the top judges are educated here. Heck, of the 54 Prime Ministers who have led the country, 32 were educated at one of three Public schools; seven at Harrow School, six at Westminster School and nineteen at Eton College. Compare that to the 9 prime ministers educated, as I was, in state schools. These institutions form part of the basis for a web of connections that defines a lot of the elite parts of British society, not just in politics but in business, in media and in higher education as well; the “old boy’s club” that provides a barrier to entry for a vast swathe of society. While supporters of these systems will note that efforts have been made to overcome this, with around 310 of Eton’s pupils receiving financial assistance, but that means that the remaining 1,000 students come from families that can afford the £12,000 per term fees, and these students are only male. The idea that this system is anything close to meritocratic is not just laughable, it is the equivalent of starting a discussion on orbital dynamics with the word’s “assuming a heliocentric universe”.

Another point to make? The entire House structure comes from these schools. Eton has 25 Houses, and in this case they are literally houses; they are where the boy’s sleep at night, since it is a boarding school. While not unique to Public Schools, they are heavily associated with them in British culture. I’m adding this in because Rowling didn’t just make up the concept of splitting the children into groups. As a teenager she attended Wyedean School, which notably historically had a four House system (oh look it’s almost as if there might be a connection), before abandoning it as the school grew (I can’t find anything about when this happened, but it could well have been after Rowling studied there).

Hogwarts itself, while it is an individual school, is also a condensation, celebration and condemnation of the British School system as a whole, being the only wizarding school in the UK. Umbridge isn’t just a single throughly unpleasant inspector, she is a stand-in for OFSTED, the body responsible for school inspections. It’s notable that in Harry’s year in Gryfindor,  you have, among others, the dirt poor Ron, the muggle born Dean and Hermione, the Irish half-blood Seamus Finnigen (and given that this was written in the 90′s holy shit is UK and Irish relations another can of worms I am not going to open here because this already too long but will be glanced a bit at in a later bit of this essay). It’s honestly hard for me to not read Gryffindor and Hufflepuff as stand-ins for the UK state schools, Ravenclaw for the private schools, and Slytherin as the public schools. Remember what I said about how Slytherin is treated as the outcast part of the school? Well, it is honestly treated much like the rest of the UK school system treats the private school. How is that? Well, when it snowed in my school days and we all went to the main park, the one thing that would immediately unite all the state and a lot of the private schools was the arrival of the public school kids (particularly since they tended to try and pick snowball fights with everyone while throwing classist insults around). Slytherin is in many ways the house of privilege, and not necessarily earned privilege. Lucius Malfoy, until his ousting when he plays his hand too hard in the second book, is the leader of the Board of Governors and escaped Azkaban despite his crimes, while it is explicitely stated in the first book that Slytherin has won the House cup for repeatedly in the previous years, mainly due to Snape bestowing

preferential 

treatment on his own House (and yes I do think it was fine for Dumbledore to pull that last minute switch, since Harry Ron and Hermione had just legimately just prevented Voldemort from returning. That kind of deserves some credit. The Neville bit might be pushing it but again, the timing was just pretty tight).

But there’s more to what Slytherin represents, and this comes back to what I was saying about how charactisation is involved in this pile up, particularly the characterisation of Slytherin himself.

Specifically the characterisation of him as a rascist shitfucker.

I know that’s blunt but so it is the characterisation. He left a giant monster behind for the sole purpose of having it one day unleashed on a load of kids for the crime of not being born to magical parents, and Slytherin the house has historically been defined as much by its stated qualities of cunning and ambition as it has been by this continuing tradition of racist ideology. The Sorting Hat song is not the full picture as to what defines the Houses; they have grown beyond that, both in universe and in fandom. This characterisation comes back into social commentary because, yes, the UK has had and still has a long history of racism and xenophobia, from our imperial history to the Troubles in Ireland to how Eastern European and muslim immigrants are treated now.

So why does Slytherin House still bare a stain from Slytherin the man? Well, in a word, it’s tradition. Remember what I said about the age of these institutions? Yeah, that’s not a joke. The Public School system, the Oxbridge higher education that it feeds into, are heavily influenced by traditions that have grown up over the ages. Heck, it used to be that in Eton, the youngest boys in the House were basically servants to the older students and staff, a practise known as “fagging” (I am not even joking). Wizarding society in general is also heavily steeped in the past; the steam train of the Hogwarts express, for instance, or the very concept of the Houses themselves. Heck, while it is never confronted directly, quite a few characters talk about how the Sorting isn’t the best idea, most notably the Sorting Hat itself. Slytherin the house has passed down the ideals of Slytherin the man in its culture, just as the UK has passed down racism, classism and xenophobia in ours. If Voldemort is the embodiment of these issues at their most violent, then Parkinson is them at their most passive; she is willing to go with Voldemort’s demands to save herself, and is willing to accept the racism and classism throughout the books.

This is what I meant by a collusion between characterisation, world building and social commentary. The books were written while Rowling was viturally penniless, and a lot of the social commentary in them reflects this, including the way Slytherin is portrayed. Is it fair to the characters of Slytherin? Should she have been more naunced about it? Well, yes. There’s a reason I called it a pile up, but if you are treating the resulting mess as simply being in universe, you are going to miss a lot of important aspects about why she created it the way that she did.

Just a very short addendum to this, but its also reflected in how members of the different houses experience the legal system: the Malfoy’s, the Crabbe’s and Goyle’s, when they experience the legal system, theres discussion of connections, of lighter punishments, of getting out of it in light of their charity work, etcetera. By contrast, lets look at how members of Gryffindor interact with the legal system: Hagrid gets it twice, first when he’s expelled on suspicion, SUSPICION that Aragog killed those children, which really made no sense but it was a neat frame up by Riddle, a slytherin, and then later when the Malfoy’s sue for the destruction of Buckbeak, again using their contacts to manipulate the legal system. Harry Potter, another Gryffindor, experiences the legal system after saving his own life and that of his cousin Dudley. His experience, the changing time and location, the intimidating setup designed to unnerve him and upset him, all pretty much entirely lift from experiences of the UK Benefits Courts, a subject JK Rowling was intimately familiar with at the time of writing Harry Potter. It’s very much the experience that the working class had with the legal system: A cold unfeeling bureaucracy that maliciously punishes those who can’t afford the ante of “greasing the wheels” as it were.

Now this wouldn’t neccesarily be related to the above post, except for one thing that I’m going to quote:

“

7% of the population attend these schools, 33% of the members of Parliament (MPs), 50% of the Peers in the second chamber of government and 70% of the top judges are educated here.”

We actually see Harry interacting with the courts twice…sort of. In Prisoner, Harry is let off the hook explicitly due to who he is. By the time he revisits the Court in Phoenix, that very status has made him a target, and his final visit to a courtroom (the Kangeroo court overseen by Umbridge in Hallows) the system has corrupted even further.

cocainesocialist:

cocainesocialist:

a truly huge shock. it’s almost as if the far right is allowed to grow because of its unthreatening relationship to big business! 🤔

sorry to all the alt right edgelords who thought you were really subversive. turns out you’re just run of the mill republicans with more open racism! v sad.

copperbadge:

engineerleopoldfitz:

0hcicero:

snakewife:

• distinct sense of fashion (not necessarily good, but. distinct.)
• has almost died, like, twice, but it’s a really funny story–
• absolutely should not be in charge
• absolutely does not WANT to be in charge
• you’re pretty sure they’re into some weird stuff
• wants to help you out when you’re sad???
• may not be equipped to help you out and will fret if that is the case
• absolutely terrible OR top-notch taste in alcohol, no inbetween
• you’ve never seen more impressive shoes 

If you know someone who exudes a powerful Danny DeVito energy despite being a lesbian in her twenties, or if you know someone whose wardrobe choices would not look out of place on Jeff Goldblum, well, you got yourself an Uncle Friend, friend

@mindkindling Guess what – you’re the Uncle Friend, in the best way possible – Like a gay Taika Waititi ❤ 

Somehow I feel like this is all about @copperbadge‘s friend R…

And here I was thinking it was me. Though yes, R does also qualify for most of those and has almost-died more times than I have, technically speaking. 

He bought his last pair of very impressive shoes off a guy on a streetcorner at 4am. 

plinytheyounger:

we ALL need escapism in our literature, a sense of having other, different problems in our lives, and i feel like the comments of william abbe, harvard law student and whaling crewman, on the delights of charlotte bronte are a great example of this:

Found “Jane Eyre” among the books in the round house.  Delighted to see it — Mary H. Blacker on cover…. Mate again “came out” in white duck, which becomes him.  I have now an immense amount of sewing to do, but cant muster energy enough to begin the labor, but must begin before long.  “Old Woman” has lined & braided a new straw hat for me.  All hands got new hack knives from Old Man the other day.  The thieves will soon make them scarce again.  You cant lay anything down for a moment, but you are sure to loose it, so dexterous & watchful are the light fingered gentry of the forecastle.  Commenced Jane Eyre — very pleasant to meet here on this old illiterate barke any traces of home refinement & taste. 

and:

I am full of excitement about “Jane Eyre.”  What a book for a woman — no, a mere girl — to write!  What originality, piquancy, energy, imagination & language!  I read it & forgot whaling.  The crassness of the forecastle, the low thoughted vulgarity of the crew, the insolent condescension of the officers, & my stagnant, un-mental life.  I does me good, its fervor quickens & its sentiment elevates me.  Its authoress died while the snow was on the ground — her death wintry as her life.

at the end of his 1859 diary he lists books read including “Jane Eyre (twice)”

salinex:

sewingfrommagic:

adhdpie:

–the Only Mood everyone else knows about: i  wanna do THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and–SQUIRREL

–galaxy brain: i was listening to the lecture but the prof said something that reminded me of something else and now i’m not sure how much time i was lost in thought

–the tutorial only comes in video format: i’m sorry, but you’ve thrown off the emperor’s groove *hurls product & its tutorial video into the sun*

–damn you hyperfocus: i went to bed intending to wake up and write but this morning i was possessed by a cleanliness spirit and spent the next 14 hours organizing the apartment

–i dont think u tried at all.jpg: did i seriously spend an entire free day refreshing twitter b/c i didn’t want to spend 10 minutes finishing my hw but wouldn’t let myself do anything else until i finished it???? (yes)

–patrick star: *unlocks phone* time to check the weather. *opens twitter* the weather. *opens messenger* the weather. *opens mobage game* the weather. *opens facebook* the weather. *opens twitter again* THE WEA–

–smells like depression: literally everything is too boring. i’m going back to sleep

Galaxy brain

Galaxy brain mixed with

Damn you hyper focus 8I