my renn faire training has made me a very Interesting dnd party member because i just leap for the funniest possible thing to say, and that’s literally it, that’s all i got, it’s just punchlines
god this is a big ask but I really wish there were like….. a site where you could plug in your state/district/whatever and tick some boxes on issues you prioritize and then the site would give you a rundown of the potential candidates in your area and where they stand on those issues in like….. clean simple bullet points. gimme the cliffnotes, I literally do not have the time or energy to comb through god knows how many articles and shit to figure out who to support, just tell me what their stance is on X, Y, and Z, and that’s gonna have to be enough.
It goes through who’s on your ballot and explains things like that based on your address.
this is really great. it gives you bullet points on what each candidate has said and done on each issue.
very illuminating, frankly, seeing the candidate’s own words and actions. for instance, under ‘defense/veterans’ the republican candidates almost always say something about a well-funded military, and the democrats almost always say something about getting veterans the medical care they need. makes it pretty obvious that republicans don’t care about soldiers once they’re done with them.
how good would it be if luna, who believes in the crumple-horned snorckack and nargles, thought that dinosaurs were made up by muggles
Okay, but consider:
Someone (probably Hermione) takes Luna to a muggle museum of natural history, in a last ditch effort to convince her that dinosaurs really did exist. They go through all of it: full and partial skeletons on display, fossil imprints of skin textures, a little video about carbon dating, exhibits on the evolution of all life from tiny one-celled sea creatures, bird-hipped vs. lizard-hipped, living giant isopods and coelacanths, the whole spiel about how the dinosaurs aren’t actually completely gone, since some, like the anchiornis and archaeopteryx, were the predecessors from which today’s birds – including every owl in the Wizarding World – evolved.
Luna takes all this in with her usual calm demeanor until the very end, when her eyes seem to grow even more enormous in her face, but doesn’t say anything. After a full minute of Luna’s silent astonishment, her companion prods her for a response. “Of course!” Luna exclaims, “no wonder I’ve never found them. I’ve been going about things the wrong way!” She launches into a lengthy explanation that the records that she and her father have been using for references were copies of copies of copies of absolutely ancient scripts, so in order to find the creatures as described in them, she needed to be looking for fossils.
Luna (with Rolf as her assistant) begins searching through areas of Wizarding Britain, using magical equivalents of the muggle tools she read about at the museum (a variation on Tempus to determine the age of a magical item or creature, Cryptozoam Revelio as a substitute for ground-penetrating radar). She finds the remains of a number of magical creatures from various ages, as well as accidentally uncovering a nest of Knuckers, a relative of the dragon previously thought to be extinct. After this discovery, she and Rolf are given a bit more credence than before, and they gain the support among creature-handlers, especially dragonologists. Because of this, they get access to more regions of the world, and their team grows. Eventually Luna ends up founding the Wizarding Archaeological Society, the first institution to combine both muggle and wizard research methods at a single institution.
On the 50th anniversary of the Society’s founding, they open a museum of their own (”Everything that was, at the WAS!”), to display the various fossils of magical creatures that they’ve managed to locate over the years. Unveiled at the opening ceremonies was what would become the pride of their collection, a diorama of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in every stage of development, along with details about their habits, average lifespan, and a map of the full range of their habitat at their peak population in the mid-17th century. Their extinction at during the 20th century was attributed to rising global temperatures, as their most flourishing period coincided with the coldest years of the Little Ice Age, and no specimens from any later than the 1976 Heat Wave had thus far been recovered. The disappearance of the Snorkacks, it was said, had been an early warning sign of the global climate change which had troubled the entire world, wizarding and muggle, for the better part of the last half-century. A cooperative partnership had been reached between the WAS and the Royal Society a scant decade after the WAS’s founding , allowing research witches and wizards to pool their resources with muggle scientists, in time to prevent a catastrophe that the wizarding world would otherwise have been unlikely to survive.
In her speech at that evening’s gala, Luna told the story of how it all happened, to reveal the person who had singlehandledly started this series of events, which resulted in not only a golden age of discovery in the field of cryptozoology, but also an era of peace and cooperation between both worlds, allowing restrictions imposed by the Statute of Secrecy to be loosened for the first time in nearly five hundred years, all in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Hermione Granger, who had been grumbling in her chair the entire time, rose when acknowledged. Luna Lovegood beamed at her aging friend, the witch who had gone from being her most skeptical critic to her most dedicated – and most challenging – supporter in a mere half-century.
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
and they told us to tell you hello.
So, I have to say something.
This is my favorite post on this website.
I’ve seen this post in screenshots before, and the first time I read it, I cried. Just sat there with tears running down my face.
Because this, right here, is the best of us, we humans. That we hope, and dream of the stars, and we don’t want to be alone. That this is the best of our technology, not Terminators and Skynet, but our friends, our companions, our legacy. Our message to the stars.
I’m flat out delighted, and maybe even a little honored, that I get to reblog this.
i don’t know how people feel about harley having actual powers but the idea of her being able to pull off ridiculous, “cartoon logic” things like in who framed roger rabbit or looney tunes or tom and jerry whereas every one else has to adhere strictly to “real world” logic is something that I very much want
things like her pulling her giant mallet out of no where or having endlessly deep pockets on her skin tight jester suit
or her having a wile e coyote and road runner relationship with Batman
Harley chasing Batman going through different doors in a hallway and coming out other doors like in scooby doo
Harley painting a hyper realistic alleyway on the side of a building, Batman cruises straight through it in the Batmobile but Harley tries to run through and gets flattened
I love how casually knowledgeable Ronald Weasley is, talking facts, including the year and the venue
like that.
Charlie studied dragons. Ron isn’t just casually knowledgeable, he takes an interest in his brothers’ hobbies
I’ll bet it wasn’t just an interest. In fact, I’ll bet those exact words were repeated in the Weasley household on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
“But Mum, my mate’s cousin’s sister’s uncle has the egg just ready to go and honestly, who better to take care of things than us, because after all—?”
“Dragon breeding was outlawed by the Warlocks’ Convention of 1709, Charlie!”
“Dad, seriously, the guy in the alleyway was practically begging me to take the egg and I mean—”
“Dragon breeding was outlawed by the Warlocks’ Convention of 1709, Charlie!”
“Good morning, family, let’s say I managed to convert my bedroom into a habitat suitable for a Chinese Fireball, wouldn’t that show that I’m respons—”
“Dragon breeding was outlawed by the Warlocks’ Convention of 1709, Charlie!”
It’s just on a gigantic af poster in the middle of the Burrow’s kitchen. Hanging right there above the tea kettle: 𝔻𝕣𝕒𝕘𝕠𝕟 𝕓𝕣𝕖𝕖𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕨𝕒𝕤 𝕠𝕦𝕥𝕝𝕒𝕨𝕖𝕕 𝕓𝕪 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕎𝕒𝕣𝕝𝕠𝕔𝕜𝕤’ ℂ𝕠𝕟𝕧𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕠𝕗 𝟙𝟟𝟘𝟡, ℂ𝕙𝕒𝕣𝕝𝕚𝕖!
It just wasn’t mentioned because it wasn’t relevant to Harry’s journey.
what i do is not up to you 