my family is so. fucking weird and resistant to talking about anything. when i was a small child i asked my mother why she had a lot of gifts and things where people called her by another name and she like. didn’t give me a straight answer? it was her Hebrew name. like that’s literally it. that’s all u had to say
great-great-grandma cohen refused to tell her younger children that they were related to her two eldest children
my family didn’t tell me about part of my actual name until i sent away for my social security info to get my driver’s permit in my junior year of high school. i have an entire middle name that no one ever felt the need to mention to me
i had to google my own brother to find out why we don’t talk about him anymore
one morning in seventh grade my mother was driving me to school and asked me if she was too overprotective. i told her “yeah, sometimes.” then she casually, calmly went, “maybe it’s because you were almost kidnapped as a baby”
she didn’t even elaborate until i asked her to explain
(my father later confirmed that i was, in fact, briefly stolen as an infant)
my mom just dropped this information on me for the first time and was then like “bye honey have a good day at school”
The fact that kids actually ask to be dropped off around the corner is so surprising, cause like if my mom could honestly drop me off right at my locker, i would get her to do it.
I get jealous really easily but not like an angry vengeful jealous more like a really sad lonely jealous because everybody likes everybody more than they like me and I really really don’t blame them.
What if instead of gilly weed Harry had showed up to the black lake challenge in muggle scuba gear like “like where’s your advanced magic now bitches? Got me a free fishing knife with this thing”
Honestly I just want an AU where Harry approached all his magical problems with muggle solutions. Nobody knows how to handle it because he’s supposed to be there learning magic but you know what, it fucking works.
Give me Harry Potter who is like fucking MacGuyver up in this shit, creating his own non-magical solutions to magical problems.
“Potter how did you get past the enchanted keys to the Sorcerer’s Stone?”
“I used a fucking net.”
“How did you get past the dragon?”
Harry shines a little red light on the wall “works on cats, why not a dragon”
“How did you get through the hedge maze?”
“Weed-b-gone, it’s like a pound. Nothing will ever grow there again”
It’s the final battle between Harry and Voldemort. The Dark Lord begins to prepare a spell to end Harry Potter’s life once and for all when….
SMALL TALK TIP FOR PEOPLE WHO HATE SMALL TALK: Ask people if they have any pets. This is light and impersonal enough to offend no one. People who have pets are usually pretty excited to talk about them and show off pictures, so there’s a good chance that you will be looking at kitties and doggos. People who don’t have pets will usually talk about the pets they wish they had, or have had in the past. People who neither have nor want pets are pretty rare.
It’s a neutral topic to talk about but be prepared for the weirdest shit. I once spent an hour listening to a financial manager who kept tropical velvet earthworms
This is really quite a big deal. A tremendous amount of modern research ends up being sold to journals which require unreasonable payments to access it and only pay the original authors a pittance. It’s nice to see an agency like NASA deliberately widebanding its findings.
Not sure if people fully realize just how big of a deal this is.
THIS is how science is advanced. Not through biased corporate research, business secrets, marketing, paywalls and patent wars. But through open, uncensored and unrestricted public access to knowledge.
