Ron always just fucking knows
If you remember, Ron was always weirdly good with Divination. Whenever he’d joke about a possible outcome, it would eventually happen in some roundabout way!
#AU where Ron is actually a great prophet but no one fucking knows it#and when they find out#Ron is torn between being pissed as hell and thinking it’s hilarious
BUT MOST OF YOU DON’T REMEMBER THAT THIS USED TO BE A LEGIT FANDOM THEORY, THOUGH. Back during the “three year summer” between GoT and OotP, it was actually pretty common for people to theorize about Ron secretly being a Seer without realizing it. In addition to the quote above, most of his predictions in books 3 and 4 come true at some point in the series if they’re read broadly enough.
This was also accompanied by a fandom theory about Ron being the “seventh son of the seventh son“ — namely that the Weasleys had lost another son at some point before the series began, making Ron the seventh. If Arthur Weasley was also a seventh son, this could have meant that Ron was born with special magical abilities such as the power of prophecy.
In the end, this theory was soundly jossed both by OoTP as well as by J.K. Rowling, who stated in her March 2004 World Day interview that Arthur Wealsey had been one of only three brothers. Ron making ‘predictions’ was a result of his own perceptiveness and by sheer dumb luck; still, the ‘Ron is Actually a Seer’ theory was an important force in pre-2004 fandom and figured into a number of major fanworks of the time.
Another major Ron-centric fan prediction included the “Dumbledore is actually a time-travelling Ron Weasley” theory, which remains one of the most complex, far-fetched, and awesome popular fan theories ever.
FANDOM HISTORY IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF FAN CULTURE AND WE SHOULD MAKE AN EFFORT TO REMEMBER THESE IMPORTANT PARTS OF OUR HERITAGE.
THANK YOU. I WAS REALLY SOLD BY THIS THEORY AND WAS CONVINCED RON WAS GOING TO DIE BECAUSE OF THE “DIE RON DIE!” CASUAL COMMENT RE: TEALEAVES. omfg. my heritage.
You know what I remember? I remember that while HP fandom had ugly wackadoodle shipping wars NO ONE WAS TOTALLY SHITTY TO PEOPLE FOR HAVING THEORIES ABOUT WHERE THE STORY WAS GOING OR HOW THE PIECES OR SYMBOLISM FIT TOGETHER.
Part of this was because the HP books are structured like mysteries, so this type of analysis is what the reader is “supposed” to do.
But remembering how awesome HP was about theories/questions… well, those were the days, eh?
Month: December 2014
Do for Self….
Love this
Black excellence
Self-sufficiency and self-determination.
Please donate to their indiegogo campaign!! It ends on Jan 19 and they are still 10k away from their goal!! This is a fantastic project with so much potential please donate if you can.
It is worth expanding on the difference between empathy and compassion, because some of empathy’s biggest fans are confused on this point and think that the only force that can motivate kindness is empathetic arousal. But this is mistaken. Imagine that the child of a close friend has drowned. A highly empathetic response would be to feel what your friend feels, to experience, as much as you can, the terrible sorrow and pain. In contrast, compassion involves concern and love for your friend, and the desire and motivation to help, but it need not involve mirroring your friend’s anguish.
Or consider long-distance charity. It is conceivable, I suppose, that someone who hears about the plight of starving children might actually go through the empathetic exercise of imagining what it is like to starve to death. But this empathetic distress surely isn’t necessary for charitable giving. A compassionate person might value others’ lives in the abstract, and, recognizing the misery caused by starvation, be motivated to act accordingly.
Summing up, compassionate helping is good for you and for others. But empathetic distress is destructive of the individual in the long run.
When I was little, the only dresses and skirts that I liked were the “spinnerooni” ones because they are so much fun to play in. After trying to come into myself, I decided to try killing every piece of me that was feminine because I was introduced to this “masculinity requirement” to pass as male and to be “trans enough” in general. For the past year and a half, I’ve been telling a lot of my friends to BREAK THE BINARY and I’m finally at a point where I have started to ease myself into physically expressing the boy inside. I’m very happy about this because I feel like, not only as a transman, but as a transman of color, my community isn’t generally happy about bois that are okay with their “femininity”, but I am finally realizing that I can’t really kill the person that I already am. I shouldn’t stop myself from feeling cute as fuck just because other people might not feel comfortable with it. It will probably take time until I can wear this out and about, but I am proud of myself for being able to put this on and take these pictures and make this post and not care too much about it.
I’m still a KING.
Blake (he/him/his)
[[[Thank you Nat & Kourt for the petticoats]]]
look at my cool af friend!!
when i was first going through realizing myself as tran s i thought i was just confused because I still liked feminine things. this post, nd other posts on tumblr recently educated and taught me than i can still be girl and have my transmasculinity still be valid and real. please reblog this so more questioning transboys can realize this too.
Panic and terror aren’t the only kinds of fear. There are deeper kinds, more terrible kinds. Apprehension and heavy, heavy dread.
Veronica Roth (via sociolab)
Realism v. gender ideology: Women in apocalyptic fiction shaving their armpits.
By Lisa Wade, PhD
This is what gender ideology looks like. That’s The Walking Dead’s Rosita Espinosa and a total absence of armpit hair.
This is also gender ideology at work: the privileging of an idea of gender over real life or, in this case, realism.
The Walking Dead’s producers go to great lengths to portray what a zombie apocalypse might be like. They are especially keen to show us the nasty bits: what it really looks like when dead people don’t die, what it looks like to kill the undead, and the evil it spawns in those left alive. It’s gruesome. The show is a gore orgy. But armpit hair on women? Apparently that’s just gross.
Gender ideology lost this battle with realism, we’d see armpit hair on the women in Gilligan’s Island, Planet of the Apes,The Blue Lagoon, Beauty and the Beast, Waterworld, Lost and, yes, The Hunger Games – but we don’t. (Thanks to Ariane Lange at Buzzfeed for the whole collection and to @uheartdanny for the link.)
At least Rosita could conceivably have a razor. How do women supposedly shave their armpits on deserted islands? Did the Beast slip Belle a razor, you know, just as part of his controlling personality? And maybe some persnickety women would continue to shave even if they were lost in purgatory, but Ripley in Alien? Come on.
Our interest in realism only goes so far. Armpit hair on women is apparently one of its limits.
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
#yep#also friendly reminder that in The Hunger Games books this is an actual thing that is brought up#Katniss mentions that every time the Capitol gets their hands on her they shave her legs#she complains about it in the second book because her leg hair was just beginning to grow back properly after the Games#it’s weird and unnecessary to her#she would not do it normally#heck most of the women I know irl don’t bother to shave all winter#let alone COME THE APOCALYPSE (tags via enigmaticagentalice)
can a dinosaur even get more fuckin rad?
you bet jurassican
i am so impressed by that dinosaur and that pun congratulations
Paris
5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think.
To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.
“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”
This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?
Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.
While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.
But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:
Navigation and Pormpuraawans
In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.Blame and English Speakers
In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)This doesn’t surprise me. I’d also propose that since Chinese has no plural nouns, only context, that a greater sense of belonging to a group or community is present among native Chinese speakers, while English speakers feel more individualistic.
So I feel like everyone should immediately go read Ted Chiang’s amazing SF short story “The Story of Your Life,” which is about learning an alien language that has an emphasis on knowing how the sentence about to spoken will end — which leads to an overall advanced understanding of time itself.
It’s a fantastic story. It’ll massively fuck with your mind. Read it.
5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think.
Caesuria 