Why are you reading this? Go do something worthwhile.
I love my original Framework running Fedora, but in order to compete with MacOS, Windows and Linux need to figure out standby battery usage without hard shutting down after each use. Otherwise, the size of the battery is not pointless, but pretty close.
I tend to stay away from the plagiarism argument, just because you can make a strong case that real human originality is exceptionally rare and most art is minimal transformation of a wide array of source material. Everything from the Illiad to Star Wars is derivative.
That said, her treatment of minotiries in Harry Potter is straight plagiarism of Confederate and Nazi ideology on slaves and untermensch. It surprised me that people were shocked at her “some people can’t be women” stance when she continuously played the “some people aren’t people” angle for laughs.
My mom taught high school English for decades and she used to tell her students that JK Rowling is a great storyteller, but a terrible author. She dreamed up a really cool world that really resonated with people, but her execution in that world is awful. The biggest place you see this is to lift the curtain on anything, and it crumbles instantly. Time Turners? Unnecessary plot device with massive implications. American wand? Kills Voldemort immediately. Sex ed at Hogwarts? No sex, only snog?
JK Rowling hasn’t helped herself with this either, by continuously editorializing. Hermione was always black. Dumbledore is gay for wizard Hitler. Wizards didn’t need bathrooms and would just magic away their shit, except wizard bathrooms are a central plot point for the second book. When she was starting out, she didn’t have the money for a real editor. When she made it big, it was by the strength of her own bootstraps, so she didn’t need one. It shows. She shat gold once, and in her eyes, it’s now gold every time.
Avada Kedavra is dumb. Wizard duels essentially have to follow the be first, best, or cheat rule. The definite death spell makes being best pointless and cheating too slow. You have to go nuclear first and fastest. Also, the defining characteristic is the green flash and no marks on the dead body. In the world of Harry Potter, if nobody sees the flash, and nobody finds the murder wand, every heart attach and brain aneurysm is indistinguishable from the universes ultimate crime.
But, I think things like this are a reason why people love Harry Potter. It’s why I did. When you’re presented with a world so incredible with an execution that’s lukewarm at best, it allows your imagination to take over. I love reading cheap, bad, free-on-Kindle sci-fi and fantasy, because oftentimes the central idea can be really unique, cool, and interesting. The execution can be awful, or sometimes not, but the core idea is usually a diamond. I get to be an archeologist, uncover it, and re-imagine it as I see fit. That’s why so many Harry Potter fans get defensive. It resonated so strongly because people had to invest their own imaginations so deeply to make sense of a story that fundamentally doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
This is probably a minority take, but I feel like it might be important to watch this show if you want to have conversations with people in your life about JKR. If you don’t want to have conversations, absolutely ignore it.
Obviously, don’t spend money on it supporting her, but the overwhelming likelihood is that the show will be at least passably good. For better or worse, it’s a beloved IP and HBO has a solid history.
The conversations about the show will happen, and if I want to steer that conversation in my life, I need to be able to offer and interject something other than “Hey, did you know JKR is the richest woman in Britain and a massive piece of shit?”
Know thy enemy.
My pet peeve with Harry Potter is the Confederate ideology with slaves and house elves. If I want to have that conversation (I do), I’m going to need some familiarity to offer critique and highlight how they’re treating it and if they’re treating it differently.
If all those voters were so upset by Kamala Harris’ stance on Palestine, they should have voted in the primaries for a candidate that matched their views.
I don’t know if that’s the argument you think it is? The first modern Chinese and Russian billionaires are products of the 80s/90s, decades after the deaths of Stalin and Mao. Arguably, there’s a fair amount of compromising that led to the collapse of the USSR and the rise of capitalist communism in China created these billionaires. Maybe if they’d kept a harder, purer, uncompromising communist line there’d be fewer billionaires.
You can also take a look at Reconstruction. Any black person will tell you that while there has been progress, it’s obviously not been enough. And Reconstruction played a large part in that. We were uncompromising at first, which led to real results. Then we compromised and Reconstruction ended. And the South went right back to the way things had been.
The sad truth is that if more people were uncompromising on their moral core, we probably wouldn’t be in this mess.
I don’t know anyone who uses Steam for the community features.
Steam works because it’s easy. Full stop.
Yeah, he’s not Catholic, so he’d spin it as a badge of honor for sure.
Eh, Prince Andrew isn’t sweating it.
Had to double check that isn’t the women’s community where we’ve all accidentally posted.