i used to think that a foot of parchment was a lot and feel bad when harry potter characters were assigned to write that much
but then i realized the paper i write on is 8.5 by 11 inches.
so a foot of parchment is the equivalent of like, a page and a half of paper.
they complained SO MUCH about essays that were like
a page and a half
wtf guys
get your shit together
No wonder Hermione always got onto the boys for not doing their homework.
it’s honestly not even a foot and a half it’s just one sheet of paper. a foot is 12 inches. like dang if i had to only write one page long essays in school about cool magic shit then i would have been ecstatic.
also 12pt times new roman— the standard assigned size and font for a lot of essay assignments— produces significantlysmaller text than a muggleborn teenageer with a pen and ink quill would be able to manage on the regular, no matter how dedicated she was. ron and harry are frequently noted to be using large handwriting on unlined paper. their homework would have been about three short paragraphs if they were feeling studious.
no wonder hermione was so fucking exasperated! muggle students their age would have strangled them.
i hate writing historical fic because every five sentences you’re googling random shit like “when did billiards become popular in america” & i’ll have you know it was the 1820s
fun fact my pals the word ‘okay’ or ‘O.K.’ (the abbreviation for the old timey spelling of ‘all correct’) was popularized in 1840 by Van Buren’s US presidential election slogan and seeing it in historical fiction before then feels like a little glitch in the matrix, but seeing it in an Old Timey Fantasy setting sends me down the rabbit hole of how a fantasy world language would be brutal to translate, and language in general is a trip, and nothing means anything, probably
I just want to add a correction: O.K. was not an abbreviation for an “old-timey” spelling of “all correct”; it is in fact an abbreviation for an INTENTIONAL MISSPELLING of “all correct.” There was a short-lived period in the 1800s where it became amusing and trendy to flagrantly misspell conversational phrases and then abbreviate them, and “O.K.” is the only one to survive to the present day.
O.K. is an ancient MEME.
OL KORECK!
You telling me like 100 years from now, words like “birb”, “smol”, and “bode” are gonna be actual words?
Well they kinda already are. You say or type them, others know what you mean. That’s what words and language do. Of course we have to make new ones, because we keep finding new concepts. Even if it’s ‘that thing is small but differently small than a normal small.’ Like two different shades of blue.
I love oll korrect for exactly this reason. So much of our language us just what a bunch of cool kids for two years in the 18th century thought was funny
I love Alex Schaefer impasto works depicting branches of Chase bank going up in flames in daytime. They were from a series by him called “Disaster Capitalism,” and apparently the banks (and cops) would pretend he was planning acts of arson to try and make him stop painting. [via mutantspace, via Janie]
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….
– everyone hates carpets. no one wants their feet to be comfortable. no one wants them to be warm. no one wants to be able to lounge on the floor. they all want to throw their back out on hardwood. – everyone hates walls. i thought that houses having walls was normal, but everyone wants the only walls to be around the bathrooms and the bed rooms. children cannot leave your sight or they will be sucked into oblivion. you need to be able to see through the entire house and into hell. – people demand double vanities. when you’re a couple, apparently you have to use the bathroom in tandem. you get shackled together and you’re brushing your teeth at the same time, there are no other options available so you NEED two sinks. – showers must be separate from the tub. not counting people with disabilities and the elderly, i don’t understand why people can’t stand in a tub and take a shower. my whole life i thought tub showers were normal but apparently they are for peasants who don’t deserve to do cartwheels in their 10 by 10 shower stall. – people don’t have kitchen tables, they have islands. they need them for cooking prep, which is impossible to do at a table. they also need them to eat at in absurdly tall stools, despite the fact that the breakfast nook is 10 feet away and the dining room table is 15 feet away through their open floor plan. – stainless steel appliances are the powerhouse of the home.
This is such an interesting dissection of a very common trope in writing female characters that I never really thought about before, but it’s so prevalent and so obvious and so fucking disgusting.
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