Life Is Art

and exomis:

Since we are here might as well share the dhoti and the lungi

https://www.wikihow.com/Wear-a-Lungi

https://www.wikihow.com/Wear-a-Pancha-Kachcham?amp=1

It’s only men in the photos but really anyone can wear them. I am wearing a lungi right now.

All you do is take oranges (and grapefruit, in my case, but you could use any citrus fruit, lemon and limes included. You could also do slices of apple or other fruits, but they don’t dry as pretty) and cut them into slim, even slices. Blot the slices as dry as you can get them with paper towel, then lay them flat on drying racks, if you have them, or cookie sheets if you don’t. The cookie sheets will take longer, but will probably produce flatter slices at the end. If you want to, you can take cloves and push them into the slices before you dry them; the oranges should contract around them and hold them in place.

Put these into the oven at 200-220 degrees F (93 C), and bake for at least 4 hours. Check them hourly; it may take up to 7 hours, depending on the thickness of your slices and oven air circulation. Take them out when they no longer feel wet or sticky to the touch. 

A 5 lb bag of navel oranges was enough to garland most of this tree. All you need for that is a thick needle and some string (DMC embroidery floss works well, and is less than a dollar a skein at walmart and other chain stores). You just tie off the first orange, and then use the needle to go in and out each slice near the edges. If you’re making ornaments, check your local dollar store for bits of ribbon, jingle bells, beads or whatever else seems good to you. A hot glue gun is helpful but not necessary; all the ornaments here are just tied together. 

I have plenty of herbs drying in my cupboard, so I also used some sprigs of rosemary and lavender, plus cinnamon sticks, cloves, and allspice. Rosemary is easy to find as live plants in the grocery section, and you can trim some off without killing the plant (and then you have i n f i n i t e  r o s e m a r y). Get creative!

These smell fantastic, and should last multiple seasons if they’re dried allll the way and stored in airtight containers. (I chucked some of the odd bits into my mulling spices, which is lovely.) They’re a very old method of decorating and look beautiful even when they’re not perfect. If you’ve made these before, I’d love to see what you made!

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)

The Monster of Sentan

The Witch’s Cat

Raise Both Children

Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)

Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)

My Arch Nemesis Cynthia

Pirates and Mermaid

Eindred and the Witch

The Demon King

The Cornerwitch

Grandmother Beetroot

Apocalypse Daycare Worker

Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon

New Year Saga

A Story About Changelings

Ranger in the King’s Forest

The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit

24. The Queen with Three Cursed Children

25. Tiny Dragon with one coin hoard

26. Haunted house

27. Shark hero was about to go rogue

28. Grandma lives in the woods comic

29. A Different Aftermath comic

30. Battery (microstory but I love it so much)

31. It’s A Date comic

32. Supervillian kidnaps rival’s kid and they want to stay

33. Narrative Town

34. I have been hired to clean the wizard tower comic

35. Robot Apocalypse

36. The Statues That Do Not Weather

37. Kushiel

38. Tooth Fairy

39. Alien abduction

40. Felonious wish-granting

41. When humans met actual space orcs

Hi I’m a fantasy writer and now I need to know what potatoes do to a society

They drastically increase peasant food security and social autonomy.

The main staple of medieval agriculture was grain–wheat, barley, oats, or rye. All that grain has to be harvested in a relatively short window, about a week or two. It has to be cut down (scythed), and stored in the field in a safe and effective way (stooked); then it has to be brought to a barn and vigorously beaten (threshed) to separate the grain from the stalks and the seed husks. It can be stored for a few weeks or months in this form before it spoils or loses nutritional value. 

Then it has to be ground into flour. In the earlier middle ages, peasants could grind their own flour by hand using small querns, but landlords had realized that if they wanted to get more money out of their peasants, it was more effective for the entire village to have one large mill that everyone used. Peasants had to pay a fee to have their flour ground–and it might say something that there are practically no depictions of millers in medieval English literature in which the miller is not a corrupt thief. 

Then the flour has to be processed to make most of its nutrients edible to humans, which ideally involves yeast–either it’s made into bread which takes hours to make every time (and often involves paying to use the village’s communal bread oven) and spoils within a few days, or it’s made into weak ale, which takes several weeks to make, but can keep for several months. 

Potatoes, in comparison…

Potatoes have considerably more nutrients and calories than any similar crop available in medieval Europe–they beat turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, or anything else all to heck. I don’t know if they beat wheat out for calories per acre, but practically…

When you dig a potato out of the ground (which you can do at any time within a span of several months), you can bury it in the ashes of a fire for an hour, or you can boil it in water for 20 minutes.

Then you eat it. Boom. Done. (I mean, if you’re not fussy, you could even eat them raw.)

You store the ones you don’t want right now in a root cellar and plant some of them in the spring to get between a fivefold and tenfold return on your crop.

Potatoes don’t just feed you–they free you. Grain-based agriculture relies on lots of people working together to get the work done in a very short length of time. It relies on common infrastructure that is outside the individual peasant’s control. The grain has to be brought to several different locations to be processed, and it can be seized or taxed at any of those points. It’s very open to exploitation.

TW: Genocide The Irish Potato Famine happened because the English colonizers of Ireland demanded rents and taxes that were paid in grain, and it ended up that you didn’t really get to keep much of the grain you grew. So the Irish farmed wheat in fields to pay the English, and then went home and ate potatoes from their gardens. And then, because they were eating only one specific breed of potatoes, a blight came through and wiped all their potatoes out, and then they starved. So English narratives about the potato famine tended to say “Oh yes, potato blight, very tragic,” and ignore the whole “The English were taking all the grain” aspect, but the subtext here is: Potatoes are much harder to tax or steal than grain.

The Anatomy of a mermaid

yes, thanks.

i hate when people draws mermaid’s tail like it was some sort of goddamn suit on normal human legs like this:

[proto whale]

[orca skelly]

whales as we know them evolved from land animals that went back out to sea, and it’s all spine all the way down to the tail fin. the pelvis is vestigial to the point of being tiny and unrecognizable, and the rear leg structure is //gone//. and by the time they evolved all that, their forelegs had turned into proper fins and they didn’t have hourglass figures, because they built up walls of insulating fat and blubber where it was needed most - around the vital organs.

[walrus skelly]

which brings us to the walrus. as you can see the skeletal structure and the external appearance are fairly ursiform - the rear legs are basically still in there forming the tail, and the pelvis is intact, and above that it may as well still be a land animal. if mermaids did exist, as hominids who went back out to sea, and if they hadn’t evolved into basically dolphins, then a walrus skeletal system, complete with vestigial thigh bones inside a kind of muscle skirt, and with significant fat and blubber deposits //on the main body// would be most likely. which is to say, mermaids with human torsos and seagoing lower bodies would waddle around on their tails, have clearly defined thigh structures, and would be a hell of a lot rounder above and about the waist than they’re usually depicted.

which begs the question, then, if you see a mermaid and it’s a skinny little thing with a slinky waist and an eel-like tail and a perfect bosom and a coy smile, //why does it look like that//? because whatever that is? it is not a land animal that readapted to the sea. it is not your distant kin. it is a sea creature that adapted //to get your attention//.

maybe it’s all an illusion, a frilly mane, an hourglass shape, and narrow antennae that mimic the shape of human arms, waving lonely sailors into the water, only to realize too late the bioluminescent patterns of lipstick and pert breasts are to distract from what lies behind them - viselike jaws and row after row of stiletto teeth.

or maybe it’s all soft tissue, the gelatinous bell of a jellyfish folded into a pleasing shape, luring the unwary down to be caught up in a tail that is nothing more than thousands of barbed lines of stinging neurotoxin cells.

or it could be that the tail goes deep into a shadowy well, and the beautiful woman is a mask for a single enormous jaw, the internal skeleton just the endless spine and ribs of a vast and hungry sea snake.

not in a ~it doesn’t matter~ way but like. molly and arthur used to worry that fred and george might turn out to be squibs because they weren’t doing any accidental magic as children, but they were, THEY TOTALLY WERE, it just wasn’t anything flashy, instead they were just like idly switching bodies all the time

and like sometimes it doesn’t make much of a difference, whatever, wake up in the opposite bed you went to sleep in, but it gets like dangerous and weird if you’re on a broom or in the pond or letting your mum teach you to cook or trying to be mad stealth, so for a long long time everybody presumes they’re clumsy maybe-squibs and that they’re doing their twin lying thing when they try to explain what’s going on, so they learn to handle the issue their ownselves

they just. don’t go anywhere without the other. they start each day deciding which body is going to be which (because at this point they really don’t know which body is technically fred and which is technically george), and they learn to reorient FAST when they switch, and what things set them off, and eventually they learn how to act like nothing’s up even when one of them’s in the air and one’s on the ground or whatever, and then they burn past that til they can finish each other’s sentences — til they can switch midsentence — til they can play beater together — til they can switch in a split second in the middle of a game — til there’s room for other kinds of accidental magic to start showing up

at hogwarts they keep each other awake in history of magic by switching back and forth. in potions they take turns brewing and keeping lookout for the slytherins. in transfiguration and charms they keep their grades up because one of them will always get a spell right on the first try so they switch and make it look like both of them do and then they practice on their own later in private. it keeps the mystery alive.

at first they thought lee was just a lucky guesser but no, lee can always tell one twin from another twin — it’s not exactly telling fred from george, because while they are definitely two distinct personalities neither one of them feels like fred all the time or george all the time — but lee knows who he argued with yesterday or who he lent his notes to or who’s best to ask for help in astronomy and who’s best at runes. 

the weasleys are pretty bad at it for the longest time, but then bill comes home from his first year cursebreaking and he can tell, and over a holiday he teaches his trick to charlie so charlie can tell. alicia and katie and angelina can tell. the twins honestly don’t know if oliver can tell or not; so long as they’re doing what they’re supposed to on the quidditch pitch he doesn’t really care about much else. harry can tell. luna can tell. tonks can tell.

THERE IS INDEED A WAY FOR THIS TO END HAPPILY LISTEN UP

so after fred dies, george hates being trapped in one body, feels claustrophobic, misses fred so much he thinks it might drive him insane

but then one day

george blinks and he’s somewhere he wasn’t a second ago, he’s in a place full of white light and he can’t orient himself, can’t ground himself, feels dizzy and sick and overwhelmed but it only lasts for about thirty seconds.

then he’s back in his own body. 

and he looks down at his chest, his legs, his arms, there’s an ear missing so it’s definitely still his living body, but there’s something written on his arm, scrawled in messy quill ink. 

“i love you. i miss you.”

george flips out, washes off the ink and immediately writes a message in reply— “how’s death going?”

he walks around with that message written on his arm for weeks, always keeping a quill pen somewhere nearby, waiting, waiting, before it finally happens again. the switch. george is alive, so he can’t handle being in the afterlife, he feels dizzy and sick and it’s the worst feeling in the world, but it doesn’t last long, and when he gets back to his living body, there’s a long message from fred waiting on his right thigh, the ink still drying.

this goes on for years, never as often as either twin would like, but it’s enough. fred helps george figure out how to propose to angelina, fred helps plan the wedding. sometimes it’s fred in george’s body when angelina kisses her husband. sometimes she suspects, but she doesn’t mind in the slightest.

it gets easier as george gets older. the times when he switches into fred’s afterlife don’t hurt as much. he almost feels comfortable there, almost feels oriented. he knows he’s getting closer to dying.

then when george is past ninety, lying on his deathbed, he writes a careful message on his palm. “i’m coming soon. where are you?”

they switch, it lasts for almost five minutes this time, and when george gets back into his own body, he sees the instructions fred wrote over his heart.

Before the Hogwarts Express, some young wizards and witches made their way to Hogwarts on broomsticks and in enchanted carriages

There are other fractional platforms at King’s Cross station. Try 7 1/2 for a trip to wizard-only villages in Europe. 

It took five and a half minutes for the Sorting Hat to decide whether to place Minerva McGonagall in Gryffindor or Ravenclaw

Several Hogwarts students have caused mayhem at King’s Cross by dropping suitcases full of newt spleens or biting spellbooks all over the Muggle Station.

Peeves the poltergeist caused a three-day evacuation of Hogwarts in 1876 after escaping a trap set for him armed with several dangerous weapons. 

The one exception to the general magical aversion to Muggle technology is cars. Even the Ministry of Magic owns a fleet, modified with various useful charms. 

Many wizards were unhappy with the invention of the Muggle-like Knight Bus, and refused to use it when it first hit the streets. 

Headmasters and headmistresses of Hogwarts can teach their magical portrait to act and behave exactly like themselves. 

Sir Cadogan’s most famous encounter was with the Wyvern of Wye, a dragon-like creature, whom he accidentally killed with his broken wand. 

Only one non-magical person has ever managed to get as far as the Hogwarts Sorting Hat before being exposed as a Squib. 

Of the Eleven wizarding schools in the world, the African school of Uagadou is the only one to select pupils by Dream Messenger, leaving a token in the child’s hand whilst they sleep. 

The 1809 Quidditch World Cup final turned into a human versus tree battle when one of the players managed to jinx an entire forest to attack the stadium. 

The Hufflepuff ghost, the Fat Friar, was executed after senior churchman became suspicious of his ability to cure the pox by poking peasants with a stick. 

Every year St. Mungo’s Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries treats at least one injury caused by homemade Floo powder. 

Before she became a teacher at Hogwarts, Minerva McGonagall used to work for the Department of Magical Law Enforcement at the Ministry of Magic. 

Part of the process of becoming an Animagus requires you to carry a leaf from a Mandrake in your mouth for an entire month. 

A Dark wizard called Raczidian was devoured by maggots that appeared from his wand when he unsuccessfully attempted to cast the Patronus Charm.

Any part of a person’s body can be added to the Polyjuice Potion to allow the consumer to take their form, including hair, toenail clippings, dandruff or worse…

Remus Lupin’s father, Lyall, was a world-renowned authority on magical creatures like poltergeists and Boggarts. 

It took 167 Memory Charms and the largest mass Concelment Charm ever performed in Britain to modify a muggle steam engine and create the Hogwarts Express. 

Students from the Russian Wizarding school, Koldovstoretz, play a version of Quidditch where they fly on entire, uprooted trees instead of broomsticks. 

a squib who spent her childhood pretending to magically start accidental fires with the lighter up her sleeve; who got her bemused little sister to grow her hair long overnight after a bad trim; a squib who shook all through shopping at diagon alley and who was so relieved that her parents were almost suspicious when they said that there wasn’t enough money that year to get her a new wand from ollivander’s— she’d have to take great-aunt jenny’s hand-me-down, eight and a half inches of oak and unicorn hair;

a squib who made it to platform 9 3/4, who made friends with some shy kid in the back of the express, who made it across the lake and up the stairs and through the great hall doors and by the great long tables and onto the wobbly old stool—

until the hat drops over her eyes

well what do we have here?

she’s got a forged hogwarts letter with penmanship that’s perfect down to the ink splatter; she’s got a complicated string of owls, only half of them forged, from parents to administration to ministry that’s so complicated her name ended up on the first year roll call anyway. she’s got ten arguments, four pleas, and one smothered threat on the tip of her mental tongue for why the house that comes out of this hat’s brim better not be squib

she’s got a lighter up her sleeve and an eight and a half inch wand in her belt that will never, ever work for her. 

well, says the hat, better be slytherin then

she finds the room of requirement in her second week, because she has always been a hallway-pacer, her head always ringing with i want i want i need i need i will do this. the room of requirement gives her books of muggle magic tricks, sleight of hand, chemical ways to turn ‘water’ into ‘wine.’ 

she bribes another first-year slytherin to wingardium leviosa her feathers in flitwick’s class. her shy friend from the train, a hufflepuff and a muggleborn, buys her a new lighter for christmas without being asked. when a gryffindor finds her scrubbing at tears in the back of the library and guesses what’s the matter (he’s seen her classwork), she tells him the story, tells him what it’s like to be denied a whole world because they think different means broken— she expects him to tattle, but instead the gryff transfigures her needles for the rest of her academic career; and she whispers hints to him when his black thumb keeps making him fail herbology. 

(the first thing she’d said, when she realized he’d guessed her secret, had been ‘you should’ve been in ravenclaw’ and he had looked at her gravely until she apologized)

the room of requirement gives her books and books on potions, arithmancy, herbology— these things are not about magic. these things are not about power that lives in your bones. she knows power, knows the way sparks fly from her little sister’s wand when they take her to ollivanders, knows the way it flicks under her quill when she practices mcgonagall’s signature and sends home disciplinary letters to the parents of every student who ever bullied her friend from the train. 

she waters nightshade and re-pots mandrakes, can tell poisonous mushrooms from magical (…also poisonous) ones by a glance. she drops in just the right amount of unicorn horn powder in potions class (.025 g more than the instructions suggest) and when making sleeping draught stirs for half a stir extra. 

this is about power that you make. 

she studies and invents, schemes and lies and excels. she holds potions tutoring in the slytherin common room when her friend from the train suggests it, then moves it to the room of requirement after it gets too large and someone stains the green-and-silver upholstery. (her arithmancy sessions are much less well attended). 

she keeps her lighter, her little packets of carefully measured powder, her jokeshop tricks up her sleeve—she keeps the names of people who she can trust, who she can call on for distraction, for help, for a needed lie on the tip of her tongue—she keeps her gryffindor’s heavy wand and quick wit close at hand; keeps her hufflepuff’s steady patience closer; keeps her own bright improvisations at her fingertips. 

her bemused little sister ends up in ravenclaw, and they all eat at the hufflepuff table for breakfast because (she says) slytherins weren’t meant to follow rules and because (her sister says) how stupid is this seating thing and because (her shy friend says) didn’t you hear the hat? helga said she’d take them all, so hold your tongue, macmillian, scoot over, and pass my friends here the hashbrowns.

when she graduates, she heads for the ministry. she has plans, and she has brave, smart, true, cunning friends to back her up. 

he does things by himself and the two people he actually trusts, bc he’s learned that authority figures are no help and will only make things worse. he takes situations at face value bc he’s never seen other options in his life, he’s never HAD other options in his life. speaking very personally, that was a serious marker of abuse that i saw in myself - i never thought abt escape, or what i could do to improve my situation, bc i didn’t even see that as an option. the options were survive or don’t, deal w it or don’t, acclimate or implode.

maybe he wasn’t thinking abt what DUMBLEDORE would do, what anyone at hogwarts would do. maybe he was acting off what he knew the dursleys (his main authority figures) would do. the dursleys would let the girl drown. and harry was there, and harry could do something, and so harry did. he took personal responsibility for fleur’s sister’s safety bc all his life he’s learned that authority figures cannot be trusted to do so.

Incidentally this is even more clear in the first and second books, to me. Because Harry DID go to adults and say someone’s trying to steal the stone, and what did the adults do? Did they say, yes, we know, we’re taking precautions, real, good protective measures? Noooo. Did they say, thank you, we’ll look into it, even? Noooo. They said, don’t be silly, it’s not your concern, nothing to see here, little boy, run along and do your schoolwork.

And they said this to a boy whose entire life experience has never involved an adult that can be depended on. And they lied, lied about their own knowledge, said “that’s silly” when they know “that’s true.” And they were too convincing: since he as well knew the truth, what they ended up convincing him was that they didn’t know. And it fit right in with his expectations. Adults, whether actively malicious (the Dursleys, Snape) or well-meaning but oblivious (Mrs. Figg, Harry’s primary-school teachers, the other Hogwarts teachers), can’t be depended on. If anything’s got to be done, Harry and his friends have got to do it himself.

Second book, same thing—they’re headed for the teacher’s lounge to tell the teachers it’s a basilisk, and overhear the teachers saying that Ginny Weasley’s been taken by the monster, and they need to close Hogwarts, and their only plan to rescue Ginny is to send Gilderoy Lockhart—knowing full well he’s a fraud, a coward, and no match for a Cornish pixie, let alone a basilisk. Once again, the adults are flat-out useless and if anyone is going to save Ginny, it’s gotta be Harry and Ron. 

Notably, this is after another ball-drop on the part of the adults: when Harry’s been framed for underage magic and locked up in his room and starved by people who have every intention of keeping him out of Hogwarts forever, it’s other kids, Ron, Fred, and George, who go rescue him, and when the adults find out, one of them punishes and scolds and the other is only interested in how his car worked.

In book three, we meet a couple of adults that are competent, helpful, and willing to listen—Sirius and Remus—and the other adults come in and the end result is, one’s fired and the other has to go on the run lest he have his soul sucked out by dementors. Dumbledore does listen and give them the necessary hints, but it’s Harry, and Hermione this time, who have to do the work.

 – OotP

“he does things by himself and the two people he actually trusts… it’s not completely unhealthy; it’s even very useful and responsible on occasion.” - @gaelissfelin

…this.  Harry sees people as: a. him and people he trusts, b. people to be evaded, and c. people in need of help.  When he gets backed into a corner (Voldemort inside his head, heading down the trapdoor alone, off to the DoM alone, into the Forest alone), the circle of people he trusts shrinks down from the DA/OotP, to the Trio, to just himself.  Harry never wants to be a hero or gets off on it, he’s just a person who’s suffered from the bystander effect and doesn’t want to be a bystander himself.

What if this is why he hasn’t updated his lessons since the Goblin Rebellion of 1752? 

Because it got to a point where he knew the people in the history, and he couldn’t bear to teach the deaths of his former students and colleagues and friends like it was nothing 

Not because he’s boring or a ghost or a relic of another time 

But because it’s too real to discuss with his students, to see their disinterest and their distance from it - from them, from all the people he once lived with, who he fought beside, who he taught, who he cared for.

Because he knows, from experience now, that the students in front of him will become part of this history, too. That if he were to keep updating his history, he’d one day teach the deaths of the children in front of him. 

Dear Tumblr @staff, 

In light of the recent white supremacist terror attacks worldwide: 

We, the Tumblr community (your community), implore you to change your previously passive policy against white supremacy and white nationalist extremist ideologies. 

Every major news station, social expert, and experts on extremist ideologies have identified that these extremist ideologies are spread and grown on online platforms: specifically social platforms. They have identified the major ways that communities can confront these violent extremist views; the biggest one being for social media groups to actually start removing user accounts that post and spread extremist white nationalist dog whistles, memes, and rhetoric.

Your users are begging for your help in stemming the rising tide of xenophobic violence. As has become evident by the recent terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, these ideologies don’t begin with violence, but with strategically spouted rhetoric and hate speech that riles up others who are vulnerable to being persuaded by their subtle methods. 

Please.  If you support the safety of your users.  If you support the Muslim Community. If you support the Jewish Community.  If you support People of Color.  If you support your users regardless of color or religious background. 

Then it’s time to start taking a proactive stance against extremist white supremacist and nationalist ideologies and remove them. 

Welp. So this is a thing now.

The title apparently counts as one line since it wouldn’t let me go past 99.

Seriously @staff ????

IMPORTANT EDIT

EVERYONE CALM DOWN!!!

I tried this on desktop and did not hit a limit. It looks like a limitation of mobile posts.

I didn’t bother going past 543 because ain’t nobody got time for that, but there is no 100 block limit on desktop. You’re just going to have to post your fics on your computer or through your mobile web browser instead of the app.

So, sometime last year (?) science invented Vantablack, which is the darkest possible shade of black. Art world got incredibly excited. But as it needs to be very carefully made in a lab, it’s hard to get a hold of, and is extremely expensive. Enter Anish Kapoor, aka FuckFace McGee. Anish Kapoor buys the rights to Vantablack. He is the only human being on the planet that can legally use it, and he’s kind of a prick about it.

Art world is not thrilled with that.

Enter Stuart Semple.

Stuart Semple is an artist, and also makes pigments to sell in his free time. Stuart Semple is astoundingly pissed about this Vantablack nonsense, and Anish Kapoor’s dickery. Stuart Semple makes a new pigment, the brightest shade of pink ever, called Pinkest Pink, and puts it for sale on the internet. To be bought by everybody except Anish Kapoor. Literally, to purchase, you need to confirm that you are not Anish Kapoor, do not associate with him, and will not sell or give the pigment to Anish Kapoor or his associates. Art world has a good laugh, everyone buys Pinkest Pink because it’s awesome, and damn it we deserve something.

Anish Kapoor however is a penis, and will not take this lying down, because HOW DARE he not have literally everything.

Anish Kapoor gets his London associates to buy him a thing of Pinkest Pink, and being such a classy human being, posts a picture to instagram of him with his middle finger covered in Pinkest Pink, captioned with “Up yours. #pink”

Everyone flips shit, because. Y’know. Fuck that guy. Especially Stuart Semple. For context here, Anish Kapoor is one of the richest artists on the planet, and has repeatedly been referred to as everything wrong with the art world, and the epitome of the art worlds elitism problem. He’s a giant douchebag. Meanwhile Stuart Semple makes pigments just to get them out there. He turns 0 profit from his now enourmously popular pigments.

Stuart Semple launches an investigation as to who the fuck leaked Pinkest Pink, and plans to strike back. He does so by releasing two new products. First is Diamond Dust, which is a glitter made from glass, so that a painting is still visible after it’s applied, but glitters like a mofo. It’s the most reflective glitter out there, and is available to everyone who isn’t Anish Kapoor. And it being made of glass, if you stick your finger in there, it’s going to hurt quite a bit, so that was Stuart Semple’s way of saying “shove your middle finger in this, asshole, see what happens”. Except without saying that, because he can get an insult across while still being fucking classy.

He also releases Black 2.0, created with the help of over a thousand artists worldwide.

Black 2.0 is the answer to Vantablack. Black 2.0 is a slightly less black black, but looks functionally the same to the human eye. It’s completely safe, smells like cherries, and costs four pounds. Vantablack is highly toxic, potentially explosive, needs to be applied in a special laboratory and sealed properly, can’t be moved across borders, can reach 300 degrees celsius if you’re not extremely careful, and costs thousands of dollars. Anish Kapoor is the only human being who can use Vantablack. He is the only human being who cannot use Black 2.0.

So I think we can guess who got the better deal.

And thus the feud ends, Kapoor defeated.

…But not quite.

Kapoor, in this entire afair, has made exactly two comments to the public. The first being his charming message about aquiring Pinkest Pink, the second being claiming to Buzzfeed that he and his small army of lawyers will be suing Semple, an extremely poor artist who cannot afford a lawyer.

No lawsuit has been made yet, fyi.

The point is, Kapoor is a prick, and doesn’t like talking to the lower classes. So one day in July 2017, he decides he needs another floor on his London studio apartment, and starts making arrangements to have it built. His neighbors are fucking pissed, because this will ruin the light of their apartments. They call to Semple to save them, or at the very least piss Kapoor off some more.

Semple answers to the call, and releases two new paints, Phaze and Shift, as always, banned to Kapoor. They change colours, Phaze with temperature, and Shift is just iridescent. Shift needs to be painted over Black 2.0 to work, and Phaze just works on its own.

So that’s been the art world for the last two years.

1. “Anish Kapoor is however a penis” is the best line in this post.

So I was rereading Harry Potter, when I came across this and thought- what if instead of Cedric Diggory, Cassius Warrington had been chosen to compete in the Triwizard Tournament?

Imagine Dumbledore calling out the name of the Hogwarts champion and it isn’t a Gryffindor, or a Ravenclaw, or even a Hufflepuff, but it’s a Slytherin. A student from a House most people hate.

Imagine Cassius Warrington getting up, and three out of four Houses are booing at him and shouting things like “NO!” or, “We can’t have a Slytherin champion!” or demanding a retry. But he’s a Slytherin- he’s been dealing with this shit since he got sorted, so he keeps his head high and joins the other champions.

Imagine Harry trying to catch Warrington alone because he doesn’t really want to associate with Slytherins (plus Malfoy has this tendency of being around the guy ALL THE TIME since he got chosen), but at the same time he’s also fair enough not to want him to walk into the first task unprepared.

Imagine Warrington walking over to Harry a few months later, and Ron and Hermione both jump into a protective stance, wands out, but instead of attacking Harry he just tells him to stick the egg underwater. (Because Slytherins don’t forget those who helped them out).

Imagine Warrington and Harry helping each other out in the labyrinth.

Imagine Harry being devastated when Peter kills Warrington- because Voldemort doesn’t care what house they’re form, a spare is a spare.

Imagine the uproar that causes among the Slytherins, because some of their parents really are Death Eaters and they know what really happened.

Imagine Slytherins reaching out, asking for help from classmates from other houses. They’re terrified, truly terrified because the being their parents claimed would never hurt them because they’re pureblood, they realize that he does not care.

Imagine Slytherins in the 5th book sneaking off to join Dumbledore’s Army, to learn more about who Voldemort is without their parents acting as a filter. 

Imagine the shock when they’re told what he’s really done.

Imagine that a few talented Slytherins went with Harry and the others into the Ministry of Magic. The others are a bit wary but they prove themselves as friends.

Imagine them being confronted by Lucius Malfoy in the the Hall of Prophecy, and when the Death Eaters descend, they know that any one of them could be their parents.

Imagine the shocked gasp of a Death Eater as they realize their own child, a pureblood, is standing defiantly with Harry Potter. They choke back a cry. They can’t let their child know that they were about to duel to the death.

Imagine a DA Slytherin facing off against their own Death Eater parent. That they make the decision to let their child defeat them, because in that moment, they realize that they love their child more than they fear Voldemort. They go down, mask unveiled, and the Slytherin kid has to be dragged from the fight before he gets killed.

Imagine Book 6 Slytherins getting more friendly and cooperative with the other houses. Two years of Voldemort terrorizing the muggle and Wizarding world, two years where their parents just up and leave some days, cringing from the pain in their arm, two years after the death of the first Slytherin pureblood, Cassius Warrington, killed by Voldemort’s right-hand man, and they’re slowly hitting the breaking point.

Imagine Slytherin kids keeping tabs on their parents, sending the information to Harry, who shares it with the Order of the Phoenix, and hoping that their parents won’t be killed.

Imagine Book 7 Slytherins low-key rebelling against the new oppressive Hogwarts staff.

Imagine the final siege on Hogwarts, where Slytherins stand proudly by their fellow houses, knowing full-well they could be fighting their own parents. Some Slytherins know their parents were in the fighting. They hope to find them first and sneak them away. Their fellow students understand. Professor McGonagall allows 7th Year Slytherin, Pansy Parkinson, to duel a death eater in her stead; her father is under that veil. She knows it.

Imagine the aftermath of the battle; every house suffered loses. Slytherin students crying over the deaths of friends they made in every house.

Imagine Harry staring over her head at everyone else until Hermione steps up–it doesn’t take long, but it takes long enough that when she does all eyes are on her as a source of motion–and says “we’re never going to forget this. They’re not going to get away with it” and the girlfriend just latches onto Hermione and everyone is in wands-out stance convinced she’s about to attack the shit out of Hermione, and then the girlfriend stares into her eyes and says “do you promise me” and Hermione just gives her this super-firm nod and says “I promise” and the girlfriend just collapses on her, sobbing. 

Imagine Dumbledore trying to give some flowery speech about inter-wizard solidarity while glossing over why, because Slytherins have always been a touchy subject, and Ron gets to his feet and says “Professor, I need to say something important” and Dumbledore is so surprised he just cedes the floor, and Ron–after that awkward moment when he realizes everyone is staring at him–says he didn’t know Warrington particularly, but he knows how Warrington and Harry played. That each was always cheering on the other. Both wanted to win, but neither was willing to undercut the other by underhanded means. He finishes up saying “I think–I think it’s important everyone should know he died being what a champion should be. Because he could have abandoned Harry and instead he stood up with him to play the game the honest way, and he died for it. And–and Slytherin House should be proud, and we should all be proud, because Warrington was a good bloke.” He sits back down all flustered because he didn’t actually stand up meaning to make a speech. And then Pansy Parkinson stands up before Dumbledore can take back control of the room and says “I want to tell Weasley thank you.” And all of Slytherin House raises a glass–to Warrington, to Weasley, to Potter–and the other houses follow suit. Many years later, Wizarding scholars will say that was the moment Voldemort truly lost.

Imagine later that summer. Harry gets several owls on his birthday, all unsigned. The birds are plump and pretentious and well-cared-for. He will never know which Slytherins sent him their treasures: parchments with hexes developed by the Death Eaters; a strange locket that will only open if he whispers a special spell but that always shows him the picture he most needs to see; a page torn from a potions book that, brewed properly, will allow him extra time to summon a Patronus by giving him a few crucial seconds not just of happiness but of bliss. It doesn’t matter. Harry knows these gifts not as birthday gifts but for what they really are, and he treasures the locket and copies out the potion to send to Hermione and Mrs. Weasley, and when first summoned by the Order of the Phoenix he marches straight up to Dumbledore with the hexes and says “I can’t tell you where I got these, Professor. But they’re in use by the Death Eaters and I think you should have them.” Months later, Sirius will recognize the spell Bellatrix shoots at him, and will dive out of the way just in the nick of time.

The final battle. Everyone is there. Sirius somehow ends up herding a group of Slytherins. They all stare at him and he at them, across a centuries-old divide Voldemort has only succeeded in deepening. Then he remembers the hexes. Harry’s locket, now tucked under Sirius’ shirt because Harry’s friends are with him in this battle but most of Sirius’ are dead. The moment that happiness potion saved Remus’ life, his very soul. Snape’s final words to Harry, finally seen not as mockery but real true advice. What Harry said Voldemort said–his first words in his new form. They are kids, and they are sharing the same kind of hurt he once wouldn’t admit to, watching his mother burn his name off the family tree. “When we go in there, it’s going to be hell,” he tells the Slytherins. “Some of you are probably going to die. I might go down too, and if I do I want your best curser in the front. But I want you all to remember one thing. There are no spares.”  Later retellings of the battle never fail to mention the moment a group of angry, screaming teens burst into the Great Hall, wearing their green and silver as the badge of honor it should be, shouting NO SPARES, NO SPARES at the tops of their voices in between hexes and curses and the occasional physical punch. When Hermione is present, she always interrupts the storyteller to be sure everyone knows about the moment Blaise Zabini shoved her to the floor, dropped on top of her, fired off three curses in rapid succession and said “stay alive, Granger, we need you” before jumping back to his feet and vanishing into the melee–how, for all anyone knows, those may have been his last words, and she will not let his sacrifice go unnoted. 

The aftermath. Malfoy holds out a hand to Sirius, badly injured on the floor. Sirius asks how Malfoy is willing to trust him. Malfoy nods at his chest. “You’ve got my godfather’s locket,” he says, and when Sirius and Harry finally speak after the battle Harry gives his full agreement to the very first thing out of  Sirius’ mouth. They give the locket to Malfoy. Sirius grits his teeth and closes his eyes and opens them and says “He probably saved my life, giving Harry that.” He doesn’t say thank you. Malfoy hears it anyway.

The school reopens under a single banner: the four Houses united. The House rivalry is reduced to just that–a competition in fun–with those deep divides slowly healing to scars, and eventually away to nothing at all.

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