The funniest part of the "your teacher dies in every possible ending" copypasta btw is that it doesn't really sell how generic the fucking Wizard game is plot wise on that front.

Like, we have two major spoilers, Rockwood curses Anne and blamed the Goblins for it, and Professor Fig dies regardless of ending. You'd expect therefore two very simple things from this reveals:

1) That this would lead to the classic mid story twist that the "oppressed minority doing terrorism was actually being manipulated the whole time and you the white saviour help them after realising they aren't so bad."

And 2) That the game has multiple endings that are shaped by your actions in the story, despite how in all of them your mentor dies (probably for different reasons each time).

This is however not fucking the case lol.

Because guess what.

Hogwarts Legacy has only two endings.

There is the "Good" ending, where you decide to keep the status quo as is and prevent systematic change, and a "Bad" ending where you "free the ancient magic" and change the status quo, but then promise to work to set ip up back as it was before.

NOTHING you do in the game changes this. Every decision, spell choice, side quest, NOTHING influences these endings. There is no Karma Meter, or checklist of decisions to have to pick the best possible ending ala Witcher, nothing, you are given ONE decision right at the end of the game, between breaking the status quo (bad) or keeping it as is (good) and that's the extent of player choice on what ending you get.

TWO ENDINGS.

ALL BASED ON YOUR FINAL CHOICE.

MASS EFFECT 3, INFAMOUS FOR DOING THIS VERY SAME SHIT, HAD THREE.

And after you have this choice, your mentor dies, and you fight the evil goblin leader who is evil because he was once the victim of a violent hate crime so now he sides with Wizard N*zis and wants to genocide all wizards, and who is, yes, the main villain of the game, not the guy who cursed the girl, nope, we're still murdering an evil minority rebellion leader with a large hooked nose as he's being powered by the status quo breaking "Ancient Magic" the hero is treated like a villain for if he decides to "share with the world."

And then there's a generic eulogy for mentor followed by the house cup being won by your fucking house as a "true" ending, which happens regardless of what choice you pick, and that is a "post credit scene" ending after finishing all collectibles and side quests, just to give the illusion of having 3 endings.

This game is shallow and mediocre beyond belief yet we have people fucking frothing at the mouth for being told they shouldn't fucking play the mid wizard game. You have streamers crying at the gentlest fucking pushback, people going "I can excuse transphobia and anti semitism but I draw the line at spoilers," for one of the most soulless, generic pieces of videogame media of this year.

"Boycotts don't work if the product is good just look at chick fill a" the product isn't fucking good the product is mid the product has an extremely shit plot baked in anti semitism and with boring "twists" and even if it was the fucking masterpiece some of those people claim it is have a minimum of moral fucking backbone and if you can't help yourself PLAY OR EAT SOMETHING ELSE.

IT'S NOT THAT FUCKING HARD.

Quick question, genuine question:

Why on earth does "more than half of US adults under 30 cannot read above an elementary school level" not strike horror into the heart of everyone who hears it?

Are the implications of it unclear????

I'm serious, people keep reacting with a sort of vague dismissal when I point this out, and I want to know why!

If adults in the US cannot read, then the only information they have access to is TV and video, the spaces with the most egregious and horrific misinformation!

If they cannot read, they cannot escape that misinformation.

This obscene lack of literacy should strike fear into every heart! US TV is notoriously horrific propaganda!

Is that???? Not??? Obvious???????

I know this sounds sarcastic, I know it does, but I'm completely serious here. I do not understand where the disconnect is.

Literacy can be broadly categorized into 3 groups. The ability to read words, the ability to read sentences or paragraphs, and the ability to texts a page or longer.

55% of US adults cannot read long texts.

The process of reading the individual sentences is so taxing due to this low literacy that actually synthesizing the total information presented becomes nearly impossible. It requires both holding onto the meaning of each sentence so that you can contextualize it with the next one, AND consciously going through the decode process of interpreting letter and word forms in that next sentence.

In general, children are expected to begin reading long texts for meaning around age 8-10, in elementary school. This is when kids normally swap from short stories to chaptered books.

55% of American adults under 30 cannot read at that level.

We know this not from some short term study or another, but from the collected data of the US Department of Education going back decades.

This is the same literacy data used internationally to determine literacy rates around the world, not some kind of shock study.

55% of American adults under 30 can't read, and it's explicitly, specifically because our schools refuse to teach them, and effectively haven't been doing so for over a decade nationally and as much as 30 years in some states.

The knock on effects and implications of this are horrific.

I understand that this sounds like some fuckery bullshit because it's such an unfathomably massive problem, but holy shit.

It's very, VERY real.

@firecoloredwater I can't see your replies while I write on mobile so I'm trying to just remember everything you mentioned. I hope this covered most of it?

But, basically, the reading skills to navigate an app menu or read a single sentence are not what's being discussed. The skills to read a newspaper or book, however, are.

I saw this a few days ago and it's been on my mind since.

I don't even need to leave Tumblr to see failed literacy.

I've seen many people, just in the last couple of days, completely misunderstand something and read it in a hostile way based on their own biases rather than in anything the author said.

It's weird and unpleasant when I go to fandom spaces and see someone completely misread a chapter. But when it comes to discussions on bigotry, politics, social justice? That ruins lives.

On a different note, I've started asking myself "am I sure I understand this" when reading dense texts, and taking a few extra seconds per paragraph to mentally summarize what I read to make sure I get it. So, thanks for making me a more conscientious reader, Vees.

And if you are a parent or if you work with children, be sure to read to them frequently, in an upbeat, animated voice. I did a report on this, and the recommendation is at least 15 minutes a day. Don’t be shy; make animal noises, raise and lower your volume, do a silly evil laugh for the villain, etc. Ask them questions about the text and point to the pictures. Reading a book to a child is not just reading; it is telling a story and making sure they are paying attention and comprehending what is read. If you don’t do it for them in the beginning, they won’t be able to in the future (or it will be very hard for them).

May I add, the timeline is suspiciously similar to the timeline for the rise of high-stakes testing. If what teachers are being forced to do is prepare children for tests - where the longest text is *maybe* a page or two - then that's the level of literacy that will be acheived.

Tumblr, do your thing! 🤞 (no batteries required)

Fantasy concept: The standard classic fantasy races, but humans are the species that's living the diaspora spread among other peoples' lands and cultures.

Humans are adaptible, can pick up whatever languages and customs they need to, learn to dress according to climate, are capable of digesting almost anything that the majority race commonly eat, can tolerate magic but don't need it to live, and altogether seem to find a way to live comfortably - or at least tolerably - wherever they can live at all. Many races who have humans living among them have a misconception that humans are some kind of sapient chameleons, that just automatically take the shape of their environment without thought or effort.

In truth, human communities are fairly tight-knit and have strong support networks, and they can and will immediately take in any newcomer stray humans and families, teaching them the ropes of how to live here. Not just out of the kindness of their hearts, but pragmatic reasons: one bad human or family will reflect badly on the whole population of the area. It's better to make sure that a stranger has a job than hear your own neighbour say that humans don't have jobs. It's fairly safe to assume that most humans who live in the same city know each other to some extent, but just because they're allies doesn't necessarily mean that they're friends.

While mixbreeding with the local population does happen - humans, for some reason, tend to be far more open to romantic and sexual relationships with other races than the rest, and the ones to do so have an astonishing knack for locating the one specific elf, orc, dwarf or any other who happens to find humans fuckable - and wherever the hybrid offspring aren't sterile, the human population of the area tends to aquire some majority-species blood and traits, mostly the distinct local traits of the human population of any area are cultural, taught and learned from the community.

Some elvish dialects don't have separate words for "half-elf", "a human born and raised in elvish lands", or "human who speaks fluent elvish and knows the customs", and even some elvish humans are surprised to hear that other cultures consider these to be completely separate concepts. As far as they're concerned, humans living among elves are all the same thing. Sometimes a person who's 75% elvish and only has one human grandparent, but was raised by the human side of their family, is considered human-among-elves.

And sometimes the divide between human poulations of different races and cultures is more stark than between the majority peoples themselves - while an orc clan and an elvish city-state might be willing to temporarily set aside their differences to work towards a mutual goal, the orcish humans and elvish humans among them might not.

While the human minorities among other races do have a distinct identity as humans of their own regions, this does not apply to goblins. Neither goblins nor the human populations among them make any distinction at all between the two at all. Both will refer to "their" humans as simply goblins, only specifying "a big one" if necessary, but even then you'll need to see the person in question to know whether they're talking about a human raised with goblins or just a particularly tall, physically large full-blooded native goblin. Goblins do not have a concept of personal property beyond "I had access to it and nobody stopped me from grabbing it, so therefore it's mine", and their humans are therefore goblins too.

Being one of the species combinations whose offspring are infertile, there's no goblin blood among their human populations save for the half-goblin individuals themselves, but considering that spontaneous adoption by simply herding unsupervised orphans into one's home is a commonplace, widely accepted practice and not any more unusual a way to start a family than having biological children, the individuals in question are largely unbothered by it.

While the humans-born-among-goblins aknowledge that they are human, they genuinely do not understand the concept of why one couldn't be both a full 100% human and a full 100% goblin at the same time. While humans from other cultures are confused and annoyed by their insistence, they'll have to agree that any person who'll come to your house as a guest (most likely unprompted and uninvited) and will just casually snatch a bug off your floor and eat it right in front of you, and then interpret the look on your face to mean that they were supposed to ask permission first is definitely a whole, entire full goblin.

The goblin-humans take this as a compliment.

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theres no way im letting you losers enjoy your antisemitism simulator.

Y’all, when people were like “hang on, are the goblins REALLY an antisemitic caricature?”

This game was like, “Hold my beer—YES.”

They literally gave the goblins a shofar. You know, the horn that’s used to rally troops in the Torah and that we still blow on Rosh Hashanah?

Oh hey, the Hogwarts Legacy discord server mods are just straight-up banning anyone who identified themselves as Jewish now.

Wait, what the fuck?

the thing about “well-behaved women rarely make history" is that the author, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, didn’t write it about women who would be considered “badly-behaved;“ she wrote it in a book about a midwife, about women who had been largely ignored and erased from history because as a result of their “good behaviour.” So it’s not a “BAD GIRLS DO IT WELL" kind of quote; it’s a reminder to respect and pay attention to the women who go about quietly living their lives.

it’s a reminder to respect and pay attention to the women who go about quietly living their lives.

It took Oscar Wilde like 65K words to say this exact thing.

Oh my god it’s true

just saw a post where someone put “detrans dni” and like… hey we should be supporting detransitioned people bc if we don’t terfs will

sometimes you’re wrong about your identity and that’s ok like i used to think i was bi but it turns out i was wrong and i know ppl who thought they were trans but it turns out they were wrong and it should be ok and accepted that sometimes people don’t get it right on the first try

Making this an all or nothing thing is scary and will make people not wanna explore bc listen, everyone in their life might be ready to jump and say “I knew it! It was all for attention!” Literally don’t do that, oh my god we are a community be kind and compassionate to one another.

For people who don't know who the Chevalier St George was:

- he was the son of a french aristocrat and an enslaved Senegalese woman called Nanon

- he actually had a relationship with his mother, which was pretty usual for children in his situation. I haven't been able to establish whether she was later freed or not, but I think she was because she left a will, suggesting she owned property

- his father legally wasn't allowed to make him his heir because of racist laws at the time, but he acknoledged him as his son and gave him a rich person's education and opportunities

- he was one of, if not the, greatest violinists of his generation, played first violin for the Paris opera and was violin teacher to the queen before the revolution

- he was in line to be composer and director of the opera but a famous dancer who was pissed off he didn't want a relationship with her started a petition to get his appointment blocked

- he knew Haydn and commissioned the Paris Symphonies from him

- Mozart's father tried to make him go and see St George perform because he thought it would be good for his musical education but Mozart was (it is speculated) jealous of there being another young music prodigy, and refused to go

- he was ridiculously handsome . Look at this, my guy is pulling off a powdered wig, do you know how hard it is to look good in a powdered wig?!

- he was considered one of the greatest duelists and swordsmen in france

- he fought a duel with the Chevalier D'eon, who at the time was living as a woman (we have no idea if D'eon was afab or amab but they made their reputation as a man and then later switched to presenting as a woman)

- he wrote incredible concertos and unbelievably terrible operas. The longest any of his opera's ever ran before being shut down was a couple of weeks. Some one lasted 1 night. He kept writing them.

- he joined the revolutionaries to otherthrow the king because they (falsely) promised to abolish slavery and emancipate all enslaved people

- he was a fantastically successful soldier and lead the first all black regiment in europe, which came to be known as the regiment st George in his honour

He's legitimately one of the most interesting figures in french history, and certainly one of the most romantic, and I'm so glad he might finally be getting the recognition he deserves!

I'm a "multiple interpretations of a character are valid" person until I see an interpretation that explicitly contradicts canon and then I start chewing on the drywall.

Hogwarts Legacy update!

We've confirmed the plot: there's an uprising among the race of hook-nosed bankers who control the economy. (Note that the more evil they are, the bigger their noses are. There's a good one who has a big nose but he used to be evil when he was younger.) They're "rebelling" because they want their stolen cultural artefacts to be returned to them and want to not be oppressed anymore, which for some reason means they also want to massacre their oppressors' entire race, because of course marginalised people asking for liberation actually secretly want to kill you. As part of this sinister cabal's nefarious plot for white—I mean, wizard—extinction, they want to kidnap a child, because that's what hook-nosed bankers like to do, right? And their leader is willing to do anything for material gain, up to and including teaming up with fascists who hate his race.

You guys know that conspiracy theorists think Jews funded the Holocaust, right? They claim we did it so we could milk it for reparation money afterwards. And did you know they think we kidnap children? Or that we actually want supremacy rather than equality, and plan to subjugate the rest of the world for our own gain? Presumably you've at least heard the claim that we control the banks. And you know this is all very popular with the alt right, don't you? Have you also heard that this game's original head developer was an alt right YouTuber?

Don't act like this is a fucking coincidence.

No, JKR wasn't involved in the game, and it's actively intended to be trans-positive. Yes, she gets money from it, and will likely donate some of that to anti-trans causes. But even if you pirate the game so she doesn't make any money off of it, you're still going to be be playing the fucking Protocols of the Elders of Gringotts.

Fucking TALK ABOUT THIS.

#being trans and jewish makes this such a weird time to be in the circles im in online#because all i see in protest of the game is 'its transphobic to play it!' and nothing about the antisemitism#EXCEPT from other jews#with exceptions for my beloved frienda who are part of the Surprisingly Jewish friend circle (via @jonaldronaldrolkientolkien)

If you're not Jewish, read those tags and read them again.

I came across this and I'm not jewish but I've seen some on Twitter say that this "goblin artefact" is in fact a Shofar. In case anybody is still doubting that the goblins in HP are pretty much a caricature of jewish people.

Deep Art Thoughts With Ri

Been thinking a lot about The Nutcracker (the ballet).  When I was a kid, I was terrified of the Mouse King but as an adult, he’s probably my favorite.  (Where is my Villain Deconstruction Piece on Mouse King a la Maleficent and Wicked?  Oh, god, someone write me a Mouse King musical pronto.  Can TikTok get on this?)

But today I’m going to talk about holiday ballet fight choreography from a fighter’s perspective. As a side note, I’m not going to be talking about technique.  I’m going to be looking at broader fight understanding, mindset, and characterization.

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you absolutely can't call yourself progressive if you're fatphobic btw

fatphobia is deeply rooted in racism, ableism, and classism and if you can't even examine your beliefs far enough to get too "fat people are also humans who deserve respect" then you absolutely aren't progressive, you're a bigot trying to act trendy.

NO ONE should be expected to completely change their whole body in order to be treated with basic respect! especially when the expected methods of change (that do not work, esp long term) are starvation and/or surgery with insanely high complication and morality rates... if you have to ask people to starve, mutilate, or even kill themselves to consider respecting them and their rights, then you are an atrociously cruel person.

reblog if its friday and you made it

my favourite type of fan fictions are like. Slightly canon divergent. Like everything is the same but we fix this one annoying detail you can’t stand and let it butterfly effect the whole story.

It's still so strange to me how apparently taboo it is to like a post on someone's Instagram from a month ago when there are posts still circulating on Tumblr from 1550 BCE

If he didn't want it circulating in 2022 he should have sold better copper